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Submission + - 3 Years Prison in CA For Covering Laptop (ca.gov) 7

Submitted by mrcaseyj
mrcaseyj writes: California penal code section 537e makes it a felony punishable by up to 3 years in prison to be in possession of an integrated computer panel where the serial number or any other distinguishing number or identification mark has been covered. It's also a crime punishable by 6 months or a year to cover or obliterate the serial number or identification mark of just about any other personal property, from tools to CDs and much more. While a district attorney might have a hard time prosecuting you for such a crime, it appears a police officer could still take you to jail without having to worry about getting in trouble, because covering is apparently illegal by the letter of the law.

Comment Failover Planning (and this broke FiOS too) (Score 4, Informative) 118

by Cysgod (#28573285) Attached to: Seattle Data Center Outage Disrupts E-Commerce

Apparently Verizon has a single point of failure for much of its FiOS for the metro areas of Western Washington state in this building as well so the FiOS customers are offline as well right now.

  • Clownshoes: Have no failover plan and be singly homed.
  • Meh: Have a failover plan.
  • Good: Have a failover plan that requires humans and exercise it regularly.
  • Better: Have a failover plan that is automated and exercise it regularly.
  • Best: Eliminate single points of failure so failover is turning off the flake or fail and going back to drinking a beer.

Hot/Hot is always a more ideal solution than Hot/Warm or Hot/Cold for disaster recovery (and increasing equipment utilization/ROI), and this event demonstrates why.
The Internet

Seattle Data Center Outage Disrupts E-Commerce 118

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the no-sigmas-for-you dept.
1sockchuck writes "A major power outage at Seattle telecom hub Fisher Plaza has knocked payment processing provider Authorize.net offline for hours, leaving thousands of web sites unable to take credit cards for online sales. The Authorize site is still down, but its Twitter account attributes the outage to a fire, while AdHost calls it a 'significant power event.' Authorize.net is said to be trying to resume processing from a backup data center, but there's no clear ETA on when Fisher Plaza will have power again."
Supercomputing

Submission + - First Electronic Quantum Processor Created (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by
Thorfinn.au
Thorfinn.au writes: "The science news site ScienceDaily is reporting a story from Yale University about making the first electronic rudimentary solid-state quantum processor. They also used the two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms, such as a simple search, demonstrating quantum information processing with a solid-state device for the first time. Their findings will appear in Nature's advanced online publication June 28."
Data Storage

Submission + - Graphene Could Make Magnetic Memory 1000x Denser (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "The density of magnetic memory depends on the size of the magnetic domains used to store bits. The current state-of-the-art uses cobalt-based grains some 8nm across, each containing about 50,000 atoms. Materials scientists think they can shrink the grains to 15,000 atoms but any smaller than that and the crystal structure of the grains is lost. That's a problem because the cobalt has to be arranged in a hexagonal close packing structure to ensure the stability of its magnetic field. Otherwise the field can spontaneously reverse and the data is lost. Now a group of German physicists say they can trick a pair of cobalt atoms into thinking they are in a hexagonal close packing structure by bonding them to a hexagonal carbon ring such as graphene or benzene. That's handy because the magnetic field associated with cobalt dimers is calculated to be far more stable than the field in a cobalt grain. And graphene and benzene rings are only 0.5 nm across, a size that could allow an increase in memory density of three orders of magnitude."
Communications

JaikuEngine Gets Open Sourced 41

Posted by Soulskill from the free-and-clear dept.
volume4 writes "The switch has been flipped and Jaiku has been moved to App Engine. Google will no longer be developing Jaiku, so the code and the future of Jaiku is in the hands of the open source community. From the Jaiku blog: 'Today, we are open sourcing the Jaiku code base under the Apache License 2.0. The code is available as JaikuEngine on Google Code Project Hosting as of now. Anyone can set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine.'" We discussed Google's purchase of Jaiku in 2007, and their subsequent decision to halt development a few months ago.

