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Comment Re:This is kind of stupid/obvious (Score 1) 638

by Tideflat (#35922102) Attached to: Mac Users More Liberal Than Windows Users
Software isn't everything. The hardware is fairly "walled garden", one can't just buy any 86x computer, and install MacOSX on it. One has to buy the computer from Apple. Windows can be installed on (or bought) a extremely high number of computers compared to MacOSX. It can even be installed on computers that one builds from parts from entirely different manufacturers. (Linux can do this all to and even more.)
Government

Submission + - Utah Repeals Anti-Transparency Law (sltrib.com)

Submitted by oddjob1244
oddjob1244 writes: After enduring two weeks of public fury, Utah lawmakers voted Friday to repeal a bill that would have restricted public access to government records. While Senate President Michael Waddoups accused the media of lobbying on the issue and others blamed the press for biased coverage that turned citizens against them, Sen. Steve Urquhart said bluntly: "We messed up. It is nobody's fault but our's."

Michael Waddoups is indirectly blaming Slashdot from previous media coverage: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/23/202234/Utah-Works-To-Repeal-Anti-Transparency-Law and http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/15/1647251/Utah-Governor-Honored-With-Blackhole-Award
Idle

Submission + - Ohio man gets a $16.4 million cable bill (yahoo.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: You may have heard the story about the man living in a 14x60 trailer who got a $12,864 electric bill, or the Corpus Christie man who was billed $7.7 million by his water company, or the Canadian whose cell phone provider hit him up for $85,000...

In this case an Ohio man's attempt to make a payment on his cable bill to Time Warner was rejected, and he learned that the company had calculated his past-due amount at more than $16 million.
Firefox

Submission + - Investigating the Performance of Firefox 4 and IE9 (mozillazine.org)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan has posted an article on his blog in which he investigates the performance differences between Firefox 4 and IE9. He writes, 'As I explained in my last post, Microsoft's PR about "full hardware acceleration" is a myth. But it's true that some graphics benchmarks consistently report better scores for IE9 than for Firefox, so over the last few days I've been looking into that. Below I'll explain the details [of] what I've found about various commonly-cited benchmarks, but the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox (as Microsoft would have you believe).'
Education

Submission + - Falling Demand for Brains?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times that information technology seems to be reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers (reg. may be required), because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing. One good recent example is how software is replacing the teams of lawyers who used to do document research. “From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” says Bill Herr, a lawyer at a major chemical company who used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.” If true this raises a number of interesting questions. "One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that the big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war," writes Krugman. "Another is how we [can] have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can’t command a middle-class income." Remember the Luddites weren’t the poorest of the poor, they were skilled artisans whose skills had suddenly been devalued by new technology."
Cellphones

Submission + - Taxes on Cell Phones Hit All-Time High

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: As the breakdown of top ten states with the higest and lowest taxes shows, the wireless consumers in Nebraska, Washington, and New York pay more than 20 percent of their wireless bills in taxes and fees, mostly due to the proliferation of archaic or duplicated surcharges.Experts from KSE Partners spent five years monitoring the federal, state, and local taxes imposed on wireless consumers. According to their analysis wireless taxes grew three times faster than the retail sales rate between 2007 and 2010. The reason behind this is that legislators and Congressmen are targeting the wireless industry for tax money to relieve the burden from more recession-starved industries. Infact a few states even tax wireless consumers for non wireless-related projects, for instance Utah funds its poison-control centers with a poison-control surcharge found on wireless bills, and in 2009 Wisconsin imposed a police and fire protection fee to subsidize local departments.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft's New Plan For Keeping the Internet Safe (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney used to think it was the responsibility of ISPs to keep hacked PCs off the Internet. Now, he says the burden should be on consumers. Speaking at the RSA Conference, Charney suggested that the solution may be for consumers to share trusted certificates about the health of their personal computer: 'The user remains in control. The user can say I don't want to pass a health certificate,' he said 'There may be consequences for that decision, but you can do it.'
Censorship

The Companies Who Support Censoring the Internet 299

Posted by samzenpus from the list-you-don't-want-to-be-on dept.
RichiH writes "From Techdirt: 'A group of companies sent a letter to to Attorney General Eric Holder and ICE boss John Morton (with cc's to VP Joe Biden, Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano, IP Czar Victoria Espinel, Rep. Lamar Smith, Rep. John Conyers, Senator Patrick Leahy and Senator Charles Grassley), supporting the continued seizure of domain names they don't like, as well as the new COICA censorship bill, despite the serious Constitutional questions raised about how such seizures violate due process and free speech principles.' A full list of companies who you might want to avoid buying from is included, as well."
NASA

US Supreme Court Says NASA Background Checks OK 172

Posted by samzenpus from the tell-us-everything dept.
coondoggie writes "In a long-running dispute about privacy and security, the US Supreme Court today sided with NASA saying its background checks were not invasive and that the information required for not only NASA but most government positions was a reasonable security precaution and that sufficient privacy safeguards existed to prevent any improper disclosures. You may recall that in this case, 28 scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory filed suit against the US government and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2007 saying that NASA's invasive background investigations as required by government regulations [inappropriately violate workers' privacy]."

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