Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,524 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 79 of 153).

RALEIGH: North Person Street business district fills up fast

Here’s a story about the growth the Person Street business district has seen in the past few years.

RALEIGH — Craig Heffley first visited the North Person Street business district about a decade ago, around the time he was opening Wine Authorities in Durham. He spotted a series of vacant storefronts amid two thriving historic neighborhoods, and he made a mental note.

“This would be a great space if I ever opened in Raleigh,” he recalled thinking. “It’s got spunk to it. It’s a good mix of neighborhood people and people who are driving through on their way to downtown.”

I found a big goof in this story, though:

And more neighbors are on the way to fill prescriptions with James, sip wines in Heffley’s store lounge and dine at Piebird. Peace Street Townes, an 18-unit townhouse development, is under construction near Krispy Kreme. Even Oakwood is expanding with a new subdivision called Oakwood North.

Oakwood North is in no way related to the Historic Oakwood neighborhood. It just has Oakwood in its name.

via RALEIGH: North Person Street business district fills up fast | Raleigh | MidtownRaleighNews.com.

Iran and America

Looks like Iranian hardliners are organizing protests against the United States again. I found this quote particularly telling:

“Fighting the global arrogance and hostile policies of America is the symbol of our national solidarity,” said Saeed Jalili, who lost to Rouhani in June’s election and later was replaced as the country’s top nuclear negotiator.

See that? Iran is driven by its hatred of America (or at least that’s what its hardliners would have us believe). America, on the other hand, couldn’t give a shit about Iran. The last protests we had against Iran were 30 years ago before the Iranian hostages were freed. We’ve moved on. Iran apparently hasn’t.

Kinda sad, isn’t it?

One in five Milky Way stars hosts potentially life-friendly Earths

Chew on this for a moment. Our galaxy, just one of hundreds of billions, harbors at least 10 billion Earth-like, habitable planets. This isn’t just an estimate, this is a calculation from NASA.

Ten billion Earth-like planets in our corner of the universe. Still believe there’s no other life in the universe?

One out of every five sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy has a planet about the size of Earth that is properly positioned for water, a key ingredient for life, a study released on Monday showed.The analysis, based on three years of data collected by NASA’s now-idled Kepler space telescope, indicates the galaxy is home to 10 billion potentially habitable worlds.

via One in five Milky Way stars hosts potentially life-friendly Earths: study – Yahoo News.

Google Employees Confess The Worst Things About Google

My brother worked for Google for a time, when his company got bought by a company that got bought by them. I thought he would be thrilled. Much to my surprise, though, he was largely unimpressed with the culture of Google. I suppose making all of that money is making the company lazy. Seems like Google is in the same position Microsoft was in many years ago and, like Microsoft, might also find itself largely irrelevant.

A job at Google. It’s career heaven, right? How could a gig at the biggest, most ambitious tech company on the planet possibly be bad?Well, take a look at this Quora thread, which is being used by current and former Google employees to dish the dirt on working for Big G.We’ve edited some of the standout comments into this excerpt.

Here’s the original Quora thread where this discussion got started.

via Google Employees Confess The Worst Things About Google – Business Insider.

Rand Paul Caught Plagiarizing Science Fiction Movie’s Wikipedia Page

This is hilarious. Sen. Rand Paul gave a speech last week that was lifted almost word-for-word from a Wikipedia page about Gattaca.

It was first mentioned on Rachel Maddow’s show. Check it out for some additional quotes.

When discussing Republicans, I often point out that I believe many of them live in some alternate reality which only seems to exist in a fictional world that they’ve created in their minds.In the case of Rand Paul, that world seems to be found in a 1997 science fiction movie starring Ethan Hawke and written by Andrew Nicool, titled Gattaca. Senator Paul used this movie as an example of where he fears we could be headed, but in doing so, seems to have copied excerpts directly from the movie’s Wikipedia page while attempting to explain the plot.

via Forward Progressives — Unbelievable: Rand Paul Caught Plagiarizing Science Fiction Movie’s Wikipedia Page While Giving Speech.

Daylight Saving Time Is Terrible: Here’s a Simple Plan to Fix It

Interesting take on DST. While I agree that DST is a bad, bad idea, I think the solution offered here is equally dumb, if not more so.

I believe local time should be coordinated as closely as possible to solar time. That’s how our bodies’ circadian clocks work. Trying to squeeze everyone into two time zones simply for convenience’s sake (and ignoring solar time) is stupid.

Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii and residents of 78 other countries including Canada but not Saskatchewan, most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour. It’s a controversial practice that became popular in the 1970s with the intent of conserving energy. The fall time change feels particularly hard because we lose another hour of evening daylight, just as the days grow shorter. It also creates confusion because countries that observe daylight saving change their clocks on different days.

It would seem to be more efficient to do away with the practice altogether. The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all. Frequent and uncoordinated time changes cause confusion, undermining economic efficiency. There’s evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks. Being out of sync with European time changes was projected to cost the airline industry $147 million a year in travel disruptions. But I propose we not only end Daylight Saving, but also take it one step further.

via Daylight Saving Time Is Terrible: Here’s a Simple Plan to Fix It – Allison Schrager – The Atlantic.

Fritsch: RTP has lost its edge

Highwoods CEO Ed Fritsch says what I’ve long said: RTP is a dinosaur.

Ed Fritsch, CEO of Raleigh-based real estate company Highwoods Properties NYSE: HIW, is blunt in his take on Research Triangle Park.He says RTP has lost its edge, and he questions whether there’s time to get it back.Fritsch, speaking to a crowd at Triangle Business Journal’s Power Breakfast at Prestonwood Country Club in Cary on Thursday morning, doesn’t pull any punches.Years ago, “we would show RTP properties and say, ‘this is the heart of the economic engine,’” he says.No more.

via Fritsch: RTP has lost its edge Video – Triangle Business Journal.

The keys to the keydom | bit-player

This is an eye-opening look at the potential danger of SSL and SSH keys not being as unbreakable as once thought. At least, when not implemented correctly. Stuff like this gets me excited again about math.

If X and Y were components of public keys in the RSA cryptosystem, their shared factor would create a huge hole in the security fence. And the problem is particularly insidious in that each of the two keys, when examined in isolation, looks perfectly sound; the weakness only becomes apparent when you have both members of the pair.This potential vulnerability of factoring-based encryption methods has been known for decades, but it seemed there was no reason to worry because coincidentally shared factors are so utterly unlikely. A couple of weeks ago I heard an eye-opening talk by Nadia Heninger, a member of a group that has searched for such unlikely coincidences in the wild. They found 64,000 of them. Reason to worry.

via The keys to the keydom | bit-player.

Obama May Ban Spying on Heads of Allied States

How nice that President Obama is contemplating the end of spying on friendly foreign leaders. I’m glad that German Chancellor Angela Merkel will soon enjoy freedom from NSA spying. Now, what does it take for millions of law-abiding American citizens to get the same deal?

WASHINGTON — President Obama is poised to order the National Security Agency to stop eavesdropping on the leaders of American allies, administration and congressional officials said Monday, responding to a deepening diplomatic crisis over reports that the agency had for years targeted the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

via Obama May Ban Spying on Heads of Allied States – NYTimes.com.

Report: US May Have Bugged Merkel Phone for More than a Decade

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA may have tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone for more than 10 years. I’m not surprised by this nor am I particularly upset. This is what intelligence agencies do and, contrary to their public protests, foreign intelligence services do the exact same thing to other world leaders.

The U.S. National Security Agency may have bugged German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone for more than 10 years, according to a news report Saturday by the German weekly Der Spiegel.

Der Spiegel also cited a source in Ms. Merkel’s office saying U.S. President Barack Obama apologized to the German leader when she called him this past Wednesday to seek clarification on the issue.

I found this quote particularly misleading:

Former CIA deputy director Michael Morrell said in a television interview to be broadcast Sunday that Snowden’s leaks are “the most serious compromise of classified information in the history of the U.S. intelligence community.”

Bullshit. Morrell thinks Edward Snowden has done more damage than the John Walker spy ring? Than CIA traitor Aldrich Ames? Than Robert Hanssen? For decades, Walker gave crypto codes to the Soviets, exposing every one of our nuclear ballistic submarines and much, much more. Ames sold out all of our highest Soviet intelligence agents, who were subsequently executed. Hanssen’s betrayal led to multiple double-agents to be executed as well as protecting Soviet spies in the CIA and FBI. So far Snowden’s leak has produced no deaths but only a great deal of embarrassment for the U.S. Government. In effect, Snowden’s revelations merely confirmed what most everyone already suspected.

Morrell needs to cut the hyperbole. It’s an insult to the fine men and women of the intelligence community who paid the ultimate price from the treason of Walker, Ames, Hanssen, and other actual traitors to compare what they did to what Snowden did. Not even close.

via Report: US May Have Bugged Merkel Phone for More than a Decade.