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Category: business

A New York State of Megabits — Susan Crawford | Backchannel

So it was great to get back to New York and be able to report on what is called the“New NY Broadband Program.” It involves a $500 million expenditure to help ensure that New Yorkers across the state have access to current-generation Internet capacity. There’s lots of potential in the plan, targeted at providing every New Yorker with access to 100 megabit per second (Mbps) service (10 Mbps uploads) by the end of 2018. Because New York expects a 1:1 match from the private sector for each grant or loan it makes, that means the state hopes to be deploying at least $1 billion on high-speed Internet access infrastructure.

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The Arctic’s Internet Is So Expensive That People Mail the Web on USB Drives — Via Motherboard

“Canada’s domestic digital divide, with the North as its epicenter, has been a point of growing concern over the last several years. Much of the internet in the northernmost regions of the country is still beamed down by satellites, but a plan to link Europe and Asia with fiber optic cable via Nunavut is currently being negotiated by a Toronto-based company called Arctic Fibre.”

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L’Oreal Goes After 3D Printed Human Skin to Test Beauty Products — By Jason Dorrier

In Lyon, France, cosmetics company L’Oreal is growing human skin.

Each year, some 60 scientists cultivate 100,000 paper-thin skin samples in nine varieties simulating different ages and ethnicities—and then they test beauty products on them. Read more

The Highest-Paying Jobs Of The Future Will Eat Your Life — Jay Zagorsky | Fast Company

“With this trend toward long hours and higher pay, what will be the impact on people? Research has identified reduced sleep, increased stress, less happiness, lower productivity, poorer health, and higher chances for injuring yourself and others when the workday expands—implications that can be dangerous in any job, be it specialized or not.” Read more

The House just passed a bill about space mining. The future is here. — Brian Fung | The Washington Post

“What could the FAA, an agency whose chief concern is air travel, want with outer space? Well, the FAA is the agency that grants licenses for commercial space launches (the ones that aren’t performed for NASA or the Defense Department, anyway). This potentially gives the nation’s aviation regulators a tremendous amount of power over the fledgling private space industry.” Read more

There’s an Uber for Everything Now — Geoffrey Fowler | The Wall Street Journal

“Can tech companies really offer better experiences than the taqueria, flower shop or dry cleaner down the street, while taking a cut for themselves? Not necessarily. Quality control is a challenge when the supervisor is just software.

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How One Man Crashed the Stock Market

Michael Maiello — Daily BeastOn Tuesday in the United Kingdom, United States law enforcement arrested futures trader Navinder Singh Sarao and froze more than $7 million of his assets in banks around the world. The Department of Justice says that Singh manipulated commodities markets and partially caused the May 6, 2010, “Flash Crash” that sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging 1,000 points in minutes.

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