Flickr revamped w 1TB of FREE storage!

Flickr gets revamp — with 1 TB of storage space free — and Yahoo gets new NYC office

By Laura Hazard Owen

20 May 2013

Summary:More news from Yahoo on Monday: The company is revamping photo-sharing service Flickr and is also opening a New York office.

Yahoo’s already had a busy Monday, what with that little $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, but the company had a few more announcements to make at a press conference Monday afternoon in New York. It’s revamping its photo-sharing service Flickr , which has largely been left to languish since Yahoo acquired it in 2005. “We want to make Flickr awesome again,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said.

Flickr is getting three big updates. All users will get 1 terabyte of photo storage for free. The photo service’s interface is also being redesigned to

Little Known History: The NRA Once Supported Gun Control.

Monday, Jan 14, 2013 10:00 AM EST

The NRA once supported gun control

It may seem hard to believe, but for decades the organization helped write federal laws restricting gun use

By Steven Rosenfeld, Alternet

The NRA once supported gun control.

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

For nearly a century after, its founding in 1871, the National Rifle Association was among America’s foremost pro-gun control organizations. It was not until 1977 when the NRA that Americans know today emerged, after libertarians who equated owning a gun with the epitome of freedom and fomented widespread distrust against government—if not armed insurrection—emerged after staging a hostile leadership coup.

In the years since, an NRA that once encouraged better markmanship and reasonable gun control laws gave way to an advocacy organization and political force that saw more guns as the answer to society’s worst violence, whether arming commercial airline pilots after 9/11 or teachers after the Newtown, while opposing new restrictions on gun usage.

It is hard to believe that the NRA was committed to gun-control laws for most of the 20th century—helping to write most of the federal laws restricting gun use until the 1980s.

“Historically, the leadership of the NRA was

NYC Seeks to Curb Painkiller Abuse With Hospital Limits

It’s only “deadly” if it’s misused or abused.

And yet, the idea is an excellent one because it limits potential for misuse and abuse by fraud.

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New York City is seeking to curb abuse of potentially addictive and deadly painkillers such as Oxycontin and Vicodin with new limits on how widely the drugs should be prescribed.

Emergency departments at New York’s public hospitals will only prescribe a three-day supply of opioid painkillers, won’t refill lost or stolen prescriptions and shouldn’t prescribe long-acting versions of the drugs, according to voluntary guidelines the city issued today.

The move is aimed at

Can you hear me now? FCC likely to get an earful from cellular power outages caused by Hurricane Sandy.

For many – if not most – people, communication issues and law are a complete mystery. They just want their #*@^$%! cell phones to work. That’s all.

But here’s a thumbnail sketch of why your service sucks, no matter your cell phone carrier.

In the beginning of cellular, it was once called “wireless” – it still is by insiders – and there was the “A” carrier, and the “B” carrier. The “A” carrier was the wireless carrier, while the “B” carrier was the wireless carrier for the landline company, which in most cases was BellSouth, which was gobbled up by AT&T.

The two carriers operated on different frequencies, but within the same bandwidth.

Then, cellular grew. It grew so much it needed more bandwidth. So, the FCC allocated more airwave “space” for cellular frequencies.

That was where the problems all began.

The Federal Communication Commission has regulatory purview and authority over all communications in the United States. And instead of telling the carriers that they had to adopt a common standard, they allowed each and every carrier to different technology and standards to build their networks.

Some built networks along major highways, such as Interstates. Others, concentrated on small local areas, while yet others adopted strategies that focused upon large markets like major cities. And yet none of them collaborated, and each one did their own thing.

The landline telephone in your house has one standard. Not several. As well, the routing it uses – that is, the wires that carry the signal – are invisibly routed to the end users. So, if a wire is knocked down, or damaged by digging, the signal is re-routed through another node – all which is invisible to the end users – and the call continues. That is called “redundancy,” and there are at least two back-ups to such system, which is called “dual redundancy.”

That is NOT SO with wireless.

If a signal from a cellular telephone to a cellular tower is broken, there is no recourse. The call is dropped/disconnected. And often times, once that call is dropped, neither the caller, nor the party being called can reach each other – even if one party is using a landline phone. (We’ve all gone through “cellular dead zones,” right?)

However, IF the FCC had mandated that all cellular carriers adopt a unified standard of signal transmission, they could’ve also required those same carriers to share cellular tower space. As it is now, competing cellular companies DO NOT share tower space with each other – which is why it’s possible to see cellular towers nearby, but not have any quality signal (if any) in many cases. The reason why, is that it’s not the tower for the cellular carrier you use. Too bad, eh?

Truth be told, the United States is at least 15 years or more behind the rest of the world when it comes to cellular communications. For example, in South Korea, the people in that nation have nationwide WiFi and have been watching teevee on their cellular phones for quite some time. Not so in the United States.

Why?

I refer the reader to the previous remark.

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F.C.C. Details Storm-Related Cellphone Problems

October 31, 2012
The New York Times

By EDWARD WYATT and BRIAN X. CHEN

WASHINGTON — For all of the modern communications that keep people connected, cellphones rely on an age-old technology that has repeatedly demonstrated its own instability during emergencies — electricity.

Power systems failures throughout the Northeast have been the main culprits in the shutdown of more than 20 percent of the cell tower sites in 10 states, causing millions of lost calls on Wednesday, government and industry officials said.

Slow progress was made in restoring some services. Federal Communications Commission officials said that the percentage of cell tower sites not working in the storm-damaged areas declined “by a few percentage points” as of Wednesday morning, down from about 25 percent on Tuesday.

Wired broadband and cable television systems remained out of service for

Hurricane Sandy Pummels East Coast, Stresses Cities’ Weak Infrastructure

Like many, I’ve read a few stories, and seen a few pics from the landing of Hurricane Sandy on the United States Eastern seaboard.

