Comment Re:Conspiracy, or just idiocy? (Score 1) 420
Whoosh!
Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 186
You have no clue what you are talking about. BTW, good job with selectively misquoting Wikipedia. That article goes on to read, ""It should be noted, however, that unlike China, successive administrations (through RBI, the central bank) have not followed a policy of pegging the INR to a specific foreign currency at a particular exchange rate. RBI intervention in currency markets is solely to deliver low volatility in the exchange rates, and not to take a view on the rate or direction of the Indian rupee in relation to other currencies."
The rupee was never fixed against the dollar - it fluctuates continuously. The RBI (India's Central Bank, like the US Federal Reserve) intervenes periodically, buying or selling dollars IN THE MARKET, AT MARKET RATE to reduce volatility. This is called a managed float. Developing countries do this to reduce sudden runs on their currency.
However, the general trend has been that the Rupee has been steadily declining. One factor has been the huge public debt that the Indian government has built up.
And India never "violated" any patents. Indian law provided for "process" patents, instead of "product" patents, in pharmaceuticals. This meant that the same molecule could be created by a different process by another company without violating patent law. This is a far more sensible approach - the company creating the molecule has a head start of a year or two while others create alternative processes.
Seriously, stop generalising and read up some of the stuff you're pontificating about.
Comment Re:GMail is a joke compared to Outlook (Score 1) 394
The only thing stopping our company from moving to Gmail is lack of REAL BlackBerry/iPhone push support. What is taking Google so long to implement ActiveSync? They licensed it from Microsoft, implemented it for Calendar and Contacts. LET'S GO, GOOGLE!
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/mobile.html
Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server
Experience the benefits of Google Apps with the BlackBerry experience you're already accustomed to. Integrate the Google Apps messaging suite with BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), letting employees use built-in BlackBerry applications for access to their Google Apps email, calendar, and contacts.
Google Apps Connector for BES is currently in beta and will be publicly available in Google Apps Premier Edition and Education Edition in July of 2009. If you'd like to speak to an Apps sales rep, please submit your contact information.
* Messages sent to your Gmail inbox are pushed to your BlackBerry within 60 seconds.
* Emails read/deleted on your BlackBerry are marked as read/deleted in Gmail, and vice-versa.
* Synchronize BlackBerry folders with labels in Gmail.
* Search for email addresses and phone numbers of other users on your company domain.
* View your Google Calendar schedule on your native BlackBerry application, with one-way synchronization from Google Calendar to your BlackBerry device.
* Contacts in Gmail are automatically synchronized with your BlackBerry address book.
$10 Laptop Downgraded By Reality; Now Fancy Storage Device 143
Ian Lamont writes "The news last week that the Indian government was working on a $10 laptop was too good to be true. It turns out that the project is actually a wireless-enabled storage device, not a laptop." Update: 02/04 21:36 GMT by T : Always-illuminating Liliputing has a short article with a picture of the device.
GAO Reports Bailout and Tech Firms Love Tax Havens 347
theodp writes "Most of America's largest publicly traded corporations and Federal contractors — including those receiving billions of dollars from US taxpayers to finance their recovery — have set up offshore operations that could help them avoid paying US taxes, according to a GAO study released yesterday. Of the 100 largest public companies, 83 do business in tax-haven hot-spots like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands. The report found that Citigroup, a recipient of $45B in bailout funds so far, has set up 427 subsidiaries in tax-haven countries, including 91 in Luxembourg, 90 in the Cayman Islands, and 35 in the British Virgin Islands. Household names on the lists from the tech sector include Apple (1 tax haven subsidiary), Cisco (38), Dell (29), HP (14), Intel (6), IBM (10), Microsoft (8), Motorola (4), and Oracle (77)."
US District Court Says Calculating a Hash Value = Search 623
bfwebster writes "Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy (a great legal blog, BTW) reports on a US District Court ruling issued just last week which finds that doing hash calculations on a hard drive is a form of search and thus subject to 4th Amendment limitations. In this particular case, the US District Court suppressed evidence of child pornography on a hard drive because proper warrants were not obtained before imaging the hard drive and calculating MD5 hash values for the individual files on the drive, some of which ended up matching known MD5 hash values for known child pornography image and video files. More details at Kerr's posting." Update: 10/28 16:23 GMT by T : Headline updated to reflect that this is a Federal District Court located in Pennsylvania, rather than a court of the Commonwealth itself.
