drc37 writes "My current boss asked me what I thought of asking all employees to work 10-11 hour days until the company is profitable. He read something from Joel Spolsky that said the best way to get new customers is to add new features. Anyways, we are a startup with almost a year live. None of the employees have ownership/stock and all are salary. Salaries are at normal industry rates. What should I say to him when we talk about this again?"

kkleiner writes "Move over Ben Franklin, we finally have a replacement for bifocals. Virginia-based Pixel Optics has developed a composite lens that can change the range of focus electronically. The emPower! glasses were created in cooperation with Panasonic Healthcare, and allow you to switch between long distance and short distance vision in a split second. Rather than having a lens divided into two sections, emPower! uses an LCD overlay that can change the focal length of the glasses via electric current. When the LCD layer is off, your lenses are good for intermediate/long distances. Turn the LCD layer on, and a section of the lens is suddenly magnifying close-up images – perfect for reading."

netbuzz writes "Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are among the major sites on board with what the Internet Society is dubbing 'World IPv6 Day,' a collective trial scheduled for June 8. 'It's an exciting opportunity to take IPv6 for a test flight and try it on for a full 24 hours,' says Leslie Daigle, the Internet Society's Chief Internet Technology Officer. 'Hopefully, we will see positive results from this trial so we will see more IPv6 sooner rather than later.'"

KidCompy writes "The newest browsers boast huge performance improvements, but how much do you trust benchmarks trotted out to prove those claims? Do they reflect the real uses to which developers will put HTML 5 and JavaScript? We've extracted several benchmarks from our existing programs to measure actual versus theoretical performance."

rsk writes "The first time I came across fake reviews on Amazon, it was hilarious. Using Amazon's Window Shop app, I came across a great category, 'Peculiar Products,' and was more than happy to look through it. Almost every one of the products I found on the list (Uranium Ore, 1 Gallon of Milk, Parent Child Test, Fresh Whole Rabbit) were fake, with thousands of reviews on them. As a shopper, I wasn't aware of how easy it was to apparently fake product reviews and it bothers me. When I'm shopping, the first (and a lot of times only) place I visit is Amazon to read the reviews if I'm in the market for something. I don't expect the reviews to be the word of God, but I do assume a certain level of legitimacy for most of them. While this won't affect my use of Amazon (especially not at this time of the year) I would like to bubble this up to Amazon's attention so some time is spent on improving the quality of the reviews."

chrb writes "Interpol have issued a wanted notice for Julian Paul Assange for alleged sex crimes. The Guardian and Wired both have commentary."

Trailrunner7 writes "A site belonging to the Savannah GNU free software archive was attacked recently, leading to a compromise of encrypted passwords and enabling the attackers to access restricted project material. The compromise was the result of a SQL injection attack against the savannah.gnu.org site within the last couple of days and the site is still offline now. A notice on the site says that the group has finished the process of restoring all of the data from a clean backup and bringing up access to some resources, but is still in the middle of adjusting its security settings."

jhigh writes "With the launch of the new Facebook messaging system designed to encourage account holders to utilize Facebook for all of their messaging needs, one would think that Facebook would recognize that it cannot continue to block content that it disagrees with. However, Wired reports that Facebook messaging, like the rest of the social networking application, continues to block links to torrents and other file sharing sites, even when users are sending messages via their facebook.com email address. Say what you want about the morality of using file sharing services to share copyrighted material, if Facebook wishes to become a player in the email market, they cannot block content."

Zothecula writes with this excerpt from Gizmag: "For almost as long as we've had computers, humans have been trying to make ones that play chess. The most famous chess-playing computer of course is IBM's Deep Blue, which in 1997 defeated the then World Champion Garry Kasparov. But as powerful as Deep Blue was, it didn't actually move the chess pieces on its own. Perhaps that's a trivial task in comparison to beating the best chess player of all time, but it's still exciting to discover this recent video of a chess robot that more closely fits the true definition of a chess automaton." My favorite part: "Note that around the 2:45 mark Kramnik extends his hand offering a draw, but the robot – since it's not fitted with any kind of optical device – just keeps playing, very nearly taking off Kramnik's hand in the process!"

Orome1 writes "The well-known whitehat hacker and security researcher who goes by the handle Moxie Marlinspike has recently experienced firsthand the electronic device search that travelers are sometimes submitted to by border agents when entering the country. He was returning from the Dominican Republic by plane, and when he landed at JFK airport, he was greeted by two US Customs officials and taken to a detention room where they kept him for almost five hours, took his laptop and two cell phones and asked for the passwords needed to access the encrypted material on them."

climenole tips a great article by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in Scientific American. Quoting: "The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles. The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments — totalitarian and democratic alike — are monitoring people's online habits, endangering important human rights. If we, the Web's users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want."

An anonymous reader writes "One of the largest meteorite impacts in the world has been discovered in the South Australian outback by geothermal researchers. It may explain one of the many extinction events in the past 600 million years, and may contain rare and exotic minerals. The crater is said to have been 'produced by an asteroid six to 12 km across' — which is really big!"

Timothy found a news report and a little video demonstrating the multi-touch capabilities of Ubuntu. It's attached below if you're curious what the new Unity Netbook UI is looking like these days.

ideonexus writes "Normally when we advocate Net Neutrality, we are talking about preventing ISPs from discriminating against content providers, but in this case, the content provider is discriminating against the ISP. Is this a new dimension in the Net Neutrality fight? From the article: 'Cablevision internet customers lost access to Fox.com and Fox programming on Hulu for a time Saturday afternoon — the result of a misguided effort on News Corp.'s part to cut off online viewing as an alternative in its standoff with the cable operator over retrans fees. Fox stations in NYC, Philadelphia, and New Jersey went dark at midnight Friday when negotiations between the two broke down.'"