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Canada

Wear a Mask During a Protest in Canada: 10 Years in Jail-> 5

Submitted by Phrogman
Phrogman writes "The Conservative government of Steven Harper in Canada has proposed a new bill that would impose a jail term of 10 years for anyone wearing a mask while "participating in a riot or unlawful assembly". The conservative backbencher who proposed the bill makes it clear that he intended it to allow police to arrest anyone wearing a mask "before protests spiral out of control". Since this is the same government that arrested hundreds of protesters during the G8/G20 summit using a law that didn't actually exist, it raises the question as to how they will define "unlawful". This is the latest in a series of "tough on crime" legislation being promulgated by the Conservatives now that they have the power of a majority government. The 10 year penalty is more than double the penalty awarded to a person who murdered someone in a fit of "road-rage" recently."
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Education

California Students Rank 47th In National Science Test->

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes "22 percent of California eighth-graders passed a national science test, ranking California among the worst in the U.S. according to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The test measures knowledge in Earth and space sciences, biology, and basic physics. The states that fared worse than California were Mississippi, Alabama, and a tie between the District of Columbia and Hawaii."
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Microsoft

Microsoft to bring full Internet Explorer browsing to Xbox 360 with Kinect contr->

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes "Microsoft is currently testing a modified version of Internet Explorer 9 on its Xbox 360 console, according to our sources. The Xbox 360 currently includes Bing voice search, but it's limited to media results. Microsoft's new Internet Explorer browser for Xbox will expand on this functionality to open up a full browser for the console. We are told that the browser will let Xbox users surf all parts of the web straight from their living rooms."
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Netherlands cements Net Neutrality in Law->

Submitted by
Fluffeh
Fluffeh writes "A while back, Dutch Telcos started to sing the "We are losing money due to internet services!" song and floated new plans that would make consumers pay extra for data used by apps that comflicted with their own services — apps like Skype for example. The politicians stepped in however, and wrote laws forbidding this. Now, the legislation has finally passed through the senate and the Netherlands is an officially Net Neutral country, the second in the world — Chile did this a while back. That's not to say that Telcos aren't smarting from the new laws, they have been busy severly reducing data on plans and charging extra for their services while using the very same apps in their marketing campaigns — sorry, I should rephrase that to "adapting to the new marketplace"."
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Advertising

Dish Network Announces Prime Time TV with No Ads

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Forbes reports that Dish Network has announced a new feature called called Auto Hop for its satellite TV subscribers that will let you automatically skip all commercials for prime time television from the four major broadcast networks when you watch the day after the programs are first aired. “Viewers love to skip commercials,” says Vivek Khemka, vice president of DISH Product Management. “With the Auto Hop capability of the Hopper, watching your favorite shows commercial-free is easier than ever before." Craig Moffett says that its going to be hard for Dish to maintain good relationships with its programming affiliates when they start offering a feature intended to cut out the bulk of the affiliates’ revenues and adds that whether the auto-skip feature can withstand legal challenge remains to be seen. “Given the already long list of industry-unfriendly features promoted by Dish, one wonders if Auto Hop will be the final straw that provokes legal action from the broadcast networks,” says Moffett. "We suspect Auto Hop probably uses some sort of bookmarking insertion based on automated recognition of commercial inserts (called ‘fingerprinting’), which if true could certainly be argued to be a manipulation of the content stream by the distributor.”"
Microsoft

Microsoft revamps chkdsk in Windows 8 to minimize downtime->

Submitted by
techfun89
techfun89 writes "Microsoft is proclaiming that with Windows 8 they have revamped the process of checking the disk for errors and it is faster and less disruptive than ever before. A lot of the checking for errors is now done on the fly, behind the scenes.

Along with a tweak of the chkdsk utility comes the tweaking of the NTFS file system. In the past the NTFS "health model" saw the machine's hard disk as a single unit that was either in good shape or damaged.

"Downtime was directly proportional to the number of files in the volume," according to a post by Kiran Bangalore, senior program manager of the Windows Core Storage and File Systems.

With Windows 8, the NTFS system scans for problems in the background while the system is online and initial attempts to fix the issue are done on-the-fly. If it can't be fixed while the system is online the details are logged so the time to fix is shorter when offline. Microsoft has termed the downtime from fixing the system "SpotFix"."
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Microsoft

Mozilla Claims 'IE only' on Windows 8 ARM->

Submitted by
Fluffeh
Fluffeh writes "Here we go again, it seems that sometimes Microsoft just can't learn old lessons. Mozilla has claimed that due to "technical restrictions" that Microsoft is putting on the Windows 8 ARM port, IE will be the only browser able to work. Unlike the x86 flavor, WOA (Windows on ARM) will not broadly support legacy applications. WOA will only run applications that are distributed through Microsoft’s application store. Third-party developers who bring their software to WOA will be confined to using the Windows Runtime stack and standard platform APIs. As Microsoft explained in a February blog post, the point of these restrictions are to maximize security, performance, and battery life for WOA users. The downside of this approach is that it makes it difficult to support certain kinds of highly complex third-party software, such as Web browsers, that require more capabilities than those provided by the standard API set."
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Security

Adobe introduces the paid security fix-> 1

Submitted by Nimey
Nimey writes "Adobe has posted a security bulletin for Photoshop CS5 for Windows and OSX. It seems there is a critical security hole that will allow attackers to execute arbitrary code in the context of the user running the affected application. Adobe's fix? You need to pay to upgrade to Photoshop CS6. For users who cannot upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe recommends users follow security best practices and exercise caution when opening files from unknown or untrusted sources."
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Comment: Stuck on. . . (Score 1) 307

by jhobbs (#38210840) Attached to: Study Hints That Wi-Fi Near Testes Could Decrease Male Fertility

Of all the problems with this study. . . of all the guys that will worry about their fertility and still have millions of "just fine" sperm. . . of the population argument and the billions of people on earth. . .

All I can think about is that this study started with some guy rubbing one out in the name of science.

Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall