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The Internet

Submission + - California Assembly Approves Internet Tax (nbclosangeles.com)

Submitted by ClientNine
ClientNine writes: ...California could collect more than $1 billion a year by taxing Amazon and other online retailers if a bill approved by the Assembly becomes law. Assemblyman Charles Calderon, a Democrat from Whittier, says his legislation doesn't impose a new sales tax, but extends one that California should already have been enforcing. AB155 passed, 47-16, with the support of one GOP lawmaker Tuesday. It now heads to the Senate. Other Republicans rejected the bill because they said it would invite lawsuits, drive business out of California, and get the state entangled in the messy task of regulating the Internet.
Science

Submission + - Why We Have So Much 'Duh' Science 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Eryn Brown writes in the LA Times that accounts of "duh" research abound as studies show that driving ability worsens in people with early Alzheimer's disease, that women who get epidurals experience less pain during childbirth than women who don't, that young men who are obese have lower odds of getting married than thinner peers, and that making exercise more fun might improve fitness among teens. But there's more to duh research than meets the eye writes Brown as experts say they have to prove the obvious again and again to influence perceptions and policy. "Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you," says Ronald J. Iannotti, a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health. "There are some subjects where it seems you can never publish enough." Kyle Stanford, a professor of the philosophy of science at UC Irvine, thinks the professionalization of science has led researchers — who must win grants to pay their bills — to ask timid questions and research that hews to established theories is more likely to be funded, even if it contributes little to knowledge. Perhaps most important, sometimes a study that seems poised to affirm the conventional wisdom produces a surprise. "Many have taken the value of popular programs like DARE — in which police warn kids about the dangers of drug use — as an article of faith," writes Brown. "But Dennis Rosenbaum of the University of Illinois at Chicago and other researchers have shown that the program has been ineffective and may even increase drug use in some cases.""
Movies

Submission + - Poor Picture at Your Local Cinema? (boston.com)

Submitted by
The Hub
The Hub writes: "Have you ever noticed that the picture in your local movie theater is too dark or grainy? The Boston Globe does some good ol' fashioned investigative reporting to find the culprit. Apparently, the cause is linked to the fact that some 3D digital projectors require a technically challenging lens switch for 2D movies and sometimes it doesn't happen."
Idle

Submission + - Say what?! US fancies a huge metaphor repository (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Researchers with the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity want to build a repository of metaphors. You read that right. Not just American/English metaphors mind you but those of Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish and Russian speakers. Why metaphors? "Metaphors have been known since Aristotle as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (for example: The world is a stage; Time is money). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reveal how people in a culture define and understand the world around them," IARPA says."
Displays

Submission + - Glossy vs matte screens: PC industry out of touch (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "A survey of PC Pro readers suggests PC makers are out of touch when it comes to glossy vs matte screens. Almost three quarters of those surveyed said they preferred matte screens, despite laptop makers moving almost exclusively to glossy screens. Apple was recently the subject of an online petition to introduce matte screens in its iMac line-up. Why is the industry hellbent on not giving the customers what they want?"
Businesses

Submission + - Corporate Mac sales surge 66% (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by syngularyx
syngularyx writes: Mac sales in the enterprise during Apple's last fiscal quarter grew a whopping 66 percent, significantly outpacing the rest of the PC market, which grew just 4.5 percent in the enterprise.

The data from Apple's previous fiscal quarter was highlighted on Friday by analyst Charlie Wolf with Needham & Company. He said though he originally viewed success in the enterprise as a "one-quarter blip," it now appears to be a "durable platform" for Apple.
Idle

Submission + - Lego Super-8 Video Projector (peaceman.de)

Submitted by
dosh8er
dosh8er writes: "This is pretty cool. Other than the reels, lamp, and lens, Friedemann Wachsmuth built this fascinating (and useful) contraption from what appears to be common parts Lego Technic parts."
Android

Submission + - CyanogenMod: The History of an Android Hack (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Wired wrote up a pretty interesting profile on some of the guys who run CyanogenMod, a popular piece of Android modification software.
Sony

Submission + - Phishing site discovered on Sony servers (msn.com)

Submitted by mcgrew
mcgrew writes: An MSNBC article by Rosa Golijan says that a Sony site is phishing — or trying to. Modern browsers warn that it's phishing, and actually hitting the link gives a 404. But as Golijan says, "Sony's just not catching any breaks lately".

