198457
submission
morpheus83 writes:
Talk about last minute upgrades: In a press release today, Apple has revealed a number of significant upgrades to both the iPhone's battery life and touch screen. Instead of around 5 hours of video/talk and 16 hours of audio playback, Apple has updated the iPhone's battery life rating to the following numbers: up to 8 hours talk time, a whopping 250 hours of standby (over 10 days), 6 hours of internet use, 7 hours of video playback and 24 hours of audio playback. The original 3.5" plastic surface of the iPhone has been changed to "optical-quality" glass, which should bring some smiles to those who were concerned about the durability of the phone's primary feature and user interface.
194997
submission
janoc writes:
Apparently not only China is censoring Flickr. Flickr has recently introduced filters to filter out images deemed inappropriate. Unfortunately, the filters are now forced also on the German users (together with Singaporeans and Korean users). Photos marked "moderate" or "restricted" are invisible even to their own authors if they happen to be in one of the restricted countries. However, users from elsewhere can still see them just fine if they disable the "Safe search" feature in preferences — this option is not available to Germans anymore. There is a large discussion about this issue going on here: link.
193833
submission
internic writes:
In 2003, a 17-year-old Georgia boy named Genarlow Wilson was convicted of felony aggravated child molestation for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl at a party. Yahoo is reporting that, after serving 28 months of the manditory minimum 10-year sentence, a judge has now reduced his sentence so that he can go free, calling the case, 'a grave miscarriage of justice.' But it seems that he's not going free after all, because Georgia's attorney general is appealing the case. The New York Times and ESPN have covered the case in the past characterized it as unjust. Georgia state law has already been changed to make these actions a misdemeanor, but the change is not retroactive. The Yahoo article also points out that, 'If he had instead had sexual intercourse with the teen, he would have fallen under Georgia's "Romeo and Juliet" exception'. Along with the prison sentence, Wilson's conviction earns him a spot on the sex offender registry.
193767
submission
StatisticallyDeadGuy writes:
A University of Georgia scientist has developed a statistical system that, she claims, can predict the outcome of wars with an accuracy of 80 percent. Her approach, applied retrospectively, says the US chance of victory in the first Gulf War was 93%, while the poor Soviets only had a seven percent chance in Afghanistan (if only they'd known; failure maybe triggered the collapse of the USSR). As for the current Iraq conflict: the US started off with a 70% chance of a successful regime change, which was duly achieved — but extending the mission past this to support a weak government has dropped the probability of ultimate success to 26%. Full details of the forecasting methodology are revealed in a new paper (subscription required — link goes to abstract).
193721
submission
TomSun writes:
Wellington Grey is a physics teacher who has been pushed to the edge by the dumbing down of his curriculum. After changes made by the government this year which introduced what he calls 'the vague, the stupid, the political and the non-science' into standardized exams, he wrote an open letter to the government begging for his subject back and asking for your help.
Some of the examples of test questions he gives will make the mathematically minded among us ill at ease with the future of education.
193713
submission
Light Licker writes:
New Scientist suggests that Steve Jobs latest plan could encourage hackers to develop exploits that work on a Mac platform. Security-through-obscurity was always a bad idea, but is Safari really going to be that popular with Windows users?
