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Submission + - Why Printers Get No Respect (wsj.com)

Submitted by Crash McBang
Crash McBang writes: Out of Ink, Out of Luck, Why Printers Get No Respect — Fussy and prone to paper jams, the printer has been trying tempers in offices and homes since the dot-matrix days when paper came in perforated accordion stacks. As other gadgets, from flat-screen monitors to wireless mice, have sprinted ahead toward gasp-inducing irresistibility, one electronic gadget has failed to thrill: the printer.

So, slashdotters, who gets more TLC in your corner of the world? The PC or the printer?

Submission + - Kickass Apt. vs. Persistent Microwave Exposure (slashdot.org) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am considering buying a penthouse apartment in Manhattan that happens to be about twenty feet away from a pair of panel antennas belonging to a major cellular carrier. The antennas are on roughly the same plane as the apartment and point in its direction. I have sifted through a lot of information online about cell towers, most of which suggest that the radiation they emit is low-level and benign. Most of this information, however, seems to concern ground-level exposure at non-regular intervals. My question to Slashdot is: should the prospect of persistent exposure to microwave radiation from this pair of antennas sitting thirty feet from where I rest my head worry me? Am I just being a jackass? Can I, perhaps, line the walls of the place with a tight metal mesh and thereby deflect the radiation? My background is in computer engineering — I am not particularly knowledgeable about the physics of devices such as these. Help me make an enlightened decision.
Movies

Submission + - Software Helps Roger Ebert Find His Voice 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: It has been nearly four years since Roger Ebert sadly lost his lower jaw and his ability to speak. But now technology is giving Ebert his voice back. Ebert sounded like his former self Friday during a taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the show's producer said. It was no medical miracle, but a demo of new software that used audio recordings of Ebert to create a synthetic voice that sounds like his own. CereProc created the voice for TV's most famous movie critic using mostly audio of Ebert's DVD commentaries on Citizen Kane and Casablanca. 'I dream of hearing a voice something like my own,' Ebert wrote last year, lamenting that past attempts to use computer voiced left him sounding 'like Robby the Robot.' Ebert's appearance on Oprah will air Tuesday.

Submission + - The School webcam spying gets weirder (tomshardware.com) 2

Submitted by
markass530
markass530 writes: "It seems that the Lower Merion schools aren't the only one with the spying capabilities that were apparently used in the current class action lawsuit. A reader of Boing Boing pointed out that PBS aired a documentary a few weeks ago called "Digital Nation." In it, vice-principle of Intermediate School 339, Bronx, NY, Dan Ackerman showed how he's able to remotely monitor students through webcam.

Ackerman demonstrates the webcam spying ability: "They don't even realize we are watching," "I always like to mess with them and take a picture," and "9 times out of 10, THEY DUCK OUT OF THE WAY."

Oddly there are no questions regarding student privacy, which is likely how the recent class action lawsuit came about.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/schools/how-google-saved-a-school.html?play

Skip to around 4:36 to see the remote webcam monitoring."

Submission + - Appeals Court Knocks Out "Innocent Infringement" (blogspot.com)

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: A 3-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has ruled that a Texas teenager was not entitled to invoke the innocent infringement defense in an RIAA filesharing case where she had admittedly made unauthorized downloads of all of the 16 song files in question, and had not disputed that she had 'access' to the CD versions of the songs which bore copyright notices. The 11 page decision (PDF) handed down in Maverick Recording v. Harper seems to equate 'access' with the mere fact that CD's on sale in stores had copyright notices, and that she was free to go to such stores. In my opinion, however, that is not the type of access contemplated in the statute, as the reference to 'access' in the statute was intended to obviate the 'innocence' defense where the copy reproduced bore a copyright notice. The court also held that the 'making available' issue was irrelevant to the appeal, and that the constitutional argument as to excessiveness of damages had not been preserved for appeal.

Comment Re:Sure it does (Score 1) 232

by Icarus1919 (#31211084) Attached to: Nintendo On the Hunt For More Scalps
I think it's pretty well documented at this point that piracy in most cases has at worst an only slightly negative effect, and in many cases a positive one. People who don't want to pay simply aren't going to, even if that means they just don't play the game at all. But people who do play, even if they pirated, may generate sales for the company through word of mouth.
Google

Submission + - Google attacks linked to top Chinese schools (nytimes.com)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.

They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.

Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan.
Power

Submission + - Bill Gates Backs Terrapower (ted.com) 1

Submitted by krou
krou writes: Talking at TED, Bill Gates backed a company (and type of energy) called Terrapower, which is essentially about getting energy from a nuclear reactor burning uranium-238 (depleted uranium), instead of the usual uranium-235, which constitutes approximately 99% of natural uranium. The whole speech sounded a bit like a sales pitch, but still interesting. Terrapower was set up by Intellectual Ventures, a think-tank created by ex-Microsoft chief scientist Nathan Myhrvold. According to BoingBoing, Bill Gates made the point that "the waste at [the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky] could supply the US energy needs for 200 years (woah!), and filtering seawater for uranium could supply energy for much longer than that". Gates claimed that they're going to need several billion in investment to get the pilot plant off the ground. He also pointed out that nuclear energy advancements such as this are the best answer to combating climate change.

Submission + - Are HR black-lists more likely for techies? 1

Submitted by Sunkist
Sunkist writes: The Wall Street Journal has an article on How a Black Mark Can Derail a Job Search. One of the interesting components of the article is that most of the cautionary tales and accounts involved technology workers, specifically mentioning programmers and software developers. Is this issue widespread among tech workers or is it just tin-foil hat, isolated-to-cranky-sys-admin-guy incidents?
NASA

Submission + - Obama's Space Plan - a Conservative Argument (associatedcontent.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: The Obama space proposal, which seeks to enable a commercial space industry for transportation to and from low Earth orbit while it cancels space exploration beyond LEO, has sparked a kind of civil war among conservatives.

Some conservatives hate the proposal because of the retreat from the high frontier and even go so far as to cast doubt on the commercial space aspects. Other conservatives like the commercial space part of the Obama policy and tend to gloss over the cancellation of space exploration or even denigrate the Constellation program as "unworkable" or "unsustainable."

Submission + - The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion (nytimes.com)

Submitted by azoblue
azoblue writes: Jaron Lanier argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract.

“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

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