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Google

Submission + - Google threatens French media ban (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: Google has threatened to exclude French media sites from search results if France goes ahead with plans to make search engines to pay for content.

In a letter sent to several ministerial offices, Google said such a law "would threaten its very existence".

French newspaper publishers have been pushing for the law, saying it is unfair that Google receives advertising revenue from searches for news. French Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti also favours the idea. She told a parliamentary commission it was "a tool that it seems important to me to develop".
Technology

Submission + - SD card survives real-life disaster test (stuff.co.nz)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A newly-wed couple lost their digital camera and SD card in the Christchurch earthquake in February 2011. The SD card survived flooding with silt and exposure to the weather for 20 months embedded in a gravel driveway. Amazingly, all 2.5 Gb of photos have recently been recovered. Sadly the digital camera did not fare so well. Even more interesting is that the SD card was from by a budget supplier, kudos to Adata!

Submission + - SC Supreme Court: Inbox emails may not be private (wistv.com)

Submitted by wesware
wesware writes: The justices unanimously ruled Wednesday that since the emails were still in the husband's inbox, the daughter-in-law did not violate a 1986 federal law about email storage. What difference would it make if an email was in your inbox vs the 'No one can see these'box?
Science

Submission + - Elephant Hair Acts as Pin Fins for Cooling (vice.com) 1

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: A new paper from Conor Myhrvold, Howard Stone, and Elie Bou-Zeid of Princeton, published in PLoS One, shows that elephants’ sparse hair actually acts as pin-shaped cooling fins, which helps the giant animals dissipate heat more effectively. The hair works by creating more area for heat to be released, while also also pushing heat away from the animal’s body where wind flow is less impeded.

The team calculated the heat transfer coefficients for measured values of elephants’ smooth skin (around ears, for example) and rough skin (on the legs), both with and without hair. They found that, at high wind speeds, the convection effect of the wind overpowered any surface differences. But at low wind speeds, when convection effects are lower and elephants have more trouble shedding heat, the team found that hair acted as pin-shaped cooling fins, which increased convection cooling efficiency by as much as 24 percent. For elephants dealing with huge thermal loads, that’s an important difference.
Robotics

Submission + - US Navy funds 'MacGyver' robot (gatech.edu)

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: A US team aims to build a robot that can work out how to use nearby objects to solve problems or escape threats.

The machine has been dubbed a MacGyver Bot, after the TV character who cobbled together devices to escape life-threatening situations.

The challenge is to develop software that "understands" what objects are in order to deduce how they can be used.

The US Navy is funding the project and says the machines might ultimately be deployed alongside humans. It is providing $900,000 to robotics researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to carry out the work.

Submission + - Oops! Sorry, we got it all wrong, IMF says (herald.ie) 1

Submitted by daem0n1x
daem0n1x writes: Ireland, Greece and Portugal have been under draconian austerity measures after they have been forced to ask financial rescue from the IMF, in the aftermath of the 2008 bank crash. The results of these austerity measures are well known: Recession, unemployment and general social and economic meltdown.
After all this pain and suffering, the IMF suddenly finds a gigantic flaw in the formulas used to calculate the economic effects of austerity.
Well, at least they stepped forward to recognise they screwed up. But is it in still time for European and global economies to recover?
How is it possible that worldwide economic policies be conducted by such flawed systems? Numerous economists have been warning about this for years, but they faced deaf ears. Sounds familiar? Yes, just like before the subprime bubble bust.
China

Submission + - Apple Maps Accidentally Reveals Secret Military Base In Taiwan (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "After one Taiwanese newspaper snapped and printed a satellite photo of a top-secret military base from the new Maps application running on an iPhone 5, the defense ministry of Taiwan on Tuesday publicly requested Apple blur the sensitive images of the country’s classified military installations. The top-secret radar base, located in the northern county of Hsinchu, contains a highly-advanced ultra-high-frequency long-range radar that military officials say can detect missiles launched as far away as the city of Xinjiang, which is located in northwest China. The radar system was obtained via US-based defense group Raytheon in 2003, and is still being constructed with hopes to be completed by the end of this year. “Regarding images taken by commercial satellites, legally we can do nothing about it,” said David Lo, the spokesman of Taiwan's defense ministry, in a statement to reporters. “But we’ll ask Apple to lower the resolution of satellite images of some confidential military establishments the way we’ve asked Google in the past.”"
Cellphones

Submission + - Is Police Cellphone Tracking Okay If There's No Trespass? (justia.com)

Submitted by marbux
marbux writes: Two-part article criticizes a questionable recent appeals court ruling that police in the U.S. may track cell phone locations without a search warrant.

