#Court Rules Cops Don't need A Warrant To Get Your Cellphone Records A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the public has no reasonable expectation of privacy
when it comes to their cell phone location records. Cops don need a search warrant to get access to cell tower location records
when investigating criminal cases because this information belongs to a third party, according to the ruling. The case centered on Miami resident Quartavious Davis,
who was convicted of robbery, possession of a firearm, and conspiracy in 2012 after investigators obtained 67 days of Daviscell phone records from Metropcs1,
606 records in total. Davis was sentenced to 162 years in prison. The case was appealed to the 11th U s. Circuit court of appeals on the grounds that Davisfourth Amendment rights were violated.
On Wednesday, the court ruled with a 9-2 vote that the overnment obtaining of a court order for the product of Metropcs business records did not violate the Fourth Amendment.
The ruling stated that even though the cell tower records concerned Davis, they did not belong to him
because they were created by a third party. Therefore, Davis did not have a right to privacy around that information.
The ruling also argued that the public knows that cell towers are used to onnect calls
document charges, and assist in legitimate law-enforcement investigations. Because the public is aware that they can be tracked through their cell phones,
the ruling argues that people should have no reasonable right to expect privacy around those records.
The ruling also compared cell phone location data to surveillance tapes in stores, saying that hose surveillance camera images show Davis location at the precise location of the robbery,
which is far more than Metropcs cell tower location records show. The two dissenting judges in the case critiqued the broad application of the hird-party doctrinein the case
fearing that the government could have grounds to dramatically expand its searching capabilities without warrants in the future.
Using the example of information Google GOOGL-1. 71%collects from its usershich includes names, email addresses, telephone numbers, credit card data, online history, devices used,
and locationhe dissent argued that all of this information could be considered third-party data in the future, meaning that Google users wouldn have a right to privacy around that data.
The dissent continued, nd why stop there? Nearly every website collects information about what we do
when we visit. So now, under the majority rule, the Fourth Amendment allows the government to know from Youtube. com what we watch,
or Facebook. com what we post or whom we riend, or Amazon com AMZN-0. 38%what we buy,
or Wikipedia. com what we research, or Match. com whom we datell without a warrant.
A few concurring judges also offered caution about the implications of the case. his case is certainly about the present,
but it is also potentially about the future, Judge Jordan wrote. have some concerns about the government being able to conduct 24/7 electronic tracking (live
or historical) in the years to come without an appropriate judicial order. Judge Rosembaum wrote that the dissenting judges were right to raise concerns. n our time,
unless a person is willing to live ff the grid, it is nearly impossible to avoid disclosing the most personal of information to third-party service providers on a constant basis,
just to navigate daily life. Rosembaum described the idea that the government could collect a wide range of third-party data without a warrant as othing less than chilling.
Because of its implications in the evolving debate around privacy and technology in courts, this case has been followed closely by many civil liberty groups.
The American Civil liberties Union the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the National Association of Criminal Defense lawyers all filed an Amicus Brief together in 2013,
arguing that Davisfourth Amendment rights had been violated. In a statement on Tuesday, ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed Wessler noted that other courts of appeal are grappling with the question of cell phone location tracking
and that the issue will likely make it to the Supreme court. s the dissenting judges recognized,
outdated legal doctrines from the analog age should not be extended mechanically to undermine our privacy rights in the voluminous digital records that come with modern life,
he said n
#Why Tesla Batteries Are Cheap Enough To Prevent New Power plants Last year, analysts hired by Oncor Electric Delivery Company were toiling away on a study of the costs
and benefits of installing enormous batteries on Oncor grid in Texas. The benefits would surpass the costs,
they calculated, if Oncor could buy batteries for $350 per kilowatt hour of capacityr less. That was the break even point.
At the time, the cheapest utility-scale batteries cost twice that much, the analysts noted, and some cost nearly ten times that much.
But prices were falling, and the analysts predicted batteries might reach the $350 point in 2020.
They didn have to wait nearly so long. Tesla Powerwall home battery unveiled late Thursday night, dominated energy news all weekend,
but the real news was the price tag on its utility-scale big sister, the Powerpack: $250/kwh. here nothing remotely at these price points, said Tesla product architect Elon musk. Earlier Thursday night,
I was covering a Northwestern University debate on the future of nuclear energy, in which the nuclear critic Arnie Gundersen predicted Tesla new utility-scale battery would render new-build nuclear plants obsolete.
