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Businesses

Blogger Loses Unemployment Check Because of Ads 554

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the time-for-an-injection-of-common-sense dept.
Techdirt is reporting that one unfortunate, unemployed New York lawyer recently had her unemployment benefits greatly reduced because of the incredible $1/day she was earning via ads on her blog. "The whole thing sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare, with NY State asking her to get a form from her new 'employer' who didn't exist. Then NY Department of Labor started giving her all sorts of contradicting information, and eventually an 'investigation' into her 'business' — during which time her unemployment benefits were stopped entirely. She's now pulled the Google AdSense from her blog (total earned over the life of the blog $238.75)."

Comment Re:how about that (Score 5, Informative) 204

by th1nk (#27497429) Attached to: Design Software Giants Target the Unemployed

Autodesk have been thought to do this for years already on the warez scene.

Autodesk are thought to have released their own cracks...

I don't know the validity of your statement, but I do know that they are quick to send their lawyers out if they think you are profiting with a pirated copy of their software.

I set up a website about 7 years ago when I was working for myself as a mechanical design engineer. The website showed some examples of my work created in AutoCAD, among other software packages. A few months after it went live I received a very threatening certified letter from a group of lawyers representing AutoCAD saying that they had no record of my company purchasing a license for AutoCAD. At that time I did not own a legitimate copy of AutoCAD. I wrote a letter back stating that the examples were created using a legitimate copy, that I was not currently using AutoCAD and that I would remove any references to it on my website if they wished. They then said that was cool and never pursued it again.
Education

NASA and Google To Back New "Singularity University" 294

Posted by kdawson from the can-that-be-taught dept.
Slatterz and Keith Kleiner were among several readers to send in word of Singularity University, announced at TED today by Ray Kurzweil. He and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis began talking about creating the school last year, after Diamandis read Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity is Near. NASA and Google are both supporting the project, NASA with space and Google with cash. The school aims to foster "disruptive innovation." As envisioned, Singularity U. will sponsor 3-day and 10-day courses for executives year-round, and its main offering will be a single 9-week course of study over the summer for 120 students, each of which will pay $25,000 for the privilege. Announced faculty so far includes Nobel Prize winning physicist George Smoot, NASA Ames chief scientist Stephanie Langhoff, Vint Cerf, and Will Wright, creator of the video games Spore and The Sims.

Comment Re:Biased view of the world have we? (Score 1) 305

by th1nk (#25263081) Attached to: Report Says China Will Demand Source Code
For what it's worth...I'm in China right now on a business trip and hardly anything is blocked. People seem to think that the Chinese government has some sort of master control over all the information flowing in and out of the country and that is just not the case. I have been denied on maybe 1% of the sites I've tried to access. All major Western news sites are freely available regardless of content. The Chinese people are certainly not being sheltered from the rest of the world's information.
Bug

Apple Error Leaves iPhone Developers In the Lurch 379

Posted by kdawson from the pretty-glass-bricks dept.
canadacow writes "iPhone developers enrolled and active in the iPhone OS 2.0 beta program got a nasty surprise today when Apple inadvertently 'expired' the recently released version. While for a beta program this typically would not be an issue, Apple has yet to release a new deployment of the iPhone OS. So developers like myself who use their iPhone for both actual phone and iPod use are bricked. Of note, this particular expired build is just 11 days old."
Transportation

New X-Prize for Fuel Efficient Cars Announced 371

Posted by Zonk from the it's-like-the-robot-one-but-with-less-programming dept.
miowpurr writes "A new X-Prize for ultra fuel efficient cars has been announced. The winning car must 'carry four or more passengers and have climate control, an audio system and 10 cubic feet of cargo space. They also must have four or more wheels, hit 60 miles per hour in less than 12 seconds and have a minimum top speed of 100 miles per hour and a range of 200 miles. Those that qualify will race their vehicles in cross-country races in 2009 and 2010 that will combine speed, distance, urban driving and overall performance.'"
Software