Comment Re:Clock can run in reverse. (Score 1) 696
we at one point WHERE paying down the debt.
so WERE exactly do you live?
Mathematicians Solve the Mystery of Traffic Jams 629
mlimber writes "Do you ever find yourself in a traffic jam, thinking, 'Man, there must be a bad accident up ahead,' but as you plod along you see no evidence of any crash? Some mathematicians have solved the mystery by developing a mathematical model that shows how one driver hitting the brakes a little too hard can cascade into a backup miles behind. The mathematicians' future research will investigate how automatic braking systems may alleviate the problem."
Heat Wave Shuts Down Alabama Reactor 401
mdsolar writes "In a first for the US, one of three nuclear reactors at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama has been shut down because the Tennessee River is too hot to provide adequate cooling for the waste heat produced by the reactor. This is happening as the TVA faces its highest demand for power ever, reports the Houston Chronicle. This effect has been seen in Europe in the past, forcing reduced generation, but the US has until now been immune to the problem. The TVA will buy power elsewhere and impose higher rates, blaming reduced river flow as a result of drought."
Submission + - Breastfeed your colleagues, says new fatwa
ramsun writes: A lecturer at the prestigious al-Azhar Islamic University in Cairo, Egypt, has been suspended after suggesting that one way to work around the Islamicist's ban on men and women working together could be to have the women symbolically breastfeed the men, which according to the Hadith, the Prophet Mohammed's sayings, creates a familial relationship. "The Dubai-based channel Al Arabiya quoted him as saying that after five breastfeedings the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair."
However, the Positive Liberty blog interprets this as Voltairean satire
What do you think? Should women breastfeed their male colleagues?
However, the Positive Liberty blog interprets this as Voltairean satire
What do you think? Should women breastfeed their male colleagues?
Self-Healing Plastic Skin 104
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have developed a form of plastic skin that can heal itself when damaged. The material relies on an underlying network of vessels — similar to blood capillaries — that carry a healing agent to areas on the material's surface that sustain damage. Unlike previous self-healing systems that relied on capsules of agent buried in the polymer and which became depleted after one use, the new system can respond to damage at the same point many times over."
OpenBSD 4.1 Released 218
adstro writes to quote from the BSD mailing list: "We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.1. This is our 21st release on CD-ROM (and 22nd via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of ten years with only two remote holes in the default install. As in our previous releases, 4.1 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system."
Feed AACS Discovers The Streisand Effect: The More You Try To Suppress Something, The (techdirt.com)
If you follow tech related sites, by now you've heard the story that the folks who control AACS, the copy protection used in next generation DVDs, have decided to send DMCA takedown notices to various sites that have posted the 128-bit integer that is needed, along with some software, to decrypt the video content on these new DVDs. This is odd for a few reasons. The key came out many months ago and has been available on the web for quite some time. There are, of course, the basic questions concerning whether or not this key alone really does violate the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA -- but that's a separate issue. What's more intriguing here is trying to understand the thought process behind the decision to send out these takedown notices. As anyone who's been online for more than about two days knows, the more you try to suppress something online, the more attention you're going to call to it. Years back, we joking referred to this as the Streisand Effect -- after an incident where Barbara Streisand tried to remove some photos from the web, making them a lot more popular. The name has stuck, and it still amazes us that anyone doesn't recognize what will happen when they try to make such a move. While the group has forced some sites to pull pages here and there, every page they pull is just increasing the anger from a growing group of folks who are making sure the number shows up in many, many more places -- including directly in a URL. Digg, which was one of the sites accused of taking down pages about this, has been under a massive effort from folks to make sure that every story on the front page somehow points to the key in question (and it's interesting to see the anger of users turned against Digg for taking down some of these stories, even though they're pretty much required to thanks to the DMCA). As happened with DeCSS, it's only a matter of time until someone writes a song incorporating the key as well. Effectively, all that's been done here is to draw much, much more attention to the fact that the encryption on next generation DVDs is incredibly weak -- so that a lot more people now know about it. Most of us honestly couldn't have cared any less about the integer or the inner workings (or non-workings) of the encryption system -- and yet now we know a lot more. That can't be the intended consequence of these notices, but that's what's happened. Nice work, Hollywood.
