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Comment Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score 1) 252

It's easy to turn instant off, but in doing that they've not made it possible to turn auto-suggest off like you used to be able to. That is one of the complaints in this thread.

The eternal cry of the power or semi-power user is that if you're going to add another feature, make sure you can turn it off. While granting this wish is not always wise, I think you should at least not remove previous options to turn other things off.

Comment Not a defense. (Score 1) 338

The argument by Roberti is not one of defense, meaning that Chris or others are wrong, it is one of problem-stating. Yes, these issues exist, but you simply target your attack/interest to deal with them.

The data on my mandated RFID passport isn't obscure and if you want it, you need only wait at the airport for me. Personally, I have an RFID-shielding wallet, but many don't.

Even for obscure information, there can be places where many people with such RFIDs come together - whether at the subway, shopping centre, airport, school, workplace etc.

Once you know where people will be, short range is a lot less of a problem.

Comment Re:Using a *NIX desktop would suck... (Score 1) 657

I used to run my Centos install as root, being a stupid windows user, and one day i was playing around in thunar (which actually has red bar at the top, to warn you not to..), and I accidentaly deleted my usr/var folder. In all fairness I learnt a lot about bash and the LFS heirachy trying to get back to Init 5 though, I think in the end I copied the folder over from a fedora ISO, still a bit glitchy to this day though.
Power

Data Center Power Failures Mount 100

1sockchuck writes "It was a bad week to be a piece of electrical equipment inside a major data center. There have been five major incidents in the past week in which generator or UPS failures have caused data center power outages that left customers offline. Generators were apparently the culprit in a Rackspace outage in Dallas and a fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle (which disrupted e-commerce Friday), while UPS units were cited in brief outages at Equinix data centers in Sydney and Paris on Thursday and a fire at 151 Front Street in Toronto early Sunday. Google App Engine also had a lengthy outage Thursday, but it was attributed to a data store failure."
Security

Sniffing Browser History Without Javascript 216

Ergasiophobia alerts us to a somewhat alarming technology demonstration, in which a Web site you visit generates a pretty good list of sites you have visited — without requiring JavaScript. NoScript will not protect you here. The only obvious drawbacks to this method are that it puts a load on your browser, and that it requires a list of Web sites to check against. "It actually works pretty simply — it is simpler than the JavaScript implementation. All it does is load a page (in a hidden iframe) which contains lots of links. If a link is visited, a background (which isn't really a background) is loaded as defined in the CSS. The 'background' image will log the information, and then store it (and, in this case, it is displayed to you)."
Google

iPhone App Causes Google To Shut Down SMS Service 420

An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago, Inner Fence released a paid iPhone app called Infinite SMS, which let iPhone users employ Google's free SMS gateway to send SMS messages without paying their service providers. The resulting surge in traffic on Google's SMS gateway forced Google to block all third-party applications from using the free SMS feature — including Google's own GTalk client."
Medicine

Asthma Risk Linked To Early TV Viewing 266

Ponca City, We love you writes "The number of children with asthma has been rising for many years. About 1 in 10 children in the UK develop asthma, compared with about 1 in 25 in the 1960s. The reason for this isn't clear, although several theories have been put forward such as keeping our homes cleaner, and having central heating and more soft furnishings where house dust mites can multiply. Now based on more than 3,000 children whose respiratory health was tracked from birth to 11.5 years of age, researchers have found a new correlation with young children who spend more than two hours glued to the TV every day doubling their subsequent risk of developing asthma. 'This study has shown for the first time a positive association between increased duration of reported TV viewing in early childhood and the development of asthma by 11.5 years of age in children with no symptoms of asthma in early childhood,' said the researchers, led by A. Sherriff, from the University of Glasgow. It's not clear exactly how sedentary behaviors like television watching are tied to asthma, but there is some evidence to suggest exercise and deep breaths that come with it stretch the smooth muscles in the airways, while lack of exercise may make the lungs overly sensitive. The results add asthma to a catalog of undesirable outcomes, including obesity, diabetes, smoking, and promiscuity, tied to TV viewing."
Software

Face Recognition — Clever Or Just Plain Creepy? 187

Simson writes "Beth Rosenberg and I published a fun story today about our experiences with the new face recognition that's built into both iPhoto '09 and Google's new Picasa system. The skinny: iPhoto is fun, Google is creepy. The real difference, we think, is that iPhoto runs on your system and has you name people with your 'friendly' names. Picasa, on the other hand, runs on Google's servers and has you identify everybody with their email addresses. Of course, email addresses are unique and can be cross-correlated between different users. And then, even more disturbing, after you've tagged all your friends and family, Google tries to get you to tag all of the strangers in your photos. Ick."
Programming

Submission + - Scripting in Commodore BASIC in Windows/Linux (pagetable.com) 1

SomeoneGotMyNick writes: "Someone with a lot of time on their hands (or more nostalgic than I am), had created a scripting language based on Commodore BASIC for Mac OSX and recently finished a version that works on Windows and Linux. You can pass text versions of Basic programs as a parameter to the program. I found it odd that it took 1.8MB of source code to compile to an interpreter that used to fit in 8K of ROM space. If this ever becomes very popular, how long will it be before we see Obfuscated CBM Basic contests?"
Science

Volcanoes May Have Caused Mass Extinctions? 210

Hugh Pickens writes "According to recent research, huge amounts of sulphur dioxide released by volcanic eruptions may have had more to do with wiping out dinosaurs than the meteorite strike at Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Marine sediments drilled from the Chicxulub crater have revealed that that the mass extinctions occurred 300,000 years after Chicxulub hit Earth. The Deccan volcanism was a long cumulative process that released vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. '"On land it must have been 7-8 degrees warmer," says Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller. "The Chicxulub impact alone could not have caused the mass extinction, because this impact predates the mass extinction."' Keller also postulates a second larger and still unidentified meteor strike after Chicxulub, that left the famous extraterrestrial layer of iridium found in rocks worldwide and pushed earth's ecosystem over the brink. But where's the crater? "I wish I knew," says Keller."
Communications

Submission + - Britain begins digital TV switch over in earnest (bbc.co.uk) 1

Alioth writes: "The long-anticipated switchover to purely digital TV began last night in Britain. Although digital broadcasts have been available for a while in most parts of the UK, they have been running alongside the old analogue frequencies. Last night, in the small hours, the analogue signal for BBC2 was switched off forever in the town of Whitehaven in Cumbria. Analogue signals are expected to have been switched off over the whole of the UK by 2012."

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