The battery would be cheap enough to solve the reliability problem of intermittent solar and wind,
he predicted, providing a cheaper alternative to nuclear power 24-hour output. Gundersen predicted the cost of the utility-scale battery would fall to 2 cents per kwh of the electricity that passes through it
which in coming years would render renewable energy with reliable storage cheaper than a new nuclear plant.
Gundersen focused on the utility-scale battery, which we would soon learn to call the Tesla Powerpack,
but most of the chatter in the wake of Musk announcement focused on the home battery, the Tesla Powerwall,
which is both more expensive per kwh and less poised to reap benefits. Some writers noticed both batteries. he Tesla battery is better than
I thought for homes, wrote the author Ramez Naam in a review of Tesla new battery line. nd at utility scale,
it deeply disruptive. At Tesla price, utility-scale batteries have the potential to perform better than 2 cents per kilowatt hour where it counts the most:
on the customer electric bill. The capital cost of utility-scale batteries may be more than offset by their benefits, according to the Texas study,
and if deployed at the grid level, they could actually lower electric bills. Even modeling batteries $100 more than the Tesla, the Texas analysts concluded that storage arrayed across the grid should cause a typical consumer electric bill to fall slightlyrom $180 per month to $179. 66.
That not a remarkable number if one is looking for savings, but it a remarkable number if one expects new capital expenditures on batteries to increase electricity bills. onsidering both the impact on electricity bills and improved reliability of grid-integrated storage,
total customer benefits would significantly exceed costs, the analysts, from The Brattle Group, found. Here why, according to their study:
1. Power Purchase Cost Savings. Utilities without sufficient storage often have to purchase power during system peaks,
and those purchases are billed directly to customers. Batteries eliminate those charges. 2. Customer Bill Offsets from Storage Merchant Value.
Utilities would make batteries available to independent companies participating in regional wholesale energy markets, auctioning off battery capacity
and returning most of the proceeds to customers by reducing their bills. 3. Avoided Distribution Outages.
By preventing blackouts, batteries would save residential customers about $10 a year and commercial customers an average of $700 a year.
An example: Socore, a Southern California Edison subsidiary, is installing Tesla batteries at two Cinemark Theaters to keep them in business
when the power goes out.)4. Deferred Investments. Typically, utilities need enough power plants to serve their customers at peak hours, not at average hours.
By using batteries to serve peak loads, they can invest in fewer power plants. They can especially avoid firing up expensive eaker plants,
which are usually fast-starting but inefficient natural-gas plants. They can also build fewer peaker plants in the future.
By deploying batteries along the grid where peak loads are greatest, they can also defer investments in transmission
and distribution infrastructure designed to serve peak loads. An example: Southern California Edison installed a battery in Orange, Cal.
and found that it both improved reliability of the grid and allowed the utility to defer replacement of a circuit for 5 to 7 years).
he combined value of these benefits exceeds the costs of storage by a substantial margin across a range of deployment levels,
the Texas study concludes. And remember, that with hypothetical batteries up to $100 more expensive per kilowatt hour than Tesla. n this analysis,
we assume that customers would pay for the storage investments just as they pay for transmission and distribution investments.
Customers would then receive offsetting reductions in retail electricity costs from the storage in the form of deferred investments, refunds from the wholesale market auction proceeds,
and reduced power purchase costs. Customers would additionally benefit through increased system reliability from avoided distribution outages.
Other customer benefits that we have not analyzed include improved power quality and support for customer-side renewable energy usage.
Tesla Powerwall and other batteries for the home should produce similar benefits, but not as powerfully:
hile individual customers would be able to capture backup-power benefits of storage, they are not likely to directly monetize the larger grid-wide and wholesale power market benefits.
Tesla is offering the utility-scale batteries in 100kwh battery blocks that are grouped in packs from 500kwh to 10mwh+.
+The Texas analysts recommended up to 15mwh for Oncore grid. Installation costs are uncertain, but installations are likely to be performed by utilities in-house
and therefore seem unlikely to approach the dimension of home installations, which will reportedly increase the capital cost of the Powerwall 17-29 percent for one utility customers.
The Texas study could be unique to Texas, but the results are consistent with other findings.
Ramez Naam review also led me to a study by the Electric power Research Institute, which found the benefits of grid-level storage exceeded costs in nearly all examined scenarios.
Utilities expect similar results. Green Mountain Power among the first utilities offering the Tesla Powerwall for homes,
is also purchasing Tesla grid-level batteries. e will also be using the Tesla grid scale system,
which we know will also offer cost savings to our customers, Dorothy Schnure, GMP corporate spokesperson, told me in an email.
