Tech

Bizarre and Hilarious Trials Evolution Glitch

The crashes are dramatic enough to begin with in this game, but this takes it to a different level all together… Derrty programmers.

Judge puts hold on Chapel Hill cell-phone ban

Written bY KATELYN FERRAL – KFERRAL@NEWSOBSERVER.COM

Raleigh News Observer) A judge has put Chapel Hill’s cell-phone ban while driving on hold.

Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson issued an injunction Wednesday, delaying the enforcement of both the town’s cell phone ban and new towing ordinance until a hearing on Monday, May 7.

The cell phone ban was to take effect June 1.

The towing regulations, which limit how much tow truck operators can charge and include restrictions on where and when vehicles can be towed from downtown, was to take effect today, May 1. It includes a provision requiring towers to report each vehicle towed to police at the time of the tow.

Read more here:

Is there a drone in your neighbourhood? Rise of spy planes exposed

By Julian Gavaghan

(DailyMail.co.uk There are at least 63 active drone sites around the U.S, federal authorities have been forced to reveal following a landmark Freedom of Information lawsuit.

The unmanned planes – some of which may have been designed to kill terror suspects – are being launched from locations in 20 states.

Most of the active drones are deployed from military installations, enforcement agencies and border patrol teams, according to the Federal Aviation Authority.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134376/Is-drone-neighbourhood-Rise-killer-spy-planes-exposed-FAA-forced-reveal-63-launch-sites-U-S.html#ixzz1syT0ngbP

Read more HERE!

Councilman Proposes Ads On Fire Trucks

(WJZ) — With a $48 million budget shortfall for the city, one councilman has an idea that he says will help the deficit: putting advertisements on fire trucks.

Andrea Fujii explains one organization wants to have the first ad with a provocative campaign.

The bright red on the side of fire engines means dollar signs to City Councilman William Pete Welch.

“These are out of the box times and you need out of the box approaches in order to create additional revenue,” Welch said.

Read the rest HERE!

Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin

Witten by Ian Katz

(Guardian.co.uk) The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”

Read the rest HERE!

CISPA: Cybersecurity Bill Authors Defend Legislation Against ‘Privacy Disaster’ Claims

(Huffington Post) Authors of a cybersecurity bill sought to rebut criticisms on Tuesday from civil liberties groups who say the legislation does not protect consumers from having their private data shared with the government.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, sponsored by Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), seeks to give businesses and the federal government legal protection to share cyber threats with each other in an effort to thwart hackers.

Currently, they do not share that data because the information is classified and companies fear violating anti-trust law.

Read more HERE.

The Living Universe: Keplar Orrery II

Daniel Fabrycky from the Kepler science team put together a visualization of all the multiple-planet systems discovered by the Kepler spacecraft as of February of 2011. This second version illustrates the planet candidates found as of Feb 2012: 885 planet candidates in 361 systems—double the number of systems in the original Kepler Orrery. The orbit radii are to scale with respect to each other and planet sizes are to scale with respect to each other, but orbits and planet sizes are different scales. The colors are in order of semi-major axis: two-planet systems (242 in all) have a yellow outer planet; 3-planet (85) green, 4-planet (25) light blue, 5-planet (8) dark blue, 6-planet (1, Kepler-11) purple.

credit: Daniel Fabrycky

The Sagan Series (part 4) – Per Aspera Ad Astra

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.” -Feynman

E-commerce tax to target out-of-state retailers

(The State) Georgia joined other states this week in passing a law aimed at collecting billions in lost sales tax revenue from online retailers. The Legislature passed the measure as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the state’s tax code. The bill now awaits Gov. Nathan Deal’s signature. His office has suggested he favors the idea. The law would not technically put a new requirement on consumers. Online shoppers who do not pay state sales tax at the point of sale are supposed to file it on their income tax returns. The legislation would require online retailers to collect the tax and remit it to the state.

It was among the recommendations set forth by the Special Council on Tax Reform and Fairness for Georgians published in January 2011. According to the report, online sales are a growing part of the state’s economy, but the estimated revenue loss to Georgia from the inability to collect sales tax on those transactions is $410 million in 2012 alone. The so-called “Amazon” law, named for the largest e-retailer potentially affected by it, is part of a tax reform bill passed by the Legislature this week. The statute covers retailer without a physical presence in the state.

