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by The End Of Days on Sunday July 06, @07:03AM (#24069343)
Attached to: In Japan, a 900 Gigabyte Upload Cap, Downloads Uncapped

Catching the subtleties isn't really your thing, huh?

Personally, if I have to live with the connectivity options in the US for actually being able to see genitals in my porn, I'll consider it a fair trade.

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  News: McCain Backs Nuclear Power 2008-06-19 08:45

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 19, @08:45AM
from the all-it-takes-is-peak-oil dept.
bagsc writes "Senator John McCain set out another branch of his energy policy agenda today, with a key point: 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030." So it finally appears that this discussion is back on the table. I'm curious how Nevada feels about this, as well as the Obama campaign. All it took was $4/gallon gas I guess. When it hits $5, I figure one of the campaigns will start to promote Perpetual Motion.
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 14, @01:03PM (#23791255)
Attached to: The Red Team Wins
I'm in a corp in Eve Online, a heavy player v player orientated spaceship game.

With Eve, a hostile ship that is attacking you is displayed on screen, and also on the overview as a flashing red bar - the flashing red showing that the enemy ship has you targeted and is activating modules upon you with hostile intent.

One of the first things we do with newcomers to our corp/Eve is tell them to change the overview colour of a hostile ship from a flashing red to a solid green.

The change has had noticable effect. Before people would see the red and get an adrenaline boost, often resulting in them freezing for long enough to lose the battle. When seeing a solid green stating a metaphorical 'go go go!' as opposed to a red screaming 'Danger!' the newcomers perform better and freeze less often.

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Posted by timothy on Thursday June 12, @04:56PM
from the oh-google-you're-so-good-to-me dept.
snydeq writes with a story from InfoWorld which says that "Yahoo has ended its talks with Microsoft and is instead nearing an agreement with Google. Yahoo's purported reason for breaking off the talks? That Microsoft was only interested in purchasing Yahoo's search business, not all of the company. 'Such a transaction would not be consistent with the company's view of the converging search and display marketplaces, would leave the company without an independent search business that it views as critical to its strategic future and would not be in the best interests of Yahoo stockholders,' the company said in a statement. The deal with Google allegedly involves Yahoo's search advertising business. The move likely will draw more ire from Icahn and may in fact remain part of the elaborate poker game between the two companies. Microsoft said this alternative transaction remains on the table and did not confirm that talks between it and Yahoo have concluded." Update: 06/12 23:58 GMT by T : CWmike writes "Just hours after saying it ended talks with Microsoft, Yahoo announced that it will start running advertising from Google alongside Yahoo search results. Yahoo expects the deal, which has a 10-year term, to generate $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow during the first 12 months."
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 [+] story, tech, yahoo, google, microsoft, money, goohoo
by zifferent on Friday May 30, @11:03AM (#23598019)
Attached to: Microsoft Acknowledges Open Source As a Bigger Threat Than Google
Nothing is stopping companies from paying the developers. What is this guy's point exactly. And it's not like a company can't add a developer to their payroll to pick up dead OSS projects. Oh wait he's a M$ troll. It's FUD. It says "Please Mr. Company, don't use the OSS product, because it might get dropped, and then where will you be?" And "Please Mr. Developer, don't work on OSS projects, because people are just taking advantage of you." Gagh!
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by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 29, @07:03PM (#23592349)
Attached to: MediaDefender's BitTorrent-Based DOS Takes Down Revision3
Can't RTFA. They're slashdotted.

Where is the federal criminal investigation?
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Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 12, @03:03PM
from the what-was-that-noise dept.
Dr. Eggman writes "In an interview with the Star-Telegram, the Air Force's chief scientist, Mark Lewis, talks about the USAF's latest research direction. The service is working on hypersonic missile and bombers for the purposes of reconnaissance and attack. In response to Chinese and Russian anti-satellite developments, the Air Force plans to develop weapons capable of sustained travel at Mach 6 to allow them to deploy against and take out anti-satellite launch sites before the enemy can fire their missiles. Furthermore, should the US spy satellite network be brought down, the Mach 6 recon flight systems would be capable of filling in. Air Force officials hope to deploy a new interim bomber by 2018, followed by a more advanced, and possibly unmanned, bomber in 2035." We've discussed on a number of occasions the scramjet technology that would power such vehicles.
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 [+] story, hardware, military, armsrace, !hedgehog, metoo

