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Cellphones

Verizon Droid Tethering Comes At a Hefty Price 555

Posted by timothy from the unlimited-and-5GB-are-not-the-same dept.
Pickens writes "Tom Bradley reports in PC World that the new Motorola Droid smartphone will cost users $199.99 with a 2-year contract, with an additional $30 per month for the mandatory 'unlimited' data plan that has a monthly cap of 5Gb. Verizon will charge $50 for each additional gigabyte over the 5Gb limit on the unlimited data plan. Verizon has confirmed that tethering will cost another $30 per month for an additional unlimited data plan that is also limited to 5Gb. If you want tethering you will pay $60 above and beyond the monthly contract for service for an 'unlimited' 10Gb of data per month, and if you plan on connecting with an Microsoft Exchange email account you have to pay another $15 a month. 'Verizon seems to be doing everything it can to make the Droid as unappealing as possible by nickel and diming customers so that actually using it is not cost-effective,' writes Bradley. 'After all of the hype around Verizon's marketing efforts, and generally favorable reviews of the Motorola Droid, users that rush out to get the new device may be in for a shock.' Droid users will have to wait until sometime in 2010 for tethering. 'That service is on our schedule for next year,' says Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney. The delay is because 'the service has to be tested on the phone so until we know it works, we don't offer the service. It is not uncommon for us to introduce the phone and continue to test the service and offer it later.'"
NASA

Submission + - What Movies do Astronauts Watch on the ISS?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Guardian has an amusing story about the 150-odd movie titles astronauts can choose from on the ISS including Wedding Crashers, The Princess Bride, and Blazing Saddles. The full list of movies and books (PDF), issued by Johnson Space Center details "books, movies, television shows, and music maintained on the International Space Station (ISS) for recreational/off-duty consumption" and was acquired last year by the website governmentattic.org, using the US's freedom of information act. In May, James Mullighan, creative director for an independent film-making collective, wrote to Nasa, arguing that "Caddyshack, Cheaper By the Dozen and Beverly Hills Cop might weaken the critical faculties of those on board, possibly even putting their lives and ours in danger" and offered a selection of the alternatives proposed on the group's website: "Our members would like to see Harold and Maude rather than Harold and Kumar, and Man on Wire replace Man on Fire." Nasa Associate Administrator William H Gerstenmaier wrote back informing Mullighan that "Nasa shares your interest in assuring that a broad selection of entertainment is available for crew members' selection" and told the group that its suggestions "have been forwarded to the crew office for further consideration" (PDF). But Gerstenmaier also made clear that the titles were largely the result of crew members' personal preferences and that astronauts had either requested these films or brought them on board themselves. "In other words," writes the Guardian. "If the astronauts on the International Space Station want to watch Pearl Harbor, Shanghai Knights or, for that matter, Apollo 13, that's what they're going to watch.""
Government

Submission + - SSN overlap with Micronesia haunts NH woman

Submitted by stevel
stevel writes: Holly Ramer, who lives in Concord, NH, has never been to the Federated States of Micronesia, but debt collectors dun her mercilessly for unpaid loans taken out by a small business owner in that Pacific island nation. Why? Micronesia and other countries in the region have their own Social Security Administrations which gave out numbers to residents applying for US disaster relief loans. The catch is that the Micronesian SSNs have fewer digits than the nine-digit US version, and when credit bureaus entered these into their database, they padded them out with zeros on the front. These numbers then matched innocent US citizens with SSNs beginning with zeroes, as many in northern New England do. The credit bureaus say to call the Social Security Adminustration, the SSA says call the credit bureaus, the FTC says they can't help, and nobody is taking responsibility for the confusion.
Space

Submission + - Physics learns why time goes only one direction (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
Death Metal
Death Metal writes: "Maccone has taken a slightly different view of this problem by looking at correlations. Imagine I do something that increases entropy slightly, and my wife observes the results of my actions and records the consequent increase in entropy--we will leave the fight over who should tidy up the mess out of the story.

Now, I can choose a set of operations that can return the entropy to its previously low value. However, doing so involves not just reversing my actions, but also reversing all correlated systems. In other words, I have to wipe my wife's memory of the event and her subsequent recording of it. If she wrote it on a piece of paper, I have to wipe the paper clean etc, etc. But at the end of it, there would be no record of the event ever having occurred.

