Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 214
Hardrives are measured in bytes, 10^5 bytes is a gigabyte. However, memory is also measured in bytes, 2^30 bytes is a gibibyte (although often refered to as a gigabyte).
Comment Re:Dormitories... (Score 1) 394
I'm just finishing up my college visits and I haven't been to a single one that still puts phones in the rooms. The RA has an emergency phone and there is one in the lobby, but thats about it.
Submission + - Israeli court protects online identities (jpost.com)
ygslash writes: The Israeli Supreme Court
refused to force an ISP
to reveal the identity of an anonymous talkback
poster,
thereby preventing a libel suit for
labeling an alternative medicine practitioner a
"charlatan". In the 70 page decision (to be
published online,
in Hebrew, within 72 hours), the
court weighed the rights of freedom of speech and
confidentiality against the right to protect one's
reputation, and discussed the procedural
complexities of allowing civil suits against
anonymous parties while protecting the rights of
all involved. The majority opinion of the court
was that legislation would be required to allow
any legal action in this case.
Business Ethics researcher Asher Meir
commented:
'If talkbacks were strictly subject to the laws of
libel, then people would give them more
credence. [The majority opinion of the court] is
correct from a judicial point of view, but if we
are weighing legislation a basic question would
be: How much credibility do we in fact want
talkbacks to have?'
Submission + - iPhone 3GS goes down at Pwn2Own (zdnet.com)
TwiztidK writes: A pair of European researchers used the spotlight of the CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacking contest here to break into a fully patched iPhone and hijack the entire SMS database, including text messages that had already been deleted.
Using an exploit against a previously unknown vulnerability, the duo — Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf Philipp Weinmann — lured the target iPhone to a rigged Web site and exfiltrated the SMS database in about 20 seconds.
Using an exploit against a previously unknown vulnerability, the duo — Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf Philipp Weinmann — lured the target iPhone to a rigged Web site and exfiltrated the SMS database in about 20 seconds.
Solar-Powered Augmented Reality Contact Lenses 213
ByronScott writes "Want eyesight that could put your neighborhood cyborg to shame? Well, University of Washington professor Babak Amir Parviz and his students are working on solar-powered contact lenses embedded with hundreds of semitransparent LEDs, letting wearers experience augmented reality right through their eyes. If their research proves successful, the applications — from health monitoring to gameplay to just plain bionic sight — could be endless."
Comment Re:Litigious society (Score 5, Insightful) 416
The parents shouldn't be given enough money to become rich but, in the case that the vaccines did cause the child to be autistic, they should be given money to assist with treating their child's autism.
Comment Needed competition (Score 0) 584
I think that if there really are as many iPad competitors as the article suggests that it could possibly do a lot to improve the iPad. If most consumers really want an open application marketplace and they show it with their wallets, Apple may be forced to loosen up their control over the App Store.
Comment Are these full-time employees? (Score -1, Redundant) 178
Employing a person full-time for $55/hr could potentially cost more than paying a person $128/hr only when they are nedded.
Comment Re:Suicide? (Score 0) 1343
Being careless with a car and making a dangerous object accessable are two different things. Driving while reading, resulting in someone's death, is comparable to shooting a gun with your eyes closed. Leaving a gun on a table is the same as leaving your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition. Vehicular manslughter and leaving a gun on a table, even with the safety off, are not even close to being the same thing.
Submission + - Steam is coming to Mac (gizmodo.com)
TwiztidK writes: After teasing Mac users about the possibility of supporting OS X, Valve has finally announced that, beginning in April, Steam and some of it's library of games will be made available to Mac users. Mac will also be considered a tier-1 platform so all of Valve's "future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360."
Submission + - Mass Produced Mini-Nukes? (publicradio.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Marketplace aired an interesting article about the possibility of decentralized "mini nukes" being used to provide power for towns or small cities. Based on designs for nuclear submarines, these reactors could prove to be a more economical solution for allowing nuclear power to become for widespread. By using a modular, mass-produced design costs for nuclear power could fall dramatically. The main corporate website for the reactors can be found here: http://www.babcock.com/products/modular_nuclear/ .
Submission + - Jet-Powered ATV (popsci.com)
derGoldstein writes: "PopSci photographer John Carnett stripped a Polaris RZR and rebuilt it with a mishmash of parts—and a powerful jet engine". The project took 10 months and $15,000. "Topping out at just over 60 mph, it isn’t much faster than a stock RZR, but the Whirl’s gas turbine reaches maximum power in seconds and stays at that level all the time, so it can get up to its top speed almost instantly even from a dead stop".
Submission + - Major ISPs Fund BitTorrent User Tracking Research (ucsd.edu)
An anonymous reader writes: I was scanning conference proceedings to come up with ideas for a reading group I run at my workplace and I noticed an interesting paper from the new IEEE WIFS forensics conference. Researchers from the University of Colorado have published a technique for tracking bittorrent users by joining and actively probing torrent swarms using low-cost cloud computing services. They claim their methods allowed them to monitor the entire Pirate Bay torrent set for as little as $13/mo using EC2. But that's not even the interesting part. Their work appears to have been "funded in part through gifts from PolyCipher" — a broadband ISP consortium. That's right. Three major national ISPs funded this round of bittorrent tracking research, not the MPAA/RIAA. Could this be evidence of ISP support for ACTA and a global 3-strikes law?
Comment Hand Sanitizer (Score 0) 404
I knew it was bad when hand sanitizer started popping up all over the place.
Comment Why would a school ever do this? (Score 0) 312
It makes sense for a school to try to protect their property and ensure that it is used for good purposes (studying as opposed to pron), but how would spying on the students ever protect their property?
The really disturbing thing about this isn't that the school could remotely activate the webcams, it's that they did, and they used that power to invade their student's privacy. Besides, the person actually doing the spying must have some serious issues.
The really disturbing thing about this isn't that the school could remotely activate the webcams, it's that they did, and they used that power to invade their student's privacy. Besides, the person actually doing the spying must have some serious issues.