Unreleased iPhone 2.0 May Already Be Hacked 183

Posted by Zonk from the who-gave-the-hackers-time-travel-machines dept.
The as-yet unreleased second iteration of iPhone hardware may already be compromised, reports Engadget and News.com. Members of the 'iPhone Dev Team' have (supposedly) made use of the recently released SDK to gin up a Beta 2.0 software hack. "Unlike previous hacks, this one isn't specific to the latest firmware version, it exploits the way that Apple designed the iPhone's main bootloader. According to the iPhone Dev Team, the iPhone verifies whether or not firmware code has been signed with an RSA certificate before allowing it to be written to memory. The team has apparently figured out a way to disable that check and allow unsigned code to be written to memory."
Science

Researchers Develop Self-Cleaning Clothes 220

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the your-washing-machine-is-pissed dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Researchers at Monash University, in Australia, have found a process to coat natural fibers such as wool, silk, and hemp that will automatically remove food, grime, and even red-wine stains by coating their fibers with titanium dioxide nanocrystals, which break down food and dirt in sunlight. Titanium dioxide is a strong photocatalyst and in the presence of ultraviolet light and water vapor, it forms hydroxyl radicals, which oxidize, or decompose, organic matter. "These nanocrystals cannot decompose wool and are harmless to skin," says organic chemist and nanomaterials researcher Walid Daoud. Titanium dioxide can also destroy pathogens such as bacteria in the presence of sunlight by breaking down the cell walls of the microorganisms making self-cleaning fabrics especially useful in hospitals and other medical settings."
Security

'Friendly' Worms Could Spread Software Fixes 306

Posted by Zonk from the perfect-way-to-make-a-rogue-ai dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft researchers are working out the perfect strategies for worms to spread through networks. Their goal is to distribute software patches and other friendly information via virus, reducing load on servers. This raises the prospect of worm races — deploying a whitehat worm to spread a fix faster than a new attacking worm can reach vulnerable machines."
Power

Nanowires Allow For Electricity-Generating Clothing 113

Posted by Zonk from the next-step-in-this-direction-is-thermoptic-camoflage dept.
lee1 writes "The latest development in the field of 'energy harvesting', which includes such opportunistic technology such as self-winding watches, generators implanted in soldier's boots, and knee brace dynamos, is a cloth that generates electrical power. The cloth is newly developed by scientists in the US, and can produce up to 80 milliwatts per square metre. It is made from brush-like fibres composed of a Kevlar stalk surrounded by zinc oxide nanowire crystals that generate electricity through the piezoelectric effect. They can be grown on any substrate, including hair. The power harnessed from this effect could be used for anything from cosmetic components to the powering of medical devices."
Science

Laser Light Re-creates 'Black Holes' in the Lab 245

Posted by Zonk from the i-have-dubbed-my-discovery-zonkinium dept.
yodasz writes "The New Scientist reports that a team of researchers from the UK were able to recreate a black hole's event horizon in the lab by firing a laser pulse down an optical fibre. The team's observations confirm predictions made by cosmologists and now they are trying to prove Hawking's hypothesis of escaping particles, dubbed Hawking radiation. 'The first pulse distorts the optical properties of the fibre simply by traveling through it. This distortion forces the speedy probe wave to slow down dramatically when it catches up with the slower pulse and tries to move through it. In fact, the probe wave becomes trapped and can never overtake the pulse's leading edge, which effectively becomes a black hole event horizon, beyond which light cannot escape.'"
Google

Rumors of Google and Dell iPhone Rival 146

Posted by CmdrTaco from the please-don't-make-me-jailbreak dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Speculation is mounting that Google is plotting the launch of a mobile phone in partnership with computer giant Dell. Senior industry sources claim the two companies will reveal their plans at next month's 3GSM telecoms conference in Barcelona, although Google insiders deny an announcement is due in the near future."

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