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The Least They Could Do: Amazon Charges 1 Cent To Meet French Free Shipping Ban 309

Posted by timothy from the not-a-sou-more dept.
Last year, we mentioned that the French government was unhappy with Amazon for offering better prices than the French competition, and strongly limited the amount by which retailers can discount books. Last month, the French parliament also passed a law banning free delivery of books. Ars Technica reports that Amazon has responded with a one-penny shipping rate on the orders that would previously have shipped free. Says the article: This is by no means the first time France has tried to put a damper on major US tech companies dabbling in books or other reading materials. In 2011, the country updated an old law related to printed books that then allowed publishers to impose set e-book pricing on Apple and others. And in 2012, there was the very public dispute between French lawmakers and Google over the country's desire to see French media outlets paid for having their content pop up in search results. At least for now with this most recent situation, an online giant has found a relatively quick and easy way to regain the upperhand.

Comment Re:Unfortunately, UK has become Uncle Sam's lapdog (Score 1) 1065

by Nex (#41006889) Attached to: UK Authorities Threaten To Storm Ecuadorian Embassy To Arrest Julian Assange

Cooperation between two allies against somebody who put lives in jeapordy? Don't forget Assange is just as much against the UK as he is the US.

As for the 'storming' mention, it's never going to happen because the UK is not Iran. What is going to probably happen is that Assange will be taken when he leaves that embassy. Nex

Comment Re:But what use would I have for it? (Score 1) 266

by Nex (#38592206) Attached to: FreeDOS 1.1 Released

Boards back in the day were pretty-much divided into two kinds, or a mixture of them: download boards and conversation, or convo boards. I used both, but hosted a purely convo board for 8 years (Walden Commune BBS in Montreal) back in the 80's mostly. I think the first poster's nostalgia concerned boards with lively message bases, while you're talking about download boards. Most had both, but they usually ended-up being either one or the other. Nex
Science

Submission + - Easily Distracted People May Have Too Much Brain (gizmodo.com) 1

Submitted by
fysdt
fysdt writes: "Those who are easily distracted from the task in hand may have "too much brain".

So says Ryota Kanai and his colleagues at University College London, who found larger than average volumes of grey matter in certain brain regions in those whose attention is readily diverted.

To investigate distractibility, the team compared the brains of easy and difficult-to-distract individuals.

They assessed each person's distractibility by quizzing them about how often they fail to notice road signs, or go into a supermarket and become sidetracked to the point that they forget what they came in to buy. The most distractible individuals received the highest score."
Image

"Farming" Amoebas Discovered 49

Posted by samzenpus from the rise-of-amoeba-agriculture dept.
Researchers from Rice University have found a type of amoeba that practices a sort of "primitive farming behavior." When their bacteria food become scarce, the Dictyostelium discoideum will group together and form a "fruiting body" that will disperse bacteria spores to a new area. From the article: "The behavior falls short of the kind of 'farming' that more advanced animals do; ants, for example, nurture a single fungus species that no longer exists in the wild. But the idea that an amoeba that spends much of its life as a single-celled organism could hold short of consuming a food supply before decamping is an astonishing one. More than just a snack for the journey of dispersal, the idea is that the bacteria that travel with the spores can 'seed' a new bacterial colony, and thus a food source in case the new locale should be lacking in bacteria." It's good to know that even a single celled creature is not immune to the pull of Farmville.
Facebook

How Zynga's CityVille Drew 70 Million Players In Less Than a Month 101

Posted by Soulskill from the none-of-us-are-as-dumb-as-all-of-us dept.
An article at Gamasutra takes an in-depth look at how Zynga's new browser-based social game CityVille managed to accumulate tens of millions of players in the relatively short time since its launch early this month. Quoting: "The Facebook interface induces a high degree of user blindness. It does not do a great job of exposing new games and applications, and lacks a directory or a 'Featured in the App Store' style of editorial (as Apple does for the iPhone), which means that for most developers there are huge problems in getting their games in front of users' eyeballs. With all of the free advertising channels on the platform now constrained or dead, this has meant that the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape. Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default."
Microsoft

ITC Investigates Xbox 360 After Motorola Complaint 71

Posted by Soulskill from the papers-please dept.
FlorianMueller writes "The US International Trade Commission, which is increasingly popular as a patent enforcement agency, voted to investigate a complaint filed by Motorola against Microsoft last month. Motorola claims that the Xbox infringes five of its patents. In October, Microsoft complained against Motorola, alleging patent infringement by its Android-based smartphones. Apple, Nokia and HTC are also involved with ITC investigations as complainants and respondents. A new one-page overview document shows the ongoing ITC investigations related to smartphones and the products that the complainants would like to have banned from entry into the US market. The good news is that any import bans won't be ordered until long after Christmas. The ITC is faster than courts, but not that fast."
Image

Air Force Sonic Booms Ignite Crocodiles' Sex Drives 61

Posted by samzenpus from the making-beautiful-booms-together dept.
It turns out the key to a male crocodile's heart is a sonic boom. Crocodiles at an Israeli farm have begun making mating calls in response to sonic booms created by air force planes breaking the sound barrier. From the article: "The males have already begun their mating calls, described by the newspaper as 'the sound a vehicle breaking,' normally reserved for the crocodiles' spring mating season, Israeli newspaper Maariv reported. David Golan of the Hamat Gadar crocodile farm in the Golan Heights, believes the reptiles were responding to the sonic booms, wrongly believing they were the calls of rival males encroaching on their territory
Earth

First Measurement of Magnetic Field In Earth's Core 34

Posted by timothy from the best-place-to-try-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A University of California, Berkeley, geophysicist has made the first-ever measurement of the strength of the magnetic field inside Earth's core, 1,800 miles underground. The magnetic field strength is 25 Gauss, or 50 times stronger than the magnetic field at the surface that makes compass needles align north-south. Though this number is in the middle of the range geophysicists predict, it puts constraints on the identity of the heat sources in the core that keep the internal dynamo running to maintain this magnetic field."

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