America’s dairy farmers could soon find themselves in the computer business, with the manure from their cows possibly powering the vast data centres of companies like Google and Microsoft. While not immediately intuitive, the idea plays on two trends: the building of computing centres in more rural locales, and dairy farmers’ efforts to deal with cattle waste by turning it into fuel. With the right skills, a dairy farmer could rent out land and power to technology companies and recoup an investment in the waste-to-fuel systems within two years, Hewlett-Packard engineers say in a research paper to be made public on Wednesday
This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke more than 30 years ago. On 20 May, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has pledged to tear through the statute book
to restore civil liberties after taking up his seat next to David Cameron in the House of Commons for the first time. In his first major speech since becoming the coalition Government’s champion of political reform, Mr Clegg will wage war on Labour’s “obsessive law-making” accusing the previous government of turning ordinary people into criminals by creating thousands of “pointless” criminal offences. He also offered the public a say in which should be repealed
Scientists have implanted the first functional glucose biofuel cell in a living animal. Unlike batteries that supply power to implants, a power-generating device may not have to be surgically removed and replaced, because glucose is a potentially limitless source of energy
A fifteen page story about the MMR vaccination controversy. As ever, I’m sure a few spelling errors have slipped past me. Feel free to point any out so I can correct them.
I did a ton of research on this piece. When I’ve got an extra minute, I’m going to add on a list of references, with links. Now! Let’s have a heated debate — via tallguywrites
A leading Russian politician has accused a prominent Moscow businessman of running an international spam and online pharmacy operation while serving as an anti-spam adviser to the Russian government. Russian investigators now say they plan to create a special task force to look into the allegations
Smartphones that offer the ability to remote wipe are great for when your device goes missing and you want to delete your data so that someone else can’t look at it, but not so great for the United States Secret Service
Police are hunting a man and woman after two limited edition Banksy prints were stolen from a central London art gallery. Metropolitan police released a CCTV image today of the pair, who smashed their way into Art Republic, on New Compton Street, before stealing the framed prints, which are worth more than £16,000
Well, as you already know that to support Internet Explorer we often serve different CSS files using IE’s special conditional-comment syntax, which is great in terms of having clean and maintainable stylesheets throughout your application, it also mitigates the need of writing CSS hacks which often makes the stylesheets messy and becomes a maintenance nightmare later. You may argue that serving different CSS files only to IE is certainly not an elegant solution and of course it is not, it still requires that extra effort and extra bandwidth for users of Internet Explorer, but it’s somewhat the most practical or possibly the cleanest solution that you can have — via Web Gyani
The head of Sweden’s National IT Crime Unit says that following the introduction of IPRED anti-piracy legislation it has become more difficult to track down serious criminals. This unfortunate eventuality is a side-effect of ISPs throwing away logging data to protect the privacy of their customers. While this protects casual file-sharers, it unfortunately protects serious criminals too
Internet public key cryptography pioneer Whitfield Diffie says Google can see what everyone in the world is interested in
, and warns there will be security and intellectual property challenges ahead as cloud computing gathers steam. Cloud computing means you are doing your computing on somebody else’s computer,
Professor Diffie told the AusCERT 2010 conference yesterday. Looking ahead a little, I firmly believe cloud — previously called grid computing — will become very widespread. It’s much cheaper than buying your own computing infrastructure, or maybe you don’t have the power to do what you want on your own computer.
But Stanford University’s visiting scholar at the Centre for International Security and Cooperation and former Sun chief security officer warns that companies that base their business on third-party proprietary systems will have to find ways of protecting their trade secrets
After a few weeks of rumours, Seagate’s senior product manager Barbara Craig has confirmed to Thinq that we are announcing a 3TB drive later this year,
but the move to 3TB of storage space apparently involves a lot more work than simply upping the areal density. The ancient foundations of the PC’s three-decade legacy has once again reared its DOS-era head, revealing that many of today’s PCs are simply incapable of coping with hard drives that have a larger capacity than 2.1TB
Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks, says he had his passport taken away from him at Melbourne Airport and was later told by customs officials that it was about to be cancelled. Last year Wikileaks published a confidential Australian blacklist of websites to be banned under the government’s proposed internet filter. The Age has been told that Assange’s passport is classified normal
on the immigration database, meaning the Wikileaks director can travel freely on it
Experts who studied almost 13,000 cell phone users over 10 years, hoping to find out whether the mobile devices cause brain tumours, said on Sunday their research gave no clear answer. A study by the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the largest ever to look at possible links between mobile phones and brain cancer, threw up inconclusive results but researchers said suggestions of a possible link demanded deeper examination
TextEdit is a nice, lightweight text editor, but in at least one sense it’s too lightweight: It doesn’t have a word-count feature. MacOSXHints.com reader mprussel figured out a solution: An Applescript that “adds a word (and character) count pop-up dialog” to OS X’s built-in editor — via Mac OS X Hints
Google announced Friday that it will shut down the Internet store it used to sell its Nexus One smart phone, the flagship device for Google’s Android operating system
A man who wrote a terrorists’ handbook using information from an al-Qaeda training manual has pleaded guilty to offences under the Terrorism Act. Terrance Brown, 46, from Portsmouth, compiled CDs which included instructions about how to build bombs. The discs, called the Anarchist’s Cookbook, were sold for $35 (£23). This particular cookbook
differs then from William Powell’s 1971 book by a similar title, though (confusingly enough) the linked Wikipedia article implies that the father-and-son pair arrested possessed a copy of the Powell book as well; its text may well have been among the materials that Brown distributed — via Slashdot
TSS Nato G10 straps are of the highest quality and finish available – period ! All TSS Nato G10 watch straps are fitted with superior quality stainless steel hardware and not the inferior zinc plated brass fittings commonly supplied with the vast majority of cheaply produced G10 straps found elsewhere. If you are anything less than 100% impressed by the quality and finish of these straps – Watchworx TSS will without question or quibble refund your money should you wish to return any design purchased — via The Strap Shop
With all the privacy issues surrounding Facebook, many people are considering quitting the site altogether. If you’re not ready to take it that far, here’s how to avoid the privacy breaches without completely deleting your account and losing touch with your friends — via lifehacker
Hollywood’s landmark copyright battle against Perth internet provider iiNet will resume in the Federal Court on 2 August. The full bench of the Federal Court will over four days hear an appeal against Justice Denis Cowdroy’s ruling in favour of iiNet last February. At the time Justice Cowdroy found that the ISP couldn’t be held liable for copyright breaches carried out by its customers. iiNet, which has lodged its own notice of contention against some aspects of the ruling, has been defending the allegations since November 2008
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