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Submission + - South Africa debuts toothy condom (aolnews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Counseling a rape victim more than 40 years ago, Dr. Sonnet Ehlers got an idea for an anti-rape female condom. Ehlers, a 62-year-old physician, lab researcher and hematologist — and a mother of two daughters — spent the next four decades developing a female condom with jagged latex hooks that latch onto the skin of an attacker.
Microsoft

Submission + - Bill Gates Doesn't Work at Microsoft Anymore (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: The recent Fortune article on Bill Gates' post-Microsoft life made one thing very clear to blogger Steven Vaughan-Nichols: 'Bill Gates was, and still is, the face of Microsoft. What Microsoft doesn't want you to know though is that Gates has almost nothing to do with the company anymore.' The fact is that Microsoft doesn't want to draw attention to Gates' absence because the company 'has been tanking in recent years,' says Vaughan-Nichols. 'While Microsoft's last quarter was far better than it was a year ago, thanks largely to Windows 7 finally picking up steam, neither Microsoft's growth nor its profits are what they were like when Gates was at the helm.'
Privacy

Submission + - Coming Soon: Web Ads Tailored to Your Zip+4 Read (wired.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Your internet service provider knows where you live, and soon, it will have a way to sell your zip code to advertisers so they can target ads by neighborhood. If your local pizza joint wants to find you, they will have a new way to do that. National advertisers will be able to market directly to neighborhoods with like characteristics across the whole country using demographic data they’ve been gathering for decades.

Juniper Networks, which sells routers to ISPs, plans to start selling them add-on technology from digital marketer Feeva that affixes a tag inside the HTTP header, consisting of each user’s “zip+4 — a nine-digit zipcode that offers more accuracy than five-digit codes. Juniper hopes to sell the software to ISPs starting this summer, having announced a partnership with Feeva earlier this year.

Earth

Submission + - Corps' Response to Katrina: Oil Spills (blogspot.com)

wistlo writes: Matt McBride painstakingly documents multiple oil spills along New Orleans' lakeshore thanks to the US Army Corps of Engineers. The aggregate amount is far smaller than the Deepwater Horizon (probably less than a second's worth), but the story calls into question just how reliable the Corps' new drainage pumps would be should the city need them--especially since it was the Corps' flawed floodwalls that made the new Rube Goldberg pump setup necessary in the first place.

Submission + - Law school retroactively boosts grades (nytimes.com)

digitalhermit writes: A law school is retroactively boosting grades for current and former students in order to assist them in this tough job market (and to fend off some lawsuits from students). I wonder if I can get my former schools to bump up my GPA too?
Intel

Submission + - Intel says farewell to PCI bus (kingofgng.com)

KingofGnG writes: Soon another technology that in the past years dominated the always-changing universe of computer hardware will bite the dust. That’s the decision by Intel, the merciless executioner of standards which the company itself imposes on the market and that in the upcoming months will rule the end of official support for the PCI bus. Developed by the chipmaker in 1993, the PCI Local Bus standard has been implemented on all the motherboards for x86 and compatible platforms until 2004, the year when it passed on the baton to the younger and faster PCI Express technology.
Cellphones

Submission + - Sprint to begin throttling data this summer? (engadget.com)

suraj.sun writes: You know the fine print of your EVO 4G contract that gives Sprint the right to limit throughput speeds without notice? Skipped past that part? Well, consider this your unofficial notice.

If what we're reading above is accurate, then Sprint appears ready to introduce data throttling this summer. Where and how are the big questions.

The image above received from a tipster appears to have been grabbed from Sprint's own "The Playbook," though we have no way of confirming that at this time. It certainly make sense though given T-Mobile USA's recent move away from overage charges in favor of throttling.

Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/11/sprint-to-begin-throttling-data-this-summer

Submission + - Electric motorcycle wins race on Isle of Man (sustainablebusinessoregon.com) 1

SustainableBzOR writes: MotoCzysz, maker of electric racing motorcycles, made an international splash this week after winning a prestigious race for clean-emission vehicles on the Isle of Man: The TT Zero. The motorcycles, designed and manufactured in Portland, Oregon, contain ten times the battery power of a Prius.

