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Businesses

Submission + - Eric Schmidt Out, Larry Page In As Google CEO (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: Google surprised just about everybody at its earnings call by announcing that Eric Schmidt, who had served as company CEO for more than a decade, would be stepping down and that cofounder Larry Page would take over. Schmidt will stay on as chairman and provide "technology thought leadership," whatever that is. When Schmidt, an old Sun hand, joined Google in 2001, it was seen as a move to turn the scrappy upstart into a mature company; now on his Twitter feed Schmidt proclaims that his "adult supervision" is no longer needed.
Data Storage

How Do You Store Your Personal Photos? 680

Posted by timothy from the and-where-do-you-put-the-negatives? dept.
mxhf writes "I just came back from a four-week vacation to Mexico. This is the country for Aztecs and Maya Ruins and we visited plenty of them. Needless to say we took thousands of pictures with two cameras. Having arrived back home I realize that my hard-disk does not have enough space left to hold the additional 16GB that I collected on the other side of the globe. Now, my hard disk already is 250GB. I work exclusively on a laptop and do not want to change this. I know that there are larger disks today. But I figured that the time has come to finally move my image collection from my laptop to somewhere else. But where should I go? So, how do you store your photo collections? And how do you keep backups? These are obviously images that I want to keep for my life. So the need to survive fires, burglaries, etc. I think the amount of data I have rules online storage out. Should I just get two USB disks and leave one at a reasonably save location? I think this must be a common problem today. And yes — before you ask — I do know that the first thing to do is to go through your collection and dump what is not worth keeping."
Earth

Submission + - NASA Data Reveals China's Industrial Air Pollution (wsj.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: China's skyrocketing industrialism comes at a price to the environment according to Canadian scientists who used NASA data to publish a report on worldwide air pollution (PDF) in the journal of Environmental Health Perspectives. The biggest problem appears to be a bright red mass in Northeastern China around the Yangtze River Delta — a rapidly developing piece of China's explosive economy. There doesn't seem to be a lot of acknowledgment from the state media but blogs are picking it up as one of the few sources of data on air pollution for the area. The sad fact is that particulate matter in the air that is less than 2.5 micrometers is not classified as pollution by the Chinese government so they have no official measurements to provide. If you're in Shanghai and looking for a breath of fresh air, you've got quite the journey ahead of you.
Idle

Submission + - ATM's That Dispense Gold Bars Coming To America. (cnbc.com) 1

Submitted by tetrahedrassface
tetrahedrassface writes: As the U.S. economic woes continue unabated, a German company is bringing gold bearing ATM'S to bear on Mainstreet America. The machines accept credit cards, and will dispense 1 gram, 5 gram, 10 gram and 1 ounce units, as well as various gold coins. The company hopes to install 35 bullion machines in the United States this year, hopefully have several hundred up and running by next year. The machines will be decorated like giant gold ingots and be over two meters tall. Physical gold has both pros and cons, but mainly from a safety standpoint would it be safe to have a couple of ounces in your pocket while walking around the mall? The giant gold dispensing ATM's will monitor the market conditions for gold every 10 minutes in order to reflect spot price changes as they occur.
Google

Schools, Filtering Companies Blocking Google SSL 308

Posted by kdawson from the right-to-look-over-your-shoulder dept.
An anonymous reader in the UK writes "Over the past several weeks we've discussed the rolling out of Google SSL search. Now an obstacle to the rollout has arisen, much to the frustration of school students and teachers alike. Content filter vendors have decided to block all Google SSL traffic — which also blocks access to Google Apps for Education. Google is working to appease these vendors. The questions at the heart of this situation are: Does a company (school, government) have a right to restrict SSL traffic so it can snoop your data, or does an individual have a right to encrypted Internet facilities? And, is the search data you create your data, or is it your employer's (school's)? IANAL but blocking SSL search seems at odds with the UK Data Protection Act, because some local governments here may be using the very same filtering service for their employees. It would also seem to go against the spirit of FIPS in the US (though I appreciate that federal standards are separate from schools in the States)."
Robotics

Submission + - Stanford Robot Car Nails Amazing Parking Maneuver (singularityhub.com) 1

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: Stanford’s Junior, the robot car that took second place at DARPA’s Grand Challenge in 2007, has learned how to perform a tire squealing 180 degree spin into a skin-tight parking space. Similar to a James Bond action scene, the maneuver is impressive and would be extremely difficult for a human to pull off. We won't be handing the keys over to robot cars anytime soon, but Stanford shows us that at least for some driving tasks robot cars can already meet or even exceed human ability.

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