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Media

The Unauthorized State-Owned Chinese Disneyland 746

Posted by CowboyNeal from the just-like-the-real-thing dept.
rmnoon writes "Apparently Japanese TV and bloggers have just discovered Disney's theme park in China, where young children can be part of the Magic Kingdom and interact with their favorite characters (like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the Seven Dwarfs). The park's slogan is 'Because Disneyland is Too Far,' and there's even an Epcot-like dome. The only problem? Disney didn't build it, and they didn't authorize it. What's more? It's state-owned!"
Microsoft

EU Rejects Microsoft Royalty Proposal 274

Posted by samzenpus from the no-money-for-you dept.
pallmall1 writes "According to MSNBC, The Financial Times has reported that the EU is going to drastically reduce or even eliminate Microsoft's proposed royalties on interoperability information required to be released by the EU's antitrust ruling issued three years ago. According to a confidential EU document, "Microsoft will be forced to hand over to rivals what the group claims is sensitive and valuable technical information about its Windows operating system for next to no compensation...". Even Neil Barrett, the expert picked by both Microsoft and the EU to oversee Microsoft's compliance with the 2004 ruling, says a zero percent royalty would be 'better.'"

Feed Verizon Wireless Slowly, Quietly, Backing Away From Misleading Claims Of Unlimit (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
For years, Verizon Wireless has been pushing its EVDO wireless internet service as "unlimited" -- but then cutting off users if they passed some unknown, unstated "cap." When pushed on this, a Verizon Wireless rep actually said "It's unlimited amounts of data for certain types of data." And... if you happened to go over a certain amount of total data, then they insisted you absolutely must have been using it for "other" types of data -- even if they had no actual proof. For a while it was thought that the cap was 10gigs, but later it was revealed that it was merely 5gigs of data per month -- which these days, really isn't all that much for some people. We've always wondered why no one ever hit Verizon Wireless with a false advertising suit over the claim of "unlimited," but it never happened. However, it appears that Verizon Wireless has been slowly backing away from the unlimited claim, and is now putting the 5gig limit into the terms of service. They still do use "Unlimited" in their press releases, but seem to be backing away from it in their ads. There's nothing wrong with limiting the total bandwidth that can be used, so as long as the company was clear about it. It's unclear why it took years for Verizon Wireless to decide that actually being (somewhat) honest about what it was selling was a good idea.
Google

Submission + - google wants you to swim across the atlantic

Submitted by
Robert
Robert writes: "Check out step 40 on these Google directions. Apparently they want you to swim across the Atlantic ocean when giving directions between continents. "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 5,572 km" http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=madrid ,+spain&daddr=new+york,+new+york&sll=-71.074056,-8 4.375&sspn=173.090734,360&layer=&ie=UTF8&z=4&ll=42 .488302,-38.408203&spn=48.515198,71.015625&om=1"
Encryption

Submission + - Seagate's Full Disk Encryption (FDE) hard drive

Submitted by
Doctor High
Doctor High writes: "Josh Kuo's article Seagate's Full Disk Encryption (FDE) hard drive talks about the pros and cons of using the new Momentus FDE notebook drives from Seagate. They feature hardware encryption of the entire drive, so it is an excellent security mechanism to prevent data loss in the event that the laptop itself is stolen. However, what about the inevitable lost passwords?"
Power

Submission + - New solar cells that don't need direct sunlight

Submitted by ultracool
ultracool writes: New solar cells developed by researchers at the Nanomaterials Research Centre at Massey University in New Zealand don't need direct sunlight to operate and use a patented range of dyes that can be impregnated in roofs, window glass and eventually even clothing to produce power. Researchers at the centre have developed the dyes from simple organic compounds closely related to those found in nature, where light-harvesting pigments are used by plants for photosynthesis.

Feed Kodak's cheap inkjet claims all talk? (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Peripherals

We were pretty stoked to hear Kodak was planning on running full tilt at the current status quo of "loss leader" printer tactics, that has unwitting consumers picking up inkjet printers for a dime, and spending a fortune on printing supplies. Unfortunately, it looks like Kodak hasn't come upon any magical printing techniques to pull this off yet, since its new printers didn't do so good up against the likes of Epson, HP and Canon. Kodak is marketing its printers as capable of producing 10 cent prints, which would indeed be a great deal. Tests show that an $18 pack of paper and ink results in about 165 borderless prints, about 11.5 cents per print. Unfortunately, the prints were basically "draft" quality, maybe fine for certain budget-minded consumers, but hardly comparable to "lab quality" photos. To boost the quality you'll need pricier Kodak paper, which ends up at about 35 cents per print, and renders the whole exercise pointless. The testers recommend the $150 Epson Stylus Photo RX580, for super good prints and great speed. Might want to leave that $200 Kodak EasyShare 5300 on the shelf for the time being.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Enlightenment

