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Comment slow news day (Score 1) 355

Why not get rid of the International Date Line? That's more confusing than DST.

When I flew from Sydney to Papeete, I arrived the day before I left, i.e., departed 8:30 p.m. Sunday from Australia...arrived after after 10 p.m.on Saturday--the day before--in Tahiti with no reservations because my stateside travel agent didn't consider the International Date Line. She might be forgiven since that was before airline schedules were computerized.

Is there DST in Alaska, Yukon, Northwest territories? Lapland? it's light most of the time in Summer, and dark much of the Winter. DST doesn't make sense in central and southern Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas where it cools down to a balmy 105 degrees F. at night.

So, what are the complaints about DST? It was for farmers and factory workers, so they say, but farmers aren't thrilled about milking cows in the dark. Oh, wait, they have lights!

Comment Re:Apple == Stupidity Tax? (Score 2) 161

Perhaps that's so. Maemo, Meego and Symbian are better than both. I like Android devices because I can use standard cables and standard peripherals, mount it on my desktop and view/hack contents, instead of having to decrypt/jailbreak, etc. to get into an iPhone. Best thing about Android: No iTunes!!!!

Is there a stupid tax for Windows 8 phones? Nokia Lumia 521 far exceeds expectations, more so with Lumia 1520. How many apps do you need anyway?

Comment Twitter ban in Egypt caused revolution (Score 4, Interesting) 29

Tayyip Erdoan isn't stupid. In fact he's one of the better recent Turkish leaders, but he's a conservative [not crazy] Muslim.

He's not following events in Egypt. When Hosni Mubarak saw all the excitement about Twitter messaging, he banned Twitter to stop the tweets. So the tweeters did the best thing to get the word out. They left their homes and businesses to rally in the streets--real, not virtual interaction--since virtual contact was shut down.

That was the beginning of the "Arab Spring" and the downfall of Mubarak. Erdoan needs to be more confident about the future and stop listening to the religious conservative extremists, so he won't make all the same mistakes as Mubareak. Turkey is more forward-thinking than that, or at least it was, until Erdoan got spooked [stupid]. http://www.todayszaman.com/new...

Submission + - Price of Amazon Prime may jump to $99 or $119 a year (networkworld.com) 1

colinneagle writes: Perhaps investors have had enough, because when Amazon released earnings yesterday that weren't quite up to part with analysts' expectations, shares of the world's largest e-retailer sank by nearly 10%. Money-wise, Amazon raked in a profit of $239 million on revenue of $25.59 billion with EPS coming in at $0.51. The folks on Wall Street, though, were anticipating EPS of $0.66 on revenue of $26.06 billion.

Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak hinted during the company's earnings conference call yesterday that we might see an increase to the company's popular Amazon Prime service. As it stands now, Amazon Prime costs $79 per year and offers users free shipping on millions of items, free book borrowing for select Kindle titles, and last but not least, free streaming to the company's video on-demand service. Going forward, Amazon may increase that pricepoint to either $99 or $119.

That's a rather significant price increase, but it's important to keep in mind that the price of Amazon Prime has remained the same ever since Amazon first started the program nine years ago.

Submission + - Signs point to XKCD's time ending

CaptSlaq writes: According to the current imagery, it looks like Randal Munroe has finished the story he was telling with the Time series. The long running series that has spanned over 3000 images and spawned multiple methods of viewing and comment appears to have come to an end.

Submission + - U.S. Government Data Center Count Rises to 7,000

miller60 writes: The U.S. government keeps finding more data centers. Federal agencies have about 7,000 data centers, according to the latest stats from the ongoing IT consolidation process. The number started at 432 in 1999, but soon began to rise as agencies found more facilities, and exploded once the Obama administration decided to include server closets as well as dedicated data centers. The latest estimate is more than double the 3,300 facilities the government thought it had last year. The process has led to the closure of 484 data centers thus far, with another 855 planned over the next year. The GAO continues to call for the process to look beyond the number of facilities and focus on savings.

Submission + - Hackers Reveal Nasty New Car Attacks (forbes.com)

schwit1 writes: Stomping on the brakes of a 3,500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop–or even slow down–produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV’s chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets–along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat.

Luckily, all of this is happening at less than 5mph. So the Escape merely plows into a stand of 6-foot-high weeds growing in the abandoned parking lot of a South Bend, Ind. strip mall that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have chosen as the testing grounds for the day’s experiments, a few of which are shown in the video below. (When Miller discovered the brake-disabling trick, he wasn’t so lucky: The soccer-mom mobile barreled through his garage, crushing his lawn mower and inflicting $150 worth of damage to the rear wall.)

The duo plans to release their findings and the attack software they developed at the hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas next month–the better, they say, to help other researchers find and fix the auto industry’s security problems before malicious hackers get under the hoods of unsuspecting drivers.

Submission + - Why Netflix is one of the most important cloud computing companies (networkworld.com)

Brandon Butler writes: Netflix, yes the video rental company Netflix, is changing the cloud game. During the past two years the company has pulled back the curtains through its Netflix OSS program to provide a behind-the-scenes look into how it runs one of the largest deployments of Amazon Web Services cloud-based resources. In doing so, the company is creating tools that can be used by both entire business-size scale cloud deployments and even smaller test environments. The Simian Army, for example randomly kills off VMs or entire availability zones in Amazon's cloud to test fault tolerance, Asgard is a cloud resource dashboard and Lipstick on (Apache) Pig, is a data visualization tool for the Hadoop program; there are dozens of others that help deploy, manage and monitor the tens of thousands of VM instances the company company can be running at any single time. Netflix is also creating a cadre of developers who are experts in managing cloud deployments, and already its former employees are popping up at other companies to bring their expertise on how to run a large-scale cloud resources. Meanwhile, Netflix does this all in AWS’s cloud, which raises some questions of how good of a job it’s actually doing when it can be massively impacted by cloud outages, such as the one on Christmas Eve last year that brought down Netflix's services but, interestingly, not Amazon’s own video streaming system, which is a competitor to the company.

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