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Comment: Re:Smart people use LaTeX. (Score 1) 567

by MITguy21 (#37152888) Attached to: Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F

Some of us are more-or-less required to use MS-Word...but that doesn't mean you have to stick to the default keyboard shortcuts. A reasonable subset of the Emacs commands are available for Word through VBacs (Visual Basic Emacs) licensed under GPL, http://rath.ca/Misc/VBacs/
Lots of fun when a "normal" MS-Word user tries to use shortcuts on my system!

The Military

Among The Costs Of War: $20B In Air Conditioning-> 1

Submitted by TechkNighT_1337
TechkNighT_1337 writes "The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion.

That's more than NASA's budget. It's more than BP has paid so far for damage during the Gulf oil spill. It's what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia."
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Security

Cancer cluster possibly found among TSA workers->

Submitted by OverTheGeicoE
OverTheGeicoE writes "TSA employees at Logan International Airport believe they have identified a cancer cluster in their ranks, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and released by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. They have requested dosimetry to counter "TSA's improperly non-monitored radiation threat". So far, at least, they have not received it.

The documents also reveal a document from Johns Hopkins that in effect questions whether it is even safe to stand near an operating scanner, let alone inside one. Also, the National Institute of Standards and Technology says that the Dept. of Homeland Security "mischaracterized" their work by telling USA Today that NIST affirmed the safety of the scanners when in fact NIST does not do product safety testing and never tested a scanner for safety."
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Microsoft

Microsoft May Add Eavesdropping To Skype->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published A Microsoft patent application that reaches back to December 2009 and describes “recording agents” to legally intercept VoIP phone calls. The “Legal Intercept” patent application is one of Microsoft’s more elaborate and detailed patent papers, which is comprehensive enough to make you think twice about the use of VoIP audio and video communications. The document provides Microsoft’s idea about the nature, positioning and feature set of recording agents that silently record the communication between two or more parties."
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Power

Top Home Energy Hogs Are DVRs and Cable Boxes 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Elisabeth Rosenthal writes that cable setup boxes and DVRs have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, causing an increase of over $10 for a home with many devices with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator. The set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are running full tilt, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use consuming $3 billion in electricity in the US with 66 percent of that power wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. “People in the energy efficiency community worry a lot about these boxes, since they will make it more difficult to lower home energy use,” says John Wilson, a former member of the California Energy Commission. “Companies say it can’t be done or it’s too expensive. But in my experience, neither one is true. It can be done, and it often doesn’t cost much, if anything.” The perpetually “powered on” state is largely a function of design and programming choices made by electronics companies and cable and Internet providers, which are related to the way cable networks function in the United States. Similar devices in some European countries can automatically go into standby mode when not in use, cutting power drawn by half and go into an optional “deep sleep,” which can reduce energy consumption by about 95 percent (PDF) compared with when the machine is active but cable companies say US customers will not tolerate the time it takes to reboot the system once the system has been shut down or put to sleep. Although the EPA has established Energy Star standards for set-top boxes and has plans to tighten them significantly by 2013 cable providers and box manufacturers like Cisco Systems, Samsung and Motorola currently do not feel consumer pressure to improve box efficiency. When Wilson asked box makers why the hard drives were on all the time, using so much power. The answer was: “Nobody asked us to use less.”"

Quibids ripped me off 1

Submitted by
npkatz
npkatz writes "I just lost $60 trying a new eBay-like site called Quibids at http://www.quibids.com/ . I am concerned that they are operating a deceptive and highly unethical business to try to capture $60 the first time you create an account (which requires you to use a credit card to pay for something you win) and try bidding on something. It doesn't work like eBay. They give you some number of bids for your registration. If you use them up on your first round of bidding, they charge you $60. I didn't win any auctions. I just got charged $60. I had no idea I was going to get charged anything for just bidding and not winning anything — I think most of you would feel the same way. I would never have signed up had I known they were going to charge me anything let alone $60.

