Tag: lottery

What Those Spray Paint Marks on the Street Actually Mean [Update]

Walking around your city, you might have noticed spray paint markings on the street and sidewalk. Clearly they’re there to mark something, but what? Turns out, construction workers aren’t just doodling for fun—those marks are there to protect you. Read more…

Visit link:
What Those Spray Paint Marks on the Street Actually Mean [Update]

More Fast Food Restaurants Are Now Automating

An anonymous reader writes: Wendy’s is adding self-service ordering kiosks “to at least 1, 000 restaurants, or about 15% of its stores, ” reports the Los Angeles Times, while McDonald’s and Panera Bread are now planning to add kiosks to every restaurant. “Lots of restaurants, not just fast-food chains, are really trying to mitigate the costs of higher wages, ” says one market research firm, while also citing a survey which found 40% of millennials willing to use kiosks (compared to 30% of restaurant-goers overall). But in some cases this means more work for human employees. Quartz points out that McDonalds doesn’t plan to reduce its workforce after installing kiosks, and Panera Bread “has said that at some locations where it has ordering kiosks, it has actually increased human hours to help the kitchen keep up with the higher number of orders that come in through the more efficient ordering system.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
More Fast Food Restaurants Are Now Automating

Serious Computer Glitches Can Be Caused By Cosmic Rays

The Los Alamos National Lab wrote in 2012 that “For over 20 years the military, the commercial aerospace industry, and the computer industry have known that high-energy neutrons streaming through our atmosphere can cause computer errors.” Now an anonymous reader quotes Computerworld: When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don’t be so quick to blame the manufacturer. Cosmic rays — or rather the electrically charged particles they generate — may be your real foe. While harmless to living organisms, a small number of these particles have enough energy to interfere with the operation of the microelectronic circuitry in our personal devices… particles alter an individual bit of data stored in a chip’s memory. Consequences can be as trivial as altering a single pixel in a photograph or as serious as bringing down a passenger jet. A “single-event upset” was also blamed for an electronic voting error in Schaerbeekm, Belgium, back in 2003. A bit flip in the electronic voting machine added 4, 096 extra votes to one candidate. The issue was noticed only because the machine gave the candidate more votes than were possible. “This is a really big problem, but it is mostly invisible to the public, ” said Bharat Bhuva. Bhuva is a member of Vanderbilt University’s Radiation Effects Research Group, established in 1987 to study the effects of radiation on electronic systems. Cisco has been researching cosmic radiation since 2001, and in September briefly cited cosmic rays as a possible explanation for partial data losses that customer’s were experiencing with their ASR 9000 routers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See original article:
Serious Computer Glitches Can Be Caused By Cosmic Rays

Congress will consider proposal to raise H-1B minimum wage to $100,000

Enlarge / Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., is one of two sponsors on an H-1B reform bill. He’s pictured here House Republican Conference meeting in 2015. (credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty) President-Elect Donald Trump is just a week away from taking office. From the start of his campaign, he has promised big changes to the US immigration system. For both Trump’s advisers and members of Congress, the H-1B visa program, which allows many foreign workers to fill technology jobs, is a particular focus. One major change to that system is already under discussion: making it harder for companies to use H-1B workers to replace Americans by simply giving the foreign workers a raise. The “Protect and Grow American Jobs Act,” introduced last week by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. and Scott Peters, D-Calif., would significantly raise the wages of workers who get H-1B visas. If the bill becomes law, the minimum wage paid to H-1B workers would rise to at least $100,000 annually, and be adjusted it for inflation. Right now, the minimum is $60,000. The sponsors say that would go a long way towards fixing some of the abuses of the H-1B program, which critics say is currently used to simply replace American workers with cheaper, foreign replacements. In 2013, the top nine companies acquiring H-1B visas were technology outsourcing firms, according to an analysis by a critic of the H-1B program. (The 10th is Microsoft.) The thinking goes that if minimum H-1B salaries are brought closer to what high-skilled tech employment really pays, the economic incentive to use it as a worker-replacement program will drop off. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
Congress will consider proposal to raise H-1B minimum wage to $100,000

Humans go through moult and grow new pelts

People who live with pets notice that some animals moult in the spring and fall. Losing feathers or fur is unattractive, but it leads to a beautiful new coat in which to survive the winter or to attract a mate. It turns out humans also moult and grow attractive new coats of hair. Read more…        

Follow this link:
Humans go through moult and grow new pelts

The World Falls Back In Love With Coal

Hugh Pickens writes “Richard Anderson reports on BBC that despite stringent carbon emissions targets in Europe designed to slow global warming and massive investment in renewable energy in China, coal, the dirtiest and most polluting of all the major fossil fuels, is making a comeback with production up 6% over 2010, twice the rate of increase of gas and more than four times that of oil. ‘What is going on is a shift from nuclear power to coal and from gas to coal; this is the worst thing you could do, from a climate change perspective,’ says Dieter Helm. Why the shift back to coal? Because coal is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time. Due to the economic downturn, there has been a ‘collapse in industrial demand for energy,’ leading to an oversupply of coal, pushing the price down. Meanwhile China leads the world in coal production and consumption. It mines over 3 billion tons of coal a year, three times more than the next-biggest producer (America), and last year overtook Japan to become the world’s biggest coal importer. Although China is spending massive amounts of money on a renewable energy but even this will not be able to keep up with demand, meaning fossil fuels will continue to make up the majority of the overall energy mix for the foreseeable future and when it comes to fossil fuels, coal is the easy winner — it is generally easier and cheaper to mine, and easier to transport using existing infrastructure such as roads and rail, than oil or gas. While China is currently running half a dozen carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects — which aim to capture CO2 emissions from coal plants and bury it underground — the technology is nowhere near commercial viability. ‘Renewed urgency in developing CCS globally, alongside greater strides in increasing renewable energy capacity, is desperately needed,’ writes Anderson, ‘but Europe’s increasing reliance on coal without capturing emissions is undermining its status as a leader in clean energy, and therefore global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Follow this link:
The World Falls Back In Love With Coal