But on an even scarier professional level, it appears the sudden and inexplicable bricking of your phone and laptop are also telltale signs for ESPN employees that the Worldwide Leader has culled them from the company.
ESPN-NFL senior producer Seth Markman (h/t SB Nation’s Seth Rosenthal) was the first to confirm Schefter’s mobile woes, tweeting that his devices had been deactivated as a result of his name being “accidentally” placed on the company’s termination list:
In late July, Huang Xiuyuan, the 28-year-old CEO of Chinese startup carmaker Youxia Motors, unveiled the design for a high-performance electric sedan. Called Ranger X, the car is attractive, nicely proportioned, sporty looking. It will be instantly familiar to anyone who has seen a Tesla Model S – but we’re no longer surprised by Chinese carmakers paying legally questionable homage to successful Western models.
The car is weird, but its story is weirder.
First, its most useless innovation: The Ranger X has a holographic display in place of a front grille. Yes, a holographic display. It can show Youxia’s name and ‘Y’ emblem (which looks suspiciously like Tesla’s ‘T’ emblem), or a snippet of driver-inputted text, or emoji, or that red Pong display from the front of Knight Rider’s KITT.
A cocky Hillary Clinton on Tuesday shrugged off the questions swirling around materials culled from her private email account which the U.S. intelligence community has since classified as ‘top secret,’ making light of a reporter who asked if she had ‘wiped the server’ clean.
‘What, like with a cloth or something?’ Clinton chuckled? ‘Well, no. I don’t know how it works digitally at all.’
The contentious exchanges with reporters from CNN and Fox News came during a press conference following a town hall event in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Clinton stuck to the most recent version of her denial that she may have exposed state secrets to prying eyes by exclusively using a non-secure email account, hosted in her upstate New York home, during the four years she was secretary of state.
‘Whether it was a personal account or a government account,’ she said, ‘I did not send classified material. And I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified – which is the way you know whether something is.’
Yeah, pretty much. The push for a higher minimum wage is forcing the automation in the restaurant industry that inflated union wages did for the automotive industry decades ago. It’s not politics. It’s math.
Of course, it’s possible to imagine all kinds of dramatic productivity enhancements. Persona Pizzeria’s Miller predicts that drone delivery systems will eventually get rid of the need to come into a restaurant at all, for example. Brewer has a bold prediction: He thinks that all the automation working its way into restaurants could eventually cut staffing levels in half. The remaining employees would just need to learn how to operate the machines and fix things when they break.
“You don’t want a $15-an-hour person doing something that the person who makes $7 an hour can do,” Brewer said. “It’s not downgrading the employees. It’s that the employees become managers of a bunch of different systems. They’ll become smarter and smarter.”
So, why not a Wisconsin Public Newspaper? Essentially it would apply the concept of WPR and WPT to a daily newspaper or online news source. Just like public radio and television, it could be funded in part by the government and in part by individual contributors. And, if it were just an online presence, it wouldn’t have the need for expensive printing costs or studios or broadcast facilities. Money could be invested in journalists and editors. What a concept.
The free market can be a wonderful thing. It can spark creativity and greater productivity and increase societal wealth. But the market doesn’t produce everything we want as a society. Sadly, the market is now failing to produce enough high-quality journalism. Good reporting is just too crucial to a good democracy to accept the market’s verdict.
It is no secret that the newspaper industry has been decimated by the shift in technology and culture. It is also no secret that good reporting is crucial to self-governance because people can only make decisions about things they know. This has been particularly problematic for smaller communities. There is still plenty of money in covering national stories on national platforms, but the cost of getting someone to cover a school board or planning commission has outstripped the public’s willingness to pay for it.
While he has an interesting solution, Cieslewicz’s idea misses two crucial points. First, if the news is funded by government, it cannot be trusted to objectively report on the people who control its funding. He cites NPR, WPR, and the BBC as examples of models that work, but do they? NPR and WPR have an exceedingly liberal bent and consistently support big government. The BBC is slightly better, but not much. As a facet of a bloated government, a government news outlet will naturally support bloated government. Also, in all three cases, they still have the problem of only having resources to cover state, national, and in the case of the BBC, international news. Local news is still unobtainable with those models sans a massive increase in funding.