Honestly, it’s difficult to go throughout the day not hearing at least one story about the extreme climatic conditions that’ve been wreaking havoc for thousands of miles, stretching North into Canada and South into the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee & North Carolina from the hurricane’s epicenter located in the New York City & New Jersey areas.

Though unlike many, I’ve not stayed glued to the weather news or developments.

Extreme climatic events in remote affected areas – unusually early and deep snowfall, including heavy rain – have accompanied this unparalleled severe weather event. Yet one of the odd things about this storm, is that – as hurricane strength is measured – it’s not a powerful storm.

Hurricane measurements grade storm intensity according to wind strength, and

North Dakota oil output at new high in August

North Dakota oil output at new high in August: regulator

NEW YORK | Wed Oct 10, 2012 5:43pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Oil production in North Dakota accelerated in August, jumping by 3.6 percent from July levels to top the 700,000 barrel-per-day mark for the first time in the state’s history, data from the state Industrial Commission showed on Wednesday.

The state’s August oil output rose by nearly 25,000 barrels-per-day from the previous month and hit just above 701,000 bpd, fast approaching volumes from OPEC-member Qatar, which produced 770,000 bpd in August.

Most of this was from

It’s still true: Alabamians are “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.”

One must understand the audience to whom Mr. Archibald writes his Birmingham News OpEds.

They’re the same ones who found hometown favorite criminal Richard Scrushy – monikered as “America’s First Oblivious CEO” – “Not Guilty” of violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, who to date, remains the solitary individual ever charged with its violation. Alice Martin, then Federal Prosecutor for the Northern District of Alabama, who failed to obtain a guilty verdict in the case, could have moved the trial to New York City – home of Wall Street – or “in Washington, D.C., or in New York City where pecuniary intricacies are understood,” but rather chose Birmingham, Alabama as the trial venue. John C. Coffee, professor of securities law at Columbia Law School, accurately said of the case, that “much of the information was over their heads” and jurors were “sick of trying to understand evidence that was beyond them.”

This remark – right, or wrong (but mostly right) – remains true for Alabama:
Citizens in the state are “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.“

In context of course, historically, one should recognize

States find private prisons too costly, move toward employment model

Many states and individuals complain about budget items, but few ever discuss the booming private prison industry in this nation – a Wall Street-traded for-profit prison system supported by tax dollars… a corporate welfare program if ever there was one.

A key paragraph is this one: “Although states spend significant amounts of money on criminal justice—it’s second only to Medicaid in state budgets—the vast majority of those costs go toward prisons, with limited emphasis on preparing prisoners for life on the outside. The costs of incarceration include an annual $82 billion spent on corrections nationwide, including millions for oversight of parole systems overseeing the 75% of prisoners released short of their full sentences.”

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From Prison to a Paycheck

Instead of training and counseling, Newark is trying work first—with promising results

By HOWARD HUSOCK

• LIFE & CULTURE
• August 3, 2012, 6:51 p.m. ET

Former inmate Hector Morales at work; the Office of Reentry in Newark, N.J., intervened to help him. He says he was tired of being a bad role model for his kids.

Hector Morales might not seem, at first, to be an American success story. At age 50, he works the graveyard shift—7 p.m. to 5 a.m.—at the back of a garbage truck, part of a three-man crew that lifts and loads 80,000 pounds of waste each night in New York City. It’s his first job in years. The native of Paterson, N.J., a high-school dropout, still owes more than $9,000 in child-support payments to the state of New Jersey.

Former inmate Hector Morales at work; the Office of Reentry in Newark, N.J., intervened to help him. He says he was tired of being a bad role model for his kids. Katie Orlinsky for The Wall Street Journal

But compared with Mr. Morales’s situation a year ago, his story is a success.

Then, he was completing a five-year sentence at the Northern State Prison in Newark, N.J. The former heroin addict has spent, by his own estimate, 18 years behind bars, mostly on drug-related charges. Today, Newark-based Action Carting, one of the largest commercial disposal firms operating in New York, considers Mr. Morales to be a model employee and a good prospect for promotion if he completes his plan to get a commercial truck driver’s license. Currently, he’s on track to earn more than $60,000 a year, including overtime. Every week, part of his check goes to pay off his child-support debt.

Part of the change is due to Mr. Morales’s own attitude. “I got tired of being in jail, tired of officers controlling my life, tired of being the wrong kind of role model for my children,” he says.

His success says much about an unusual intervention by Newark. In April 2009, with the help of

Ask a silly question, get a silly answer. Yes, there’s such thing as a STUPID question.

The title says it all.

But the title doesn’t explain why.

Read on for more understanding.

On the FaceBook page of Loyola University New Orleans, a photograph was posted of a… well, here it is.

A True Tale of a Good Man Gone Bad… Gone Good

A Jail Guard’s Tale of His Journey to Inmate

June 3, 2012, 4:26 pm, By COREY KILGANNON

Gary Heyward, once a Rikers Island guard, in Harlem selling copies of his book recounting his experiences. (Todd Heisler/The New York Times)

Gary Heyward stood on 125th Street in Harlem, not far from the Apollo Theater, wearing a jumpsuit that was half blue and half orange.

Mr. Heyward, 44, had this odd-looking uniform specially made — part prison guard, part inmate — to illustrate that at Rikers Island, where he worked as a corrections officer from 1997 to 2006, he went from cop to criminal.

“One day you’re taking the count and the next day you’re in the count,” he said, referring to the jails’ regular head counts of inmates.

This abrupt transition is precisely the angle of his new book, a self-published paperback called “Corruption Officer: Perpetrator With a Badge.”

It is a raunchy tell-all and a critical portrayal of Rikers Island, where