Comment Re:Why not release it? (Score 2, Informative) 84

by Cysgod (#26481959) Attached to: Agora Android Phone Delayed By Glitches

What kind of software patches increase screen resolution?

How dare you question him!?! Can't you see that his UID is less than half yours? He clearly knows more about this stuff than you.

Clearly. Through empirical evidence we can see that the cutoff is not half your UID, but an order of magnitude less.
_..-* The More You Know

Slightly more seriously, who puts something like a phone up for sale without testing with some engineering prototypes first? And then still has not tested with prototypes before going to manufacture?

Presuming gross ignorance rather than malice as the culprit here seems to stretch credibility some. Does Australia have class-action lawsuits? If so, several lawyers will probably make some money on this.
Medicine

Coffee Can Reduce the Risk of Alzheimer's 242

Posted by kdawson from the more-coffee-please-wait-what dept.
Amenacier writes "Recent studies by Finnish and Swedish researchers have shown that drinking moderate amounts of coffee can reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease in people. The reason for this is as yet unknown, although it has been hypothesized that the high levels of antioxidants found in coffee may play a role in preventing dementia and Alzheimer's. Alternatively, some studies have shown that coffee can protect nerves, which may help prevent Alzheimer's. Other studies have shown that coffee may also help to protect against diabetes, another disease which has been shown to have links to Alzheimer's disease. However, researchers warn against drinking too much coffee, as 3 cups or more may cause hallucinations."
Communications

February Deadline For Emergency Beacons Approaches 184

Posted by timothy from the emergency-bacon-unaffected dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In two weeks, older emergency locator beacons will no longer be monitored by satellites. USA Today noticed that 85% of private aircraft in the US have not switched to the 406 MHz beacons. I thought I'd send up a flare about this. And this should not be relevant to the airplane which landed in the Hudson River today, as that was a commercial plane and its location was known by a number of bystanders, one of whom helped crash TwitPic."
Google

Submission + - Google Challenging Proposition 8

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "Coming the day after it announced layoffs and office closures, Google's Supreme Court filing arguing for the overturn of Proposition 8, which asks the Court not to harm its ability to recruit and retain employees, certainly could have been better-timed. Interestingly, Google's support of same-sex marriage puts it at odds with ex-Microsoft HR Chief Mike Murray, who cited religious beliefs for his decision to contribute $100,000 to 'Yes On 8', quite a surprise coming from the guy charged with diversity and sensitivity training during his ten-year Microsoft stint. Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft's man-in-Silicon-Valley, joined other tech leaders last October to denounce Prop 8 in a full-page newspaper ad."
Google

Submission + - Quoted in Google News? Post a Comment

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From NYT[Reg req] Google News has a feature it calls "Comments From People in the News." The idea is simple: if you have been quoted in an article that appears on Google News, you can post a comment that will be paired with that article. (Journalists can comment, as well, Google says, though none have done so thus far.) Since it was introduced in the spring, the feature has largely existed under the radar, with roughly only about 150 total comments having been made. Thus far, Google News has used e-mail messages to encourage people quoted in articles to submit comments — an effort to prime the pump similar to the process that results in the first issue of a new magazine magically having letters to the editor.
Government

Submission + - U.S. tech workers' group ends H-1B fight (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
cweditor
cweditor writes: "Five years ago, some unemployed IT workers in Connecticut formed an advocacy group to fight against the H-1B and L-1 visa programs. The Organization for the Rights of American Workers (TORAW) succeeded in getting visa-overhaul legislation introduced in Congress; they also held protests (including one at an outsourcing conference where one member held a "will code for food" sign). But now TORAW is disbanding, president John Bauman told Computerworld.

"People lost interest in the fight," Bauman said. Many members just gave up and moved on, taking jobs in other industries. For instance, one of the organizers is driving an 18-wheeler, while another is doing home repair work."

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