hasanabbas1987 writes "From the article: 'Well 'technically' they aren't the smallest fonts in the world as if they were you wouldn't be able to read even a single letter, but, you should be able to read the entire paragraph in the picture given above... we did. A Computer science professor called Ken Perlin designed these tiny fonts and you can fit 500 reasonable words in a resolution of 320 x 240 space. There are at the moment the smallest legible fonts in the world.'"

Mark Zuckerberg just held a presentation to unveil Facebook's "next generation messaging" system. He repeatedly drove home the idea that "this is not email," nor is it "an email killer." Their plan is to tie together multiple forms of communication — email, texts, social updates, etc. — and blend them into conversations. As users go about their days, interacting with a variety of devices, the communication method automatically updates to whatever is appropriate at the time. If a user receives an email while he's at a desktop, browsing Facebook, it will bring up the message in a Facebook chat window. If the user is browsing on a smartphone, it will bring up the message there, instead. If it's a dumbphone, then a text message can be sent. Another central feature is the idea that conversation histories from multiple sources and different forms of communication can be integrated through Facebook, so that you no longer have to separately root through IM logs, SMS logs, old emails, etc., to see old correspondence. (Users will have the ability to delete these, should they desire.) The last major feature they mentioned is what they call the "social" inbox, which is based on whitelisting. Users will be able to set up primary inboxes which only display communications they definitely want to see, while leaving low-priority messages, spam, and all the other noise typical to email in an inbox they check less frequently. The new system will be rolled out slowly over the next few months.

dasButcher writes "Viruses and worms get all the headlines, but poor password management is a worse problem according to a new study by Channel Insider and CompTIA. As Larry Walsh writes in his Security Channel blog, VARs and security service providers say they find more problems with password management than antivirus applications when they do security assessments. While password problems are nothing new, Walsh and those posting on his blog correctly assert that users remain cavalier about passwords and businesses are doing too little to address this serious vulnerability."

An anonymous reader writes "The French Assembly has rejected the Three Strikes bill (in French!) which would allow ISPs to cut off users found to have been downloading protected content after two warnings. Summary: the Sarkozy administration can go back with a new draft for approval by both chambers or try to get upper house approval of a softer version without the cutoff passed by the lower house."

jeroen8 writes "A Dutch guy was able to build his own solar panel in his garage using materials that were a third as expensive as the mass produced solar panels currently available on the European market. He bought his solar cells on eBay and used them to create his own panel. His output price is only 1.20 Euro per Watt Peak (Wp). This makes you wonder if we are paying too much for mass-produced solar panels, which should, in theory, be a lot less expensive than something you create in your garage."

walterbyrd notes that new data from Gartner indicates that the successful launch of the iPhone 3G was enough to push iPhone market share over that of Windows Mobile devices — the entire range of them. And reader Spy Hunter writes: "Seadragon Mobile is Microsoft's first iPhone application. Seadragon is a technology for streaming zoomable user interfaces, and this iPhone incarnation allows viewing huge collections of gigapixel-sized images over WiFi or 3G. If you don't have an iPhone, you can also try Seadragon in your browser via Seadragon Ajax."

thepacketmaster writes "A previous Slashdot article I posted mentioned the possibility of Stephen Hawking coming to Canada. The Toronto Star now reports that he has accepted the position. Hawking will hold the title of distinguished research chair at the prestigious Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics."

bxwatso writes "My niece just took the ACT and got a perfect score on the math section. 25 years ago, when I took the test, the kids who aced the math section were pretty special. Her score, combined with straight A's so far in high school, suggest to me that she might be able to go to a top university (MIT?) based on her math aptitude. The rub is that she doesn't like math or science, even though she finds them easy. She doesn't want to be an engineer or scientist. I thought the folks here would be a great group to ask: What are some creative, not too nerdy professions that nonetheless require a talent for math, engineering, or science?"

1sockchuck writes "All your online data doesn't really live in a big, fluffy cloud. It resides in servers and data centers. That's why Amazon.com is quietly building a large data center complex in Oregon along the Columbia River, not far from Google's secret data lair in The Dalles. Amazon Web Services started as a way to monetize excess data center capacity for its retail operation, but has grown to the point where it requires dedicated infrastructure. Amazon recently said that its S3 cloud storage service is hosting 29 billion objects."

After Joe Wurzelbacher of Ohio gained fame as "Joe the Plumber" in the course of the current presidential campaign, it seems that he's drawn more than idle curiosity from people with access to what should probably be confidential information. An anonymous reader writes with a story from The Columbus Dispatch that "government insiders accessed Joe the Plumber's records soon after the McCain-Obama debate. 'Public records requested by The Dispatch disclose that information on Wurzelbacher's driver's license or his sport-utility vehicle was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database three times shortly after the debate. Information on Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.' Welcome to 1984."

Science News reports on a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters in which an international team of researchers describes their computer simulation of the most violent collision imaginable: two black holes colliding head-on at nearly light-speed. Even in this extreme scenario, Roger Penrose's weak cosmic censorship hypothesis seems to hold — the resulting black hole (after the gravitational waves have died down) retains its event horizon. "Mathematically, 'naked' singularities, or those without event horizons, can exist, but physicists wouldn't know what to make of them. All known mechanisms for the formation of singularities also create an event horizon, and Penrose conjectured that there must be some physical principle — a 'cosmic censor' — that forbids singularity nakedness ..."

mjasay writes "Is Google making us stupid? Following a growing body of research within neuroscience, Carr argues that as we use the Web 'we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.' This sounds great: Who wouldn't want to have the 'recall' capacity of Google? But, as Carr writes: 'The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. ... The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image.' In other words, as we 'go online' in increasing numbers and to an increasing degree, are we losing our ability to think coherently and deeply, preferring instead to process byte-sized information quickly, regurgitate 140-character 'tweets,' and skim thought? Is the concern overblown, or are we becoming the Web that we created?"