Schnure couldn say how big or small those promised savings will be: e know there will be savings
and are still evaluating what that might be, so I don have a number for you yet.
In its press release last week, Tesla named Southern California Edison as a partner for grid-level storage. here are a few opportunities
which we believe are economical today, a Southern California Edison spokesman told me via email,
ut as prices decline for energy storage, we expect a substantial broadening of the economically viable projects.
Opportunities should blossom as prices fall and also as batteries improve. Gundersen based his 2¢estimate in part on improvements in cyclinghe number of times a battery can be drained
and rechargedhat Tesla is known to be working on, and that have begun already to appear in other batteries.
Analysts often assume batteries will cycle once per day, 1, 000 times. The Michigan company Xalt Energy markets a lithium-ion battery that it says can cycle 4, 000 to 8, 000 times.
Some lithium-ion batteries used to back up data servers are designed to cycle up to 10,000 times.
These achievements are likely to be exceeded soon by the next generation of batteries coming down the pipe.
More cycles mean longer battery life and lower cost per kwh. Booms, Busts And Billionaires: An ebook From Forbes Find out what happened to the oil industrynd where it headed next. oth solar
and batteries are not uelsbut rather technologies, Gundersen said. he extraction cost of fuels continues to rise,
while technology costs continue to fall. My Doctoral contacts at battery companies are confident that 2 cents is indeed here in the lab and on the horizon commercially.
It is all about the number of cycles that can be pulled from a battery. We still don know what cycling improvements Tesla has bundled into the Powerpack,
if any, and Tesla has responded not to a request for comment. Ramez Naam thinks that both Gundersen optimistic 2¢(for the Powerpack)
and my Forbes colleague Chris Helman pessimistic 50¢(for the Powerwall are outliers in the range of possibilities for the cost of electricity flowing through Tesla batteries.
If utilities get the same 10-year warranty Tesla offers to home customers, Naam estimates the Powerpack cost per kwh will be told 7,
¢he me via Twitter. Even at twice that price, he said, grid-level batteries offer utilities a return on investment now:
hat batteries bring positive ROI at such a price surprises lots of people. And it means windmills+batteries may be cheaper than nuclear plants right now,
with windmills+solar panels likely to follow e
#Medical marijuana Sparks New Technology The emerging cannabis industry has created not only thousands of new jobs, it has also given birth to a new technology niche.
Existing software companies are adapting and news ones are being born to address the specific needs of this new sector.
Government agencies and business owners find that they are at ground zero for the creation of these new products.
The low hanging fruit was the copy cat web design for internet cannabis sites based on already popular traditional internet sites.
Leafly is called the elpof pot because of its product reviews and Weedmaps is the rouponof cannabis with its daily deals.
Weedhire is the equivalent of Monster. com for its marijuana jobs. However it isn just marijuana businesses,
government agencies have also been challenged with meeting the specific requirements of complicated cannabis legislation. Since each state is unique in its regulations,
there isn a one size fits all software program on the market. Plus, the most unique challenge that faced many software designers was seed the to sale tracking that several states require.
Franwell didn start out as a marijuana software company. It had 20 years of fresh fruit and berry tracking experience.
Another customer told them that Colorado was taking bids on supply chain tracking for marijuana
and they won the bid. Cathy Jolley said one of the biggest challenges is the continuous change in regulations.
She said the state made 14 software changes in the first six months. As they look to working with more states,
adjusting the software to each state particular regulations becomes a challenge. t would be great to have standardized tracking,
she said. Franwell has reached out to more states including Illinois and New york. The bonus for Franwell is that Oracle
and Microsoft have not decided to jump in as of yet. MJ Freeway was created out of necessity.
Cofounder Jessica Billingsley said she had invested in the first licensed business in Colorado and was tasked with choosing the software.
That when she and cofounder Amy Poinsett decided they needed to create a platform that tracked every gram of marijuana and every dollar.
They both came from the computer space. Now they have 1 000 licenses in 19 states.
MJ Freeway is one of the few businesses that has translated its product to Spanish and is looking at foreign markets.
It was one of only a handful of American companies at the World Cannabis Conference in Spain.
Business is so good that MJ Freeway has doubled is revenue every year since inception. NIC targets the government as its client in the cannabis space.