Why should they?
Games

Submission + - 10 Unreleased Video Game Consoles

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: It's been almost four decades now since the first video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, made waves in electronic entertainment. With such a long and varied history of video game systems behind us, it should be no surprise that more than a few consoles were planned but never made it to market. Even though concepts like Odyssey 3, Phantom and others were marketable, unfortunately they never made it into production.

Submission + - NSA CS man: My algorithm was 'twisted' by Bush (newyorker.com)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "Crypto-mathematician Bill Binney worked in the Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center at the NSA. There, he worked on NSA's ThinThread program; a way to monitor the flood of internet data from outside the US while protecting the privacy of US citizens. In a new interview with Jane Mayer, he says his program "Got twisted. . . I should apologize to the American people. It's violated everyone's rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world. . . . my people were brought in, and they told me, 'Can you believe they're doing this? They're getting billing records on U.S. citizens! They're putting pen registers on everyone in the country!'""
Networking

Submission + - How Windows 7 knows about your internet connection (superuser.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In Windows 7, any time you connect to a network, Windows tells you if you have full internet access or just a local network connection. It also knows if a WiFi access point requires in-browser authentication. How? It turns out, a service automatically requests a file from a Microsoft website every time you connect to any network, and the result of this attempt tells it whether the connection is successful. This feature is useful, but some may have privacy concerns with sending their IP address to Microsoft (which the site logs, according to documentation) every single time they connect to the internet. As it turns out, not only can you disable the service, you can even tell it to check your own server instead.

Submission + - Do Developers Really Need A Second Monitor? (earthweb.com)

Submitted by
jammag
jammag writes: "It was an agonizing moment: a developer arrived at work to realize his second monitor had been taken (given to the accounting dept., to add insult to injury). Soon, the wailing and the gnashing of teeth began. As this project manager recounts, developers feel strongly — very strongly — about needing a second monitor (maybe a third?) to work effectively. But is this just the posturing of pampered coders, or is this much screen real estate really a requirement for today's developers?"
Google

Devs Grapple With 100+ Versions of Android 386

Posted by CmdrTaco from the propagation-of-the-androids dept.
Barence writes "The scale of the challenge facing Android developers has been laid bare by Twitter client TweetDeck. During beta testing of its new software, TweetDeck encountered more than 36,000 testers using an enormous pool of 244 different handsets. Not only was hardware for the platform fragmented, but Tweetdeck had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android, highlighting just how muddled the market is for the open-source platform. The splintering of Android is making life difficult for app developers. 'It's not particularly harder to develop for Android over iPhone (from a programming standpoint),' said Christopher Pabon, a developer who writes apps for both the iPhone and Android platforms. 'Except when it comes to final quality assurance and testing. Then it can be a nightmare (a manageable nightmare, mind you).'"
Education

Proving 0.999... Is Equal To 1 1260

Posted by CmdrTaco from the nerds-like-math-right dept.
eldavojohn writes "Some of the juiciest parts of mathematics are the really simple statements that cause one to immediately pause and exclaim 'that can't be right!' But a recent 28 page paper in The Montana Mathematics Enthusiast (PDF) spends a great deal of time fielding questions by researchers who have explored this in depth and this seemingly impossibility is further explored in a brief history by Dev Gualtieri who presents the digit manipulation proof: Let a = 0.999... then we can multiply both sides by ten yielding 10a = 9.999... then subtracting a (which is 0.999...) from both sides we get 10a — a = 9.999... — 0.999... which reduces to 9a = 9 and thus a = 1. Mathematicians as far back as Euler have used various means to prove 0.999... = 1."

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