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Comment Re:How is this even a fucking question? (Score 1) 204

by mctk (#28908591) Attached to: FCC Probing Apple, AT&T Rejection of Google Voice
Quoting Fight Club as an argument for the existence of more Wal-Mart like companies is like using Office Space as an argument for TPS reports. It's like using Lebowski as an argument for holding a 9-5 job. It's like using Alien as an argument for the frailty of women. It's like using Predator as an argument for the wussiness of United States governors. It's like using American Beauty as an argument for filming plastic bags in the wind. It's like using Ninja Turtles as an argument *against* nuclear experimentation. It's like using Ravenous as an argument for the impact of good soundtracks. It's like using web standards as an argument for using IE6.

I don't think the penguin is AT&T's power animal.
The Courts

Student Suing Amazon For Book Deletions 646

Posted by kdawson from the incident-that-will-not-stay-down-the-memory-hole dept.
Stupified writes "High school student Justin Gawronski is suing Amazon for deleting his Kindle copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four (complaint, PDF), because doing so destroyed the annotations he'd created to the text for class. The complaint states: 'The notes are still accessible on the Kindle 2 device in a file separate from the deleted book, but are of no value. For example, a note such as "remember this paragraph for your thesis" is useless if it does not actually reference a specific paragraph.' The suit, which is seeking class action status, asks that Amazon be legally blocked from improperly accessing users' Kindles in the future and punitive damages for those affected by the deletion. Nothing in Amazon's EULA or US copyright law gives them permission to delete books off your Kindle, so this sounds like a plausible suit."
Transportation

Prototype Vehicle For the Blind 238

Posted by timothy from the this-needs-a-playstation-analog-too dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A student team from Virginia Tech Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory have created a vehicle which allows the blind to drive. The vehicle uses a laser range finder to determine distances and alerts the driver through voice commands and vibration. Tomorrow [Friday] morning, the vehicle will have its first public test drive at the University of Maryland. At last, Braille on drive-up ATMs may finally be vindicated."
Games

Which Game Series Would You Reboot? 1120

Posted by Soulskill from the star-control-please dept.
Franchise reboots are all the rage these days in Hollywood, and the trend is starting to creep into the games industry as well. The Guardian's games blog is running a story discussing a few examples and pondering likely candidates for future reboots. Quoting: "If anything, the concept of the reboot makes more sense in the videogame sector than it does in movies. For a start, games are complex entities, with each new iteration in a familiar series adding many, many hours of fresh narrative content. Entering, say, the Zelda, Resident Evil, Half-Life, Dragon Quest or Metal Gear worlds at this stage must be massively intimidating — even if the developers go to great lengths to make each entry work as a singular, self-contained entity within the canon. Also, videogames are going through a paradigm shift in terms of popular appeal at the moment. The faithful audience of young males has been joined by new demographics brought in by the Wii, PC casual games, and now the iPhone. Many of these people may be vaguely aware of long-running game brands, but won't have a clue about the key characters, sign post events and basic gameplay mechanisms." So, which series (or individual title) would you like to see rebooted?

Western Digital Announces 1TB Mobile HD 252

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the better-sew-some-deeper-pockets dept.
Western Digital has announced a couple of new 2.5-inch mobile hard drives weighing in at 750GB and 1TB. The drives feature a 3 GB/s transfer rate and Western Digital's "WhisperDrive" tech along with specialized shock tolerance and head parking to ensure durability. "Both models are shipping now through various channels; the 1TB model is currently available in My Passport Essential SE USB drives. The Scorpio Blue 750GB model has a suggested sticker price of $190 while the Scorpio Blue 1TB is a mere $250. The My Passport Essential SE 1 TB portable drive is $299.99 USD and the 750 GB model is $199.99 USD."
Patents