It specializes in helping the government agencies tasked with creating a marijuana department. It one thing for lawmakers to decide that applicants for licenses
and dispensaries need to follow certain procedures and pay specific fees, but its another thing to create that process online. he policies being set up by the state,
wee putting them into play, said Robert Knapp COO of NIC. Paul Vandenbussche, NIC General manager in Maine said,
We moved from paper driven because there were too many issues, such as whether the paper was valid or real.
We strengthened it by making it fraud proof. NIC is currently providing services for Hawaii
and Maine. the marijuana program in Hawaii began in the Department of Public Safety, but in January it moved to the Department of health where NIC implemented a new system that doctors
and patients have found to be simpler and faster. Product testing is another cannabis hot button issue.
In the early months of retail marijuana in Colorado, customers became confused as to how much THC was in the product they bought.
The problem was pronounced very in the edible market, but dispensaries increasingly realized they had to deliver as much information about their product as they could.
Sage Analytics was founded when they saw that growers, labs and producers were forced to ship their product off to third party labs losing time and money.
Necessity is the mother of invention, so they built a small desk top measuring device to deliver instant and accurate THC, CBD and CBN measurements.
On the financial side Amercanex is creating a cannabis commodity exchange with the plan for a futures market.
Not unlike the other commodities exchange, this platform will allow cannabis farmers to lock in prices for their crops
and for buyers to secure their inventory. Steve Janjic, CEO of Amercanex said his company is looking ahead to
when the Federal government declassifies marijuana, which would allow him to sell derivative financial instruments. He anticipates option
and futures. ou have to give them the ability to manage infrastructure, said Janjic. e allow growers in Denver to sell all over the state.
so we built our own software for seed to sale tracking, said Bierman. He said the problem with the cannabis tech companies is a lack of access to institutional money.
He suggests that if the best minds of silicon valley started an incubator lab, that far superior products would emerge. ecause of the nature of the business,
either get bought out for their databases or fail. not being negative, just realistic. When Yelp decides to get in, it over for Weedmaps.
The only space that Bierman is impressed with is the payment kiosk space and in particular Integrated Compliance Solutions.
Banking is another problem for the cannabis industry causing businesses to become very creative in order to process transactions.
It becoming a crowded space with other kiosk companies like Medbox and C4eversystems. Some of the kiosks actually dispense medical marijuana,
while others are strictly banking related. The banking transaction works in coordination with the seed to sale software so that the product and purchase match up.
With 23 states legalizing medical marijuana and more to follow, these businesses hope that by getting in on the ground floor,
they will be successful. First to market advantages have paid usually off. However, Bierman could be right about the bigger players.
if Microsoft wants to play and will kiosks be needed if Bank of america decides cannabis won get them in trouble with the Feds.
In the meantime these new companies aren letting any grass grow beneath their fee t
#Goodbye iphone Bulge: This Technology Reduces Lenses To The Thickness Of A Credit card A team of scientists at the Harvard School of engineering
and Applied sciences has developed a radical new technology which could replace the bulky optical components we use today with an ultra-thin and completely flat etasurfacelens.
Following on from advances first shown in 2012, the metasurface lens consists of a flat glass surface coated with microscopic silicon antennae
which bend incident light by precisely amounts which can be designed pre algorithmically to create lenses of differing strengths.
According to principal investigator Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical engineering at Harvard SEAS, omplicated effects like color correction,
which focuses multiple wavelengths to a single point from one flat surface. Traditional lenses (left) require a number of thick optical elements to focus different wavelengths of light, unlike the achromatic metasurface (right),
which focuses multiple wavelengths to a single point from one flat surface. While the majority of photographic lenses are constructed from multiple individual lens elements, each of a considerable thickness and curvature,
Taking the iphone 6 as an example, the rear isight camera uses five individual lens elements stacked on top of each other,
resulting in a thick lens module which creates the familiar protruding lens bulge at the back of the phone t
#Whatsapp For ios Will Receive Voice Calling Feature In A few Weeks Whatsapp the instant messaging app that Facebook acquired for $19 billion last year hit 700 million monthly active users
At the Facebook f8 conference this week, Whatsapp cofounder Brian Acton said that the ios version of the messaging app will gain the highly anticipated free voice calling feature within the next few weeks, according to Venturebeat.
Whatsapp spent the last year refining the voice calling feature before it launched on Android last month.
Whatsapp voice calling feature on Android is limited on an invite-only basis as of right now
and holding the microphone icon above the keyboard. The new voice calling feature will let you make phone calls to your contacts,
meaning Whatsapp will become more competitive against Skype. Whatsapp revealed it will be adding voice calling to its app over a year ago at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Whatsapp cofounder Jan Koum also said at the Mobile World Congress event that mobile phones will be sold in Germany with the Whatsapp brand.
