Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Republicans

Submission + - Are Ron Paul Supporters Real?

Submitted by
BunkAsInBed
BunkAsInBed writes: "Following the first three Republican debates Ron Paul was shown as coming in first ,second and first in online and text page polls. He frequently places first in numerous online straw polls and has the largest amount of activity on YouTube then any other candidate. Major news sources such as Fox News suggest that this is the work of hackers, could this be true? In phone polls he is only receiving 1-2%, is this representative of his actual support or skewed from the growing number of people without land lines? Are Ron Paul Supports simply that much more active?"
Spam

Submission + - Good-natured (?) spam

Submitted by
TheSHAD0W
TheSHAD0W writes: "Ever since I once used Panda Software's Activescan antivirus, they've been spamming me with advertising. I finally got fed up with it and followed a link to an unsubscribe page, but when given a confirmation link to follow in a follow-up email, I was told "We are sorry that we are unable to process your request at the moment". An email to their customer service address bounced. What else should I do to stop their spam? Has anyone else had trouble getting an otherwise legitimate company to stop sending repetitive advertising?"
Businesses

Submission + - FDA Considering Allowing Fake Chocolate

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "First, they replaced our cane sugar with icky, fattening high-fructose corn syrup. Now, the "great American chocolate bar" may soon be made of fake fillers so big candy companies can shave more profit off the cocoa bean.

This New York Times Op-Ed (registration maybe required) describes how "Industrial confectioners have petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to be able to replace cocoa butter with cheaper fats and still call the resulting product 'chocolate.' The reason: the substitution would allow them to use fewer beans and to sell off the butter for cosmetics and such."

The issue is not whether it would be legal for them to make it this way... this is America — they can do what they want. The issue is whether it would be legal for them to package the fake chocolate AS chocolate (and not something like "diluted chocolate substitute — contains 10% actual chocolate") so that consumers wouldn't know the difference (before tasting it). Kids would ultimately be eating this stuff. Could Corporate America really go so far just to squeeze more out of a buck?"
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Sued for Malicious Prosecution

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Tanya Andersen, the disabled single mother in Oregon who had been defending herself against baseless copyright infringement allegations by the RIAA for almost two years, until the RIAA finally dropped its case against her, has filed a lawsuit for malicious prosecution, Andersen v. Atlantic. Included as defendants in the complaint (pdf), in addition to the record companies, are the RIAA itself, Safenet (which owns MediaSentry), and Settlement Support Center LLC."
Portables

Submission + - Are laptop batteries the next "printer ink"

Submitted by Quixote
Quixote writes: Sometime back I bought a Dell Inspiron laptop because Dell was offering a very good deal on it. A few weeks after the warranty expired, the battery suddenly died. It was as if the battery was non-existent: the laptop would shutdown if unplugged even if the battery had been in the laptop the whole time. When plugged in, the battery charging light would keep flashing. This seemed quite puzzling, since just days before this, the battery used to give me a good 2 hours or so of use.

Searching around on the web to see if the flashing lights meant anything, I came across this page. It seems like lots of people have been reporting the same symptoms: just after the warranty expires, the battery mysteriously "dies". Even the Dell forums are replete with posts from unhappy users.

The solution from Dell is: buy a new battery. But they aren't cheap: a Dell one runs you about $100.

I know I should have known better than buying a Dell (cue the "Dude!" jokes). But this begs a bigger question: is this legal (it certainly doesn't seem ethical)? How many of these (working) batteries end up in the landfill? Have laptop batteries become the next "printer ink", forcing us to keep buying new ones?
The Internet

Submission + - Emails Have 4th Amendment Protections

Submitted by taoman1
taoman1 writes: It isn't just judges who define the protections of the 4th Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. So do ordinary citizens, with the way they live their lives. A federal appeals court has reaffirmed that principle by ruling that e-mail messages stored by an Internet service provider deserve the same privacy protections as the contents of telephone calls. In both situations, the legal touchstone is the same: whether users of a communications service have a "reasonable expectation of privacy."
Communications

Submission + - A good mobile phone with no camera?

