It’s July. Why on Earth Is There Still Snow in Boston?

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Boston brownstone houses in winter. Kasia Baumann/Getty Images

There was a bunch of snow in Boston this year—and some of it’s still there. Yes, in July some of the snow has not yet melted. Why? There are a couple of reasons, some of them have to do with physics.

Piles of Snow

According to weather.com, Boston had 110 inches of snow this winter. Sure, some of this snow melted at different times—but much of it didn’t. What do you do with all this snow? Suppose that there was just 50 inches (1.27 m) of snow that covered an area that was 1 square mile. If you take all of this snow and move it to a football field, it would stack 600 meters high (almost 2,000 feet). So you can see the problem with the massive amounts of Boston snow. If you want to clear the roads, you have to put the snow somewhere. This makes giant piles of snow.

Snow Mixed With Trash

When trucks plow snow covered roads, they don’t just get the snow. They also gather up stuff that was on the ground before the snow (and after the snow). Typically this stuff is call “trash.” With regards to melting, there’s a big difference between snow and trash.

continue http://www.wired.com/2015/07/july-earth-still-snow-boston/

Adblock Plus Reduces University’s Network Traffic By 25 Percent

A Canadian university claims to have saved between 25 and 40 percent of its network bandwidth by deploying Adblock Plus across its internal network.

The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus browser extension in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of bandwidth was saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers.

Lack of studies

“While the present popularity of Adblock Plus represents a certain vindication of its ad-blocking model, there is a lack of technical studies on its effectiveness,” said Malcolm Toms, Manager of Network Operations in the faculty of arts and social sciences at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

“The purpose of this study was to fill this knowledge gap and evaluate the effectiveness of Adblock Plus in an enterprise environment, and document any reduction in network traffic.”

The study was carried out over a period of six week, and involved 100 volunteers in an active enterprise computing environment at the university. The study’s main conclusions were that Adblock Plus was not only effective in blocking online advertisements, but that it “significantly” reduced network data usage.
Read more at http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/e-marketing/adblock-plus-adblocking-network-traffic-172245#iw40l7iyH677HuVz.99

MTV to Air ‘White People’ Documentary Hosted By Illegal Alien

MTV will air a documentary on what it means to be white in America later this month, and has released a trailer showing young white people confronted about their race.

The documentary “White People” debuts July 22 at 8 p.m. and can also be seen on other platforms, according to MTV.com. The documentary is hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning filmmaker and journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who is an illegal immigrant from the Philipines.

MTV will air a documentary on what it means to be white in America later this month, and has released a trailer showing young white people confronted about their race.

The documentary “White People” debuts July 22 at 8 p.m. and can also be seen on other platforms, according to MTV.com. The documentary is hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning filmmaker and journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who is an illegal immigrant from the Philipines.

Story continues below video.

MTV President Stephen Friedman said, “Whiteness often remains unexamined in conversations about race in this country, even as it acts as the implicit norm against which other racial identities are judged,” Mediaite reports.

“By shining a spotlight on whiteness, we hope ‘White People’ will serve as a powerful conversation starter that encourages our audience to address racial bias through honest, judgment-free dialogue,” he said.

MTV.com reports that the young people in the film share their thoughts, feelings and personal stories about their race, and help Vargas further explore ideas like “white privilege, affirmative action and racial identity” with the goal of starting “some real and honest conversations in a thoughtful, judgment-free environment.”
continue http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/mtv-white-people-documentary/2015/07/09/id/654326/

Bus stop cheekily put outside pub becomes part of the route

A CHEEKY landlord who plonked an old bus stop sign outside his pub to pull in the punters has seen his move rewarded.

John Hawkridge says his efforts give “stopping for a pint” at the Gallipot Inn a whole new meaning – and now customers are hopping on board to raise a glass from as far afield as Tunbridge Wells.

The Upper Hartfield publican found the discarded bus stop sign in a hedge four miles away in Cowden, and moved it to his establishment and placed a pub flier in the slot normally reserved for a timetable.

Drink

“We have good food, good drink – and now a good bus stop,” said Mr Hawkridge, 70.

“I found the sign outside the Queen’s Arms in Cowden – it had been taken down because the stop was thought dangerous – so it had been stuck in a hedge for a year.

I just moved it and put it outside (the pub).

“We bought the Gallipot about two years ago and I just thought it would be good to have a bus stop by the pub. I put it there, I put in my own sign, and a couple of customers started queuing up. . . and buses started stopping.”

continue http://www.eastgrinsteadcourier.co.uk/Landlord-borrowed-bus-stop-outside-pub-amazed/story-26847504-detail/story.html

Why Nasdaq Is Betting On Bitcoin’s Blockchain

• By Mike Orcutt

Why It Matters

Those who use commercial database tools have to trust their valuable data to the companies that market those tools.

