Comment Re:Come on (Score 5, Insightful) 1223
Romney has crossed "Poe's Threshold", the point where it's no loner certain whether his statements are serious or facetious.
The eBook Backlash 418
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that people who read ebooks on tablets like the iPad are beginning to realize that while a book in print is straightforward and immersive, a tablet is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity offering a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks. 'The tablet is like a temptress,' says James McQuivey. 'It's constantly saying, "You could be on YouTube now." Or it's sending constant alerts that pop up, saying you just got an e-mail. Reading itself is trying to compete.' There are also signs that publishers are cooling on tablets for e-reading. A recent survey by Forrester Research showed that 31 percent of publishers believed iPads and similar tablets were the ideal e-reading platform; one year ago, 46 percent thought so. Then there's Jonathan Franzen, regarded as one of America's greatest living novelists, who says consumers have been conned into thinking they need the latest technology and that e-books can never have the magic of the printed page. 'I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change.'"
Hacked Syrian Officials Used '12345' As Email Password 231
Nominei writes "The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the Syrian President, aides and staffers had their email hacked by Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of emails online. Reportedly, many of the accounts used the password '12345' (which their IT department probably warned them to change when the accounts got set up, of course)."
Richard Stallman's Dissenting View of Steve Jobs 1452
Garabito writes "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has posted his not-so-fond memories of Steve Jobs on his personal site, saying, 'As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.' His statement has spurred reaction from the community; some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice."
Trojan Goes After Bitcoins 344
Orome1 writes "Bitcoin has definitely caught the attention of criminals. Even though it has been calculated that the use of botnets for Bitcoin mining is still not quite as lucrative as renting them out for other purposes, targeting people who have them in their digital wallets is quite another matter. Symantec researchers have spotted in the wild a Trojan dedicated to this specific purpose. Named Infostealer.Coinbit, it searches for the Bitcoin wallet.dat file on the infected computer and sends it to the criminal(s)."
Comment Re:Sounds like an antitrust conspiracy (Score 2) 190
Which is ironic because it's was Google who got the 'shall not deny, limit, or restrict the ability of their customers to use the devices and applications of their choice' clause in the LTE spectrum in the first place to prevent carriers from denying people's ability to use Android devices.
Google Allows Carriers To Ban Tethering Apps 328
iluvcapra writes "Google, in its continuing struggle to provide phone carriers (if not its end users) with an open platform, is now banning tethering apps from the Android market. These apps haven't disappeared and can still be sideloaded, insofar as your carrier doesn't lock this functionality or snoop on your packets."
NVIDIA Gets Away With Bait-and-Switch 336
racquetballguy writes "As part of a December 2010 settlement agreement, NVIDIA agreed to provide all owners of laptops containing a defective NVIDIA GPU with a laptop of similar kind and value. In February, NVIDIA announced that a $279 single-core Compaq CQ56 would be provided as a replacement to all laptops — from $2500 dual-core tablet PCs to $2000 17" entertainment notebooks. Ted Frank, from the Center for Class Action Fairness, filed an objection to the court, which was overruled by Judge Ware today. Once again, the consumers of a class action lawsuit lose."
Sony Wins Restraining Order Against Geohot 397
tekgoblin writes "The courts have just issued a temporary restraining order against George Hotz (Geohot). Sony filed this lawsuit because they were unhappy that Geohot had released the Playstation 3 decryption keys so other people could play unsigned games on it. [Geohot is prohibited from] 'offering to the public, creating, posting online, marketing, advertising, promoting, installing, distributing, providing, or otherwise trafficking' in any software or methods for circumventing the PS3's protection methods. No longer can he 'provide links from any website to any other website' relating to such matters, or publish any information obtained by hacking the PS3. And more to the point, he can no longer 'engage in acts of circumvention of TPMS in the PS3 System to access, obtain, remove, or traffic in copyrighted works.' Pretty much he can't talk or think about the PS3 for some time."
Comment Re:Sorry, the movie was "meh" at best. (Score 1) 429
Kevin Flynn is The Dude...
From Tron:
---*Because*, man, *somewhere* in one of these memories is the *evidence*! If I got in far enough, I could reconstruct it.
---Paranoids, Matrix Blaster, Vice Squad, a whole slew of them. I was this close to starting my own little enterprise, man. But enter another software engineer. Not so young, not so bright, but very very sneaky. Ed Dillinger. So one night, our boy Flynn, he goes to his terminal, tries to read up his file. I get nothing on there, it's a big blank. Okay, now we take you three months later. Dillinger presents Encom with five video games, that's HE'S invented. The slime didn't even change the names, man! He gets a big, fat promotion. And thus begins his meteoric rise to - -what is he now? Executive VP?
---Like the man says, there's no problems, only solutions.
Foodtubes Proposes Underground, Physical Internet 431
geek4 writes "Automatically routed canisters could replace trucks with an Internet of things, says Foodtubes. A group of academics is proposing a system of underground tunnels which could deliver food and other goods in all weathers with massive energy savings. The Foodtubes group wants to put goods in metal capsules two meters long, which are shifted through underground polyethylene tubes at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour, directed by linear induction motors and routed by intelligent software to their destinations. The group, which includes an Oxford physics professor and logistics experts, wants £15 million to build a five-mile test circuit, and believes the scheme could fund itself if used by large supermarkets and local councils, and could expand because it uses an open architecture."
Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall! 728
theodp writes "To move forward with programming languages, argues Poul-Henning Kamp, we need to break free from the tyranny of ASCII. While Kamp admires programming language designers like the Father-of-Go Rob Pike, he simply can't forgive Pike for 'trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade.' Kamp adds: 'For some reason computer people are so conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33 terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be able to express our intentions clearly.' So, should the new Hello World look more like this?"
Thieves Use Vacuum To Siphon Cash From Safes
173
Tootech writes "A gang of thieves armed with a powerful vacuum cleaner that sucks cash from supermarket safes has struck for the fifteenth time in France. The burglars broke into their latest store near Paris and drilled a hole in the pneumatic tube that siphons money from the checkout to the strong-room. They then sucked rolls of cash totaling £60,000 from the safe without even having to break its lock. Police said the gang — dubbed the Vacuum Burglars — always raid Monoprix supermarkets and have hit 15 of the stores branches around Paris in the past four years. A spokesman added: 'They spotted a weakness in the company's security system and have been exploiting it ever since.'"
Toyota Adds External Speakers To Warn Pedestrians 531
HockeyPuck writes "When I was a kid, playing with my matchbox cars, I used to say 'VROOOM VROOOM' to pretend my toy cars had big engines in them. Well it seems that Toyota has decided to do the same thing with the Prius by optionally installing, in Japan, external speakers to alert pedestrians of oncoming Priuses."
Why the World Is Running Out of Helium 475
jamie writes "The US National Helium Reserve stores a billion cubic meters of helium, half the world supply, in an old natural gasfield. The array of pipes and mines runs 200 miles from Texas to Kansas. In the name of deficit reduction, we're selling it all off for cheap. Physics professor and Nobel laureate Robert Richardson says: 'In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell off the strategic reserve and the consequence was that the market was swelled with cheap helium because its price was not determined by the market. The motivation was to sell it all by 2015. The basic problem is that helium is too cheap. The Earth is 4.7 billion years old and it has taken that long to accumulate our helium reserves, which we will dissipate in about 100 years. One generation does not have the right to determine availability forever.' Another view is The Impact of Selling the Federal Helium Reserve, the government study from 10 years ago that suggested the government's price would end up being over market value by 25% — but cautioned that this was based on the assumption that demand would grow slowly, and urged periodic reviews of the state of the industry."
