The New York Times will vacate eight floors of its midtown headquarters in a bid to make some money and improve its efficiency. “The current way we have configured our office makes us slower and less collaborative,” New York Times CEO Mark Thompson and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in a memo to staff Friday. “It is also, frankly, too expensive to occupy this many floors when […]
When it emerged from stealth in 2011, MapR was an outlier in the Hadoop community. At the time, Hadoop was defined largely by two projects adapted from Google research: MapReduce, which introduced highly linear, massively parallel processing to big data, and the HDFS file system, which could accommodate data by the petabyte. And at the time, Hadoop was defined as an Apache open source platform. MapR’s message, […]
Capitalism as we know it is irrevocably in its death throes, argues German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, which on its own is not a novel thesis. In our age of regular financial crashes and bursting bubbles, illiberal movements and borderless wars, even Nobel Prize winners and mainstream thinkers – I think of Joseph Stiglitz, among others – say that the post-war free market regime is broken, and that […]
‘You can’t put a price tag on anybody’s life’ Two years after the overdose that killed her 21-year-old son, Terri Bartlett traveled to Illinois’ state capital to champion an unlikely cause: revamped painkillers. Bartlett’s son Michael became hooked on Vicodin and later graduated to heroin. In emotional testimony last year, she urged lawmakers to support a bill that would prioritize the new harder-to-crush pills, saying she believed […]
Submitted by Duane via Free Market Shooter blog, On Thursday, December 1st, Yasmin Seweid was allegedly assaulted by Trump supporters in NYC. According to BuzzFeed and the NY Daily News, the attack took place at the uptown 6 train stop at 23rd Street in midtown Manhattan. The assaliants allegedly called Seweid a terrorist, broke her bag strap, followed her when she tried to get away from them, […]
BEIJING Beijing’s city government has ordered 1,200 factories near the Chinese capital, including an oil refinery run by state oil major Sinopec and a Cofco food plant, to either shut or cut output following its highest possible air pollution warning. Environmental authorities issued a red alert that started on Friday night and will run until Wednesday after warning of a smog build-up across China’s north. That will […]
Image: ZDNet [This article has been updated several times since its initial publication to incorporate changes in Windows 10. Last updated: December 16, 2016] Over the past year, I’ve read countless “privacy guides” for Windows 10. Most are well-intentioned, but they invariably take a simplistic approach to privacy: Just turn off every switch in the Privacy section of the Settings app. If you do that, you’re not […]
An Amazon picture of a flying “octocopter” mini-drone that would be used to fly small packages to consumers Amazon said Wednesday it completed its first delivery by drone, in what the global online giant hopes will become a trend in automated shipments by air. The delivery to a customer near Cambridge, England, was announced in a tweet by Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos. “First-ever […]
Dubai, 15 December 2016 At the end of October the new cryptocurrency Zcash was launched. It is positioned by its creators as a more secure alternative to Bitcoin. Soon after the launch, the price of Zcash coins skyrocketed, followed by a spike in the installation of the application used to generate Zcash on personal computers. In many of these cases, the app was disguised as something else […]
The biggest surprise in meeting the entrepreneur behind Gulf meat eateries such as B+F Burger Boutique and Slider Station is learning that he is a recent adopter of veganism. Basil Al Salem — king of the juicy steak shawarmas on offer at Nomad Kitchen and the Coca-Cola-braised short ribs served up at Slider Station — went vegan earlier this year. But this does not mean that he […]
On April 6, 2009, an earthquake of a magnitude of 6.3 on the Richter scale hit the Italian city of L’Aquila. It killed more than 300 people, injured 1,500 and wreaked enough destruction to force 65,000 to abandon their homes, “politics and corruption” having led to the “poor enforcement” of essential laws of what could have been life- and home-saving anti-earthquake construction in many buildings. This real-life […]
A group of intelligence experts, including a former head of MI6, has cut ties with fellow academics at Cambridge university, in a varsity spy scare harking back to the heyday of Soviet espionage at the heart of the British establishment. Sir Richard Dearlove, the ex-chief of the Secret Intelligence Service and former master of Pembroke college, Stefan Halper, a senior foreign policy adviser at the White House […]