It’s much too early to tell whether Bitcoin is the future of money, but a recently launched Nasdaq experiment will test whether it can be the future of financial record keeping.The stock exchange announced recently that it has begun experimenting with the blockchain—the publicly accessible and cryptographically verified record of every single Bitcoin transaction that has ever occurred. Transactions are verified and recorded in the blockchain by a network of “miners” all over the world who exchange their computing power for a chance to solve complex cryptographic puzzles and earn money—freshly minted bitcoins. Specifically, Nasdaq will take advantage of a feature in Bitcoin’s design that allows additional data to be recorded on the blockchain along with information about a Bitcoin transaction (see “Why Bitcoin Could Be Much More Than a Currency”).

Nasdaq intends to use this feature of the blockchain to streamline financial record keeping while making it cheaper and more accurate. Though the company says the blockchain initiative could ultimately be used to record trades of stocks in public firms listed on its exchange, it will begin by focusing on its relatively new private market platform, a service that connects private companies with investors. In this case, record keeping via the blockchain will complement a cloud-based data management tool that tracks who owns shares of a given company, and how much they own.

Keeping track of a company’s ownership structure can be a complicated, time-consuming, and expensive task, especially for fast-growing startups looking to attract new investors. In many cases, companies manage their own data in a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, and pay lawyers to validate the information every time the table changes.

Big changes are coming to Firefox to win back users and developers

Firefox is about to undergo some dramatic changes, according to Mozilla. Most notably, it sounds like future versions of Firefox will focus on Firefox-esque features such as Private Browsing Mode, while features that are unpolished or otherwise not very useful will be stripped out of the browser entirely. Furthermore, it looks like Mozilla is finally getting serious about moving Firefox away from XUL and XBL, though it isn’t clear if they will be replaced with open Web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS) or native UI.

In an e-mail to the firefox-dev mailing list, Firefox Director of Engineering Dave Camp has outlined what he calls the Three Pillars of the new Firefox: Uncompromised Quality, Best Of The Web, and Uniquely Firefox. Let’s take them in order.

Uncompromised Quality will aim to strip out Firefox’s half-baked ideas or carry them through to completion so that they’re “polished, functional, and a joy to use.” This program is internally dubbed “Great or Dead”—as in, if the Firefox devs can’t make a feature great, it should be killed off. Camp says in the e-mail that Electrolysis (e10s)—Firefox’s massively overdue implementation of per-tab processes—is one of the first features that needs to be focused on in order “to get the kind of snappy experience we need to make Firefox feel great.”

Best Of The Web is a slightly more nebulous pillar that will concern itself with the add-ons community and partnerships with third parties like Telefonica. “We intend to spend some significant effort making addons even more awesome by improving security and performance for users and building a better API that increases x-platform compatibility for addon authors and partners,” Camp says in the e-mail.

continue http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/big-changes-are-coming-to-firefox-to-win-back-users-and-developers/

Free plugin provided here to help you remove DRM and dvd copy protection on Windows or Mac

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Some Video Converters like Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate, Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate for Mac are able to convert videos or rip DVDs except Commercial DVDs. However, the Free DRM & DVD Protection Removal Plugin provided here can enable these video converters to rip both common and commercial DVD movies.
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This Organization Wants to Stop Killer Robots

The U.S. Dropped A Fake Nuclear Bomb In Nevada Recently

The U.S dropped a fake nuclear bomb in Nevada’s Great Basin Desert as part of a test used to upgrade their nuclear capabilities from Cold War standard B61 nuclear bombs to “Mod 12″.

RT News reports [1]:

The B61 has been a top weapon in the US nuclear arsenal since its development at the height of the Cold War in 1963. The intermediate-yield thermonuclear weapon can be delivered by a supersonic aircraft. It is designed to cause a two-stage radiation implosion, but it is a “gravity bomb” – which just means that it’s unguided.

The once USSR-facing technology might seem to be an anachronism in this day and age, but President Barack Obama has taken initiative in keeping this weapon alive and well, despite a hefty price tag. The total cost of the program is estimated to be as high as $11 billion, according to the New York Times – and that’s just to update it to its current version [2].

This seems to be at odds with Obama’s promise of not fielding any new nuclear warheads, which he made during a speech in Prague in 2009. In that same speech, he explained his vision of a United States with less reliance on nuclear arms, and ultimately a world where nuclear weapons are a thing of the past.

continue http://yournewswire.com/the-u-s-dropped-a-fake-nuclear-bomb-in-nevada-recently/