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Politics

Submission + - Abductions, Torture of Palestinians in Hebron (independent.co.uk)

Submitted by gauharjk
gauharjk writes: In shocking testimonies that reveal abductions, beatings and torture, Israeli soldiers confess the horror they have visited on Hebron.

The birds are singing as he (Israeli soldier) describes in detail some of what he did and saw others do as an enlisted soldier in Hebron. And they are certainly criminal: the incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back – for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten "to a pulp" when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.

Breaking the Silence — http://www.shovrimshtika.org/index_e.asp
Transportation

Submission + - Airlines Get Billions from Unbundled Services

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "In hearings before Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that airlines reported revenue of $7.9 billion from baggage fees and reservation change and cancellation fees in calendar years 2008 and 2009, fees on unbundled services that once were considered part of the ticket price and witnesses from the GAO, the Department of Transportation and associations for air travel and travel agents all urged the government to require uniform pricing information from airlines to help consumers make easy comparisons. "We believe that the proliferation of these fees and the manner in which they are presented to the traveling public can be confusing and in some cases misleading," says Robert Rivkin, the Department of Transportation's general counsel. Published fares used by consumers to choose flights don't "clearly represent the cost of travel when these services are added." However, Spirit Airlines President and CEO Ben Baldanza defended the practice of unbundling, saying it allows his airline to charge lower fares (PDF) and allows the customers the choice to purchase the services or not. "Carrying more than one bag is not necessary for all travelers and we believe it is unfair to charge those customers for extra services they do not use," testified Baldanza adding that bag fees have led customers to pack less reducing total baggage on flights, lowering airline's operating costs and resulting in fewer lost or damaged bags."
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Submission + - StarCraft II cost $100 million to develop (gamepron.com)

Submitted by UgLyPuNk
UgLyPuNk writes: Video game production is in a slump, the world’s struggling with the tail-end of the Global Financial Crisis, and Activision Blizzard has spent more than US$100 million developing StarCraft II.

The sequel’s been 12 years coming, and expectations are understandably high, with analysts predicting several million units will be sold this year alone – comfortably padding Activision‘s wallet.

Comment Re:Getting ready for the MS bash (Score 1) 205

by gauharjk (#32935346) Attached to: Recomputing the Sky
You really hate everything Microsoft, don't you? They are just like any other corporation, super aggressive and ruthless. Their OS monopoly helped businesses by standardizing operating platforms. Imagine a world with hundreds of different OSes and file-systems and incompatible hardware to deal with. Microsoft is not perfect, but has certainly made valuable contributions to the Computer Industry.

Comment Re:Getting ready for the MS bash (Score 1) 205

by gauharjk (#32925616) Attached to: Recomputing the Sky
I agree this is really awesome. Microsoft has done some revolutionary things in the past, like giving away the TCP/IP stack Internet Explorer 4.0 for free when these products were very expensive and would have hampered the growth of Internet. I have silverlight installed, but it it really worth an extra addon? I hope HTML 5 becomes a web standard soon so that people don't have to depend on these innumerable addons and the web becomes truely platform neutral.
Ubuntu

Submission + - Ubuntu Satanic Edition 10.04 (Lucifer’s Legi (desktoplinuxreviews.com)

Submitted by JimLynch
JimLynch writes: It has been ages since I delved into the nightmarish and barbaric world of Ubuntu Satanic Edition. Much has changed since I first dared to install it back when I worked for ExtremeTech. Is Ubuntu Satanic Edition still as evil as it used to be? Find out in this review as I take you on a journey into the dark side of Ubuntu Linux. Together we’ll explorethe distro of the beast!
Science

Submission + - Qualcomm Bets on Augmented Reality

Submitted by goG
goG writes: Qualcomm is pushing augmented reality hard — $125,000 worth, if you can develop mobile phone applications with it. That's the offer Qualcomm made to developers who can design the "most effective, entertaining and functional application" of augmented reality, or AR. But that may be a small price to pay if Qualcomm is right about its bet that AR will be the next big thing in mobile technology.

Comment Blame AT&T (Score 0) 1

by gauharjk (#32772440) Attached to: iPhone 4 - Apple's OFFICIAL response
The main reason why Apple gets all the hate is its AT&T network, which wrecks the beautiful iPhone. Now Apple says the signal strength on iPhones was fake! Does that imply that AT&T network is worse than we imagined it was? I don't think other phones on the ATT network drop as many calls as the old iPhones did. I suspect Apple is trying to cover-up a defective hardware design.
Open Source

Submission + - Finding Open Source Projects Looking for Help 1

Submitted by aus
aus writes: I've been doing web development for about 10 years now. It's been very good to me, but I want to do more that write HTML, PHP, Javascript and CSS. Since the job market isn't all that great right now in the US, it would seem that volunteering some time on an open source project would give me the satisfaction I'm looking for. The problem is finding a project that wants/needs help that I would also be interested in. I've tried browsing around on sourceforge and freshmeat...is there a site somewhere that I'm not aware of that has classifieds where open source project maintainers post "job" listings?
Apple

Submission + - Apple Software Update to Fix iPhone4 Signal (wsj.com) 1

Submitted by dogmatixpsych
dogmatixpsych writes: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the drop in signal when holding some iPhone4s is due to a software glitch in how the phone displays signal strength: "'Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don't know it because we are erroneously displaying four or five bars,' Apple said. 'Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.'"

Submission + - Pirate Party to Run Pirate Bay from Parliament (torrentfreak.com) 2

Submitted by rdnetto
rdnetto writes: After their former hosting provider received an injunction telling it to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the worlds most resilient BitTorrent site switched to a new ISP. That host, the Swedish Pirate Party, made a stand on principle. Now they aim to take things further by running the site from inside the Swedish Parliament.

The party has announced today that they intend to use part of the Swedish Constitution to further these goals, specifically Parliamentary Immunity from prosecution or lawsuit for things done as part of their political mandate. They intend to push the non-commercial sharing part of their manifesto, by running The Pirate Bay from ‘inside’ the Parliament, by Members of Parliament.
Politics

Submission + - New study reveals media's servitude to government (salon.com)

Submitted by gauharjk
gauharjk writes: A newly released study (PDF) from students at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials. This new study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by America's four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as "torture" — until the U.S. Government began openly using it and insisting that it was not torture, at which time these newspapers obediently ceased describing it that way
Communications

Submission + - What will Windows Phone 7 mean for apps?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: recombu.com has taken an interesting look at what Windows Phone 7 means for apps and what challenges it will face. Will Windows Phone be able to attract consumers and developers, for example, and when the app bubble pops where will it stand? "Microsoft has a plan though; it doesn't want to just offer you the same app experience you get on a myriad of other handsets or a homescreen chockablock with app icons. It's not too keen on you having to use apps one at a time either, manually clicking in and out of each app. The way Microsoft talks, you'd think it was a huge chore to open an app, not a quick press of the screen in the appropriate place. Still, we're all for re-thinking the app, and Microsoft's take has it integrated into your handset, running all the time on your homescreen. This goes beyond push notifications; it's more like a series of interlocking widgets — a system Microsoft is calling 'live tiles'."

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