The second point Cieslewicz misses is that the very technology that is destroying newspapers is providing avenues for more, and often better coverage of local news. He dismisses this notion with the example of himself. He admits that he doesn’t do much news generation and does mostly opinions on the news. This is true of most bloggers – including me. But that’s just Cieslewicz and me. Here in West Bend, while I occasionally engage in news generation (not as much as I used to), others do it as their primary format. Another local citizen, Judy Steffes, generates a tremendous amount of local news content on her Facebook page, Washington County Insider. Others, like Washington County Nosey Neighbor and Washington County Scanner, provide additional information. Then there are the countless individuals who attend meetings, see events, and post their stories in various outlets. No, it’s not “professional” reporting, but as a citizen, I know a lot more about what’s going on in my community from listening to the entire myriad of news sources that technology makes available.
Cieslewicz is nostalgic for the days of a handful of highly-paid professional newsmen who bring the news to the people. Those days are long gone. Instead, the people largely bring the news to themselves. And that’s a good thing.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton relented Tuesday to months of demands she relinquish the personal email server she used while secretary of state, directing the device be given to the Justice Department.
The decision advances the investigation into the Democratic presidential front-runner’s use of a private email account as the nation’s top diplomat, and whether classified information was improperly sent via and stored on the home-brew email server she ran from her house in suburban New York City.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Dozens of emails that traversed Hillary Clinton’s private, unsecure home server contain national security information now deemed too sensitive to make public, according to the latest batch of records released Friday.
In 2,206 pages of emails, the government censored passages to protect national security at least 64 times in 37 messages, including instances when the same information was blacked-out multiple times. Clinton has said she never sent classified information from her private email server, which The Associated Press was first to identify as operating in her home in New York.
The Friday release brings the volume of emails publicly released by the State Department to roughly 12 percent of the 55,000 pages Clinton had turned over to department lawyers earlier this year. That falls short of the 15 percent goal set by a court ruling in May, a lag the State Department attributed to interest by the inspector general of the U.S. intelligence community in the possible compromise of classified information.
Washington (CNN)The inspector general for the intelligence community has informed members of Congress that some material Hillary Clinton emailed from her private server contained classified information, but it was not identified that way.
Because it was not identified, it is unclear whether Clinton realized she was potentially compromising classified information.
The IG reviewed a “limited sampling” of her emails and among those 40 reviewed found that “four contained classified [intelligence community] information,” wrote the IG Charles McCullough in a letter to Congress.
We have to assume that everything in Clinton’s communications for her entire tenure of Secretary of State has been compromised and is in the hands of our enemies.
A Cincinnati federal appeals court has ruled in favor of a woman who took advantage of an accidental phone call to listen in on conversations between two of her bosses for 91 minutes. Carol Spaw listened to the entire call, taking written notes and even recording the last few minutes of audio with a nearby iPhone.
Accidentally dialing a number from a phone in a pocket, or a butt-dial, is preventable, the court said. So caller James Huff had no expectation of privacy. Huff admitted knowing there was a risk of pocket dialing, and said he had made similar calls in the past.
(CNN) —Video of a handgun fired from a hovering drone into a wooded area has been posted on YouTube — where it has gone viral — apparently by an 18-year-old Connecticut student whose father says his son created the drone for a college class.
No one was harmed, nor has the teenager been arrested or charged. Still, the video has stirred fresh debate about the use of, and dangers posed by, drones.
While armed unmanned aircraft have long been in the government’s arsenal in targeting terrorists in distant lands, the idea of someone being able to fire bullets or other dangerous projectiles on a remote controlled flying object over the United States is something else entirely.
The gun drone in Connecticut appears to have been fired on private property and — so far, authorities said — it did not appear any laws were broken. There were no complaints from neighbors until after the “Flying Gun” video went viral with almost 2 million views as of Tuesday, authorities said.
If it was fired on private land and nobody was in danger or threatened, there’s nothing wrong with what the guy did. It does, however, bring to light the potential for drones in the hands of criminals or terrorists.
After a decade-long journey through our solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto Tuesday, about 7,750 miles above the surface — roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India – making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.
Taylor Swift has pulled her hit album 1989 from Apple’s new streaming music service and criticised the company.
In an open letter to Apple, Swift said she was withholding the record as she was unhappy with the three-month free trial offered to subscribers.
“I’m not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months,” she wrote.
She said the plan was “unfair”, arguing Apple had the money to cover the cost.
