mackid - Slashdot User

Submission + - Jack Thompson sues Facebook for $40M (goodgearguide.com.au) 2

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Wednesday September 30, 2009 @10:03PM

angry tapir writes: "Jack Thompson has sued Facebook for US$40 million, saying that the social networking site harmed him by not removing angry postings made by Facebook gamers. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Thompson is best know for bringing suit against Grand Theft Auto's Take Two Interactive, Sony Computer Entertainment America, and Wal-Mart, arguing that the game caused violent behavior."

Journal Journal: Teen Falls Into Sewer Hole. Too busy texting to look out 1

Journal by Dr_Ken on Sunday July 12, 2009 @02:41AM

If you can't walk and text at the same time then you really should stop and just do one or the other.

Whether this was simply bad luck or a confirmation Darwinian evolutionary theories (i.e., the unlucky and/or maladjusted die off sooner) I don't know. I do understand it sounds cruel to some but you just have to *be here now* (IOW have some focus ) when you walk down a street.

Submission + - Hackers get serial numbers of new U.S. passports

Submitted by schwit1 on Saturday July 11, 2009 @11:50PM

schwit1 writes: Fox News has an AP story on a SF Hacker driving around and needing as little as 20 minutes to be successful in acquiring a passport number.

Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, his scanner detected, then downloaded to his laptop, the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" the identifiers of four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been promoting broad use of RFID even though its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy warned that radio-tagged IDs have the potential to allow "widespread surveillance of individuals" without their knowledge or consent.

In its 2006 draft report, the committee concluded that RFID "increases risks to personal privacy and security, with no commensurate benefit for performance or national security," and recommended that "RFID be disfavored for identifying and tracking human beings.

Submission + - Apple to Sell WiFi-less iPhone in China

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Friday July 10, 2009 @08:05PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Business Week reports that the Chinese government has received an application from Apple seeking a Network Access License to sell the iPhone for officially-sanctioned use in the country however the application is for an iPhone that does not include wifi connectivity, a sticking point in negotiations with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which wants the phone to only run on the cellular networks. "Apple was hellbent on having the iPhone be wifi-enabled," says analyst Matt Mathison. "The Chinese government has been just as adament that it not be." Dan Butterfield reports that for many years now, China ministry officials told wireless consumers that WiFi would not be allowed on mobile phones for fear that consumers might be tempted to illegally load VoIP apps and make calls over the Net undermining carriers' interests. However Glenn Fleishman says that China uses WAPI, a homegrown proprietary extension to Wi-Fi that only a handful of Chinese manufacturers have access to and that equipment made and sold in China must have WAPI support, and chips made in China. Fleishman speculates that China's WAPI standard contains backdoor technology to allow China to monitor any communications sent over "secure" links."

Submission + - Swine Flu Killing Obese People (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by

Philip K Dickhead

on Friday July 10, 2009 @06:43PM

Philip K Dickhead writes: "From the Super-Size-Me Dept: Bloomberg is reporting that the World Health Organization discovered a single, surprising characteristic that's emerged among swine flu victims who become severely ill: They are all fat. Infected people with a body mass index greater than 40 suffer respiratory complications that are harder to treat and can be fatal. The virus appears to be on a collision course with the obesity epidemic. WHO officials are gathering statistics to confirm and understand this development. "It's very likely that if we went back retrospectively and looked at people who did poorly during seasonal flu, what would shake out is that obesity would be one of the risks," Fat cells secrete chemicals that cause chronic, low-level inflammation that can hamper the body's immune response and narrow the airways, says Tim Armstrong, a doctor working in the WHO's chronic diseases department in Geneva."

Comment Re:Convenience vs Performance (Score 1) 199

by mackid on Friday February 22, 2008 @12:08PM (#22515470) Attached to: In-Home Wireless Vs. Mobile Broadband

Hmm, are you having capitalization issues..? You are not getting 2MB (megabytes) per second on UMTS/HSDPA. "Currently, HSDPA enables downlink transfer speeds of up to 7.2 Mbit/s," according to Wikipedia. 7.2 Megabits per second / 8 = 0.9 Megabytes per second = 900 Kilobytes per second is the fastest possible downlink transfer rate on any deployed UMTS/HSDPA network at this time.

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