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Comment Re:Oh, hell... (Score 1) 153

I hope this new plant begins to make system boards for Thinkpads and the like. Right now they are made by Quanta (Taiwan), and the BGAs are terrible. Quanta has still not come to terms with lead-free BGAs, and it's been going on for years.

Hopefully they can consistently make a system board that will last for more than 2 years.

United Kingdom

No Porn From Public WiFi Hotspots In the UK Proposed 390

whoever57 writes "Prime Minister David Cameron is proposing that porn should not be available through WiFi hotspots in public areas. Exactly how this will be implemented has not been identified, even to the extent of whether the ISP or the hotspot operator should implement the blocking. From the article: ' The Prime Minister said: “We are promoting good, clean, WiFi in local cafes and elsewhere to make sure that people have confidence in public WiFi systems so that they are not going to see things they shouldn’t.” His intervention comes after a long-running campaign from children’s charities to ensure a blanket ban on unacceptable sites on public WiFi networks.'"

Comment Separate the extra charges (Score 2) 220

Call your phone company and ask them to separate the extra charges from your phone bill. That way, the (perhaps) evil company will have to bill you independently of your phone bill. Often, they won't bother because they now know that you're the kind of person that doesn't mindlessly pay some mystery charge on your phone bill. I did this when I received a huge and clearly exploitative charge for receiving a collect call. This was several months ago and I have yet to hear back from the company that now has to send me a bill independently of the phone company.
Power

New Rechargeable Battery Uses Water 179

fergus07 writes "Scientists at Stanford have developed a battery that uses nanotechnology to create electricity from the difference in salt content between fresh water and sea water. The researchers hope to use the technology to create power plants where fresh-water rivers flow into the ocean. The new 'mixing entropy' battery alternately immerses its electrodes in river water and sea water to produce the electrical power."
NASA

Programmer For Endeavor Now Crew On Final Flight 68

Lucas123 writes "Greg Chamitoff, a computer programmer who wrote software for NASA's Endeavour spacecraft, will be blasting off on shuttle's final 15-day flight as a mission specialist on Friday. Chamitoff, who created software focused on spacecraft analysis and maneuver optimization, will operate the space station's robotic arm, and he'll also take part in two spacewalks."
Privacy

Pirate Party of Canada Promises VPN For Freedom 98

An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Party of Canada has announced that it will extend a VPN originally set up to allow people in Tunisia to browse freely while internet censorship was imposed there. Canada may soon be added to that list since the ruling Conservative Party has vowed to introduce a bill that would provide unprecedented systematic interception and monitoring of Canadians' personal communications. So the Pirate Party of Canada has announced it will extend that service to Canadians."
Advertising

Tearing Apart a Hard-Sell Anti-Virus Ad 192

climenole writes "I came across an email sent by a security vendor, reminding me, no urging me with the liver-transplant sort of urgency, to renew my subscription to their product, lest my pixels perish. I spent a minute or two staring at the email, thinking about all the poor souls out there who do not have the comfort of being a geek and who may actually take the advertisement seriously." That led to this insightful deconstruction of these over-the-top ads, the kind that make it hard to keep straight the malware makers and the anti-malware makers.

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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