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Comment Re: Study financed by (Score 3, Informative) 285

I live in Chicago and have followed this story as it was happening. The yellow light time didn't decrease, just the time when the cameras went off. The government has a standard of 3 seconds for a yellow light, but it also has a legal limit do the variation due to hardware accuracy. That limit means that legally a yellow can go for 2.9 seconds (or something similar) to account for hardware that doesn't hit exactly 3 seconds every time. The red light camera company began using this slightly lower limit as their standard, instead of 3 seconds. That is what caused the increase in the number of tickets. When they got caught they admitted that the city asked them to use the lower standard and then it was changed. I believe the courts upheld the tickets that were issued in the end, since technically they met the federal standards.

Comment Re:This is different from what Facebook did (Score 1) 161

Actually, Facebook did the exact opposite. They specifically removed positive news from people's feeds to produce a negative affect. They were literally trying to make people unhappy. Also, "facebook wants users to feel happy" is not true. There's already been research showing that Facebook tends to make people less happy, and that less happy people spend more time on Facebook. Knowing this, it's in Facebook's interested to ensure people are unhappy.

Comment Will lead to higher prices (Score 2, Interesting) 437

Seriously people, the truth is that this is too good to be true. It's a short term solution for the record companies to take pricing power away from Apple. All they had to do was do everything Apple wanted them to do but with Amazon, who doesn't have the pull to make long term contracts for specific pricing. Now everyone's jumping out of iTunes and the record companies have bargaining power that will allow them to charge whatever the hell they want to. I know that the prices are all lower now, but it's just the introductory rate and they are sure to go up given time. Hell, gain enough power back in the online music industry and they can even slip DRM back in. That leaves us with an end game of higher priced music heavily controlled by the record companies.

Also, for those saying competition here is a good thing, remember that these distributors are running at extremely low margins. What they are basically doing is competing against each other for how much the record companies will give them out of the profits. They aren't competing for the consumer's money so much as for the record companies' money. All this does is give the record companies the power that normal competition should give the consumer.
AMD

Submission + - AMD's Radeon HD 2900 XT put through the paces

J. Dzhugashvili writes: The folks at The Tech Report have whipped up a detailed expose of the new AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card's architecture and features, with plenty of benchmarks to boot. While the card dazzles with 320 stream processors, a 512-bit memory bus, and oodles of memory bandwidth, its performance and power consumption seem disappointing in the face of Nvidia's six-month-old GeForce 8800 graphics cards.
Microsoft

Submission + - Why Microsoft Won't List Patent Violations

BlueOni0n writes: "Earlier today, Microsoft announced it will begin actively seeking reparations for patent infringement by Linux and the Open Source Community in general. One opinion on this issues is that it's fear of having these IP-infringement claims debunked or challenged that's keeping Microsoft from publishing these 235 alleged infringements to the public — and instead waiting until the OS community comes to the bargaining table. But a more optimistic thought is that Microsoft is afraid to list these violations not because it's afraid they're false but because it knows they can be worked-around by the open-source community — leaving Microsoft high & dry without any leverage at all."
XBox (Games)

Xbox Spring Update To Offer Codecs, MSN Messenger 207

adachan writes "It seems that Microsoft has decided to add Xvid playback into the upcoming Spring Xbox 360 dashboard update. Xbox.com has a list of all the upcoming enhancements to the dash. The playback of video using H.264 and mpeg4 codecs seems to be the biggest news for those using the system as a media extender. If this is indeed true, my Xbox Media Center will be used less and less." Update: 04/09 17:29 GMT by Z : MSN Messenger is kinda interesting as well. Several sites are reporting that instant messenging is being added to the Xbox Live experience, with a USB keyboard controller attachment to be offered sometime in the near future.

Feed Arsenic In Chicken Feed May Pose Health Risks To Humans (sciencedaily.com)

Pets may not be the only organisms endangered by some food additives. An arsenic-based additive used in chicken feed may pose health risks to humans who eat meat from chickens that are raised on the feed. Arsenic has been linked to cancer and other illnesses.

Feed Male Births: Decline In The US And Japan (sciencedaily.com)

During the past 30 years, the number of male births has decreased each year in the US and Japan. The decline in births is equivalent to 135,000 fewer white males in the US and 127,000 fewer males in Japan over the past three decades and suggest that environmental factors are one explanation for these trends.

Feed Researchers 'See' Brain Development (sciencedaily.com)

Large mammals -- humans, monkeys and even cats -- have brains with a somewhat mysterious feature: the outermost layer has a folded surface. Understanding the functional significance of these folds is one of the big open questions in neuroscience. Now researchers have developed a tool that could aid such studies by helping "see" how those folds develop and decay in the cerebral cortex.

Feed Cancer Research: Progress Against Sarcoma (sciencedaily.com)

University of Utah geneticists have engineered mice that can develop synovial sarcoma -- a significant early step toward developing new treatments for the aggressive, deadly cancer that most often kills teenagers and young adults. The genetically engineered, cancer-stricken mice were used to determine that synovial sarcoma develops in muscle cell precursors known as myoblasts, the researchers report in the journal Cancer Cell.

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