America’s Second-largest Employer Is a Temp Agency

cold fjord writes “From the Examiner: ‘…the second-largest employer in America is Kelly Services, a temporary work provider. … part-time jobs are at an all-time high, with 28 million Americans now working part-time. … There are now a record number of Americans with temporary jobs. Approximately 2.7 million, in fact. And the trend has been growing. … Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, but now make up a tenth of the jobs in the United States. In fact, nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary.’ The NYT has a chart detailing the problem.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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America’s Second-largest Employer Is a Temp Agency

Netflix keeps eyes on wider library with extended CBS pact

The latest stage in their content arms race, Netflix extends its agreement for classic and recent CBS shows, after Amazon Prime starts streaming “Under the Dome” days soon after they air. [Read more]        

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Netflix keeps eyes on wider library with extended CBS pact

What Are the Weirdest Languages in the World?

According to Idibon, a company that makes language processing applications, these are the weirdest languages on different continents: In North America: Chalcatongo Mixtec, Choctaw, Mesa Grande Diegueño, Kutenai, and Zoque; in South America: Paumarí and Trumai; in Australia/Oceania: Pitjantjatjara and Lavukaleve; in Africa: Harar Oromo, Iraqw, Kongo, Mumuye, Ju|’hoan, and Khoekhoe; in Asia: Nenets, Eastern Armenian, Abkhaz, Ladakhi, and Mandarin; and in Europe: German, Dutch, Norwegian, Czech, and Spanish. But is weirdness relative? Maybe the World Atlas of Language Structures provides a source for objective evaluation. Here’s what Idibon did with it: For each value that a language has, we calculate the relative frequency of that value for all the other languages that are coded for it. So if we had included subject-object-verb order then English would’ve gotten a value of 0.355 (we actually normalized these values according to the overal entropy for each feature, so it wasn’t exactly 0.355, but you get the idea). The Weirdness Index is then an average across the 21 unique structural features. But because different features have different numbers of values and we want to reduce skewing, we actually take the harmonic mean (and because we want bigger numbers = more weird, we actually subtract the mean from one). In this blog post, I’ll only report languages that have a value filled in for at least two-thirds of features (239 languages). What’s the weirdest language (subjectively speaking) that you’ve ever encountered? Link -via Marginal Revolution (Photo: Amazon.com)

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What Are the Weirdest Languages in the World?

Accept The Fact That You’re Aging Breath Spray

  Accept The Fact That You’re Aging Breath Spray   We heard that you were getting old. Not to worry. Now you can make the bitterness of life more palatable with The Accept The Fact That You’re Aging Breath Spray from the NeatoShop. This spearmint-flavored breath spray is less emotionally painful than therapy and much cheaper than plastic surgery.  Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Personal Care items.  Link

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Accept The Fact That You’re Aging Breath Spray

Group Chat Vulnerability Discovered in Cryptocat, Project Fixes and Apologizes

alphadogg writes “The founder of an eavesdropping-resistant instant messaging application called Cryptocat has apologized over a now-fixed bug that made some types of messages more vulnerable to snooping. Cryptocat, which runs inside a web browser, is an open-source application intended to provide users with a high degree of security by using encryption to scramble messages. But Cryptocat warns that users should still be very cautious with communications and not to trust their life with the application. The vulnerability affected group chats and not private conversations. The encryption keys used to encode those conversations were too short, which in theory made it easier for an attacker to decrypt and read conversations.” The bug report/merge request, and an analysis of the bug (although, in light of the Cryptocat’s gracious response, overly acerbic and dismissive of the project). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Group Chat Vulnerability Discovered in Cryptocat, Project Fixes and Apologizes

Racing Google To Bring Affordable, Driverless Cars To The Road, Mobileye Valued At $1.5B As Investors Take $400M Stake

