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Comment Legislators (Score 1) 355

You can always reach out to your legislators office. Give them a list of the executive branch agencies that aren't responding to your requests. (Especially since congress isn't happy with the FCC right now). There is nothing they love more than to have a reason to squeeze executive agencies and the agencies generally respond to questions from congressional offices. Nobody wants to be called up to the hill for hearings.

Submission + - Norway's Army Battles Global Warming By Going Vegetarian - Vikings Appalled (dailycaller.com)

cold fjord writes: It looks like no more spam, spam, spam for Norway's warriors... at least on Mondays. The Daily Caller reports, "Norway’s military is taking drastic steps to ramp up its war against global warming. The Scandinavian country announced its soldiers would be put on a vegetarian diet once a week to reduce the military’s carbon footprint. “Meatless Monday’s” has already been introduced at one of Norway’s main military bases and will soon be rolled out to others, including overseas bases. It is estimated that the new vegetarian diet will cut meat consumption by 150 tons per year. “It’s a step to protect our climate,” military spokesman Eystein Kvarving told AFP. “The idea is to serve food that’s respectful of the environment.” ... The United Nations says that livestock farming is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting meat consumption, environmentalists argue, would help stem global warming and improve the environment." — The Manchester Journal reports, "The meatless Monday campaign launched in 2003 as a global non-profit initiative in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University to promote personal and environmental health by reducing meat consumption. "

Submission + - HIV Tracking Technology Could Pinpoint Who's Infecting Who (vice.com)

Daniel_Stuckey writes: No man is an island, but evolutionarily, each person functions like one for the HIV virus. That's according to Thomas Leitner, a researcher working on a project aimed at creating technology for tracking HIV through a population. The technology, which is being studied at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, may allow people to identify who infected them with the virus, a development that could have major implications in criminal proceedings. “If you’re familiar with Darwin’s finches, you have a population of birds on one island and they keep moving and evolving as they spread to other islands so that each population is a little different,” Leitner said. “With HIV, it’s the same. Every person infected with HIV has a slightly different form the the virus. It’s the ultimate chameleon because it evolves this way.”

Comment Re:This is slashdot? (Score 1) 2254

Having the same issue in IE7 - yes. I know. It is the only browser my employer will allow because it is "secure". Hey, we only moved from IE6 last March/April after sites started banning it.

* the issue - can't see the stories (now on the far far right) because everything is on top of them.

Why no link to the old format?

Science

Antarctic's First Plane, Found In Ice 110

Arvisp writes "In 1912 Australian explorer Douglas Mawson planned to fly over the southern pole. His lost plane has now been found. The plane – the first off the Vickers production line in Britain – was built in 1911, only eight years after the Wright brothers executed the first powered flight. For the past three years, a team of Australian explorers has been engaged in a fruitless search for the aircraft, last seen in 1975. Then on Friday, a carpenter with the team, Mark Farrell, struck gold: wandering along the icy shore near the team's camp, he noticed large fragments of metal sitting among the rocks, just a few inches beneath the water."
Image

Passenger Avoids Delay By Fixing Plane Himself 178

It would be a shame if an engineer on a recent Thomas Cook Airlines flight doesn't get a complimentary first class upgrade every time he flies. The engineer was on flight TCX9641 when it was announced that the trip would be delayed eight hours, while a mechanic was flown in to fix a problem. Luckily for the other passengers, the engineer happened to work for Thomsonfly Airlines, which has a reciprocal maintenance agreement with Thomas Cook. After about 35 minutes the man fixed the problem and the flight was on its way. A spokeswoman for Thomas Cook said, "When they announced there was a technical problem he came forward and said who he was. We checked his licence and verified he was who he said he was, and he was able to fix the problem to avoid the delay. We are very grateful that he was on the flight that day."
Graphics

Submission + - ATI committed to fixing its problems with OSS

Sits writes: "While talking about the Red Hat summit Chris Blizzard mentions how an ATI marketing spokesman was on stage. The spokesman said ATI knows it has a problem with open source and is committed to fixing it. Does this mean ATI will finally resolve alleged agpgart misappropriation, fast track the release of open source 2D drivers on its latest cards while releasing specifications for its mid-range cards or is ATI only concerned with fixes to its binary driver to maintain feature parity with competitors?"
Media

The Unauthorized State-Owned Chinese Disneyland 746

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

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)

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.

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

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.

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

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Enlightenment

Submission + - Circuit City and the American Dream job

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?????
Intel

Intel Next-Gen CPU Has Memory Controller and GPU 307

Many readers wrote in with news of Intel's revelations yesterday about its upcoming Penryn and Nehalem cores. Information has been trickling out about Penryn, but the big news concerns Nehalem — the "tock" to Penryn's "tick." Nehalem will be a scalable architecture with some products having on-board memory controller, "on-package" GPU, and up to 16 threads per chip. From Ars Technica's coverage: "...Intel's Pat Gelsinger also made a number of high-level disclosures about the successor to Penryn, the 45nm Nehalem core. Unlike Penryn, which is a shrink/derivative of Core 2 Duo (Merom), Nehalem is architected from the ground up for 45nm. This is a major new design, and Gelsinger revealed some truly tantalizing details about it. Nehalem has its roots in the four-issue Core 2 Duo architecture, but the direction that it will take Intel is apparent in Gelsinger's insistence that, 'we view Nehalem as the first true dynamically scalable microarchitecture.' What Gelsinger means by this is that Nehalem is not only designed to take Intel up to eight cores on a single die, but those cores are meant to be mixed and matched with varied amounts of cache and different features in order to produce processors that are tailored to specific market segments." More details, including Intel's slideware, appear at PC Perspectives and HotHardware.
Music

Submission + - Musicians Ask to Keep the Internet Neutral

eldavojohn writes: "124 bands and 24 music labels are sending a clear message to keep the net a neutral place regarding traffic. The want to keep all traffic equal instead of allowing providers to charge a fee for certain pages to load faster than others. These musicians are the latest to join the Save the Internet campaign for internet freedom. They have friends in high places on this matter, however: "Rep. Edward Markey, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, said if Internet providers are allowed to start charging fees for preferential treatment then it will stifle innovation across many industries, not just music." I think it's obvious that musicians (especially independent & small labels) will find themselves with the short end of the stick if they are asked to pay a fee to have their music streamed as fast as larger bands or even corporations."

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