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Students Banned From Bringing Pencils To School 426

mernilio writes "According to UPI: 'A Massachusetts school district superintendent said a memo banning sixth graders from carrying pencils was written without district approval. North Brookfield School District interim Superintendent Gordon Noseworthy said Wendy Scott, one of two sixth-grade teachers at North Brookfield Elementary School, did not get approval from administrators before sending the memo to all sixth-grade parents, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported Thursday. The memo said students would no longer be allowed to bring writing implements to school. It said pencils would be provided for students in class and any students caught with pencils or pens after Nov. 15 would face disciplinary action for having materials 'to build weapons.'"

Comment Maybe it's not the iPhone (Score 1) 144

Perhaps it's not the iPhone that is causing all of these problems. Maybe it's all the people who haven't upgraded their phones in years. When they hit a cell with old-school GSM/GPRS, that means there's less capacity for UMTS/HSDPA phones.

Why not make at least one band (1900mHz) UMTS/HSDPA only, so that way one or two customers can't kill the bandwidth for 50.

Graphics

Nvidia's DX11 GF100 Graphics Processor Detailed 220

J. Dzhugashvili writes "While it's played up the general-purpose computing prowess of its next-gen GPU architecture, Nvidia has talked little about Fermi's graphics capabilities — to the extent that some accuse Nvidia of turning its back on PC gaming. Not so, says The Tech Report in a detailed architectural overview of the GF100, the first Fermi-based consumer graphics processor. Alongside a wealth of technical information, the article includes enlightening estimates and direct comparisons with AMD's Radeon HD 5870. The GF100 will be up to twice as fast as the GeForce GTX 285, the author reckons, but the gap with the Radeon HD 5870 should be 'a bit more slender.' Still, Nvidia may have the fastest consumer GPU ever on its hands — and far from forsaking games, Fermi has been built as a graphics processor first and foremost."
Linux Business

Red Hat CEO Says Economic Crisis Favors Open Source 191

arashtamere writes "Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst predicts the enterprise open source software business will emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market. 'I've had a couple of conversations with CIOs who said, "We're a Microsoft shop and we don't use any open source whatsoever, but we're already getting pressure to reduce our operating costs and we need you to help put together a plan for us to... use open source to reduce our costs." And we've had other customers literally looking at ripping and replacing WebLogic or WebSphere for JBoss ... I think we'll know in about six to nine months but there is no question that open source will come out of this in relatively better shape than our proprietary competitors,' he told Computerworld."

Comment Re:Exactly: weed out is definitely GOOD (Score 1) 567

What I take from the article is that there are plenty of other good weed-out type courses out there to choose from.

As a Computer Science major who is now a 2nd year Medical Student, I found orgo to be a giant thorn in my back. I succeeded in every other pre-med class I took, such as microbiology, genetics, honors biotech, biochemistry.

But because I got a C in orgo and had relatively few basic science courses (I did want to graduate on time with my CS degree), I had to get a masters degree before any med schools in the US would take me.

If it were up to me, I would use Physics II as the new weed-out - it's MUCH more important for Physiology and the basis of Cardiology, etc.

- Rick

Microsoft

OOXML Vote and the CPI Corruption Index 190

Tapani Tarvainen writes "It turns out there's an interesting correlation between Transparency International's 'corruption perceptions index' and voting behavior in ISO's OOXML decision. Countries with a lower score (more corruption) on the 2006 CPI were more likely to vote in favor of OOXML, and those with a higher score were less likely. According to the analysis, 'This statistics supports with a P value of 0.07328 the hypothesis that the corrupted countries were more likely to vote for approval (one-tailed Fisher's Exact test). In other words, simplified a bit: the likelihood that there was no positive correlation between the corruption level and probability of an approval vote, that is, this is just a random effect, is about 7%.' Of course, correlation doesn't prove causality."
The Internet

Social Networking Sites Opening Their APIs 56

prostoalex writes "Business Week magazine is looking at social networking sites opening their APIs to third-party developers to enable social applications not supported by the network itself. Facebook is setting an example by releasing their API from beta into 1.0, and many others are expected to follow the suit. Quoting from the article: 'Since Facebook, a network of 17 million college students, started a pilot program last summer, third-party developers have created some 100 new applications. Now a Facebook user name and password can be used to log in to content-sharing and chat site Mosoto, and to automatically import Facebook friends into Mosoto's buddy list for chat. Facebook itself does not offer a chat function.'"
The Courts

RIAA Admits ISPs Have Misidentified "John Does" 271

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA has sent out a letter to the ISPs telling them to stop making mistakes in identifying subscribers, and offering a 'Pre-Doe settlement option' — with a discount of '$1000 or more' — to their subscribers, if and only if the ISP agrees to preserve its logs for 180 days. Other interesting points in the letter (PDF): the RIAA will be launching a web site for 'early settlements,' www.p2plawsuits.com; the letter asks the ISPs to notify the RIAA if they have previously 'misidentified a subscriber account in response to a subpoena' or become aware of 'technical information... that causes you to question the information that you provided in response to our clients' subpoena'; it notes that ISPs have identified 'John Does' who were not even subscribers of the ISP at the time of the infringement; and it requests that ISPs furnish their underlying log files, not just names and addresses, when responding to RIAA subpoenas."
Movies

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Protections Fully Broken 682

gEvil (beta) writes "According to an article at BoingBoing, the processing keys for the AACS encryption scheme used by both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray video discs have been extracted, and a crack has been released. What this means is that there is now a method to extract the copy-protected content of any HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc out there. This is different from Muslix64's previous crack, which only extracted the volume key for each disc. This new method bypasses this step and allows anyone to extract the data without first requiring the volume key."
Security

ISECOM's Top 10 Real Computer Crimes 155

thelordx writes "ISECOM, the Institute for Security and Open Methodologies, has just posted their Top 10 Real Computer Crimes for 2007 and Beyond. This list runs the gambit from poorly designed patches to chlamydia! It's entertaining, but also scary, as many of us could fall victim to some or all of them."
Displays

Computer Monitor In Eyeglasses 109

ozancakmakci writes "We have all seen science fiction ideals of computer displays concealed in eyeglasses. One of the earlier spectacle-based designs was created by David Bettinger and disclosed in US Patent 4,806,011. Advances in fabrication technologies are now allowing complicated surface profiles to be manufactured. Exploitation of a complicated surface profile leads to low element count designs. Researchers at the University of Central Florida, CREOL/College of Optics & Photonics have designed and fabricated a computer monitor in eyeglasses that uses sophisticated surface profiles to achieve a compact design. The current specifications include an 8mm exit pupil, 20-degree field of view, 15mm eye clearance, and a resolution of 1.5 arcminutes. Follow the link for two pictures of this latest prototype." Read on for some of the challenges in designing a workable eyeglasses-based display.
Security

"Month of Kernel Bugs" Project Head Interviewed 42

An anonymous reader writes "November has been labelled the 'Month of Kernel Bugs' in security circles. The Month of Kernel Bugs began on November 1, with the publication of a vulnerability in Apple's AirPort drivers. SecuriTeam blogs did an interview with LMH, who hosts the project."

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