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Comment: Disturbed by the concept of Advertising? (Score 3, Informative) 146

by Quantus347 (#43406057) Attached to: Why AppGratis Was Pulled From the App Store
Apple was "more than a little troubled that AppGratis was pushing a business model that appeared to favor developers with the financial means to pay for exposure."

In other words they are disturbed by an advertising App whose business model is based on that of every other advertising firm on the planet?

Comment: Invented Conenctions (Score 4, Insightful) 1168

by Quantus347 (#42339287) Attached to: School Shooting Prompts Legislation To Study Violent Video Games
Saying this man killed his mother and then a bunch of children and teachers because he played video games is about and logical as saying he did it because he ate fatty foods, so we need shut down all McDonald's. There is no link whatsoever, beyond the fact that somebody wants to milk the events and the heightened emotions it is generating for their own crusades. Tighter gun control would not have stopped a determined and unstable man from stealing guns to go killing. Even if there had been no guns, Im sure he could have found another way. Hell, this was the 2nd deadliest elementary school killing because the deadliest used a bomb.

This really is getting ridiculous. I am getting really tired of all the politicians and lobby groups trying to spin this tragedy to their own agenda.
Facebook

+ - Facebook Disables URL Login Shortcut After Google Search Exposes Security Flaw

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "security hole has been discovered that allows anyone to see the email addresses corresponding to certain Facebook accounts. Worse yet, some appear to be accessible without even entering a password. However, a Facebook engineer now says that the company has disabled the feature that created the hole."
Science

+ - Crushed Silicon Triples Life of Li-Ion Batteries in the Lab->

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes "Batteries rule everything around us, which makes breakthroughs a big deal. A research team at Rice says they have produced a nice jump: By using a crushed silicon anode in a lithium-ion battery, they claim to have nearly tripled the energy density of current li-ion designs.

Engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal and research scientist Madhuri Thakur reported in Nature’s Scientific Reports (it has yet to be published online) that by taking porous silicon and crushing it, they were able to dramatically decrease the volume required for anode material. Silicon has long been looked at as an anode material because it holds up to ten times more lithium ions than graphite, which is most commonly used commercially.

But it’s previously been difficult to create a silicon anode with enough surface area to cycle reliably. Silicon also expands when it’s lithiated, making it harder to produce a dense anode material. After previously testing a porous silicon “sponge,” the duo decided to try crushing the sponges to make them more compact. The result is a new battery design that holds a charge of 1,000 milliamp hours per gram through 600 tested charge cycles of two hours charging, two hours discharging. According to the team, current graphite anodes can only handle 350 mAh/g."
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Iphone

+ - Tinkerer Invents iPhone Interface for Ham Radios->

Submitted by jjp9999
jjp9999 writes "By using the same technology found in older modems, Thomas Tumino, vice president of the Hall of Science Amateur Radio Club, has invented an iPhone interface for ham radios. He told The Epoch Times, 'Today there are iPhone apps where you can use the systems in the phone—and its sound card, which is being used as a modem ... And then you connect that into your radio with an interface like this, that just isolates the telephone from the radio, and then you can do all sorts of things.'"
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Cloud

+ - US Government Says You Don't Own Your Cloud Data so We Can Access It At Any Time-> 2

Submitted by jest3r
jest3r writes "Yesterday the EFF filed a brief proposing a process for the Court in the Megaupload case to hold the government accountable for the actions it took (and failed to take) when it shut down Megaupload's service and denied third parties access to their property. Many businesses used Megaupload's cloud service to store and share files not related to piracy. The government is calling for a long, drawn-out process that would require individuals or small companies to travel to courts far away and engage in multiple hearings just to get their own property back. The government's argument that you lose all your property rights by storing your data on the cloud could apply to Amazon's S3 or Google Apps or or Apple iCloud services as well."
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Censorship

+ - Nonpartisan Tax Report Removed After Republican Protest-> 1

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "On September 14th a PDF report titled "Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945" penned by the Library of Congress' nonpartisan Congressional Research Service was released to little fanfare. However the following conclusion of the report has since roiled the GOP enough to have the report removed from the Library of Congress: 'The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. As measured by IRS data, the share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top 0.1% fell from over 50% in 1945 to about 25% in 2009. Tax policy could have a relation to how the economic pie is sliced—lower top tax rates may be associated with greater income disparities.' From the New York Times article: 'The pressure applied to the research service comes amid a broader Republican effort to raise questions about research and statistics that were once trusted as nonpartisan and apolitical.' It appears to no longer be found on the Library of Congress' website."
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Science

+ - Video of scientists who developed new transparent solar cell->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at UCLA are reporting development of a new transparent solar cell, an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their report appears in the journal ACS Nano http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn3029327. Two of the authors describe the development in a new video http://youtu.be/-gJLetxYm5Q."
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Power

+ - Solar Panel Breaks "Third of a Sun" Efficiency Barrier->

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes "Embattled photovoltaic solar power manufacturer Amonix announced on Tuesday that it has broken the solar module efficiency record, becoming the first manufacturer to convert more than a third of incoming light energy into electricity – a goal once branded "one third of a sun" in a Department of Energy initiative. The Amonix module clocked an efficiency rating of 33.5 percent."
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Technology

+ - Scientists develop first all-carbon solar cell->

Submitted by SternisheFan
SternisheFan writes "by Brittany Hillen on November 2, 2012.

Scientists at Stanford University have built the world’s first all-carbon solar cell. Because carbon offers a combination of low cost and high performance, it is a viable alternative to current photovoltaic materials, which are expensive. This new solar cell is made from materials such as carbon nanotubes and “buckyballs”.

Said Zhenan Bao, the study’s senior author, “Carbon has the potential to deliver high performance at a low cost. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a working solar cell that has all of the components made of carbon. This study builds on previous work done in our lab.” Silicon solar panels are rigid, while the newly-built solar cell is a thin film that “can be coated from solution.”

According to Bao, in the future we could see these new flexible carbon solar cells coated on various surfaces, such as windows, rather than the rigid silicon panels often seen on roofs. The solar cell itself uses graphene and carbon nanotubes rather than indium tin oxide electrodes, a material that is becoming more expensive and scarce as demand grows. The active layer is also composed of carbon nanotubes, as well as carbon molecules called buckyballs.

The study’s co-author Michael Vosgueritchian said, “Every component in our solar cell, from top to bottom, is made of carbon materials. Other groups have reported making all-carbon solar cells, but they were referring to just the active layer in the middle, not the electrodes.” So what’s the downside? For now at least, the all-carbon cell is inefficient, mostly absorbing almost infrared wavelengths and offering a lab efficiency under 1-percent. According to Bao, the researchers have a long way to go in terms of efficiency, which they expect to increase by utilizing better processing techniques and materials."
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Privacy

+ - Police cameras allowed on private property without warrant->

Submitted by sbinning
sbinning writes "A federal judge has ruled that police officers in Wisconsin did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they secretly installed cameras on private property without judicial approval. The property in question was heavily wooded, with a locked gate and "no trespassing" signs to notify strangers that they were unwelcome."
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Patents

+ - Let's Go Back to Patenting the 'Solution,' Not the 'Problem'->

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes "Functional claiming of software inventions is arguably responsible for most of the well-recognized problems with software patents today. Software patentees have increasingly been claiming to own the function of their program itself – not merely the particular way they achieved that goal.

Since patentees have regained the ability to claim ownership not of what they built, but of what it does, they have brought suits purporting to own everything from international electronic commerce to video-on-demand to voice over the Internet to emoticons to means of hedging commodity risk. Mind you, the claims aren’t that defendants used their method of implementing electronic commerce or video on demand: the argument is that defendants used the idea itself."
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Idle

+ - Buddhist monk is the world's happiest man ->

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes "Tibetan monk and molecular geneticist Matthieu Ricard is the happiest man in the world according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin. The 66-year-old’s brain produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — never before reported in neuroscience.

The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricard's brain produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — "never reported before in the neuroscience literature", Davidson said.

The scans also showed excessive activity in his brain's left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, giving him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity, researchers believe.

Research into the phenomenon, known as "neuroplasticity," is in its infancy and Ricard has been at the forefront of ground-breaking experiments along with other leading scientists across the world."
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Power

+ - Researchers claim breakthrough with power amplifiers->

Submitted by Dupple
Dupple writes "Powering cellular base stations around the world will cost $36 billion this year—chewing through nearly 1 percent of all global electricity production. Much of this is wasted by a grossly inefficient piece of hardware: the power amplifier, a gadget that turns electricity into radio signals.

The versions of amplifiers within smartphones suffer similar problems. If you’ve noticed your phone getting warm and rapidly draining the battery when streaming video or sending large files, blame the power amplifiers. As with the versions in base stations, these chips waste more than 65 percent of their energy—and that’s why you sometimes need to charge your phone twice a day.

It’s currently a lab-bench technology, but if it proves itself in commercialization, which is expected to start in 2013—first targeting LTE base stations—the technology could slash base station energy use by half. Likewise, a chip-scale version of the technology, still in development, could double the battery life of smartphones."
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Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep. -- Carl Sandburg

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