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Portables

Fujitsu Offers Free Laptop Upgrades For Life 166

Posted by samzenpus from the one's-all-you-need dept.
Barence writes "Fujitsu Siemens is offering its customers free laptop upgrades for life with its Lifebook4Life scheme. Customers buying a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook will be offered a free upgrade three years after their original purchase, and every subsequent three years for the rest of their life — as long as they purchase an extended three-year warranty. Customers will have to hope inflation stays low, though: the value of each new notebook cannot exceed the value of the previous one, adjusted 10% for inflation. Fujitsu says the scheme is profitable, and a raft of small print ensures plenty of people will find they've excluded themselves from the scheme for all sorts of reasons."

Comment Results from a Brit... (Score 1) 334

by Firefalcon (#25851255) Attached to: US Officials Flunk Test On Civic Knowledge

I'm not even American, and I know little of the details of the US Constitution, Declaration of Independence, US case law, and political systems, yet I got 20 correct out of the 33 (about 60%), so I'm astounded to read that US citizens on average did worse.

One thing I noticed on the results page though was "Average score for this quiz during November: 77.4%".

So, while I don't know what the average for US citizens in the figures for this month (and all time) was, it suggests that results reported in the story were most likely not a representative sample...
Earth

Rubber Duckies For Global Warming Research 167

Posted by kdawson from the next-time-try-penguins dept.
The Wall Street Journal has a look at global warming research using rubber duckies. The toys have been employed in tracking ocean currents since 1992; but recently NASA robotics expert Alberto Behar released 90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in a Greenland glacier. "Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Dr. Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier's edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier's slide to the sea."

Comment Re:FF 3 in portage (Score 1) 138

by Firefalcon (#25778461) Attached to: Firefox 2 and Gecko 1.8 End of Life

While that is the case for Gentoo, it is intended to be for hardcore Linux geeks. Apt or RPM based distros such as Redhat, Mandriva, or Ubuntu make it nice and easy to install - go to your package manager, search for "firefox", select "Firefox 3", and click "Install" (or "Apply") and when it's finished, the software has been installed.

That's nicer and more consistent (only one place to look) compared to finding and installing some Windows software. I'm not going to try to pretend that everything is easier using Linux, but it is a lot more user friendly than it used to be, and some Distros are concentrating very much on ensuring that they are as user-friendly and "plug and play"-esq as possible...
Google

Submission + - SPAM: Flickr/Facebook/Google changes prompt big backlash 1

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "How should web services respond when their users are revolting over unannounced changes to their web services? One analyst explains it this way. "There is backlash to change, simple as that." (Thursday's upgrade to Flickr's "Recent Activity" page has already prompted over 3,700 angry posts.) And his solution? Giving users a way to opt out. "You can dismiss it," Yahoo's Tapan Bhatt tells the New York Times, "which is stupid. Or you can try to understand what it is that users are telegraphing." One Facebook user has even launched a group just to protest forced web page designs, and angry activists have even tried swamping Google's headquarters with phone calls and emails to the developers and executives behind recent changes to the iGoogle homepages."
Link to Original Source
Power

Submission + - Computers Causing 2nd Hump in Peak Power Demand

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Traditional peak power hours — the time during the day when power demand shoots up — run from 4 pm to 7 pm when air conditioning begins to ramp up and people start heading for malls and home but utilities are now seeing another peak power problem evolve with a second surge that runs from about 8 pm to 9 pm when people head toward their big screen TVs and home computers. "It is [not] so much a peak as it is a plateau," says Andrew Tang, senior director of the smart energy web at Pacific Gas & Electric. "8 pm is kind of a recent phenomenon." Providing power during the peak hours is already a costly proposition because approximately 10 percent of the existing generating capacity only gets used about 50 hours a year: Most of the time, that expensive capital equipment sits idle waiting for a crisis. Efforts to reduce demand are already underway with TV manufacturers working to reduce the power consumption in LCD and plasma while Intel and PC manufacturers are cranking down computer power consumption. "Without a doubt, there's demand," for green PC's says Rick Chernick, CEO of HP partner Connecting Point adding that the need to be green is especially noticeable among medical industry enterprise customers."
Security

Submission + - UK Claims Link Between Child Porn and Terrorism (timesonline.co.uk) 3