By Pawel Sobczak and Karol Witenberg | WARSAW WARSAW Protesters blocked all exits from the Polish parliament on Friday after the opposition said ruling party lawmakers illegally passed the budget for next year by moving the vote outside of the main chamber of parliament. The protest marked the biggest political standoff in years in European Union member Poland and the sharpest escalation of the conflict between the […]
Toronto worker Kristy Milland looks for data jobs that she can pick up to make ends meet. Image: Sam Santos/George Pimentel Photography This article originally appeared on TechRepublic. Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, […]
When President-elect Donald Trump moves into The White House, he’s going to have a lot of company. In the last week, several major news organizations — including The New York Times, Politico and The Washington Post — outlined their plans to dispatch reporters to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In what is perhaps a nod to the hyper-competitive nature of Washington, D.C. political reporting, each newsroom is devoting more reporters than […]
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts, The claims that the Russian government hacked US voting machines are absurd. Voting machines are not connected to the Internet. To hack a voting machine you have to be physically in proximity to the machine and use a hand held device. The machines can be programmed to throw the vote count to one candidate or the other, and there are other […]
By James Oliphant and Emily Stephenson | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON With more than 20 nominees now selected, Donald Trump’s cabinet appears much like the president-elect himself: mostly older, white males, many of them wealthy, who see themselves as risk-takers and deal-makers and prize action over deliberation. Trump, who says Washington is “broken” and controlled by special interests, has largely eschewed technocrats with long government experience. Instead, he has […]
Low-frequency mechanical energy harvesting could provide as much as 40 percent of the power requirements for next generation smartphones and tablets. Credit: Wang Lab/Penn State A new concept in energy harvesting could capture energy that is currently mostly wasted due to its characteristic low frequency and use it to power next-generation electronic devices. In a project funded by electronics giant Samsung, a team of Penn State materials […]
Yahoo has already confirmed that as much as 1 billion of its users are affected by a breach that seemed to have been executed in August 2013. The staggering number adds to the 500 million compromised accounts by a separate cyber attack carried out a year later. What is particularly significant with the latest revelation is the fact that Yahoo did not uncover it on their own. They only […]
DUBAI // A group of adventurers travelling the world by car, motorcycle and bicycle have said the UAE’s peace and security made it a popular destination for tourists. During a stop in Dubai, four travellers made camp in Mushrif park for the 5th Dubai Traveller’s Festival. Leonhard Salwey, who left his home in Germany seven months ago to explore the world on his bicycle, thought the event […]
Your daily guide to community and cultural activities across the Emirates for December 17, 2016, including performances, festivals, art exhibitions, film screenings, health and fitness events, talks, classes, workshops and family fun. newslide Nationwide New movie Collateral Beauty stars Will Smith as Howard Inlet, a successful New York advertising executive, who has suffered a tragedy and retreats from life, spending his time writing letters to Love, Time […]
There’s a great scene in The Big Short, the movie of Michael Lewis’ book about the mortgage crisis, where two shiny-suited brokers brag about how many loans they’ve been producing — for big commissions — to unsuitable borrowers. “We call those loans ‘Dorothys’ ‘cause they’re magic,” grins the one in black. “No credit, no income, no problem: just tap your shoes together three times and say ‘There’s […]
Short takes and quick hits for the week of November 11-17, 2016. ‘Yahoo is not safe to use,’ former company engineer says Posted December 16, 2016 14:10 PST An absolutely brutal article in The Parallax by Seth Rosenblatt. After a second data breach involving as many as a billion users, what should users do? Let’s just say there aren’t many advocates for the company right now. Here’s […]
By Anggy Polanco and Maria Ramirez | EL PINAL/CIUDAD GUAYANA, Venezuela EL PINAL/CIUDAD GUAYANA, Venezuela Small protests and looting broke out in some Venezuelan provinces on Friday due to lack of cash after the socialist government suddenly decreed this week that its largest banknote would be pulled from circulation in the midst of a punishing economic crisis. President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday gave Venezuelans a few days […]
