Gefion - Slashdot User

Submission + - Vegetarian spider found

Submitted by

Smivs

on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @03:50PM

Smivs writes: "The BBC are reporting on a spider that dines almost exclusively on plants . It is the first-known predominantly vegetarian spider; all of the other known 40,000 spider species are thought to be mainly carnivorous. Bagheera kiplingi, which is found in Central America and Mexico, bucks the meat-eating trend by feasting on acacia plants. The jumping arachnid, which is 5-6mm long, has developed a taste for the tips of the acacia plants — known as Beltian bodies — which are packed full of protein. To reach this leafy fare, the spider has to evade the attention of ants, which live in the hollow spines of the tree, but the crafty Bagheera kiplingi has found a way to evade the ants and safely reach it's food."

Server Failure Destroys Sidekick Users' Backup Data 304

Posted by timothy on Sunday October 11, 2009 @05:29AM from the oh-well-enough-said dept.

Expanding on the T-Mobile data loss mentioned in an update to an earlier story, reader stigmato writes "T-Mobile's popular Sidekick brand of devices and their users are facing a data loss crisis. According to the T-Mobile community forums, Microsoft/Danger has suffered a catastrophic server failure that has resulted in the loss of all personal data not stored on the phones. They are advising users not to turn off their phones, reset them or let the batteries die in them for fear of losing what data remains on the devices. Microsoft/Danger has stated that they cannot recover the data but are still trying. Already people are clamoring for a lawsuit. Should we continue to trust cloud computing content providers with our personal information? Perhaps they should have used ZFS or btrfs for their servers."

Why AT&T Should Dump the iPhone's Unlimited Data Plan 501

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 10, 2009 @01:40PM from the traffic-shaping-on-the-go dept.

Pickens writes "Farhad Manjoo has a provocative story at Slate asserting that while the iPhone has prompted millions of people to join AT&T, it has also hurt the company's image because all of those customers use their phones too much, and AT&T's network is getting crushed by the demand. The typical smartphone customer consumes about 40 to 80 megabytes of wireless capacity a month, while the typical iPhone customer uses 400 MB a month. As more people sign up, local cell towers get more congested, and your own phone performs worse. He says the problem is that a customer who uses 1 MB a month pays the same amount as someone who uses 1,000 MB, and the solution is tiered pricing. 'Of course, users would cry bloody murder at first,' writes Manjoo. 'I'd call on AT&T to create automatic tiers — everyone would start out on the $10/100 MB plan each month, and your price would go up automatically as your usage passes each 100 MB tier.' He says the key to implementing the policy is transparency, and that the iPhone should have an indicator like the battery bar that changes color as you pass each monthly tier. 'Some iPhone fans will argue that metered pricing would kill the magic of Apple's phone — that sense of liberation one feels at being able to access the Internet from anywhere, at any time. The trouble is, for many of us, AT&T's overcrowded network has already killed that sense, and now our usual dealings with Apple's phone are tinged with annoyance.'"

Comment Re:Why this is a good thing (Score 1) 517

by Gefion on Thursday September 17, 2009 @02:43PM (#29457057) Attached to: Lawyer Demands Jury Stops Googling

As I recall, France has a system, unlike our adversarial process, similar to this where the Judge is the chief determiner of fact and ask questions directly of witnesses, etc. Slightly vaguer memory around I think the lawyers act as agents of the court in helping determine the complete facts of the case with the Judge. A bit different courtroom experience than for our average American litigant, I would presume.

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