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Comment No need to block everyone (Score 1) 107

The UAE authorities know very well that they cannot block everyone. Even with the "gaping holes" in their firewalls, I won't be surprised if they block more that 90% of the local population from accessing restricted sites. That's probably good enough for them. The effort required to block the remaining 10% would be too high and not worth it.

Submission + - Giant buses in China that cars can drive under (inquisitr.com)

yahyamf writes: One Chinese company has proposed new buses that are so big they straddle the road, while cars drive beneath them. Designers at Shenzhen Hashi Future Parking Equipment Co., Ltd say that these behemoth buses solve a number of issues in one fell swoop, and would result in fewer traffic jams, less emissions, and faster travel.

These buses are actually being put into pilot use shortly. They should make their debut in Beijingâ½âsÂâs Mentougou district, where work is to commence on the first 186km of track at yearâ½âsÂâs end.

Each of the jumbo buses will measure 4 to 4.5 meters high, with passengers aboard the upper level and other vehicles lower than 2 meters going under. Powered by electricity and solar energy, the bus can carry 1,200 to 1,400 passengers at a time.

PHP

SolarPHP 1.0 Released 125

HvitRavn writes "SolarPHP 1.0 stable was released by Paul M. Jones today. SolarPHP is an application framework and library, and is a serious contender alongside Zend Framework, Symphony, and similar frameworks. SolarPHP has in the recent years been the cause of heated debate in the PHP community due to provocative benchmark results posted on Paul M. Jones' blog."
Graphics

64-Bit Flash Player For Linux Finally In Alpha 172

Luchio writes "Finally, a little bit of respect from Adobe with this alpha release of the Adobe Flash Player 10 that was made available for all Linux 64-bit enthusiasts! As noted, 'this is a prerelease version,' so handle with care. Just remove any existing Flash player and extract the new .so file in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or /usr/lib/opera/plugins)."
Open Source

Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released 195

diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."

Comment Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score 1) 720

In many cases it makes sense to spend more energy in extracting oil than the energy available in the oil itself. This is because oil is mobile energy. It can be easily transported and stored. Also, much of modern infrastructure depends on energy in liquid form, eg. cars, airplanes, farming equirpment etc. There may be plentiful nuclear, solar, coal, or natural gas energy, but it's useless in many cases because the current infrastructure can not use it. So it does make sense for example to use a certain amount of nuclear energy to get a lesser amount of energy in the form of oil.
Social Networks

Crowd-Source Translation Software For Free Content? 62

yahyamf writes "I have a lot of free educational content in the form of audio lectures and text, which I'd like to translate into as many languages as possible. I would also want to transcribe the audio and create audiobooks from the text. There are already several volunteers willing to contribute, but I need some web based software to manage all the work. Facebook is already doing something like this, but it is only for their content. I've also looked at Damned Lies, which is part of the Gnome project, but it doesn't seem to handle audio. Are there any other open source translation projects out there that I can customize and build upon?"
Programming

Python 3.0 Released 357

licorna writes "The 3.0 version of Python (also known as Python3k and Python3000) just got released few hours ago. It's the first ever intentionally backwards-incompatible Python release."
Software

FCC Rules Open Source Code Is Less Secure 365

An anonymous reader writes "A new federal rule set to take effect Friday could mean that software radios built on 'open-source elements' may have trouble getting to market. Some US regulators have apparently come to the conclusion that, by nature, open source software is less secure than closed source. 'By effectively siding with what is known in cryptography circles as "security through obscurity," the controversial idea that keeping security methods secret makes them more impenetrable, the FCC has drawn an outcry from the software radio set and raised eyebrows among some security experts. "There is no reason why regulators should discourage open-source approaches that may in the end be more secure, cheaper, more interoperable, easier to standardize, and easier to certify," Bernard Eydt, chairman of the security committee for a global industry association called the SDR (software-defined radio) Forum, said in an e-mail interview this week.'"
Supercomputing

A Look Inside the NCSA 89

Peter Kern writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is one of the great supercomputing facilities in the world and is home to 'Abe', one of the top 10 supercomputers on the current Top 500 list. TG Daily recently toured the facility and published a stunning report about their computing capabilities (more than 140 teraflops), power requirements (a sustained 1.7 megawatts), enormous 20-ft chillers in four cooling systems and other installations that keep the NCSA online."
Microsoft

Microsoft Cracking Open the Door To OSS 222

AlexGr sends us to a long piece in Redmond Magazine on Microsoft's changing relationship to open source. The article centers around a profile of Bill Hilf, Microsoft's internal and external evangelist for OSS. It's an even-handed piece that fully reflects the continuing deep skepticism in the community of Microsoft's motives and actions.
Television

Who Controls Your Television? 245

Nurgled writes "The EFF, reportedly the only consumer rights organization to be granted membership of the Digital Video Broadcasting consortium, reports that TV and movie industry representatives have been pushing for DRM in the DVB technologies. This in itself is not entirely unexpected, but these talks have been going on in closed meetings. The EFF itself has been blocked from reporting on this until now as a condition of being allowed to attend. The proposed technologies allow rights-holders and broadcasters to severely hamper your ability to make use of broadcast television content, including the ability to retroactively blacklist any devices that consumers may already own that act in ways undesirable to the rights-holder or broadcaster. The EFF concludes that public interest and consumer rights advocates must fight back."

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