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Comment Interesting (Score 1) 295

I don't know why, but I find this strangely fascinating. I guess it's the little things that point to Obama as a technology friend. It's interesting that they made a rather big deal over it being the first official digital picture of a president.

Comment Its not Ubuntu's fault (Score 2, Insightful) 1654

While DELL should have fixed the problem, don't blame Ubuntu. Verizon purposely designs its phones to be unusable with Linux. Verizon has a track record of locking its phones. For example, the Blackberry's built in GPS is inaccessible so that Verizon can charge to use its triangulation based navigation system.

As for the classes, the developers of the online software have an obligation to make it work on as many systems as possible. While Linux developers must continue to work towards compatibility with other systems, the companies behind them must work with us as well.

Finally, before anyone goes calling this woman idiotic for this compliant, we should make an offer to teach her about the technology and how to use non-Linux software through applications such as Wine.

Privacy

Biometric Passports Agreed To In EU 217

An anonymous reader writes "The European Parliament has signed up to a plan to introduce computerized biometric passports including people's fingerprints as well as their photographs, despite criticism from civil liberties groups and security experts who argue that the move is flawed on technical grounds. (Back in 2005 Sweden and Norway began deploying biometric passports.)"

Comment What is this costing the state? (Score 0) 849

My angry comment earlier asides, it does offend me that not only are some of the representatives of my state this conservative, but are foolish enough to attempt to pass a law that is blatantly unconstitutional. In the mean time my college which is a public school was just given a 22% budget cut. I ask how much time, effort, and energy has been spent on this maddening bill from Senator Ford that could have been spent in better ways such as making sure are public universities are fully funded.
Government

Submission + - Support F/OSS through the Citizen's Breifing Book (change.gov)

reeeh2000 writes: "The new citizen's briefing book is a new idea from change.gov that allows ordinary people to submit ideas to be presented to our incoming president. It features a voting system that allows participants to select the most popular ideas to be included in the briefing book.

Naturally the idea to switch many government technologies over to open source has surfaced. This is our chance to present our ideas and comments. By switching over to open source technologies we could save millions if not billions of dollars yearly.

If enough of us voice our ideas, perhaps we can get something great done."

Space

Liquid Mirror Telescopes Set For Magnetic Upgrade 64

KentuckyFC writes "Liquid mirror telescopes start life as a puddle of mercury in a bowl. Set the bowl spinning and the mercury spreads out in a thin film giving the surface an almost perfect mirror finish. But these telescopes have two important limitations. First, they can only point straight up since tilting the mirror spills the mercury. And second, they cannot be made adaptive to correct for any blurring introduced by the Earth's atmosphere. But liquid mirror telescopes look set for an upgrade thanks to the work of a group of Canadian researchers. Their technique is to change the shape of the liquid mirror using powerful electromagnets. They use a ferromagnetic fluid of iron nanoparticles in oil instead of mercury which is too dense to be easily manipulated in this way. The work is just proof of principle at this stage but the idea is to use magnets to correct for the usual range of optical aberrations that telescopes have to deal with (abstract). And also to allow a liquid telescope to be tilted by using oil that is much more viscous than mercury and correcting any periodic deformation in the fluid that tilting might cause."

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Ya'll hear about the geometer who went to the beach to catch some rays and became a tangent ?

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