I asked them for a refund and they refused with a very cocky attitude that was both sarcastic and insulting. The closing line in the email was "Thank you and have a wonderful day!" ... with the exclamation point. The support person identified himself as only Michael C. Their site is listed at QuiBids Holdings LLC, 4 NE 10th, Suite 242, Oklahoma City, OK 73104-1402. If you happen to get enticed into visiting this site by some solicitation, I recommend you avoid it to avoid the experience I just had."
Books

After Books Go Extinct

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Books are on their way to extinction writes Kevin Kelly, adding that we are in a special moment when paper books are plentiful and cheap that will not last beyond the end of this century. "It seems hard to believe now, but within a few generations, seeing a actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion." But a prudent society keeps at least one specimen of all it makes, so Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has decided that we should keep a copy of every book that Google and Amazon scan so that somewhere in the world there was at least one physical copy to represent the millions of digital copies so if anyone ever wondered if the digital book's text had become corrupted or altered, they could refer back to the physical book that was archived somewhere safe. The books are being stored in cardboard boxes, stacked five high on a pallet wrapped in plastic, stored 40,000 strong in a shipping container, inside a metal warehouse on a dead-end industrial street near the railroad tracks in Richmond California. In this nondescript and "nothing valuable here" building, Kahle hopes to house 10 million books — about the contents of a world-class university library. "It still amazes me that after 20 years the only publicly available back up of the internet is the privately funded Internet Archive. The only broad archive of television and radio broadcasts is the same organization," writes Kelly. "They are now backing up the backups of books. Someday we'll realize the precocious wisdom of it all and Brewster Kahle will be seen as a hero.""

Does anything today work like Lotus Agenda?

Submitted by Chris.Nelson
Chris.Nelson writes "Does anyone remember Lotus Agenda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda)? It was a sort of free-text personal data mining tool that let you take random notes that it organized and/or searched for you.

What I'm looking for is something like it to keep a garden journal. I want to be able to enter "The roses bloomed today" or "Planted gladiolus" and later be able to ask the system "When do my roses usually come up?" or "When did I last mulch" or "Do the lilies or the peonies bloom first?" A wiki or blog tool almost works but the data isn't really self organizing the way Agenda's was. Any recommendations?"
Censorship

Ask Slashdot: Do we, geeks realize our power ?-> 3

Submitted by TheBlackMan
TheBlackMan writes "I think we all agree, that the Internet is probably one of the most amazing & important inventions of mankind and that it has turned upside down the way humanity sees the world.
But after recent[1] events[2] , it should be now clear what are the intentions of world's largest governments towards freedom of the Internet.

This got me into thinking. After all it is us, geeks who started all of it. All the amazing power which computer era brought is in our hands. We are the ones who created every one of the modern communication technologies. It was geeks, not politicians who created WWW, Google, Facebook, IRC and only geeks can really comprehend it use it effeciently. We also have all the means needed to work and make decisions together effeciently — fast communication, control of all of the major network hubs, ease of organization virtual/real meetings using social networks. Also, unlike "common folk", most of us is fully aware what is currently happening in the topic of internet freedom and we usually have similiar viewpoints in this matter.

So, strictly theoretically speaking, what could happen if all of us who control the web would just refuse to follow orders and resist simultaneously ? Computer era and Internet and are both children of us, geeks. When it will come to it, can we really be forced to hurt or kill our children quietly ?"
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Recovering from bank fraud? 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Last week, I logged into my online banking account to find that thousands of dollars had been fraudulently withdrawn from my account. My bank claims to have a policy of restoring fraudulent transactions, but they are refusing to do so, arguing that the transaction was not really fraudulent. Of course, I'm lock out of my other savings so now I'm having issues paying my day-to-day bills. Has anyone on Slashdot had experience with resolving this sort of issue?"
Twitter

Human Brain Places Limit on Twitter Friends

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "MIT Technology review reports that back in early 90s, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar began studying human social groups measuring the number of people an individual can maintain regular contact with and came up with 150 — a number that appears to be constant throughout human history — from the size of neolithic villages to military units to 20th century contact books. But in the last decade, social networking technology has had a profound influence on the way people connect vastly increasing the ease with which we can communicate with and follow others so it's not uncommon for tweeters to follow and be followed by thousands of others. Now Bruno Goncalves has studied the network of links created by 3 million Twitter users over 4 years and after counting tweets that are mutual and regular as signifying a significant social bond, found that when people start tweeting, their number of friends increases to a saturation point until they become overwhelmed. Beyond that saturation point, the conversations with less important contacts start to become less frequent and the tweeters begin to concentrate on the people they have the strongest links with. So what is the saturation point? The answer is between 100 and 200, just as Dunbar predicts. "This finding suggests that even though modern social networks help us to log all the people with whom we meet and interact," says Goncalves, "they are unable to overcome the biological and physical constraints that limit stable social relations (PDF).""

When the ax entered the forest, the trees said, "The handle is one of us!" -- Turkish proverb