Mass. Bill Would Put Privacy Squeeze on Cloud Apps For Schools 95
Posted
by
timothy
from the rent-seeker-vs.-rent-seeker dept.
from the rent-seeker-vs.-rent-seeker dept.
An anonymous reader points out a story at The Register about a Microsoft-backed bill proposed by Massachusetts state representative Carlo Basil which seems aimed directly at Google's cloud apps. The bill, if it should be enacted, would require that "[a]ny person who provides a cloud computing service to an educational institution operating within the State shall process data of a student enrolled in kindergarten through twelfth grade for the sole purpose of providing the cloud computing service to the educational institution and shall not process such data for any commercial purpose, including but not limited to advertising purposes that benefit the cloud computing service provider."
China's Yangtze River Turns Red 272
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-on-again dept.
from the have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-on-again dept.
redletterdave writes "The Yangtze River, the third longest river in the world traditionally known as the 'golden watercourse,' mysteriously blushed for the first time on Sept. 6. Residents in the surrounding area near the city of Chongqing, where the Yangtze connects to the Jialin River, literally stopped in their tracks when they noticed their once golden river had turned a shocking shade of red. Residents have carefully crept down to the riverbanks for the past few days to save some of the red, tomato juice-like river water in bottles. Early predictions from scientists say the red water was likely a result of pollution, but investigators are still investigating the unknown cause."
Jury In Apple v. Samsung Case May Have to Agree on 700 Points 111
Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
from the vexing-jury-members-for-fun-and-profit dept.
from the vexing-jury-members-for-fun-and-profit dept.
puddingebola writes "Jurors in the Apple v. Samsung case will receive a 100 page 'instructions to the jury' document. They will also receive a multi-page form with numerous questions to come to a verdict. From the article: 'The document, which both sides have yet to agree on, is still in its draft stage. In Samsung's case, it's 33 questions long, and stretched across 17 pages. For Apple, it's 23 questions spread over nine pages.' Perhaps this is standard in patent trials? Perhaps road sobriety tests will soon include hopping on one foot while juggling?"
As usual, Groklaw has the juicy details on the battle over writing the jury instructions.
Comment: Re:Let me guess the price (Score 1) 278
According to the review, the X1 RAM is soldered onto the motherboard and is not user-modifiable. Do you have a reference somewhere?
Comment: Re:Oh noes! (Score 3, Interesting) 167
You do know that the retina display in the iPhone is designed an manufactured by Samsung, right? The only "innovative" thing Apple did was to lock the supply chain by buying every single one of them, making them unavailable for anyone else until manufacturing capacity ramped up.
Comment: A few questions (Score 1) 239
The primary question is: why are you trying to do this? Is it to make sure you have an off-site backup in case all of your electronics gear gets stolen? Redundancy can be best covered with extra hard drives.
Another consideration is what kind of photos you are taking. If you're shooting RAW with a modern DSLR, you're going to have images of 20-30MB each. At 300 pictures per day, you could be looking at a data footprint of up to 9GB per day. I don't know what kind of coverage or data plan you have, but in my opinion that's a lot of upload data for a mobile connection. In this case, you may want to consider batch processing the images to a lower resolution before uploading, just to have some record of the images online.
Comment: Scheduling meetings (Score 5, Insightful) 168
Before everyone chimes in about how you might as well ban Google and Bing too, I think that there is a valid security concern for using Siri when you consider that many people use it for making appointments. Search history is much easier to obfuscate. I can understand if IBM doesn't want Apple to know who it is having "top secret" meetings with.
Comment: Asteroid Discovery From 1980 - 2010 (Score 4, Informative) 99
Here's a cool video showing all known asteroids with a time-lapse revealing the year they were discovered: http://youtu.be/cKT1VGIDEd4?hd=1
Comment: Re:Physical keyboard? (Score 1) 195
The only current-generation one I'm aware of is the Motorola Droid 4, which isn't GSM. Or the Droid 3 which is about 8 months old. I wish the list of options were longer since I prefer physical buttons too.
http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_droid_3-4036.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_droid_4_xt894-4418.php
Users Spend More Time On Myspace Than Google+ 310
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the never-underestimate-the-power-of-shiny-flashing-objects dept.
from the never-underestimate-the-power-of-shiny-flashing-objects dept.
pigrabbitbear writes "Google is boasting that more than 90 million people have signed up for its Google+. Those are pretty impressive numbers. I mean, if you had 90 million people at your disposal, you could do anything. You'd rule the Internet. Except there's one little problem: No one is using the site. The Wall Street Journal has the hard, unfiltered truth: According to comScore numbers, users spent an average of 3 minutes on G+ in the entire month of January. Facebook users spent 405 minutes, or nearly 7 hours, on the site. People managed to find 17 minutes to spare to add connections on LinkedIn. Heck, even Myspace users — many of whom are probably ghost accounts — surfed for eight minutes over the month."
Comment: HTTP 301 (Score 5, Informative) 113
As Anrego says, I'd suggest not actually handing over the domain. Instead, rebuild the site under a new domain while updating key content such as contact links, and then set up an "HTTP 301: permanently moved" redirect to the new site on the new domain. This will transfer your pagerank to the new domain and makes search engines happy. Then, you can keep your email and other domain services under your own control.
Comment: Re:Blue phone icon (Score 1) 226
Here's a picture of the StarTac, circa 1996: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MotorolaStarTAC.jpg
It, like almost all mobile phones since, has a green button to call (go) and a red button to hang up (stop). I would wager most people have this association.
Facebook Wants To Buy Skype 192
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the poke-that-ebay dept.
from the poke-that-ebay dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Remember when we learned that Facebook had resumed talks with Skype? Well, it turns out that Facebook is considering buying Skype outright. 'Skype is reportedly talking to Facebook about some sort of deal. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been involved in internal discussions about buying Skype, while Facebook also reached out to the Luxembourg-based company about forming a joint venture.'"
Comment: Re:Game Animations? (Score 3, Informative) 36
Yes, but Kinect mocap data is very low quality in comparison to what most studios use for professional production. Also, the skeleton tracking doesn't include rotations of the head, feet or hands. On top of this, it doesn't track props, fingers or faces so it is quite limited. If you watched the video you hear the narrator talking about the Kinect getting them 70% there with lots of tweaking (he specifically mentioned adding head animation). The great advantage with Kinect, of course, is cost.
For high end work, equipment from Vicon or Motion Analysis is the way to go. I use a 24 camera Vicon T160 system daily at Motek Entertainment, which is also where Brekel works. He's developed the plugin for which allows the Kinect to stream skeleton data directly into Motionbuilder.