One of the cornerstones of Amazon’s business has been avoiding sales taxes; because their transactions are online, you don’t have to pay Uncle Sam with every purchase. And now, thanks to some maneuvering around a proposed California law, you’ll remain off the hook for another year…
According to a new study from Pew, it has been found that the American Dream of upward social mobility has stalled for some people. A third of Americans who grew up in the middle class falling out of it as adults.
Post office is the latest casualty of digital technology.
Digital technology is slowly but steadily replacing working humans. And the latest casualty of digital technology is the U.S. Postal Service. The post office is going to have to drastically scale back its operations or shut down altogether if they don’t find an external source of funding. 600,000 people will be out of work and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms.
The decline in the self-employed is a “troubling” trend.
Fewer Americans are choosing to be self-employed. 14.5 million people were self-employed in August. That number is down 2.1 million from the most recent peak in December 2006, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Malware sucks. In the best-case scenario, it craps up your system with unwanted files and occasionally makes itself known in the form of a persistent pop-up window or annoying browser-based toolbar. In the worst-case scenario, malware completely takes over your desktop or laptop and ruins your life.
Your system slows it to a crawl. You can’t even boot into Windows in the time it takes you to walk to the kitchen and back. Your data gets sent off to a faraway Internet land or, worse, your actual keystrokes are recorded for some unsavory individual to see. Malware locks down you browser, making you unable to actually do any browsing without being carted off to some bogus domain. You can barely run a program in Windows without getting bombarded by fake advertisements, programs, and dancing people on your desktop.
It’s been estimated that 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in cities, with another two billion expected to move to already overcrowded urban areas in the next twenty years. The pressures of rapid urbanization often mean that careful urban planning is difficult, and may be completely overlooked in ad-hoc situations like slums.
In the hopes of helping urban planners and designers make better decisions in the face of such constraints, researchers at MIT’s City Form Research Group have launched the Urban Network Analysis (UNA) toolbox, an open-source software that uses mathematical network analysis to describe spatial patterns of cities. Often used to study social networks like Facebook, network analysis methods can also be used to better examine urban issues like accessibility, spatial patterns, urban growth and change…
These 10 brainy students are refining cancer treatments, cleaning up car exhaust systems, and improving communication between humans and robots and they are doing all of this in between pep rallies and history tests.
Americans may be witnessing their global superpower influence decline in the face of challenges from other emerging players on the world stage, but they have been voted the world’s “coolest nationality” in an international poll.