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China Starts Outsourcing From ... the US 274

Posted by Soulskill
from the wait-what dept.
hackingbear writes: Burdened with Alabama's highest unemployment rate, long abandoned by textile mills and furniture plants, Wilcox County, Alabama, desperately needs jobs. And the jobs are coming from China. Henan's Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group opened a plant here last month, employing 300 locals. Chinese companies invested a record $14 billion in the United States last year, according to the Rhodium Group research firm. Collectively, they employ more than 70,000 Americans, up from virtually none a decade ago. Powerful forces — narrowing wage gaps (Chinese wages have been doubling every few years), tumbling U.S. energy prices, the rising Yuan — up 30% over the decade — are pulling Chinese companies across the Pacific. Perhaps very soon, Chinese workers will start protesting their jobs being outsourced to the cheap labor in the U.S."

Linux Mint 17 KDE Released 61

Posted by samzenpus
from the brand-new dept.
sfcrazy writes The Linux Mint team has announced the release of Linux Mint 17 KDE codenamed Qiana. It's based on KDE Software Compilation 4.13.0. There are notable improvements in Mint Display Manager (MDM). The multi-monitor display has improved and it allows a user to “configure which of the monitors should be used as the primary monitory by MDM.” Users can also define a background color or a background picture no matter what greeter they are using.

Microscopic View of How Leaves Repel Water 33

Posted by Soulskill
from the make-like-a-tree-and-get-outta-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Years of research has gone into products that are hydrophobic — they resist getting wet. But nature solved this problem long ago, and it's ubiquitous outside our buildings and homes. You've probably seen it yourself, after a light rain: water collects in round droplets on many leaves from trees and plants, refusing to spread out evenly across the surface. This article explains why that happens using super slow-mo cameras and an electron microscope. "[T]he water isn't really sitting on the surface. A superhydrophobic surface is a little like a bed of nails. The nails touch the water, but there are gaps in between them. So there's fewer points of contact, which means the surface can't tug on the water as much, and so the drop stays round. ... [After looking at a leaf in the electron microscope,] we saw this field of tiny wax needles, each needle just a few microns in length! The water drops are suspended on these ultra-microscopic wax needles, and that keeps it from wetting the surface."

Elon Musk: I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026 275

Posted by samzenpus
from the go-to-mars dept.
An anonymous reader writes Elon Musk says that he'll put the first human boots on Mars well before the 2020s are over. "I'm hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly possible for that to occur," he said. "But the thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multiplanetary." He acknowledged that the company's plans were too long-term to attract many hedge fund managers, which makes it hard for SpaceX to go public anytime soon. "We need to get where things a steady and predictable," Musk said. "Maybe we're close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally we've flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense."

Comment: Re:Not surprising. (Score 1) 378

Not sure where you get your information from, but find a new source. Any language can be on the outside as long as the French is bigger OR on top (or both), and I'm from Quebec but barely speak French; we only ever spoke English outside of class. I don't deny they're pretty stupid with some of the language laws though... For example, considering the laws are to protect their culture from erosion due to the overwhelming English majority in North America, which makes sense, doesn't it also make sense to assume that road signs for tourists should be in English because a) tourists don't speak French and b) the locals already know where they're going?!

Replicating the NSA's Gadgets Using Open Source 47

Posted by samzenpus
from the spy-on-it-yourself dept.

How Open Government Data Saved New Yorkers Thousands On Parking Tickets 286

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the pesky-citizens-ruining-revenues dept.
jfruh (300774) writes "Ben Wellington is a New Yorker and city planner with an interest in NYC Open Data, the city's online open government initiative. One thing he noticed in this vast dataset was that just two fire hydrants in the city generated tens of thousands of dollars a year in tickets. The sleuthing by which he figured out why is a great example of how open government data can help citizens in concrete ways."

Comment: Re:icewm (Score 1) 611

by static0verdrive (#47118865) Attached to: Which desktop environment do you like the best?
Of course world is absolutely full of weird situations which make Windows go on knees too, but those can be pinpointed to specific components, like the "wrong network driver" you mentioned. They are not a general problem.
They aren't general problems in Linux either - they're usually related to graphics drivers. If you buy a video card that is well supposed in Linux on purpose you'll find everything runs quite well. It's all about being smart when you build a system - knowing you want to run whichever distro makes the hardware choices pretty easy.


Posted by samzenpus
from the getting-small dept.

Comment: Re:Data Caps are already here (Score 1) 475

by static0verdrive (#47008481) Attached to: Comcast Predicts Usage Cap Within 5 Years
Don't be fooled into thinking AT&T won't add caps soon too - they've always had them here in Canada (Rogers here is AT&T) and they make a killing off the overage fees - I can't imagine they wouldn't want to apply that to a larger marker like the US; it's free money! Re "no one seems to care", I would guess the polititians are getting hand-out incentives to go for this. "If the company makes more they promise me more, and I can afford the unlimited plan (if they don't give it to me free anyway)!" Matured-Capitalism-in-a-Matured-Democracy 101.

Comment: Re:Only pirates & terrorists need more than 30 (Score 3, Interesting) 475

by static0verdrive (#47008185) Attached to: Comcast Predicts Usage Cap Within 5 Years
So true... and they'll ignore the obvious stuff like Netflix, Steam, and the other modern e-business models that have greatly increased our average monthly bandwidth. I'm in Canada and I got tired of paying Rogers (AT&T) $68 a month for a 120GB cap, only to habitually over-step that line (I'm a habitual line-stepper, as Charlie Murphy would say) and get charged up to $100 more - thankfully laws prevent them from charging any more than $100 extra per month, but that's still $168 in a month just for internet. I've recently switched to Acanac where I'm paying less than $50 for the same speeds with no cap. Hopefully US customers will be able to find smaller/independant ISPs that offer something similar... switching away from the big guys when they make stupid moves like this is the only way to ge the message across - vote with your dollar! Don't be shy to sign online petitions and send out emails to politians on the upcoming bill they have to vote on, too.

Comment: Re:WTF is TV? (Score 1) 443

by static0verdrive (#44552059) Attached to: Despite Global Release, Breaking Bad Heavily Pirated
Yes. You remember seeing your grandparents watching golf, Matlock, Murder She Wrote and The Price is Right? That was on a TV, not a computer. I know you don't believe me, but it was in 480i at best!!! And they'd have to sit through commericials and wait until the show started! At least it was free! Hahaha! It's true!