Submitted by
Brian Ribbon
Brian Ribbon writes: "The Times reports claims made by government officials and security services, regarding an alleged correlation between the use of indecent images and terrorist activity. According to the article, "secret coded messages are being embedded into child pornographic images, and paedophile websites are being exploited as a secure way of passing information between terrorists" and "it is not clear whether the terrorists were more interested in the material for personal gratification or were drawn to child porn networks as a secure means of sending messages." The correlation is likely to be false; under UK law, nude photographs of all minors — including those who are over the age of consent — are illegal, so it's not surprising that many people (including terrorists) are found to have illegal material when their computers are searched. In reality, this story is probably just a poor attempt to justify the government's proposed big brother database."
United States

Submission + - DHS vs GLP Forum "Terrorists"

Submitted by
st1d
st1d writes: "Just thought I'd bring this to your attention. A little morbid humor apparently touched a nerve. A group of random people watching the market tumble made DHS's watchlist. Apparently jokes and random stock market predictions are now a threat to national security. The forum: http://www.godlikeproductions.com/ The relevant article: http://www.nationalterroralert.com/updates/2008/10/16/economic-terrorism-is-the-stock-market-being-manipulated/ Thanks for taking the time to check this out."
Security

Submission + - What is Your Opinion on Federated Login? (google.com)

Submitted by
anomalous cohort
anomalous cohort writes: "Federated login, or the ability to sign in to many services using the same credentials, has been brewing for quite some time. Microsoft has had their passport. Sun Microsystems has had their Liberty Alliance compliant Sun ONE Identity server. I'm starting to see more and more sites adopt Six Apart's OpenID project. Last month, Google published their usability research on how best to employ federated login from the end user perspective.

My question is this. Has federated login's time finally come? How many here use federated login? How many here are planning to add federated login to their web sites? Is this a good thing or yet another annoying nuisance?"
Space

No Naked Black Holes 317

Posted by kdawson from the also-no-hair dept.
Science News reports on a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters in which an international team of researchers describes their computer simulation of the most violent collision imaginable: two black holes colliding head-on at nearly light-speed. Even in this extreme scenario, Roger Penrose's weak cosmic censorship hypothesis seems to hold — the resulting black hole (after the gravitational waves have died down) retains its event horizon. "Mathematically, 'naked' singularities, or those without event horizons, can exist, but physicists wouldn't know what to make of them. All known mechanisms for the formation of singularities also create an event horizon, and Penrose conjectured that there must be some physical principle — a 'cosmic censor' — that forbids singularity nakedness ..."
It's funny. Laugh.

DHS Official Considered Shock Collars For Air Travelers 673

Posted by timothy from the kip-hawley-please-to-the-red-discourtesy-phone dept.
"The Washington Times is reporting that the DHS wants to replace your boarding pass with a GPS-enabled shock bracelet. Plans for the device include subduing passengers remotely as well as onboard interrogation. There's even a promotional video." Perhaps Paul Ruwaldt (the official named in this story) has been watching "The Coneheads" a bit too much, or not actually flying enough. Expressing interest is not quite the same as ordering mass quantities, but it's scary enough.
The Internet

In Japan, a 900 Gigabyte Upload Cap, Downloads Uncapped 368

Posted by timothy from the no-such-luck-in-tennessee dept.
Raindeer writes "While the Broadband Bandits of the US are contemplating bandwidth caps between 5 gigabyte and 40 gigabyte per month, the largest telco in Japan has gone ahead and laid down some heavy caps for Japan's broadband addicts. From now on, if you upload more than 30 gigabyte per day, your network connection may be disconnected. Just think of it ... if you're in Japan and want to upload the HD movie you shot of yesterday's wedding, you soon might hit the limit. The downloaders do not face similar problems."
Media

G8 Summit Aims To Kill International Piracy 340

Posted by CmdrTaco from the this-can-only-end-well dept.
arcticstoat writes "Next week, the G8 summit will discuss proposals for new international piracy laws, which include border controls and cooperation from ISPs to identify pirates. The laws will also prevent ISPs from being liable for copyright infringement. If the G8 summit were to agree on these measures and enforce them through international cooperation, could they really cut down piracy, or would they be impractical to enforce?"
Patents

Submission + - What to do with a good idea?

Submitted by
Claire
Claire writes: "I've been working as a software engineer for close to the past decade, and occasionally i come up with a great idea for a gadget that would make my life easier (I've had the idea for couple of gadgets that I can actually say I didn't pursue, and companies are selling in volume now). I've not acted on them because, typically, after pitching the ideas, the companies i've worked for would shoot these ideas down as not being part of their 'core business' rather than on merit... My question for all of you is how would you go about pursuing these ideas while still working a 9 to when-its-done job? Is it just a matter of working your butt off until you have something to sell to VC's, or are there other ways to birth an idea, sell it, maintain some semblance of a personal life, and still get paid for it?"

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