The upshot is that entropy-decreasing events can occur, but can never be observed from within the system. You can extend this to the universe, which may well be a closed system: we are within it and, even though events that reduce the entire entropy of the universe are possible, we can never observe such things."
Security

Submission + - Opera is hackers favorite browser (well almost) (forbes.com)

Submitted by Leevi
Leevi writes: The best defense on the Web could be Opera. And hackers themselves are Opera lovers. Paul Royal, a security researcher at Atlanta-based Purewire discovered. He found that while 33% used Firefox, 26% used Opera. Generally, Opera has only 1-3% user share.* "Criminals themselves are using less targeted browsers, perhaps because they understand their product and about what it does," Royal says. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_Table
Earth

Submission + - Hydrogen to Hydrino -- huge energy source? (greentechmedia.com)

Submitted by kipb
kipb writes: Convert hydrogen to an even lower energy form called the Hydrino, thus releasing 200 times as much energy as it takes to generate the hydrogen by splitting water. So claims Blacklight Power (1999 on Slashdot), which also appears in an August 12 Greentech Media article. Blacklight claims that the energy is released as ultraviolet light, which can be readily converted to heat. The resulting product can be converted back to normal hydrogen (or hydrogen-containing substance) by simply heating it. They claim that scientists at Rowan University (Glassboro, NJ) have reproduced the reaction, generating 6.5 times as much energy as could be obtained through known chemical reactions and also agreed that there appeared to be a transition of hydrogen to an energy state lower than the previously known ground state, with emission lines below 80 nm. There was no analysis on whether the universe would implode upon seeding of a star with hydrinos, as in Vonnegut's Ice 9.
Operating Systems

Submission + - FreeBSD developer sues Lenovo for Vista on laptops (freebsd.dk) 2

Submitted by __aaxwdb6741
__aaxwdb6741 writes: The Danish FreeBSD developer Poul-Henning aka. "Hero" Kamp has sued Lenovo because they do not offer a refund for Windows Vista on their laptops. The Windows EULA clearly states that the user can, if they do not accept the license, have their money refunded by the entity which installed the OS on their system, which in this case is Lenovo.
Medicine

Submission + - Why it might be a good idea to catch swine-flu (aardvark.co.nz)

Submitted by
NewtonsLaw
NewtonsLaw writes: "The current strain of swine-flu that appears ready to sweep the globe is putting many people in a panic — but I'm suggesting that it might be a really good idea to find someone who has the flu, shake their hand then suck your fingers.

Why?

Well it seems that doing so could provide you with a degree of immunity against what might be a far more dangerous mutant strain of the same virus later on.

Even the CDC agree that an encounter with one variant of a flu virus can provide a measure of immunity against later closely-related variants for a period of up to a year or more — so maybe now is the time to get infected, before a deadly related strain appears.

I blogged about this today.

Might self-immunization be a good way to dodge the bullet of what may turn into a lethal pandemic once the virus mutates a little further?"
User Journal

Journal Journal: Why doesn't the "world" like us? Should we care??

Journal by 8282now

http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/16/obama-anti-american-oped-cx_mk_1216kaminski.html?feed=rss_news

Interesting article highlighting the fact that try as we might, the fact is the rest of the world may not like us. But then again, can we really do anything to change that?
Windows

The Myth of Upgrade Inevitability Is Dead 597

Posted by kdawson from the standing-pat dept.
Several readers pointed out a ComputerWorld UK blog piece on the expanding ripples of the Vista fiasco. Glyn Moody quotes an earlier Inquirer piece about Vista, which he notes "has been memorably described as DRM masquerading as an operating system": "Studies carried out by both Gartner and IDC have found that because older software is often incompatible with Vista, many consumers are opting for used computers with XP installed as a default, rather than buying an expensive new PC with Vista and downgrading. Big business, which typically thinks nothing about splashing out for newer, more up-to-date PCs, is also having trouble with Vista, with even firms like Intel noting XP would remain the dominant OS within the company for the foreseeable future." Moody continues: "What's really important about this is not so much that Vista is manifestly such a dog, but that the myth of upgrade inevitability has been destroyed. Companies have realized that they do have a choice — that they can simply say 'no.' From there, it's but a small step to realizing that they can also walk away from Windows completely, provided the alternatives offer sufficient data compatibility to make that move realistic."

Comment Re:Total BS! (Score 1) 178

by 8282now (#25372797) Attached to: Do Nerds Have Better Sperm?

Maybe it's time to turn in your geek/nerd card....

Should sperm count/ fertility be a part of the entrance exam for CS and other science degrees??

... just a thought....

 

While I usually refer to myself as a geek, rather than a nerd (geek = nerd + personality [IMHO]) this is one that hits home with me. I've been married 2 years now and been trying to conceive for 3+ with no luck. Testing has determined that I have an abnormally low count (healthy in all other respects) and no current cause has been identified.

So no, being a geek/nerd DOESN'T mean you have better sperm, you INSENSITIVE CLOD!

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