Submission + - Out of control Job Responsibilities 5

greymond writes: I was originally hired as an Online Content Producer to write articles for a company website as well as start up the company’s social media outlets on Facebook and Twitter. With budget cuts and layoffs I ended up also taking over the website facilitation for three of the company’s websites (they let go of the current webmaster). During this time the company has been developing a new website and I was handed the role of pseudo project manager to make sure the developer stayed on course with the projects due date. Now that we’re closer to launch the company has informed me that they don’t have the budget or staff in place to set up the web server and have tasked me with setting up the LAMP and Zend App on an Amazon EC2 setup, which while it’s been years since I worked this much with Linux I’m picking it up and moving things along. Needless to say I want to ask for more money, as well as more resources, as well as a better title that fits my roles, but what is the best way to go about this? Of course my other thought is that I'd much rather go back to writing and working with marketing than getting back into IT.
Power

Submission + - ITER Fusion Reactor Enters Existential Crisis

deglr6328 writes: The long beleaguered experimental magnetic confinement fusion reactor ITER, is currently in what some are calling the worst crisis of its 25 year history. Still existing only on the paper of thousands of proposed design documents, latest cost estimates for the superconducting behemoth are soaring to nearly 20 billion USD; roughly twice the estimates of as recent as a few years ago. Anti-nuclear environmentalist organizations have seized upon the moment as an opportunity to use the current global economic crisis as a means to push for permanently killing the project. If ITER is not built, the prospect of magnetic confinement fusion as a technique to reach thermonuclear breakeven and ignition in the laboratory would be in serious question. Meanwhile, the largest laser-driven inertial confinement fusion project, the National Ignition Facility, has demonstrated the ability to use self generated plasma optical gratings to control capsule implosion symmetry with high finesse, and is on schedule to achieve ignition and potentially high gain before the end of the year.
Microsoft

Submission + - Project Natal Will Debut New Parental Controls (dasreviews.com)

sk8pmp writes: Microsoft is going to show off more of their Project Natal next week for E3 but some people have gotten their hands on it early. The word coming out is that Natal will use facial recognition to help parents monitor what games their child plays.

Submission + - Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: Far Worse Than Expected (nytimes.com)

Daniel P. writes: Apparently, the amount of oil leaking from the source is a lot greater than estimated so far. Recent numbers said that the amount of oil spilled would lie anywhere between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels daily. Those numbers have now been corrected and increased tremendously to at least 20,000 barrels, and up to 30,000 barrels of oil per day, according to The New York Times.

The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) even talks of up to 40,000 barrels a day (http://www.faz.net/s/Rub47C2F00B5F984DC2A4997324448B2EA2/Doc~ED1146D96CA1849D6B551FBD42C5AEF40~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html).

If those numbers turn out to be true, then the amount of oil spilled every week exceeds the total amount of oil spilled during the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989.

Software

Submission + - Apple Safari 5 Still Not The Fastest

adeelarshad82 writes: As most of us know that Apple released the fifth version of the Safari web browser a few days ago. Apple claims that the new browser's updated Nitro JavaScript engine runs JavaScript "30 percent faster than Safari 4, 3 percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6". However benchmark results using Sunspider and FutureMark PeaceKeeper show that while Safari 5 is much faster than the previous version, it is still not the fastest browser. According to the Sunspider test Safari posted a time of 580ms whereas Chrome 5 posted a time of 546ms. On the other hand, FutureMark's PeaceKeeper test showed that Safari 5 scored 2659 and Chrome 5 scored 3738.
Security

Submission + - AT&T bug discloses iPad owners' e-mail address (computerworld.com)

CWmike writes: A glitch in AT&T's Web site has exposed the e-mail addresses of more than 100,000 iPad users. The data was downloaded by a hacking group known as Goatse Security, which obtained the information after stumbling upon a program on AT&T's Web site that would send back the iPad user's e-mail address when given a unique SIM card identification number known as an ICC-ID (Integrated Circuit Card Identifier). By guessing ICC-ID numbers, the hackers were able to download 114,000 e-mail addresses, according to the Web site Gawker, which first reported the news on Wednesday. 'AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC-IDs,' AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel said in an e-mail message on Wednesday. 'This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses.' There are some pretty powerful iPad users out there, apparently. After examining the hackers' data, Gawker found e-mail addresses belonging to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and ABC News Anchor Diane Sawyer, as well as addresses belonging to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the U.S. military.

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