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Comment Amazon: A Job Well Done (Score 4, Interesting) 199

by ThorntonAZ (#35740176) Attached to: Amazon Named the "Most Reputable Company"
Amazon really is a great company to buy from. I have been purchasing from them more than any other etaler now it seems. I have even replaced some items that we would buy at Target or Costco and purchase them from now. I have had to deal with customer service a few times and it has been a pleasurable experience. I also stand with amazon as far as sales taxes go. I also run a small business online and I cant collect taxes from hundreds of counties across the US. I could be for a flat national sales tax maybe though.
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German Kindergartens Ordered To Pay Copyright For Songs 291

Posted by samzenpus from the easy-as-taking-music-from-a-baby dept.
BBird writes "Deutsche Welle reports: 'Up until this year, preschools could teach and produce any kind of song they wanted. But now they have to pay for a license if they want children to sing certain songs. A tightening of copyright rules means kindergartens now have to pay fees to Germany's music licensing agency, GEMA, to use songs that they reproduce and perform. The organization has begun notifying creches and other daycare facilities that if they reproduce music to be sung or performed, they must pay for a license.'"
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Thief Posts His Photo To Facebook Victim's Account 222

Posted by samzenpus from the criminal-status-update dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher discovered his house had been burgled; money, a winter coat, an iPod and his son's laptop were stolen. Imagine his surprise when Facebook friends of his 15-year-old son reported that a photo of the apparent thief, wearing Fisher's coat and holding a wad of notes, had been uploaded to his son's Facebook account. How addicted do you have to be to a social network to post a status update and upload your photo *while* you're burgling someone's house?"
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Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed 1352

Posted by samzenpus from the fair-balanced-and-simple dept.
A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!
Announcements

Submission + - It is time to give (yourcelebsource.com)

Submitted by
ThorntonAZ
ThorntonAZ writes: "I understand this is not a tech post or even much of a news post but today is Christmas. While we are all out enjoying time with our family lets not forget about those who are not with family or do not even have a home. We are at an all time high with homelessness and people in need. Even some celebritys are getting in on it as Alyssa Milano and Melissa Joan Hart helped at a homeless shelter this Christmas Eve."
Technology (Apple)

Revamped WebKit JavaScript Engine Doubles In Speed 270

Posted by Soulskill from the upgrades dept.
Shin-LaC writes "In a post on their official blog, WebKit developers introduced the 'next generation' of their JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme, claimed to be twice as fast as its predecessor. The post lists several changes contributing to the performance improvements, including 'bytecode optimization,' a 'polymorphic inline cache' (which sounds similar to V8's 'hidden class transitions'), and a 'context threaded JIT' compiler which generates native code (currently only for x86 processors), and is also applied to regular expressions. The new JavaScript engine is already available in the latest WebKit nightly builds. According to comparative benchmarks, the new engine is around 35% faster than the V8 engine recently introduced in Google Chrome, and 55% faster than Mozilla's TraceMonkey."
Communications

Cisco To Buy Jabber 66

Posted by Soulskill from the swallowed-whole dept.
Danny Rathjens writes "In the continuing trend of big companies buying out small companies with open source products, Cisco has announced that they are buying Jabber. The press release doesn't really talk about the open source aspect of Jabber, and Jabber's website doesn't mention the news yet. I'm sure the question many of us have is whether Jabber's open source status will be changed in any way due to the purchase." Reader Eddytorial had this to contribute: "eWEEK offers a good look into how Jabber's messaging client will fit into Cisco Systems' overall 'presence' strategy in its market wars with Avaya, Microsoft, Nortel, and others. Cisco, which already had a basic instant messaging option, but one that didn't scale for an enterprise nearly as well as Jabber's, has just about everything else in place." It's also worth noting that Cisco open-sourced Etch in recent months.

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