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Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed 1352

Posted by samzenpus from the fair-balanced-and-simple dept.
A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!
Oracle

RIP, SunSolve 100

Posted by timothy from the to-the-moon-instead dept.
Kymermosst writes "Today marks the last day that SunSolve will be available. Oracle sent the final pre-deployment details today for the retirement of SunSolve and the transition to its replacement, My Oracle Support Release 5.2, which begins tomorrow. People who work with Sun's hardware and software have long used SunSolve as a central location for specifications, patches, and documentation."
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New York To Spend $27.5 Million Uncapitalizing Street Signs 322

Posted by samzenpus from the beware-the-big-letters dept.
250,000 street signs in New York City feature street names in capital letters only, which is not the national standard. Having no other issues on the table, The New York City Department of Transportation has decided to fix the problem and put up proper signs featuring both capital and lower-case letters at a cost of $27.5 million. The Transportation Department hopes to have the job completed by 2018 with 11,000 of the most important improperly capitaled signs fixed by the end of the year. Catastrophe averted.
Image

3 Drinks a Day Keeps the Doctor Away 470

Posted by samzenpus from the drink-em-if-you-got-em dept.
Nzimmer911 writes "Heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers according to a 20 years study following 1,824 people. From the article: 'But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that - for reasons that aren't entirely clear - abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one's risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers' mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.'"
Image

Lies, Damned Lies and Cat Statistics 175

Posted by samzenpus from the nine-lies dept.
spopepro writes "While un-captioned cats might be of limited interest to the /. community, I found this column on how a fabricated statistic takes on a life of its own interesting. Starting with the Humane Society of the United States' (HSUS) claim that the unsterilized offspring of a cat will '...result in 420,000 cats in 5 years,' the author looks at other erroneous numbers, where they came from and why they won't go away."
Privacy

Submission + - Facebook Adds Delete Account Option 1

Submitted by roseability
roseability writes: Facebook have quietly added the ability to delete you account. 'Deactivate Account', under Account Setting, has become 'Deactivate or Delete Account', and when checked it purports to permanently delete your account and all information you have shared. Facebook is actually willing to erase your data permanently? They must be counting on very few people doing so.
Open Source

Open Source OCR That Makes Searchable PDFs 133

Posted by timothy from the word-of-advice dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In my job all of our multifunction copiers scan to PDF but many of our users want and expect those PDFs to be text searchable. I looked around for software that would create text searchable pdfs but most are very expensive and I couldn't find any that were open source (free). I did find some open source packages like CuneiForm and Exactimage that could in theory do the job, but they were hard to install and difficult to set up and use over a network. Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface. Hope this proves helpful to someone else who has this same situation."
Data Storage

"Limited Edition" SSD Has Fastest Storage Speed 122

Posted by timothy from the genuine-leather-bits dept.
Vigile writes "The idea of having a 'Limited Edition' solid state drive might seem counter-intuitive, but regardless of the naming, the new OCZ Vertex LE is based on the new Sandforce SSD controller that promises significant increases in performance, along with improved ability to detect and correct errors in the data stored in flash. While the initial Sandforce drive was called the 'Vertex 2 Pro' and included a super-capacitor for data integrity, the Vertex LE drops that feature to improve cost efficiency. In PC Perspectives's performance tests, the drive was able to best the Intel X25-M line in file creation and copying duties, had minimal fragmentation or slow-down effects, and was very competitive in IOs per second as well. It seems that current SSD manufacturers are all targeting Intel and the new Sandforce controller is likely the first to be up to the challenge."
Google

Submission + - Yale Switching to Gmail, Not Without Opposition (yaledailynews.com) 2

Submitted by PwnSnake
PwnSnake writes: While it makes sense for small (and large) corporations to move to Gmail, something seems amiss when a top private university decides to hand everything over to Google. Although most on campus seem to welcome the change, several organizations on campus have joined forces to call for a transparent process and get students and faculty thinking about the downsides of the switch. The problem is choice (users can already forward mail to Gmail; it doesn't make sense to force that option and not have a backup or opt-out mail server).
Power

G.M. Opens Its Own Battery Research Laboratory 173

Posted by timothy from the under-pressure dept.
Al writes "Bankrupt automaker G.M. has taken a significant step towards reinventing itself by opening a battery laboratory in Michigan on a site that once churned out internal combustion engines. The new facility lets G.M. engineers simulate all kinds of conditions to determine how long batteries will last once they're inside its vehicles. Battery packs are charged and discharged while being subjected to high and low temperatures as well as extremes of humidity. Engineers can also simulate different altitudes by placing the packs in barometric chambers. The facility has also been designed so that engineers located in New York and Germany and at the University of Michigan can perform experiments remotely. Despite its financial troubles, G.M. has committed to producing the Volt and is already working on second- and third-generation battery technology at the new lab."
The Courts

Security Firms Fined Over Never-Ending Subscriptions 194

Posted by timothy from the crooks-v.-thieves- dept.
Barence writes "'Security firms Symantec and McAfee have both agreed to pay $375,000 to US authorities after they automatically renewed consumers' subscriptions without their consent.' The two companies were reported to the New York Attorney General after people complained that their credit cards were being charged without their consent. The investigators found that information about the auto-renewals was hidden at the bottom of long web pages or buried in the EULA."

Comment Where are civil liberties truly valued? (Score 5, Insightful) 814

by dd (#13137389) Attached to: British Police Demand Access To Encryption Keys
The real measure of a free, open and just society is how it behaves in bad times - not in good times. When difficulties arise and the authorities want sweeping powers to 'protect' the citizens, should the citizens give up important civil liberties for what is probably just an illusion of safety? When are you ever safe enough in these times? Maybe the citizens should stop and ask themselves how much they really value their civil liberties - just how far should you go? Maybe the citizens should not crow too loudly about how free, open and just their society is when they look back at how their country has behaved in difficult times..

Comment there is no MSN search engine (Score 5, Informative) 470

by georgescriban (#6779817) Attached to: How Objective Is Microsoft's Search?
Searching search.msn.com for "linux" will really highlight the weakness of MSN's search features -- the results are actually supplied by three different companies, then stitched together.

MSN provides up to five "featured" sites for a search phrase, usually to companies that have marketing relationships with MSN (like Amazon or eBay).

Overture gets to throw three "sponsored" sites at the top of every page of results, so these are companies who bid to be shown for a particular search term.

LookSmart provides the "directory" results. Of course, you get into the LookSmart directory by paying a fee to have your URL(s) associated with certain (a) certain search phrase(s). In the case of a search for "linux", you have to wade through 400+ directory results before you get to...

"Web" results, which are provided by Inktomi. Inktomi's engine collects URLs in one of two ways: through a regular crawl of the Web (like any search engine), and through a fee-based "paid inclusion" program where companies can submit their sites through a direct XML feed into the Inktomi index.

At least, that's the way it works for now. Given that both Inktomi and Overture have been bought by Yahoo!, there's very little chance that Microsoft wants MSN to fatten a competitor's coffers. Microsoft's moving as fast as they can to get their own technology in shape to replace the outside vendors. But MSN Search isn't powered by Microsoft quite yet.

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