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Crime

Thief Returns Stolen Laptop Contents On USB Stick 352

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-been-a-pleasure-being-your-victim dept.
While it's true that Sweden is responsible for unleashing IKEA and ABBA on humanity, not everything they produce is terrible. Their thieves are some of the most considerate in the world. An unnamed professor at Umeå University received a USB stick with all his data after his laptop was stolen. From the article: "The professor, who teaches at Umeå University in northern Sweden, was devastated when ten years of work stored on his laptop was stolen. But to his surprise, a week after the theft, the entire contents of his laptop were posted to him on a USB stick. 'I am very happy,' the unnamed professor told the local Västerbottens-Kuriren newspaper. 'This story makes me feel hope for humanity.'"

Comment slippery slope (Score 1) 314

by Chaseshaw (#33901342) Attached to: Webvention Demanding $80k For Rollover Images
Small-time software patent holders should get together and sue Webvention, citing that they are seeking to destroy the ability to patent software by ANYONE through their overly-aggressive and overly-ambitious campaigns. I, personally, think that innovative ideas should be rewarded. But just as the pdf went public, there are some things that are too useful or too common to make claiming them reasonable. Companies like Webvention are going to be responsible for the death of software patents.

Comment Yerkes Dodson Law (Score 2, Informative) 547

by Chaseshaw (#31850060) Attached to: How Many Hours a Week Can You Program?
I'm in a very similar position. Coding something that is not interesting with a boss that hovers over me and thinks my productivity goes up if I spend an hour a day in meetings with her (she is not tech-saavy by any means and lacks any understanding of program developing). I'm pretty good at forcing myself to work, but end up with 45-50 minutes of good work in an hour. I chalk it up to the Yerkes-Dodson Law ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law ) which basically says productivity has an inverse-U shape as a function of creativity. If you're a grunt adding receipts you need pressure on you to do your job and get anything done, but if you are asked to solve a problem creatively using a computer (e.g. most software development--the path to the finished version is not always explicit), high pressure from above makes productivity go way down.

Submission + - Dyson launches the bladeless electric fan (ft.com)

Submitted by Chaseshaw
Chaseshaw writes: "Dyson claims the bladeless fan, which works by forcing a jet of air out of a narrow circular slit and then over an aerofoil-shaped blade, is at least as efficient as its bladed counterpart, more comfortable and much safer.Conventional electric fans have gone largely unchanged for years,” notes Mr Dyson. “The fundamental problem has remained the same for more than 125 years – the blades ‘chop’ the air creating an uneven airflow and unpleasant buffeting." Mr Dyson and his team of fluid dynamics engineers developed the technology behind the bladeless fan after studying the performance of an earlier Dyson invention, the Dyson Airblade commercial hand dryer that uses sheets of clean air travelling at 400mph to dry hands far more quickly and efficiently than rivals."

Submission + - An Einstein robot with human facial expression (ted.com)

Submitted by TEDChris
TEDChris writes: This short demo at the TED Conference caused enormous buzz. Hanson Robotics founder David Hanson showed how his Einstein robot could mimic his own facial expressions in unnerving manner. Is this paving the way to machines we think about in a very different way? The equivalent to forging across cinema's 'uncanny valley'? Or is it likely to turn out to be a dead end?
Science

Submission + - The End of Moore's Law (insidescience.org)

Submitted by BuzzSkyline
BuzzSkyline writes: Physicists have found that there is an ultimate limit to the speed of calculations, regardless of any improvements in technology. According to the researchers who found the computation limit, the bound "poses an absolute law of nature, just like the speed of light." While many experts expect technological limits to kick in eventually, engineers always seems to find ways around such roadblocks. If the physicists are right, though, no technology could ever beat the ultimate limit they've calculated. At the current Moore's Law pace, computational speeds will hit the wall in 75 years. A paper describing the analysis, which relies on thermodynamics, quantum mechanics and information theory, appeared in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

Submission + - Buying music online can cut carbon by 80%, study s (treehugger.com)

Submitted by hessian
hessian writes: A new report put together by Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University examines how environmentally friendly digital music distribution is in comparison to traditional methods. Turns out, carbon emissions and energy use can be cut by 40% to 80%, depending on a few factors, including packaging, shopping methods and delivery methods.
Internet Explorer

Submission + - Is OpenDNS safe?

Submitted by
Chaseshaw
Chaseshaw writes: "I'm sitting here in Los Angeles, and my Time Warner Cable's DNS servers are down...again. I called and they told me all of Bakersfield, Los Angeles, San Diego, and the desert cities have been down for four days and have no estimated date yet to come back online. Well, I have bills to pay, emails to check, and people to poke, so I've switched my router DNS over to OpenDNS (www.opendns.com). My question is: are the domain names provided reliable? I'm nervous signing into my bank accounts via information I received from an open source third-party software (at least if Time Warner messed it up, I could sue--here I have no recourse if it resolves the url to a phishing site). Does anyone have any experience working on OpenDNS, or looked into anything similar to this in the past? Should I worry about OpenDNS? (p.s. for the record, Time Warner Cable for SoCal is now flirting with dropping below 50% uptime for the month of February.)"

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