Submission + - Circuit City and the American Dream job

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Circuit City said yesterday that it had fired 3,400 of its highest-paid sales staff and will replace them with lower-paid workers, however the fired workers have a chance to apply for lower-paying positions after a 10-week delay, said the 655-store electronics chain based in Richmond, Va. Circuit City spokesman Jim Babb said: "This is no reflection on job performance,". "We deeply regret the negative impact. Retail is extremely competitive, and if we're going to thrive and operate a successful company for our shoppers, employees and shareholders, we just have to control costs." So work hard, become the best in your field and get fired so they can offer you a new job 10 weeks later at a lower salary. That seems to fit the American Dream?????
Space

Submission + - The Red Expedition to the Red Planet

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "After a three day meeting in Russia, a space agreement was signed by the China National Space Administration head Sun Laiyan and Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) chief Anatoly Perminov and witnessed by the two countries' presidents. From the article, "After entering orbit around the Red Planet, the Chinese micro-satellite will detach from the Russian spacecraft, and probe the Martian space environment, according to the statement. The Russian spacecraft will touch down on the Martian moon Phobos and collect soil samples for return to Earth. There was no mention of a timetable in the Chinese space agency statement. But earlier Russian reports said the launch window for the 10-11 month voyage to Phobos, Mars' largest moon, will be in October 2009." Will the cooperation of these two countries outdo the United States' plan for a mission to Mars?"
The Internet

Submission + - Do Online Petitions Matter?

Submitted by cybermage
cybermage writes: Snopes.com, the resource for ferreting out urban legends, has engaged in a bit of editorializing about the ineffectiveness of online petitions. Many petitions sites have sprung up that seem to be mostly geared toward attracting traffic to ads more than having any tangible effect; but, at the same time, efforts like DraftGore.com and petitions from moveon.org seem to be having some effect — at least some of the time. Is snopes right? Are online petitions a counter-productive waste of time? What have you experienced?
Operating Systems

Submission + - Dell Already sells pcs without M$ outside of US

Submitted by
Radeonic
Radeonic writes: "This is an interesting Topic that I've seen the most in slashdot.org, but in reality dell has in their website what they call "DOS ready computers" and the price is way lower than a normal dell. Only in desktops and in select sites. Here is an example (in spanish, dominican republic) http://lastore.dell.com/store/frameset.asp?c=do&en tity_key=DIMC521N_LACLCOMXPR&entity_type=model&l=e s&s=dhs&shopper_country=do&shopper_language=es&sho pper_segment=dhs&store_key=LATRANS"
Security

Submission + - TJX breach now worst ever: 45.7M numbers

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "While the TJX data breach case first made headlines earlier this year, it took recently filed financial disclosure forms from the company to flesh out the magnitude of that crime, which experts are now calling the largest of its ilk. "Considerable damage" has been done, says a Gartner analyst, and we can presume she's speaking of both the victims and the company. ... By the way, with 45.7 million to write, TJX execs had better get busy writing those apology notes, a genre that has become so common these days that, yes, there is a "best of breed" list available.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1306 7"
Communications

Submission + - Free GPS navigation for your mobile phone

Submitted by
Yoav
Yoav writes: "amAze is the first FREE GPS navigation solution for ordinary cell-phones. It's a Java application, small and easy to download and use, that works on most of the modern java-enabled phones.
Coupled with any bluetooth GPS device, amAze offers turn-by-turn instructions (vocal and graphical) for any route in the USA and Europe. The latest released version has, for the first time ever, the ability to navigate over aerial photos and a new enhanced economic navigation mode that reduces data usage to a minimum, while retaining the accuracy of maps."
Security

Submission + - Report for Britain's Security Vs Their Privacy

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "There's a new report (pdf) out from The Royal Academy of Engineering that "identifies likely developments in information technology in the near future, considers their impact on the citizen, and makes recommendations on how to optimize their benefits to society." What's interesting about this report is that people have been lead to believe that security and privacy are related and one must be sacrificed for the other to be improved but the report claims that isn't necessarily true. A notable excerpt from the report: "Trust in the government is essential to democracy. Government use of surveillance and data collection technology, as well as the greater collection and storage of personal data by government, have the potential to decrease the level of democratic trust significantly. The extent of citizens' trust in the government to procure and manage new technologies successfully can be damaged if such projects fail." This report seems to present the possibility of maximizing what trade-offs may exist between the two but with the citizen in mind, not the government. Novel idea — maybe the British government should listen?"

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