This past August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in United States v. Skinner, held that police may, without a warrant or probable cause, use global positioning technology to track a suspect’s whereabouts through his cellular phone. This ruling is important because it follows up on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last term in United States v. Jones that police do need a warrant and probable cause to attach a global positioning device to a vehicle and thereby track a suspect’s whereabouts.
Government

Submission + - Confirmed: Germany Monitors Skype, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail and Facebook chat (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: German Government has went a bit too far trying to be transparent and has inadvertently revealed that German police monitors Skype, Google Mail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Facebook chat as and when necessary. The revelations come as the German Government let out figures of expenses incurred by the Federal Ministry of the Interior following a parliamentary inquiry, which were spotted by the annalist blog. The pages contain a whole lot of tables and as many would find those boring, some pages reveal something very startling. On page 34 and page 37 of the report line item 486 and 265 respectively, represent decoding software for Google Mail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo Mail for prevention and investigation.
Privacy

Submission + - Government Censors Draft Snooping Laws (delimiter.com.au)

Submitted by coolstoryhansel
coolstoryhansel writes: Stating that release of the draft legislation is not in the public interest [PDF] because it would prejudice decision making processes already in train, the Attorney General's Department has denied the release of the draft laws that would see wide-scale dragnet surveillance implemented along with an expansion of law enforcement powers for the purposes of 'national security'.

Serkowski, speaking for the Pirate Party who lodged the FOI request labelled the Department response as "disgraceful and troubling" saying the decision is "completely trashing any semblance or notion of transparency or participative democratic process of policy development."
Science

Submission + - The LED is 50 years old (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
BoxRec
BoxRec writes: "The light-emitting diode has brightened our lives for half a century — from lighting up the city streets at night, to decorating Christmas trees each December.
The LED started life in October 1962, as a single red illumination in a General Electric research lab in New York state.
Prof Nick Holonyak Jr from the University of Illinois, takes a look back at how it all began with his invention of the first practical visible-spectrum light-emitting diode."
Technology

Submission + - A 30-minute, 150-mile charge for your car using solar power! (power-technology.com) 2

Submitted by Matthew Smiths
Matthew Smiths writes: Last month, US electric car manufacturer Tesla launched a Supercharger network of solar-powered chargers for electric vehicles aiming to prove that renewables can rule the road. The 30-minute, 150-mile charge using a Supercharger is a massive improvement on current charging systems and is already a revolution for the eco-friendly electric vehicle market.

Submission + - Halliburton Missing Radioactive Cylinder Found (rigzone.com)

Submitted by Tator Tot
Tator Tot writes: "A small radioactive cylinder that went missing from a Halliburton Co. truck last month was found on a Texas road late Thursday, the company said, ending a weeks-long hunt that involved local, state and federal authorities."
Google

Submission + - Google doesn't support OpenDocument Format (muktware.com)

Submitted by
rysiek
rysiek writes: "After killing off support for old Microsoft formats, Google apparently decided to turn against OpenDocument Format (used by LibreOffice, OpenOffice and many other office suites).

The support for ODF is lacking from Chromebooks, Android phones, Google Drive and QuickOffice. However, Microsoft's controversial OOXML seems to be supported well."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Patents 1826 Choropleth Map Technique

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: A newly-granted Microsoft patent for Variable Formatting of Cells covers the use of 'variable formatting for cells in computer spreadsheets, tables, and other documents', such as using the spectrum from a first color to a second color to represent the values in or associated with each cell. Which is really not a heck of a lot different from how Baron Pierre Charles Dupin created what's believed to be the first choropleth map way back in 1826, when he used shadings from black to white to illustrate the distribution and intensity of illiteracy in France. BTW, beginning in March, the U.S. will switch from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system of granting patents. Hey, what could go wrong?

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