Whatsapp launched a desktop client service called Whatsapp Web. The desktop version of Whatsapp only works for Android, Windows phone, Blackberry and Nokia S60 devices right now though.
Hopefully, Whatsapp Web will support ios devices soon. If you have a jailbroken iphone, then you can already access the voice calling feature on Whatsapp.
To use the voice calling feature on Whatsapp with a jailbroken iphone, you can follow these instructions that Thefusejoplin. com provided:
1.)You will need to install Appsyn and download the latest Whatsapp BETA version. Then you have to add the cydia. angelxwind. net and apt. imokhles. com repository on the Cydia sources. 2.)Download the latest version of the Whatsapp beta application and Whatsapp Call Enabler.
You have to make sure that Whatsapp Call Enabler is activated in the settings. 3.)After voice calls are activated,
you will need to have someone call you through Whatsapp and restart your iphone. Why did Facebook acquire Whatsapp?
During a keynote at Mobile World Congress last year, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg said that the acquisition was linked to his vision for Internet. org.
Internet. org is an initiative to bring the Internet people who do not have access
since two-thirds of the world is connected not. The amount that Facebook paid for Whatsapp was particularly interesting
because the messaging app is far from profitable. Whatsapp lost $230 million in the first half of last year on revenues of approximately $15 million, reported The Wall street journal
. While Facebook generates most of its revenues from advertising, Whatsapp charges 99 cents per year for a subscription after one year of free service.
However, Koum acknowledged that Whatsapp scaled back efforts to generate revenue following the acquisition i
#The XX Factor: Getting More Young Women Ready For STEM Jobs More girls and women than ever before are studying
and excelling in science, technology, engineering and applied mathematics (STEM) studies, but those gains are not being reflected in the workforce,
according to a new research report published today by the American Association of University Women (AAUW).
The number of women working as computer scientists is actually declining, and women still make up only 12 percent of working engineers, according to the AAUW report, olving the Equation:
The Variables for Women Success in Engineering and Computing. Even more troubling, qualified women are leaving the STEM workforce in large numbers,
even though there is rising demand for their skills and even though STEM jobs offer more flexibility for balancing work-life issues than many other professions, according to the AAUW research.
Why? olving the Equationconcludes that the reasons are complex and involve social, educational, personal and workplace issues.
But one theme emerges again and again: Stereotypes and biases play a major role in discouraging women from pursuing careers in STEM professions, starting early in life and continuing into the workplace.
We can level the playing field for women in STEM professions without counteracting those stereotypes and biases.
and bias often plays a role in the workplace, as studies find that employers are more likely to hire male than female candidates for science and math jobs regardless of qualifications.
But wee making progress. olving the Equationidentifies a number of successful strategies for counteracting those biases
and making academic and work environments more welcoming to women. For example a familiar stereotype about engineering and computer science jobs is that they are solitary occupations offering few opportunities for contributing to society.
Research has found that women are more likely than men to prioritize communal goals, such as work in which they can see an impact for societal good, over other career goals.
When teachers and mentors emphasize the importance of computer science and engineering in helping to address global and community problems,
however, women are more likely to be attracted to those professions and less likely to disengage.
At Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif.,one of the world premier colleges of science, mathematics,
and engineering, the percentage of women among graduates of its computer science programs jumped to 40 percent from 12 percent in just five years.
First, the college has made the computer science path more welcoming by revising introductory classes, splitting them into two levels based on experience.
Then, after just one year in college students are offered research opportunities to give them project-based work
female students attend the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the largest gathering of women in technical professions,
Put another way, Harvey Mudd College made entry into the STEM environment more welcoming to women,
We think those simple changes have applicability not just in college but also in middle school and the workplace.
Broadcom Presents Design code build, a program Broadcom Foundation created in partnership with the Computer History Museum in Mountain view
Calif.,has achieved success by giving middle school girls the opportunity to engage in fun, hands-on projects that require teamwork, problem-solving and attention to detail.
Design code build also introduces students to project mentors and ock starscientists and engineers from local technology companies.
Now the challenge is to apply these proven strategies to the workplace. These early signs of success will be diminished
The closer we move toward gender parity in computer science and engineering, the more welcoming and engaging for women our workplaces will be.
As more women advance in STEM occupations, stereotypes and biases will break down, and the more role models there will be for future generations of women.
It a calculus of success. Working together, we can solve the equation w
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