Submitted by SuperG
SuperG writes: It seems like every mobile phone out there has a camera on it these days. The only ones without cameras are low-end models with poor battery life, poor reception, and minimal features. And low-end means the cool factor is nonexistent as well. I often visit facilities where phones with cameras are not allowed, so I end up being incommunicado with my current camera phone. Is there a good (in terms of battery life, call quality, build quality, and style points) phone without a camera out there in the US market?
Enlightenment

Submission + - Women are fleeing IT jobs

Submitted by
Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: "An alarming number of women are currently abandoning IT jobs that require workers to be on-call at all hours, according to a story in Computerworld. One study cited in the article states that by 2012, 40% of women now working in IT will leave for careers with more flexible hours. 'I think women in that regard are at a real disadvantage,' said Dot Brunette, network and storage manager at Meijer Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based retailer and a 30-year IT veteran. She noted that companies can fail to attract female workers, or see them leave key IT jobs because they fail to provide day care at work, or work-at-home options for someone who leaves to have a child.'"
AMD

Submission + - AMD reports $611 million loss

Submitted by mpfife
mpfife writes: Toms hardware reports that "Declining microprocessor sales as well as dropping average selling prices for its microprocessors have pushed AMD deeper into the red. The company reported a net loss of $611 million on revenues of $1.233 billion, which is more than 20% below the guidance the company expected at the end of Q4 2006. The loss includes charges related to the ATI acquisition in the amount of $113 million, but is mainly a result of the increasing competition with Intel in the microprocessor market."
United States

Submission + - "Dark Side" of the H1-B Program

Submitted by TheGrapeApe
TheGrapeApe writes: Froma Harrop examines the "Dark Side" of the H1-B Visa program, and the subtle ways that corporations are using it to dismantle and extract American programming, graphic design and other service-sector jobs to overseas economies in this piece from the Seattle Times:

Ron Hira has studied the dark side of the H-1B program. A professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he notes that the top applicants for visas are outsourcing companies, such as Wipro Technologies of India and Bermuda-based Accenture.

The companies bring recruits in from, say, India to learn about American business. After three years here, the workers go home better able to interact with their U.S. customers.

In other cases, companies ask their U.S. employees to train H-1B workers who then replace them at lower pay. "This is euphemistically called, 'knowledge transfer,' " Hira says. "I call it, 'knowledge extraction.' "
Quickies

Submission + - Adamantium

Submitted by HomeySmurf
HomeySmurf writes: Not really adamantium, but scientists at UCLA have designed a new super hard and incompressible metal, rhenium diboride which is relatively easy to fabricate and can scratch diamond. Now we can start working on the Weapon X project and develop Wolverine claws.
Communications

Record High Frequency Achieved 141

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the music-to-their-ears dept.
eldavojohn writes "Researchers at UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science managed to push our control of frequencies to another level when they hit a submillimeter 324 gigahertz frequency. As any signal geek out there might tell you, this is a non-trivial task. 'With traditional 90-nanometer CMOS circuit approaches, it is virtually impossible to generate usable submillimeter signals with a frequency higher than about 190 GHz. That's because conventional oscillator circuits are nonlinear systems in which increases in frequency are accompanied by a corresponding loss in gain or efficiency and an increase in noise, making them unsuitable for practical applications.' The article also talks about the surprising applications this new technology may evolve into."
Games

Feed Xbox 360 scratching discs? Maybe, says Microsoft (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Gaming, Storage

So far the Xbox 360 has had its fair share of hardware problems, both large and small, and while Microsoft has dealt with most of these challenges by extending warranties and offering up free fixes, it usually takes its own sweet time to come around, which seems to be the case here. After completely ignoring a minor public outcry over what appeared to be a problem with a decent number of the 360s produced in December 2006 -- where a missing part in the drive caused the Xbox to scratch the disc it was reading -- Microsoft is finally confessing that there might actually be a problem and promising to look into it. This statement comes after Dutch TV show "Kassa" gave the movement some PR and ran its own tests on the 360, proving it to be the scratching culprit. Microsoft's still pretty wishy-washy about the whole thing: "We are not able to respond in detail on the results. It is possible that scratches on discs originate from frequent use. However, we have no indication that the results of the tests from Kassa are a large scale problem." But at least now Microsoft is willing to hear out customer complaints on the matter, and recommends that affected users contact support to deal with the issue. We're not quite sure what kind of pyrotechnics it'll take for Microsoft to actually run its own tests on these things, but at least things are moving in the right direction.

[Via gadgetzone.nl]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Slashdot Top Deals

An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.

Close