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39 mile point to point three days two night thru-hike.

My DutchWear Hammock and The Hammock Gear RainFly setup.
This is my favorite setup on trail were trees will be available.

A weekend on the Long Trail.

Christmas 2017 Shipping Deadlines for Online Shopping.
The holidays are fast approaching and if you've slacked on playing Santa, you're in luck, because there's still time to get your gifts delivered to your loved ones in time for the holidays. But don't procrastinate too much.




Below we've created a list of shipping deadlines for a variety of carriers and popular online retail stores. We'll update the list with new retailers and cut-off dates on a daily basis, so make sure to check in frequently. 

Amazon has posted its holiday shipping deadlines online. Non-Prime members are going to have to pay for timely delivery after Dec. 16, but Prime members enjoy free shipping right up until Christmas Eve.

Volkswagen executive tells judge he was “misused” by VW.
In a letter to the US federal judge who will sentence him on Wednesday, former Volkswagen executive Oliver Schmidt wrote "I must say that I feel misused by my own company in the diesel scandal or ‘Dieselgate'."

Schmidt is one of the most senior executives to be charged in the diesel emissions scandal that rocked Volkswagen Group in late 2015. The scandal broke when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accused VW Group of installing illegal software on its diesel vehicles that would suppress the emissions control system while the car was being driven under normal driving conditions, thereby giving the cars better performance.

Schmidt, who was 48 at the time of his arrest, was in charge of emissions compliance for Volkswagen cars sold in the US during the years that VW pushed its "clean diesel" vehicles with emissions-defeating software. In the aftermath of the scandal, Schmidt left VW and returned to Germany, but he was arrested in January while on vacation in Miami. In August, the executive pleaded guilty to two charges: conspiracy to defraud the US government and violate the Clean Air Act, and making a false statement under the Clean Air Act.

The plea agreement stated that Schmidt could be sentenced to up to seven years in prison and face a fine between $40,000 and $400,000. He also may be sentenced to up to four years of supervised release.

We could fund a universal basic income with the data we give away to Facebook and Goo.gle.
Robots are going to take your job and there’s nothing you can do about it. You need look no further than the trucking industry to find the writing on the wall, but what do we do when robots are better at the jobs we need? One solution is to give them the work and us the paychecks.

A universal basic income (UBI), wherein government provides a monthly stipend so citizens can afford a home and basic necessities, is something experts believe would directly address the issue of unemployment and poverty, and possibly even eliminate hundreds of other welfare programs. It may also be the only real solution to the impending automation bonanza.

There are, of course, detractors. AI expert Steve Fuller last month told Futurism:

Universal basic income, at the end of the day, is an idea that made sense in an older era, one where we imagined a strong state that would actually take control of the population and feel responsible for it, as a result of increasing productivity and so forth.

Mattis gave the Pentagon a stark w.arning about the Air Force's struggling new tanker program. A
KC-46 Pegasus refuels an A-10 Thunderbolt II with 1,500 pounds of
fuel, July 15, 2016. Boeing/John D.

Android s.ecurity alert Goo.gle's latest bulletin w.arns of 47 bugs, 10 critical.
Google has published its Android security bulletin for December, warning of 47 bugs across the operating system.

Ten of the vulnerabilities are rated 'critical' in their potential impact, the most severe type of bug, while the other 37 are rated as 'high' priority.

Google said it had split the vulnerabilities into two patch levels in its alert, so that Android smartphone makers can fix a subset of vulnerabilities that are similar across all Android devices more quickly, should they want to.

But it warned: "Android partners are encouraged to fix all issues in this bulletin and use the latest security patch level." It recommended that they bundle the fixes for all the issues they are addressing in a single update.

Kasten launches to simplify data management for container apps.
Kasten is a new startup that emerged from stealth today aiming to help companies better manage their data in an era of containerized applications.

While software containers are great at providing a portable, isolated, and lightweight execution environment for applications, they’re not as good at working natively with applications that need to maintain an internal state. Kasten’s software, K10, helps with this by tracking data on a per-container level and allowing customers to set up rules for how it should be managed.

K10 should help fix several of the key problems with managing data with containerized applications, including compliance monitoring, backup, and migration.

For example, customers using Kasten’s K10 software could save a record of a multi-container application, including all of the associated data, then migrate it to another environment managed by Kubernetes (an open source system for orchestrating multi-container applications) with a few clicks.

Feds shut down allegedly fraudulent cryptocurrency offering.
The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday announced that it was taking action against an initial coin offering (ICO) that the SEC alleges is fraudulent. The announcement represents the first enforcement action by the SEC's recently created cyber fraud unit.

In recent months, the SEC has been wrestling with what to do about ICOs. US securities laws impose a number of requirements on anyone who offers new investments to the public. ICOs—in which a company offers the public cryptocurrencies that could appreciate in value the way Bitcoin has—look a lot like securities offerings. But most ICOs have ignored the SEC's requirements.

At the same time, the SEC is aware that new cryptocurrencies could become an important source of innovation. And some experts argue that many new cryptocurrencies—those that serve a useful function beyond their potential to grow in value over time—are not securities, legally speaking.

So the SEC has proceeded cautiously. In July, the agency fired a warning shot. It announced that a 2016 fundraising campaign had run afoul of securities law, but that the SEC would decline to prosecute those responsible. The hope was to get the cryptocurrency world to take securities laws more seriously without doing anything drastic.

Apple's Venmo k.iller is finally here — here's how it works (AAPL).
APApple's iPhone now has a built-in way to send cash via a text message.




On Monday, the company launched Apple Pay Cash. The feature allows users in the United States with an up-to-date iPhone to send money to other iPhone users through the company's Messages app. 

A direct competitor to other digital cash apps like Venmo and Square Cash, Apple Pay Cash was first announced in June, at Apple's annual developer's conference. It was originally supposed to launch with iOS 11, the latest version of the operating system underlying the iPhone, which Apple released in September. But the company delayed its launch until the release of iOS 11.2, which the company made available over the weekend.