  Science: New "Endoscope On a Pill" 2008-01-25 14:34

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday January 25, @02:34PM
from the easy-to-swallow dept.
ScienceDaily is reporting that a new form of endoscope developed at the University of Washington is more like swallowing a pill than the typical "massive" cable. The pill, complete with a 1.4 mm wide tether, contains a single optical fiber for illumination and six fibers for collecting light. "Once swallowed, an electric current flowing through the UW endoscope causes the fiber to bounce back and forth so that its lone electronic eye sees the whole scene, one pixel at a time. At the same time the fiber spins and its tip projects red, green and blue laser light. The image processing then combines all this information to create a two-dimensional color picture."
Posted by Zonk on Thursday October 04 2007, @01:06PM
from the seems-to-defeat-the-purpose dept.
A non-mouse Coward writes "PGP Corporation's widely adopted Whole Disk Encryption product apparently has an encryption bypass feature that allows an encrypted drive to be accessed without the boot-up passphrase challenge dialog, leaving data in a vulnerable state if the drive is stolen when the bypass feature is enabled. The feature is also apparently not in the documentation that ships with the PGP product, nor the publicly available documentation on their website, but only mentioned briefly in the customer knowledge base. Jon Callas, CTO and CSO of PGP Corp., responded that this feature was required by unnamed customers and that competing products have similar functionality."
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 [+] story, it, security, wrongsummary, encryption, !backdoor, !feature

  Company aims to patent security patches[->] 2007-06-08 04:31 Jonas Maebe

Submitted by Jonas Maebe on Friday June 08 2007, @04:31AM
Jonas Maebe writes "Someone thought up another way to profiteer from the software patent system: when a security hole is discovered, they'll try to patent the fix in order to collect money when the affected vendors close the hole in their product.. The company in question is not shy about its intentions: Intellectual Weapons will only consider vulnerabilities in high profile products from vendors with deep pockets. Let's be thankful for yet another way software patents are used to promote science and the useful arts."
http://securitywatch.eweek.com/patches/new_firm_eager_to_slap_patents_on_security_vulnerabilities.html
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 [+] submission, it, patents
Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday May 05 2007, @05:28AM
from the back-to-the-drawing-board dept.
SteakNShake writes "Once again professional astronomers are struggling to understand observations of the sun. ScienceDaily reports that a team from Saint Andrew's University announced that the sun's magnetic fields dominate the behavior of the corona via a mechanism dubbed the 'solar skeleton.' Computer models continue to be built to mimic the observed behavior of the sun in terms of magnetic fields but apparently the ball is still being dropped; no mention in the announcement is made of the electric fields that must be the cause of the observed magnetic fields. Also conspicuously absent from the press releases is the conclusion that the sun's corona is so-dominated by electric and magnetic fields because it is a plasma. In light of past and present research revealing the electrical nature of the universe, this kind of crippling ignorance among professional astrophysicists is astonishing."
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 [+] story, science, space, pseudoscience, crackpot, troll, electricuniverse, bunk
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday May 03 2007, @02:46PM
from the i-can-only-imagine dept.
bricko noted a story of our modern journalism world gone so wrong it makes me sad. "Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly today because the company's new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs." The link discusses that the CEO was the former head of MacWorld and would get calls from Jobs. Apparently he also told the staff that product reviews had to be nicer to vendors who advertise in the magazine. The sad thing is that given the economics of publishing in this day and age, I doubt anything even comes of this even tho it essentially confirms that PC World reviews should be thought of as no more than press releases. I know that's how I will consider links from them in the future. But congratulations to anyone willing to stick to their guns on such matters.
Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 05 2007, @11:11AM
from the can-you-fax-me-a-wrench-please dept.
An anonymous reader writes "What will it mean when 3D fabricators become cheap and common? A NY Times article explores the ease of copying objects by scanning them with NextEngine scanner and sending them to 3d 'print shops'. The experiments were done with Legos because most of the things around his office were protected by copyright. What will happen to the economy for engineering when we can just download a pirated description of a machine and 'print' it out? 'The world is just beginning to grapple with the implications of this relatively low-cost duplicating method, often called rapid prototyping. Hearing aid companies, for instance, are producing some custom-fitted ear pieces from scanned molds of patients. Custom car companies produce new parts for classic cars or modified parts for hot rods. Consumer product makers create fully functional designs before committing themselves to big production runs.'"
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 [+] story, hardware, printer, science, replicator, diamondage, universalconstructor
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday April 04 2007, @04:01PM
from the flights-are-for-napping dept.
GayBliss writes "CNN is reporting that the FCC has decided to keep a rule in place that would ban mobile phone usage on airplanes. The FAA has a similar ban, but for different reasons. 'In an order released Tuesday, the agency noted that "insufficient technical information" was available on whether airborne cell phone calls would jam networks below. [...]Unlike the Federal Aviation Administration, which bans the use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices for fear they will interfere with navigational and communications systems, the FCC's concern is interference with other cell phone signals on the ground.'"
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 [+] story, hardware, usa, phonesonaplane, good, woohoo
Posted by Zonk on Sunday March 04 2007, @09:57PM
from the i-think-the-shulmans-are-particularly-funny-this-week dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Danger Room, a Wired blog, today cites a study of future electronic snooping technologies from Reuters, written by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board. More than anything, it seems these outside advisers want a surveillance system that would put Big Brother to shame, and they're looking at the commercial sector to provide it. 'The ability to record terabyte and larger databases will provide an omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past that can be used to rewind battle space observations in TiVo-like fashion and to run recorded time backwards to help identify and locate even low-level enemy forces. For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data.'"
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 [+] story, yro, privacy, technology, insovietrussia, bigbrother, dailyhate