Comment In other news: (Score 4, Funny) 406
AT&T buys all you can eat shrimp restaurant. Complains that it attracts too many fat people.
Comment Typo in Headline (Score 3, Insightful) 284
"Rare Earth Magnets" should read "Negligent Parents".
China Telecom Mulls Entry Into US Telecoms Market 161
hackingbear excerpts from a story at Engadget: "Instead of resting on its laurels as China's third-largest wireless provider, China Telecom is now looking to branch out into relatively uncharted waters — namely, the U.S. consumer market. ... The proposed service would provide customers with handsets that could be used in both China and the U.S., theoretically appealing to Chinese-Americans, students or businessmen who travel frequently between the two countries ... and would even consider purchasing or constructing its own network in the States,' with the 'capacity to spend 'hundreds of millions or billions' on stateside acquisitions.' At its home turf, despite being a state-owned company, China Telecom, along with China Unicom, is being investigated over alleged monopolistic practices by the Chinese government. The two companies would face penalties of up to 10 percent of their annual business revenues if they were found guilty of monopolistic practices. This is the first such investigation into China's large enterprises since the Anti-Monopoly Law came into effect in 2008."
Smartphones Can't Cure Acne, FTC Rules 205
jfruhlinger writes "Your smartphone can send texts, surf the Web, and update your Facebook page, so it stands to reason that it can cure acne too, right? Well, maybe not. Two companies that marketed acne-cure apps have settled with the FTC and have been forced to take the apps off the market. (Colored light can kill acne-causing bacteria, but needs to be much more powerful than what a smartphone screen can put out.) Almost 15,000 people bought the apps."
Spamming Becoming Financially Infeasible 212
itwbennett writes "Making money in spam isn't as easy as it used to be. 'It's not something financially feasible for anyone to even consider,' said Robert Soloway, who in his heyday made $20,000/day as a spammer. 'Spam — the Internet's original sin — dropped for the first time ever at the end of 2010,' writes IDG News Service's Robert McMillan. 'In September, Cisco System's IronPort group was tracking 300 billion spam messages per day. By April, the volume had shrunk to 34 billion per day, a remarkable decline.' Soloway says spam filters have become too good."
Supreme Court Rules Against Microsoft In i4i Case 162
CWmike writes "The US Supreme Court has let stand a $300 million patent infringement ruling against Microsoft, granting a victory Thursday to i4i (PDF), which filed the lawsuit back in 2007. The legal battle already forced Microsoft to modify certain functionality in its Word application in 2009, when the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas ruled in favor of Toronto-based i4i and told Microsoft to stop selling Word in the US. At issue was an i4i patent that covers technology that lets users manipulate the architecture and content of a document, which i4i alleged Microsoft infringed upon by letting Word users create custom XML documents. Microsoft removed the feature. 'This case raised an important issue of law which the Supreme Court itself had questioned in an earlier decision and which we believed needed resolution. While the outcome is not what we had hoped for, we will continue to advocate for changes to the law that will prevent abuse of the patent system and protect inventors who hold patents representing true innovation,' Microsoft said in a statement."
Comment Re:Somewhere in the back of the student fridge... (Score 1) 210
Was going to suggest down the back of sofa while searching for loose change.
MESSENGER Enters Orbit Around Mercury 108
krswan writes "From the NASA press release: 'At 9:10 p.m. EDT, engineers in the MESSENGER Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., received the anticipated radiometric signals confirming nominal burn shutdown and successful insertion of the MESSENGER probe into orbit around the planet Mercury.' If you don't know much about this little spacecraft, check out its website. Designed with a completely passive cooling system, it will stay at 600C on the sun side, but room temperature behind the sunshade. During its 6-year journey it used solar panels as sails, relying on the solar wind instead of thrusters to adjust its trajectory. Over the next year it will build a high-res map of Mercury, and maybe determine if there is really ice hiding within polar craters (PDF)."
Comment At work or at home? (Score 1) 252
At work, I'm still printing about the same, roughly a ream of archive paperwork per week from horrible archaic software which should have been replaced a decade ago.
At home I print virtually nothing, although since getting a new DSLR I have been using services like photobox for high quality digital prints if that counts?
Comment Re:yeah, that'll fail. (Score 1) 283
I have a whitelist (actually called Guestlist), which people have to be on for wall access. It works much better that way. I know who I can trust to put on it, no one from work is on there unsurprisingly....
Comment Missing Option: (Score 1) 500
Opium Tea.
Comment Twinkle twinkle (Score 1) 480
I have 2x 4U rackmount fileservers and a 16 port Gbit switch in my bedroom, the gentle hum of the server fans luls me off to sleep nicely. I rarely need to turn the radiator on in the winter either!
UK Royalty Group Wants ISPs To Pay For Pirating Customers 289
Idbar writes "A group representing British songwriters and composers will on Wednesday call for the introduction of a levy on broadband providers based on the amount of pirated music they allow to pass through their networks. Will Page, chief economist at PRS for Music, will argue at a Westminster conference that a piracy fee would better align the financial interests of internet service providers with rights holders at a time when the two industries are at odds over who should bear the costs of online song swapping."
Comment Re:And that means...? (Score 1) 204
Indeed, I remember playing Quake 2 on dialup with 150-200 ping... This feels like the service has been built with the assurance that the associated technologies that it's going to be relying on will have caught up by then. This type of gaming service might just about be viable in 3-4 years, but only to the city dwellers. I can't see it ever working properly out in the rural areas where carriers just don't see enough return against upgrades due to sparse populations.
Mozilla Updates Firefox To Appease FarmVille Users 220
CWmike writes "Just three days after adding plug-in crash protection to Firefox, Mozilla rushed out another release because people playing FarmVille on Facebook complained that their browser was shutting down the game. Although complaints about Firefox's quick killing of hung plug-ins were not limited to FarmVille, that game was the squeaky wheel that got the update grease. 'A lot of people play FarmVille. To ignore those people for any length of time could have a significant effect on Firefox's share of browser users,' said Firefox user Jeff Rivett on Bugzilla Sunday. 'The problem already existed, but the perceived impact suddenly changed, giving it a much higher priority.'"
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