In the world of self-driving cars and autonomous vehicle technology, Google gets most of the attention, but it’s far from being the only player in the field. Earlier this month, Mobileye , the Israeli and Dutch maker of advanced driver assistance technologies, claimed that self-driving cars “could be on the road by 2016.” Rather than Google cars’ array of radar, cameras, sensors and laser-based range finders, Mobileye wants to offer autonomous driving capability at a more affordable price point by using mainstream cameras that cost only a few hundred dollars. While cars using Mobileye’s systems, like the Audi A7 , aren’t quite as “autonomous” as Google vehicles, they could help advanced driver assistance technology make it onto the road long before 2025 — the date industry experts expect driverless cars to go mainstream. With its intelligent, camera-based “traffic assist” technology expected to begin arriving this summer thanks to partnerships with five major automakers, the automotive A.I. company is looking to take advantage while its stock is still high, so to speak. Mobileye announced today that it is selling $400 million in equity to “five unaffiliated” financial investors, which include “some of the largest U.S.-based global institutional asset managers and a leading Chinese government-affiliated financial investor, ” according to a statement released this morning . The transaction, which values the company at $1.5 billion (pre-money) and was overseen by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, is expected to close in August. The company attributes the timing, in part, to the current regulatory support and progression of global safety standards, which have helped encourage automakers to accelerate integration of intelligent driver assistance technologies. Mobileye has been around since the 1990s, and like Google, is more interested in being an artificial intelligence company and, specifically, improving the intelligence of cameras to assist with autonomous driving, than being an automaker itself. The company’s technology has been tested in a number of capacities, but mostly it’s focused on helping drivers avoid collisions. According to The New York Times , in the past, its tech has been used by companies like Volvo to detect pedestrians or vehicles up ahead or crossing in your blind-spots, alerting drivers when they get too close to those objects, for example. The newer version of Mobileye’s system that arrives this summer aims to help steer the car in stop-start situations, though drivers are still required to keep their hands on the wheel. Coming up next, and expected to be street-ready by 2013, is a more advanced system that will allow for hands-free driving. The company plans to begin experimenting with and adding to the number of onboard cameras in vehicles to improve the efficacy of its technology in autonomous driving cases and presumably push it closer to the kind of hands-free, full autonomy promised by Sergey Brin and Google in the years to come.

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Racing Google To Bring Affordable, Driverless Cars To The Road, Mobileye Valued At $1.5B As Investors Take $400M Stake

Next-Gen Gorilla Glass: Smartphones Could Have Antibacterial, Anti-Glare Displays

MojoKid writes “It’s not too often that upcoming glass technology is worth getting excited over, but leave it to Corning to pique our interest. During a recent talk at MIT’s Mobile Technology Summit, Dr. Jeffrey Evenson took to the stage to reiterate what it is about Gorilla Glass that makes it such an attractive product (something well evidenced given the majority of smartphones out there today implement it), as well as to give us a preview of what’s coming. Having pretty much mastered Gorilla Glass where strength, scratch-resistance and general durability are concerned, the company is now looking to improve-upon it (possibly for Gorilla Glass 4) by making it non-reflective and germ-resistant. Imagine your smartphone sporting this — you’d finally be able to see the screen regardless of how bright the sun behind you is. Unfortunately, it appears that it won’t be hitting our phones or tablets that soon. The estimate is ‘in the next two years.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Next-Gen Gorilla Glass: Smartphones Could Have Antibacterial, Anti-Glare Displays

Microsoft To Shut Down TechNet Subscription Service

otaku244 writes “Since 1998, Microsoft TechNet has been a the mainstay for all system developers attached to the Microsoft Platform given the ease of access to almost every product the company has produced. Unfortunately, the days of a cheap, unlimited Microsoft development stack are coming to an end.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft To Shut Down TechNet Subscription Service

XenServer 6.2 Is Now Fully Open Source

First time accepted submitter Jagungal writes “Although the core Xen hypervisor has always been open source from the start, Citrix have now released the next version of their XenServer including all features and tools under an open source license. This includes also introducing a new XenServer.org community portal. The major change for users is that they now get all features from the licensed version for free but unless they pay for support, they have to do all security updates manually. Change logs for the new version 6.2 can be found here. It’s been a few years since Citrix started giving it away, free as in beer. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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XenServer 6.2 Is Now Fully Open Source