“I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company,” the 25-year-old said, describing Apple as one of her “best partners in selling music”.
This makes sense to me. At the very least, it should require a permit to make sure people know to whom the drone belongs in the event of an accident.
Green Bay could become the first city in Wisconsin to ban aerial drones at public events under a proposed ordinance that users of the small unmanned aircraft call unnecessary and overreaching.
The measure being drafted by the city attorney’s office would prohibit anyone from flying a drone over large public events such as farmers markets, concerts or holiday celebrations.
The ban was requested by the Green Bay Police Department in order to protect people in the event of an accident, said Captain Jeremy Muraski.
Apple’s forthcoming news app has been criticised over claims the company is hoodwinking bloggers into accepting its terms and conditions.
An unsolicited email from Apple inviting publishers to join the service presumes acceptance of the terms, unless they actively opt out.
It requires them to cover Apple if legal issues arise, among other things.
[…]
Other terms in the email allow Apple to place adverts next to publishers’ publicly available content without paying them.
So even though I didn’t ask them to redistribute my content, they will do so, hold me liable for any lawsuits, and not compensate me despite their being compensated for my content?
No thanks.
I agree with this guy.
And, in a blogpost entitled I Do Not Agree To Your Terms, he took issue with the requirement to opt out.
He wrote: “Let me get this straight, Apple: you send me an email outlining the terms under which you will redistribute my content, and you will just assume that I agree to your terms unless I opt out?
“You’re going to consider me bound to terms you just declared to me in an email as long as I don’t respond? That’s completely crazy. You don’t even know if I received the email!”
The FBI is investigating the St Louis Cardinals on charges that the US baseball team hacked into the computers of a rival club to steal player data, the New York Times has reported.
The alleged cyber-attack against the Houston Astros is thought to be the first time a professional sports team has been hacked by another.
Trade discussions and proprietary statistics were reportedly targeted.
Major League Baseball has confirmed the investigation.
Well, it was the good intentions that matter, right?
Madison’s Metro Transit announced Tuesday it would discontinue its audible turn alerts on buses after receiving complaints and hearing more than an hour of public testimony protesting the frequent beeping.
The audible turn alert system chirps every time a bus’ turn signal is activated and was installed with the goal of increasing safety. But the chirping noise has aggravated residents on bus lines and neighborhood groups, who amassed a significant showing at a Transit and Parking Commission meeting last week to testify against the system.
Residents raised issues with the noise and questioned whether there is any proof of their effectiveness in increasing safety. Some also said they’re avoiding riding the bus because of the noise.
Many moons ago, a small space probe named Philae skipped across the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko when the lander’s harpoon-like anchoring mechanism failed. It came to rest in a shady spot and, without enough sunlight to keep it powered, it fell asleep after about 60 hours of operation.
At 10:28 p.m., the European Space Agency’s operations center in Darmstadt, Germany, just south of Frankfurt, received a signal from Philae, which transmitted more than 300 data packets. Those have been analyzed at the Lander Control Center at the German Aerospace Center, which dubbed Philae’s emergence from its seven-month slumber a “‘hello’ from space.”
“Philae is doing very well. It has an operating temperature of -35ºC and has 24 watts available,” Philae project manager Stephan Ulamec said in a statement. “The lander is ready for operations.”
There are so many uses for drones… of course, one might just require the students to surrender their devices before the test. Or detonate an EMP… whatever.
Schools in the Chinese province of Luoyang decided to prove they’re a little smarter than cheating kids. The schools know that kids might try to use cell phones or other devices to find answers they just don’t have.
So, as students prepare to take the so-called gaokao — a highly intense two-day exam — they might hear a buzzing sound that isn’t inside their heads.
For above their heads may be drones, designed to spot signals being emitted from the exam room.
As Google’s translation of a People’s Daily report tells me, staff within the exam rooms are connected to the drone. It will inform them of any signal being emitted by those who might wish to use nefarious means to seem smarter than they are.
Hackers working for the Chinese state breached the computer system of the Office of Personnel Management in December, U.S. officials said Thursday, and the agency will notify some 4 million current and former federal employees that their personal data may have been compromised.
The hack was the second major intrusion of the same agency by China in less than a year and the second significant foreign breach into U.S. government networks in recent months. Russia last year compromised White House and State Department e-mail systems in a campaign of cyber-espionage.
