Comment Re:I'm Not Going to Lie (Score 1) 58
Federal aid per $1.00 of tax collected (2005)
New York State - $0.79
Texas - $0.94
Pennsylvania - $1.07
Minnesota - $0.72
Submission + - BestBuy Sells 9-year-old Hard Drive Refuses Refund (consumerist.com) 2
JagsLive writes: Consumerist :
Jon spent $250 on a Western Digital VelociRaptor but what he received from Best Buy was a Quantum Fireball, a discontinued hard drive that hasn't been sold for nine years. Best Buy, of course, took no responsibility for the odd swap, and said that Western Digital must have accidentally sold a competitor's discontinued drive. Western Digital, of course, said that a Best Buy employee stole Jon's hard drive. We've seen this happen before with Best Buy, and Jon has made it clear that he knows how to bite back...
"Last week, I purchased a Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drive on bestbuy.com for in-store pickup. After receiving the confirmation email, I drove approximately 1 hour to the store I had selected (the closest store to me), picked up my drive, and returned home. When I opened the package (it was sealed), I was shocked and dismayed to find that instead of the VelociRaptor, there was a 9 year old 30GB Quantum Fireball (a drive not even made anymore)."
More at Consumerist : http://consumerist.com/5206541/best-buy-sells-9+year+old-discontinued-hard-drive-as-brand-new-western-digital-refuses-refund
Jon spent $250 on a Western Digital VelociRaptor but what he received from Best Buy was a Quantum Fireball, a discontinued hard drive that hasn't been sold for nine years. Best Buy, of course, took no responsibility for the odd swap, and said that Western Digital must have accidentally sold a competitor's discontinued drive. Western Digital, of course, said that a Best Buy employee stole Jon's hard drive. We've seen this happen before with Best Buy, and Jon has made it clear that he knows how to bite back...
"Last week, I purchased a Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drive on bestbuy.com for in-store pickup. After receiving the confirmation email, I drove approximately 1 hour to the store I had selected (the closest store to me), picked up my drive, and returned home. When I opened the package (it was sealed), I was shocked and dismayed to find that instead of the VelociRaptor, there was a 9 year old 30GB Quantum Fireball (a drive not even made anymore)."
More at Consumerist : http://consumerist.com/5206541/best-buy-sells-9+year+old-discontinued-hard-drive-as-brand-new-western-digital-refuses-refund
Submission + - Court Rules MySpace Posts Aren't Private
The Narrative Fallacy writes: "Following a visit to her hometown of Coalinga California in 2005, Cynthia Moreno wrote "An ode to Coalinga," and posted it in her MySpace page. The Ode opened with "the older I get, the more I realize how much I despise Coalinga" and made a number of negative comments about Coalinga and its inhabitants. The entry was posted for six days before Moreno removed it but that was long enough for the principal of Coalinga High School to find the ode and forward it to Pamela Pond, editor of the Coalinga Record, who published it in the newspaper's letters section. Local reaction was swift. Moreno's parents say they received death threats, a gun shot was fired at their home and her father's 20-year-old business lost so much money that it was closed and the family moved out of town. Moreno and her family responded by suing for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Now a Fresno based appellate court says Moreno had no grounds for her claim of invasion of privacy even if she meant her thoughts for a limited audience. "Cynthia's affirmative act made her article available to any person with a computer and, thus, opened it to the public eye," wrote Justice Levy. However, the claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress was not dismissed and a jury will get to decide if the defendants' conduct was extreme and outrageous. In the meantime the editor who republished the essay has been fired and lawyer Eric Goldman, Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law, wonders "if the violent and ostracizing community response to Moreno's post didn't in fact validate some of her critiques.""
Submission + - Terrorists using American web servers (arstechnica.com)
Death Metal writes: "The front page for Houston-based Web host The Planet proudly boasts the "lowest price on the planet." But you probably won't see them advertising the most striking proof of their global competitiveness: prices so low that the Taliban prefers to run its propaganda sites out of the Lone Star State! The situation has outraged some bloggers, but there's reason to think American intelligence officials are only too happy to have the enemy's data flowing across US soil."
Comment Re:magnetic (Score 2, Insightful) 141
It's obvious that suction wouldn't work in space, but why would magnetic stickers fail?
You're trying to stick to plastic?
Comment Re:Speaking as a pro-life person here (Score 1) 139
They do, in fact, use umbilical cords, and cord blood to harvest stem cells, for what it's worth.
Comment Re:NSA patenting it because... (Score 5, Interesting) 161
The NSA can not only file for patents, they can do so secretly.
From wikipedia:
The NSA has the ability to file for a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under gag order. Unlike normal patents, these are not revealed to the public and do not expire. However, if the Patent Office receives an application for an identical patent from a third party, they will reveal the NSA's patent and officially grant it to the NSA for the full term on that date.
Submission + - What is Bill Gates learning from Open Source? (zdnet.com)
christian.einfeldt writes: "In the world of Free Open Source Software communities, Microsoft is often viewed as the very epitome of the Cathedral-style model of software production. But is Bill Gates learning from the software development phenomenon that he once compared loosely to communism? In commenting on the results of a Microsoft-commissioned survey of approximately 500 board-level executives about the importance of interpersonal skills versus raw IT coding skills, Gates starts to sound a bit more like a member of the Apache Foundation than the take-no-prisoners king of cut-throat competition: 'Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.' [Emphasis added]. One wonders how long until 'sharing ideas' starts to become 'sharing source' code. Nah. it'll never happen."