How To Vet Clever Ideas Without Giving Them Away? 539

Posted by timothy from the don't-clever-ideas-want-to-be-free? dept.
Rival writes "As an inquisitive and creative geek, I am constantly coming up with 'clever' ideas. Most often I discover fundamental or practical flaws lurking in the details, which I'm fine with. As Edison said, 'I haven't failed; I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.' Other times, I discover that someone else has beaten me to the idea. I'm fine with that, too. At least I know that I've come up with a great idea, even if I'm not the first. There are times, however, when I can find no flaws with an idea and nobody else seems to have thought of it. I'm not conceited enough to think my idea is genius; I just assume that I'm not knowledgeable enough to see what I'm missing. In these times, I often want to ask a subject matter expert for their thoughts. On the admittedly long chance that an idea is genius, however, what is the best way to ask for another's insights while mitigating the risk of them stealing or sharing the idea? Asking a stranger to sign a contract before discussing an idea seems like a good way to get a door closed on my face. What are your experiences and suggestions?"
Image

Kingston Unveils $1000 USB Flash Drive Screenshot-sm 119

Posted by samzenpus from the because-they-can dept.
Barence writes "Kingston has unveiled the 'world's first' 256GB flash drive, raising flash drive storage to the kind of capacity you normally associate with laptop hard disks. Kingston claims the drive is 'ideal for netbook users who want to extend the limited capacity of their machines,' although given that the device costs about twice as much as a netbook, buyers could probably get more storage by purchasing two of the cheap ultraportables. The device is made on a build-to-order basis, with a suggested UK retail price of £650.52 including VAT — that's an astonishing $1074.69 at current exchange rates. Not exactly cheap and cheerful."
Programming

Collaborative Software For Pair Programming? 302

Posted by timothy from the is-your-sister's-name-cynthia? dept.
DavidMatuszek writes "I will be teaching Java again this Fall. Students work in pairs, but unfortunately (after the first hour) typically not physically together. I would like to find collaborative software that is (1) dead simple to use, because that's not what the course is about, and (2) free. Google Docs would do, but students will be sharing code — plain text — not RTF or HTML or Word files. Is there such software for plain text?"
Books

Amazon Pulls Purchased E-Book Copies of 1984 and Animal Farm 645

Posted by Soulskill from the miniplenty-malquoted-kindle-rectify dept.
Oracle Goddess writes "In a story just dripping with irony, Amazon Kindle owners awoke this morning to discover that 1984 and Animal Farm had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for, and thought they owned. Apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by George Orwell from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. Amazon customer service may or may not have responded to queries by stating, 'We've always been at war with Eastasia.'"
Graphics

Typography On the Web Gets Different 378

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-i-miss-comic-sans dept.
bstender writes "Most major browsers — including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera — recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face. What that means, in brief, is that Web developers can now easily embed downloadable fonts in their pages. To see an example, load up Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 and learn more. You'll see three new typefaces — Liza, Auto, and Dolly — used in the body text and headlines." No doubt the licensing issues are just as complex as the font nerd potential.
NASA

NASA Has the Lost Tapes 256

Posted by kdawson from the we-know-what-you-did-on-that-satellite dept.
The Shuttle launch may have been delayed by two days, but NASA has better news to report. caffiend666 writes "As speculated a few weeks ago, NASA has found and is starting to restore the lost Apollo 11 tapes. A Briefing will be held July 16th at the Newseum in Washington to 'release greatly improved video imagery from the July 1969 live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk... The original signals were recorded on high quality slow-scan TV (SSTV) tapes. What was released to the TV networks was reduced to lower quality commercial TV standards.'"

New Router Manages Flows, Not Packets 122

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the let-the-injections-begin dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A new router, designed by one of the creators of ARPANET, manages flows of packets instead of only managing individual packets. The router recognizes packets that are following the first and sends them along faster than if it had to route them as individuals. When overloaded, the router can make better choices of which packets to drop. 'Indeed, during most of my career as a network engineer, I never guessed that the queuing and discarding of packets in routers would create serious problems. More recently, though, as my Anagran colleagues and I scrutinized routers during peak workloads, we spotted two serious problems. First, routers discard packets somewhat randomly, causing some transmissions to stall. Second, the packets that are queued because of momentary overloads experience substantial and nonuniform delays, significantly reducing throughput (TCP throughput is inversely proportional to delay). These two effects hinder traffic for all applications, and some transmissions can take 10 times as long as others to complete.'"

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