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Comment The downside slope of the Hubbard curve (Score 1) 430

by vm146j2 (#42447071) Attached to: 2012 Set Record For Most Expensive Gas In US

The costs of production will continue to drive up all oil products as the relatively easily extractable oil is sucked up and (mostly) burned, and increasingly desperate measures are taken to keep the inevitable collapses in production at bay. In the U.S., as in most countries of the world, consumption is still heavily subsidized for every step of the oil production and consumption cycle, but it is getting harder to rob from the future to pay for it; food importers (and market based food production is heavily oil dependent) are in for a much rougher time, and there really is no plan B.
Technology

Submission + - Flywheel Bicycle with regenerative braking mechani (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Regenerative braking mechanisms are actually a new type of energy harvesting method used in vehicles to generates and stores energy everytime you apply brake.This technology has been around there and were used in motor sports but they were not popular until modern hybrid cars began to use it.Here is a similar kind of energy generation mechanism developed by Maxwell von Stein, a 22-year-old graduate of The Cooper Union.He brought the regenerative braking idea to a whole new level — on bicycles.
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook steals every number from your smartphone (bgr.com) 1

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "Facebook users discovered this week that every contact number stored on their smartphone may now also be stored on Facebook's servers. One technology site notes "numerous reports from users who claim to have never synchronized their contacts with Facebook's mobile apps, yet still find all of their contact data stored on Facebook's servers." Even if your friends don't have Facebook accounts, Facebook may still have their names and phone numbers. There's a six-click path through each user's "Account settings" which ultimately leads to a page for re-claiming your friends' phone numbers, and "There is probably a clause buried deep within Facebook's terms and conditions that makes this invasion of your privacy OK on paper," this article notes. "But odds are still pretty good that it's not OK with you.""
Security

Submission + - Researchers use accelerometer to keylog smartphone (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Two researchers from the University of California Davis, Hao Chen and Lian Cai, have successfully divined the keystrokes on an Android on-screen keyboard by measuring the wiggles, jiggles, and vibrations picked up by the device’s accelerometer. Every key has a unique pitch, roll and yaw fingerprint that can be identified, and the researchers use this data to accurately infer what the user is typing.

This is significant because the data from accelerometers is not thought of as a potential attack vector, and is thus freely available to any application on any smartphone or tablet. Accelerometer and gyroscope data is also available through the DeviceOrientation API which is present in almost every web browser, including Android 3.0 and iOS 4.2."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Fired IT workers claim discrimination (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Eighteen IT employees of Molina Healthcare Inc. who were laid-off after their jobs were offshored, have filed a lawsuit in California claiming they are victims of discrimination after they were replaced with foreign nationals, Indian workers from a outsourcing company. As the company's offshore engagement increased, Indian workers dominated the IT shop so much so that meetings sometimes shifted to an Indian language, which added to a growing sense of isolation among the Molina IT employees. When the IT workers were informed of their layoff at a mass meeting, they went on the attack. "We were being quite confrontational about why they are laying us off and keeping all these H-1B workers," said one of the fired IT professionals.
Security

Submission + - Understanding Spamming Bad Neighborhoods (utwente.nl)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the same way crime rates change according to the neighborhood in a city, malicious activities rates vary on the Internet depending on the subnet. In a recent study (PDF: http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/20379/) to be presented at CNSM 2011 ( http://cnsm.loria.fr/ ), researchers of the University of Twente have investigated Spamming Bad Neighborhoods. They have showed that badhoods with more spammers are not necessarily the worst ones in terms of spam volume. In fact, 6 of the 10 most criminal badhoods had only 1 spammer. Their results also show that 10% of the badhoods were responsible for most of the spam, and they have identified the "most spam-friendly providers" (those that turn a blind eye to massive spammers ) and the "worst protected" badhoods (the ones with more malware).
Technology

Submission + - Swarmanoid Robots Work Together to Steal Books (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Swarms of small, intercommunicating robots are now being eyed up for all sorts of potential uses, including the creation of communications networks for disaster relief, mapping out hazardous environments, or even perhaps helping with the colonization of Mars. Since 2007, a group of European research groups have been collaborating on the now-completed Swarmanoid project, in which a variety of purpose-specific mini robots where programmed to cooperate in order to accomplish a task. Although the bots have been perfecting their book-stealing routine since 2009, a video depicting the task won the Best Video award at last week's 2011 Artificial Intelligence Conference in San Francisco, and was many peoples' introduction to Swarmanoid.

Comment Re:This is the final nail in the coffin (Score 1) 415

Verizon, like all public corporations, is required by law to list it's corporate officers in their yearly reports. That is a minimum, and most companies have a lot more personnel info available via the tubez. Pick one to start with that has "sales" or "customer" in their title, and write a clear, short and personal letter. It is truly astonishing what you will accomplish, and on the very rare occasion that you get no (or a negative) response, a physical letter to the CEO including your dissatisfaction is the equivalent to a loud screechy alarm clock to these types.
Graphics

Submission + - What Makes a Photograph Memorable?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Anne Trafton writes in MIT News that next time you go on vacation, you may want to think twice before shooting hundreds of photos of that scenic mountain or lake because researchers have developed a computer algorithm that can rank images based on memorability and found that in general, images with people in them are the most memorable, followed by images of human-scale space — such as the produce aisle of a grocery store — and close-ups of objects. Least memorable are natural landscapes. Researchers built a collection of about 10,000 images of all kinds for the study — interior-design photos, nature scenes, streetscapes and others and human subjects who participated through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program were told to indicate, by pressing a key on their keyboard, when an image appeared that they had already seen. The researchers then used machine-learning techniques to create a computational model that analyzed the images and their memorability as rated by humans by analyzing various statistics — such as color, or the distribution of edges — and correlated them with the image’s memorability. “There has been a lot of work in trying to understand what makes an image interesting, or appealing, or what makes people like a particular image," says Alexei Efros at Carnegie Mellon University. “What [the MIT researchers] did was basically approach the problem from a very scientific point of view and say that one thing we can measure is memorability.” Researchers believe the algorithm may be useful to graphic designers, photo editors, or anyone trying to decide which of their vacation photos to post on Facebook (PDF)."

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