gilgongo - Slashdot User

Submission + - Latest Firefox build passes Acid2!

Submitted by claar on Saturday December 09, 2006 @02:41AM

claar writes: The Firefox Acid2 bug (bugzilla #289480) has officially been marked as FIXED and VERIFIED, and merged into the official development build (to be part of Firefox 3). Hurray! Thanks goes especially to David Baron for his hard work on the Reflow Branch.

Submission + - Biodiesel banned in Texas

Submitted by

Alternative Energy

on Saturday December 09, 2006 @02:33AM

Alternative Energy writes: "The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) is set to effectively ban biodiesel in the state's largest markets. The problem, they say, lies with the fuel's nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions and their contribution to the formation of ground-level ozone in Texas' eastern counties. According to the TCEQ, biodiesel does not meet the stricter NOx standards recently imposed on diesel and alternative diesel fuels under new regulations. Efforts to clean up the air, led the TCEQ in November 2005 to adopt Texas low emission diesel standards (TxLED) in an effort to reduce pollutants in the state's smoggiest 110 counties. Texas' biodiesel industry — the largest in the country — suddenly found itself essentially outlawed after the standards went into effect."

Journal Journal: Yahoo CEO Speaks Up about Shake Up 88

Journal by cvos on Saturday December 09, 2006 @12:43AM

Yahoo has been under fire from loosing marketshare to Google and now MSN. Many executives have departed in the last few weeks, and Yahoo has received a lot of unfavorable press. Their CEO let out a (untentional) personal and heated response to media critics.

Semel's rhetoric goes to show how well-balanced he is: he's got a chip on both shoulders.

Feed BitTorrent's Move From PCs to TVs (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Friday December 08, 2006 @07:12AM

The file-sharing company swallows up one of its rivals in a bid to ease distribution of video and movies to cable boxes and mobile devices. Can the digital dream of peer-to-peer television become a reality? Analysis by Scott Gilbertson.

Submission + - Real Color TVs At Last?

Submitted by on Monday August 21, 2006 @05:11PM

eldavojohn writes: A recent discovery made by scientists could at long last bring us the full spectrum of color in our television sets. Currently, televisions are limited to the range of colors that can be produced by mixing red, blue and green. There are more colors than that, however, as the article states: "When pure white light from a light emitting diode (LED) hits the grate it is split into the full spectrum of colours like a rainbow produced by a prism. By applying different voltages to the artificial muscle the grate expands and contracts, causing the fan of split light to shift from side to side. Different colours can then be isolated from the spectrum using a tiny hole fixed in front of the grate. Adjusting the voltage across the muscle allows different parts of the colour spectrum to be lined up with the hole. "

Submission + - Police seize 6,000 gb of data in alleged plot

Submitted by on Monday August 21, 2006 @01:29PM

paddyxmurphy writes: The BBC is reporting that the British police have charged eleven people in connection with an alleged plot to blow up airplanes. What caught my attention was the report that the British police seized '400 computers, 200 mobile telephones and 8,000 computer media items such as memory sticks, CDs and DVDs' in 69 separate searches. The BBC is also reporting that police experts have removed '6,000 gigabytes of data from the seized computers alone'.

If defies belief that eleven people could have owned or exercised any degree of control over 36 computers and 18 mobile phone each. Nor do I see how they could possibly have created 6,000 gigabytes of plot-related data. What were the alleged plotters doing: building a particle accelerator, designing a factory to make a nuclear bomb?

I guess that the police have swept up every single computer-related item they could find that could have been used at some point by the alleged terrorists under some blanket warrant without having to justify each seizure. I suspect that the vast bulk of the computer equipment swept up by the police for examination has nothing to do with any alleged plotters let alone the alleged plot. This makes me very, very uncomfortable about the state of civil liberties or the legal protection of privacy in Britain today.

Submission + - BBC says Vista may help Promote Free Software

Submitted by on Monday August 21, 2006 @10:27AM

elzurawka writes: The BBC's Bill Thompson writes about how Microsofts efforts to keep Vista secure could help to promote free software. Locking down of the kernel among many other reasons could lead consumers to switch a more "democratic" model of software development, as opposed to putting "their faith in the 'benign dictator' approach to security."
From TFA:
"The release of Vista, the latest incarnation of Microsoft's Windows operating system, could mark the point at which the ongoing argument between two very different models of how software should be developed and maintained is finally resolved. "

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