Month: September 2016

Parents in Town, Day 5

Not that any combination of foot maladies could stop these unfashionable juggernauts. Though The People of New York v. Their Families clearly states that parental visits “may not exceed 4 days, although 3 is honestly ideal,” it was somehow now Day 5 of parents-in-town. We had crossed a dangerous threshold, into a netherworld where there wasn’t really anything left to do. A desperation took hold of us all—my stepfather, wielding a rolled-up copy of Time Out like a truncheon, began to suggest truly depraved activities. A visit to the Botanical Garden loomed.

Oversharing

#blessed

A 18-year-old woman from Carinthia is suing her parents for posting photos of her on Facebook without her consent. She claims that since 2009 they have made her life a misery by constantly posting 100s of photos of her, including embarrassing and intimate images from her childhood.

NYC Trash

spot on

2018-06-04:

Local 124, the union at Sanitation Salvage, also represents workers at several other Bronx companies owned by the Squitieris, including Metropolitan Transfer Station and D&J Ambulette. It turns out that Local 124 often gives to the same politicians as the Squitieris — and often on the same day. On 5 separate occasions between 2006 and 2010, Local 124 donated to the same Bronx political causes on the exact same days as the Squitieris and their companies. 1 of those same-day matching donations was to Bronx Borough President Diaz, and 2 of them were to Klein. “The Squitieris run the Bronx”. In 2016, the de Blasio administration came out in support of a plan for overhauling the private trash industry. New York would be carved up into zones, companies would make bids to collect the garbage in a given zone, and then the city would pick the winners. In this system, backers have argued, the city could make winning a bid contingent on meeting strict benchmarks for things like safety training, wages, hours or recycling rates.

EmDrive

A group at NASA’s Johnson Space Center has successfully tested an electromagnetic (EM) propulsion drive in a vacuum – a major breakthrough for a multi-year international effort comprising several competing research teams. Thrust measurements of the EM Drive defy classical physics’ expectations that such a closed (microwave) cavity should be unusable for space propulsion because of the law of conservation of momentum.

there’s a low, but nonzero probability that we’ll have a reactionless drive by eoy:

Spacecraft equipped with a reactionless drive could potentially make it to the moon in just a few hours, Mars in 2-3 months, and Pluto within 2 years. that’s about 4x faster.

Largest DDoS yet

the attackers behind this record assault launched it from quite a large collection of hacked systems — possibly 100k of systems. “Someone has a botnet with capabilities we haven’t seen before. We looked at the traffic coming from the attacking systems, and they weren’t just from 1 region of the world or from a small subset of networks — they were everywhere.”