28039062
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Researchers in California have produced a cheap plastic capable of removing large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. Down the road, the new material could enable the development of large-scale batteries and even form the basis of "artificial trees" that lower atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in an effort to stave off catastrophic climate change.
27485552
submission
smitty777 writes:
The NY Times is running a piece on the tug of war between publishers and librariesfor e-book lending. With the In one corner are the publishers, who claim that unlimited lending of e-books "without friction is not a sustainable business model for us". For example, Harper Collins claims in this corporate statement that unlimited lending would lead to a decrease in royalties for both the publisher and the writers. The NTY author further states that "To keep their overall revenue from taking a hit from lost sales to individuals, publishers need to reintroduce more inconvenience for the borrower or raise the price for the library purchaser." Their current solution is to limit the number of readings to 26 before a book license must be renewed.
In the other corner are the libraries, who are happy that e-books are luring people back to libraries, bringing with them desperately needed additional funding. With e-book sales going extremely well this year and the introduction of more capable e-readers, this debate is likely to get worse before it gets better. The Guardian also has an interesting related piece on the pricing practices of the Big Six publishers.
27456400
submission
N!NJA writes:
My favourite fact of this past year was the proof that China makes almost nothing out of assembling Apple‘s iPads and iPhones. It’s a favourite because it speaks so directly to one of the great political arguments going on in both the US and the UK. I refer, of course, to this very strange idea that both countries would get (even) richer if only they would do more manufacturing. [...] If you want lots of jobs and lots of high paying jobs then you’re not going to find them in manufacturing. They’re where the money is, in the design, the software and the retailing of the products, not the physical making of them. Manufacturing is just so, you know, 20th century.
27447564
submission
Freddybear writes:
A study of online gamers in the Steam community finds that those who are friends with cheaters are more likely to begin cheating themselves.
"First up, cheats stick together. The data shows that cheaters are much more likely to be friends with other cheaters.
Cheating also appears to be infectious. The likelihood of a fair player becoming labelled as a cheater in future is directly correlated with this person's number of friends who are cheaters. So if you know cheaters you are more likely to become one yourself. Cheating spreads like flu through this community.
Finally, being labelled as a cheat seems to significantly affect social standing. Once a person is labelled as a cheat, they tend to lose friends. Some even cut themselves off from friends by increasing their privacy settings."
27421482
submission
Fraser Cain writes:
GoDaddy listened to reason, and reversed their position on SOPA. Here's a crowd sourced list of every other company supporting SOPA with web address, Twitter feed, contact emails and phone numbers.
Perhaps they should be contacted to find out if they still fully support SOPA, or have changed their mind.
27386242
submission
parkejr writes:
I started off building a media library a few years ago with an old PC running ubuntu. Folders for photos, ogg vorbis music from my CD collection, and x264 encoded mkv movies. I have a high spec machine for encoding, but over the years I've moved the server to a bigger case, with 8 TB of disk capacity, and reverted back to debian, but still running with the same AMD Semperon processor and 2Gb RAM. It's working well, it's also the family mail server, and the kids are starting to use it for network storage, and it runs both llink and twonkyserver, but my disks are almost full, and there are no more internal slots. The obvious option to me is to add in a couple of SATA PCI cards, to give me 4 more drives, and buy an externally powered enclosure, but that doesn't feel very elegant. I'm a bit of an amateur, so I'd like some advice. Should I start looking at a rack system? Something that can accomodate say 10 3.5" drives (I'm thinking long term, and some redundancy)?. Also, what about location — I could run some cat6 to the garage and move it out of the house, incase noise is an issue. Finally, what about file format, file system, and OS/software. I'm currently running with ext3 and debian squeeze. Happy with my audio encoding choice, but not sure about x264 and mkv. I'd also consider different media server software too. Any comments appreciated
