If Times Square is too gaudy, crowded, and frankly insane for you, then there is another New York tradition worth your New Year’s Eve—one that is, in fact, ending tonight. For the past fifty years, the Pratt Institute has set out its amazing collection of big old steam whistles out on the lawn of its Brooklyn campus . Tonight’s your last chance to steam blast your way into the new year. Read more…
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Brooklyn’s Best NYE Tradition Ends Tonight
Every decade produces iconic pieces of futurism that help to define a generation. For the 1960s it was The Jetsons and Star Trek . For the 1970s it was Future Shock and Soylent Green . What about the 1980s? It was almost certainly Back to the Future Part II . Read more…
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Back to the Future II Takes Place This Year. How Close Did We Get?
1910 was just two years after the first Model T was produced by Ford, and cars were quickly taking over the New York City’s streets. It was also the first year NYC began keeping track of traffic deaths. And now, the number of deaths has dipped below that first year. Read more…
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Pedestrian traffic deaths in NYC haven’t been this low since 1910
We debunked a lot of fake viral photos this year. Eighty-six, to be exact. And that doesn’t even include all those fake toilet photos from the Sochi Olympics , those fake Ebola cures , and all the lies that UberFacts helped spread . It was a busy year for fakes. Read more…
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86 Viral Images From 2014 That Were Totally Fake
An unnamed airline is said to be planning a “coach-minus” service that features smaller, more crowded seats. They say they’re providing cheaper tickets to passengers who demand it. Read the rest
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Coach-minus: a new low in high-flying travel
An anonymous reader writes: Have you enjoyed reading the constant flow of news about how red light cameras are failing? They’ve been installed under the shadow of corruption, they don’t increase safety, and major cities are dropping them. Well, the good news is that red-light cameras are on the decline in the U.S. The bad news is that speeding cameras are on the rise. From the article: “The number of U.S. communities using red-light cameras has fallen 13 percent, to 469, since the end of 2012, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit scientific and educational organization funded by the insurance industry. That includes the 24 towns in New Jersey that participated in a pilot program that ended this month with no pending legislation to revive it. Meanwhile, the institute estimates that 137 communities use speed cameras, up from 115 at the end of 2011.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Out With the Red-Light Cameras, In With the Speeding Cameras
Nerval’s Lobster writes Is the tablet market rapidly collapsing? Mobile-analytics firm Flurry doesn’t come to quite that stark a conclusion, but things aren’t looking too good for touch-screens that don’t qualify as “phablets.” According to Flurry’s numbers, full-sized tablets accounted for only 11 percent of new devices in 2014, a decline from 2013, when that form-factor totaled 17 percent of the new-device market; small tablets experienced a smaller decline, falling from 12 percent to 11 percent of new devices between 2013 and 2014. (Meanwhile, phablets expanded from 4 percent of new devices in 2013 to 13 percent this year.) Boy Genius Report, for its part, looked at those numbers and decided that the tablet market is doomed: “Consumers happy with compact smartphones are not switching to larger iPhones for now, but former tablet buyers are.” That’s not to say people will stop using tablets, but the onetime theory that they would one day cannibalize all PCs looks increasingly nebulous. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Is the Tablet Market In Outright Collapse? Data Suggests Yes
jones_supa writes: Another day, another corporate network intrusion. NVIDIA has reportedly been breached in the first week of December, with the attack compromising personal information of the employees. There is no indication that other data has been compromised. This is according to an email sent out by the company’s privacy office and Nvidia’s SVP and CIO Bob Worwall on December 17th. It took NVIDIA a couple of weeks to pick up all the pieces and assess the incident. It appears that the issue was pinned down by an employee or several employees getting their personal data compromised outside of the company network. After that, the information was used to gain unauthorized access to the internal corporate network. NVIDIA’s IT team has taken extensive measures since then to enhance the security of the network against similar attacks in the future. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NVIDIA Breached
The ingenious twig-burning folks at BioLite have done it again. Their latest, the NanoGrid, is a combo battery pack and lighting system for the outdoors. Now you can charge your gadgets and light up your campsite with the power of a single wood stove. Read more…
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BioLite’s New Lanterns Are a Tiny Powergrid For Your Campsite
Here’s a scary thing that happened: South Korean authorities found evidence that a worm was recently removed from devices connected to nuclear power facilities. The news comes a little over a week after the country’s nuclear plant operator received warnings on Twitter that its network had been compromised . Thankfully, the reactor controls were not infected. Read more…
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Hackers Uploaded a Worm to South Korean Nuclear Plants