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Transportation

Paris To Test Banning SUVs In the City 509

Posted by timothy from the you-must-be-shorter-than-this-line-to-ride dept.
thecarchik writes "Paris may be the first city to experiment with such a policy. Next year, it will begin to test restrictions on vehicles that emit more than a certain amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilometer — the measure of a car's contribution to greenhouse gases. An official within the Parisian mayor's office, Denis Baupin, identified older diesel-engined cars and sport-utility vehicles as specific targets of the emissions limit. Residents and travelers have responded by buying thousands of electric cars, including the low-speed fiberglass G-Wiz — despite major safety concerns with the vehicle."
Cellphones

Anti-Smartphone Phone Launched For Technophobes 437

Posted by samzenpus from the I-do-one-thing-and-I-do-it-well dept.
geek4 writes "A Dutch company has launched what it calls 'the world's simplest phone,' targeting users who are sick of new-generation models. Only capable of making and receiving calls, John's Phone is dubbed the world's simplest mobile phone, specifically designed for anti-smartphones users. It does not provide any hi-tech features. No apps. No Internet. No camera. No text messaging. All you have to do — in fact, all you can do — is call, talk and hang up."

Comment Re:Not just Microsoft (Score 1) 650

by doktor-hladnjak (#34149472) Attached to: Income Tax Quashed, Ballmer To Cash In Billions
It's not just the rich people in places like Clark County. Pretty much everybody living there goes over the border to Oregon to shop for big ticket items. For example, there's a huge shopping center near the airport on I-205 with an Ikea and other big box stores right across the river. The parking lot is filled with cars bearing Washington plates. In order to combat this effect, WA passed a law years ago which allows OR residents to shop in WA sales tax free.

Comment Re:Not just Microsoft (Score 1) 650

by doktor-hladnjak (#34149442) Attached to: Income Tax Quashed, Ballmer To Cash In Billions
Local sales taxes are still pretty high in many areas of Washington state. In Seattle, the rate is 9.5% on most things, 10% on restaurants. Various special excise taxes are relatively high here too. Two examples are liquor and cigarette taxes. The liquor taxes are the highest in the nation once you figure in the markup by the state liquor stores ($16 bottle of vodka at Costco in CA is like $42 in WA). Property taxes are relatively low (although maybe not as low as California in terms of real dollars collected with the Prop 13 caps). The tax breakdown is roughly one-third for each of sales/excise, property and B&O. A lot of the disparity is probably made up by B&O, which is a particularly weird tax that's not seen outside of WA as far as I know. It's a gross revenues (as opposed to income) business tax.
The Courts

WikiLeaks Founder 'Free To Leave Sweden' 410

Posted by timothy from the totally-generous dept.
An anonymous reader writes "AFP reports that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is free to leave Sweden, after prosecutors said there was no arrest warrant against him for an alleged case of rape. Assange said the charges against him were part of 'a clear set-up,' and that he had 'two reliable intelligence sources that state that Swedish intelligence was approached last month by the United States and told that Sweden must not be a safe haven for WikiLeaks.' The news comes just one day before the Swedish national election."
Businesses

Defending Self In a Case of On-Line Identity Theft? 390

Posted by timothy from the show-them-a-video-of-your-entire-life dept.
SoccerDad41 writes "I am a systems administrator for an Indiana-based bricks-n-clicks retailer currently suspended because an unscrupulous typosquatter stole my name and registration information for his/her fraudulent domain registration. My company hired a third party service to protect their trademark by identifying and terminating infringing web sites. The third party identified a domain name, performed a WhoIs lookup & issued a complaint in compliance within ICANN's rules. This was presumably all reported back to our Legal department and it was noticed that the name on the domain registration matched mine. I have a locally uncommon ethnic last name so an immediate connection to me was made & although I protested my absolute innocence in the matter, I have been suspended on grounds of violating non-compete policies pending proof that it isn't me. The fraudulent domain registration was made with a different registrar (let's call them Registrar B) than the one my company uses (let's call them Registrar A). The public parts of the registration information at Registrar B match pretty exactly those of my legitimate domain registrations at Registrar A, including Registrar A's mailing address and phone number. The only things left out in the mailing address are the reference to a domain name and ATTN: Registrar A. Of course the anonymized email address differs as well. Surely I'm not the first in the Slashdot community to find myself in this situation. I'd like to avoid incurring the cost of a lawyer but I am intent on maintaining my good name and continued employment. What are my rights and responsibilities in this matter? What is my best course of action? How did you resolve this issue? How can I prove it's not me?"
Programming

Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier 590

Posted by Soulskill from the no-substitute-for-experience dept.
theodp writes "Raw intellect ain't always all it's cracked up to be, advises Ted Dziuba in his introduction to Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier, so don't be too stubborn to learn the things that can save you from the headaches of over-engineering. Here's some sample how-to-avoid-over-complicating-things advice: 'If Linux can do it, you shouldn't. Don't use Hadoop MapReduce until you have a solid reason why xargs won't solve your problem. Don't implement your own lockservice when Linux's advisory file locking works just fine. Don't do image processing work with PIL unless you have proven that command-line ImageMagick won't do the job. Modern Linux distributions are capable of a lot, and most hard problems are already solved for you. You just need to know where to look.' Any cautionary tips you'd like to share from your own experience?"
Software

How Can I Make Testing Software More Stimulating? 396

Posted by Soulskill from the flamethrowers-spice-up-any-chore dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I like writing software. In fact, I revel in it. However, one thing has always kept me back from being able to write the best software I possibly can: testing. I consider testing to be the absolute bane of my existence. It is so boring and un-stimulating that I usually skip it entirely, pass the testing off to someone else, or even worse, if I absolutely have to test, I do a very poor job at it. I know I'm not that lazy, as I can spend hours on end writing software, but there's something about testing that makes my mind constantly want to wander off and think about something else. Does anyone have any tips on how I can make non-automated testing a little bit more stimulating so I can at least begin to form a habit of doing so?"
Space

LCD 'Engine' For Spacecraft Attitude Control 95

Posted by kdawson from the little-more-to-the-left dept.
Bruce Perens writes "Japan's IKAROS satellite, which earlier performed the first successful demonstration of a solar sail, has broken more new ground. Liquid-crystal displays — yes, like in your video monitor — were fabricated into strips on the edges of the solar sail. By energizing some of the LCDs and changing the reflective characteristics of parts of the sail from specular to diffuse, JAXA scientists successfully generated attitude control torque in the sail, changing the spacecraft's orientation."

Comment Re:To be replaced by...? (Score 1) 342

by doktor-hladnjak (#33047776) Attached to: Will Ballmer Be Replaced As Microsoft CEO?

All Microsoft had to do was implement a store in addition to the previously-open nature of Windows Mobile, clean up the GUI a bit (the GUI was always the weak point of PocketPC/Windows Mobile/Windows Phone) and they would have a serious contender. Instead, they took the most attractive features of Windows Mobile and threw it away, and turned it into yet another would-be iPhone contender: too much too little too late.

What you describe is exactly Windows Phone (formerly known as Windows Mobile) 6.5 and it has not done well in the market. Its main features were a massive cleanup (as opposed to complete redesign in the case of 7) of the UI to make it more "finger friendly", Windows Marketplace for Mobile (i.e., an app store) and My Phone for backup/restore/find my phone. The lackluster sales of 6.5 have really shown that Microsoft had little choice but to undertake the massive backwards incompatible rewrite that is WP7.

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