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Earth

Nuclear Energy Now More Expensive Than Solar 635

Posted by samzenpus from the sunlight-is-free dept.
js_sebastian writes "According to an article on the New York Times, a historical cross-over has occurred because of the declining costs of solar vs. the increasing costs of nuclear energy: solar, hardly the cheapest of renewable technologies, is now cheaper than nuclear, at around 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Furthermore, the NY Times reports that financial markets will not finance the construction of nuclear power plants unless the risk of default (which is historically as high as 50 percent for the nuclear industry) is externalized to someone else through federal loan guarantees or ratepayer funding. The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive, and the push from the US government to subsidize it seems to be forcing the wrong choice on the market."
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."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Fashion is free from Intellectual Property (learcenter.org)

Submitted by fjin
fjin writes: Site contains very prominently very enlighting video speak about Fashion industry, and how it is free of protection of Intellectual Property. Still it is very innovative, and money flow is orders of magnitude bigger than industries with strong IP protection. Can fashion industry be the model of really innovative and lucrative business.
About the site: The Ready to Share project explores the fashion industry's enthusiastic embrace of sampling, appropriation and borrowed inspiration, core components of every creative process. The event featured provocative trend forecasts, sleek fashion shows and an eclectic mix of experts from the fashion, music, TV and film industries.
Idle

Canadian Blood Services Promotes Pseudoscience 219

Posted by samzenpus from the type-A-negative-personality dept.
trianglecat writes "The not-for-profit agency Canadian Blood Services has a section of their website based on the Japanese cultural belief of ketsueki-gata, which claims that a person's blood group determines or predicts their personality type. Disappointing for a self-proclaimed 'science-based' organization. The Ottawa Skeptics, based in the nation's capital, appear to be taking some action."

Comment Re:I don't believe anyone cares (Score 1) 319

by fjin (#29881435) Attached to: Microsoft Opening Outlook's PST Format
"Being able to import it directly into gmail would be very useful." Install Thunderbird. Import Outlook mails. Setup second email address as IMAP to Gmail. then drag and drop from OldMail Inbox to Gmail Inbox in Thunderbird. Now you can read your Gmail, including old mails from Thunderbird And WebMail.
Printer

Submission + - HP Moving to Jumbo-Sized Ink Cartridges

Submitted by
writertype
writertype writes: "Hewlett-Packard said Tuesday that the company plans to completely overhaul its consumer inkjet printer cartridges this year, adding an "XL"-sized printer cartridge that will hold about the double the ink of the standard cartridges. The motivation is the 80-20 rule, analysts said: 20 percent of customers use 80 percent of the ink, and HP's losing money to the third-party refillers. We've got estimated pricing and page counts at PC Magazine."
Microsoft

Submission + - Vista's UAC Feature Not Secure

Submitted by asphault_jesus
asphault_jesus writes: Despite wide spread promotion of Microsoft's User Access Control security feature over over the years leading up to the Vista release, it turns out that Microsoft's Mark Russinovich has officially lowered security expectations by stating UAC doesn't enhance end-user security at all. Mr. Russinovich is quoted "malware can still read all the user's data; can still hide with user-mode rootkits; and can still control which applications (anti-virus scanners) the user can access."
Education

Submission + - Concise 9 page guide to slicing a layout in CSS

Submitted by
avengex
avengex writes: "A concise, 9 page full-featured guide for anybody who is interested in becoming a CSS web designer, CSS Slicing Guide teaches you how to take a layout straight out of Photoshop, or infact any graphics program, and turn it into fully standards compliant XHTML and CSS with superfast loadtimes."

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