If signed by the governor, the section referring to Internet sales tax would take effect Oct. 1. New York was the first state to pass such a law in 2008, and nine more states have done so since then. Besides Georgia, they include North Carolina, Rhode Island, Illinois, Arkansas, Connecticut, Vermont, California and Pennsylvania. Legislation was introduced or pending in several other states in recent months, including Kansas, Maryland, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Read more HERE.

Apple plans nation’s biggest private fuel cell energy project at N.C. data center

North Carolina will be home to the nation’s largest private fuel cell energy project, a nonpolluting, silent power plant that will generate electricity from hydrogen.

Apple (yes, that Apple) filed its plans with the N.C. Utilities Commission last week to build the 4.8-megawatt project in Maiden, about 40 miles northwest of Charlotte. That’s where Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple has built a data center to support the company’s iCloud online data storage system and its Siri voice-recognition software.

The fuel cell project, the nation’s largest such project not built by an electric utility company, will be developed this year. It will be located on the same data complex that will host a planned 20-megawatt solar farm – the biggest ever proposed in this state.

But it’s the fuel cell project that’s generating buzz, eclipsing anything ever dreamed of in California, the nation’s epicenter for fuel cell projects.

Read more here.

House Shoots Down Legislation That Would Have Stopped Employers From Demanding Your Facebook Password

(Tech Crunch) Well, that didn’t take long. A proposed Facebook user protection amendment introduced yesterday in the U.S. House of Representatives has already been shot down. The legislation, offered by Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter, would have added new restrictions to FCC rules that would have prohibited employers from demanding workers’ social networking usernames and passwords.

The final vote was 236 to 184, with only one House Republican voting in support of the changes.

Had it passed, this amendment would have tacked on an extra section to H.R. 3309, the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2012, basically allowing the FCC to step in to stop any employers who asked applicants for this confidential information.

Check it out.

WTVI’s merger with CPCC may cost county $800,000

(Charlotte Observer) Charlotte’s financially struggling public TV station got new life late Tuesday when Mecklenburg commissioners approved turning over WTVI to Central Piedmont Community College.

The board voted 6-3 to merge the community college and 47-year-old station.

“This is not about saving a legal entity, it is about saving local programming that is valuable to our community,” Chairman Harold Cogdell said. “It’s about access to education through programming, as well as those (students) learning to put together that programming at the community college.

“Truth is a matter of subjective perspective.”

Check it out.

Spencer Balks at Subsidizing Salisbury’s City-Owned Broadband

(Carolina Journal) A controversy is brewing in Rowan County between the City of Salisbury and the Town of Spencer over funding for Salisbury’s municipal broadband system.

At issue is Salisbury’s use of funds from the city’s water-sewer capital reserve fund to support Fibrant, the municipal broadband system that went online in late 2010, financed with $33 million in debt.

Fibrant has been reliant on “interfund loans” to shore up its operations until it becomes self-sustaining, which officials hope will occur by 2014.

Over the past two years, Fibrant has borrowed almost $5 million from the city’s water and sewer capital fund at a 1 percent interest rate, according the Salisbury Post.

Such loans have sparked concern among public officials in Spencer. Salisbury took over Spencer’s water system in 2000 when compliance issues became cost-prohibitive.

Spencer officials are concerned that fund transfers to Fibrant violate the water-sewer agreement between the two municipalities.

Check it out.

Per Aspera Ad Astra

Your own life or even your species might be owed to a restless few drawn by craving they can hardly articulate or understand to undiscovered lands and new worlds. Each victory is only a prelude to another. And no boundaries can be set to rational hope.

How to Build a Speech-Jamming Gun

The drone of speakers who won’t stop is an inevitable experience at conferences, meetings, cinemas, and public libraries.

Today, Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University, both in Japan, present a radical solution: a speech-jamming device that forces recalcitrant speakers into submission.

The idea is simple. Psychologists have known for some years that it is almost impossible to speak when your words are replayed to you with a delay of a fraction of a second.

Kurihara and Tsukada have simply built a handheld device consisting of a microphone and a speaker that does just that: it records a person’s voice and replays it to them with a delay of about 0.2 seconds. The microphone and speaker are directional so the device can be aimed at a speaker from a distance, like a gun.

In tests, Kurihara and Tsukada say their speech jamming gun works well: “The system can disturb remote people’s speech without any physical discomfort.”

Check it out.