Archived stories
1.
When we first spied Huawei's SmaKit S7 Android tablet, we were at CeBit and it was... well, non-functioning. Well Huawei's officially announced the tablet now, and we have to say that it looks just like every other Android tablet being hoisted upon the...
2.
Boing Boing partner John Battelle was on a WiFi-enabled flight last night, and wanted to say bedtime-goodnight to his kids using videochat. Lots of parents tuck their kids into bed over video when they're far from home. What gentler, more loving example...
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+ Is Lady Gaga a stealth refashionista? The empty soda cans in her hair could be the next haute hair accessory. + Woody Harrelson, Food Inc.'s Robert Kenner, Suzy Amis Cameron (wife of James), and Livia Firth (wife of Colin) were just some of the Oscar...
4.
Mar 11th 5:05pm by ars@lasarletter.net (Matthew Lasar)
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Federal Communications Commissioner Mignon Clyburn solidified her role as the agency's tail gunner on Wednesday with a warning to the big ISPs that the FCC's patience with rising broadband subscription rates is wearing thin. "When prices rise across the...
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Windows: doubleTwist makes for a convenient way of syncing your smartphone, camera, and other USB-plug-able gadgets, especially if you're not using Apple products. Now doubleTwist does a great job of finding and monitoring podcasts, and sending them...
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Dr. Stephen Leeb submits:Jobs continue to be front and center of economists’ and Americans’ minds alike as the Labor Department released a highly anticipated February employment report last week. The report was mixed. On the positive side,...
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In the House, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader: FLOOR SCHEDULE FOR THURSDAY, MARCH 11, 2010 House Meets At... 10:00 a.m.: Legislative Business First Vote Predicted... 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. Last Vote Predicted... 1:00 – 2:00 p.m....
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With Microsoft becoming increasingly marginalized in areas like mobile media, DirectX is becoming less of a must-use toolset and more of a gaming-specific one. The other side of the coin is, of course, the increasing relevance of standards like OpenGL,...
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Motorola will be loading Microsoft’s Bing search onto its Android cellphones in China this month, ousting Google on its own smartphone platform. Motorola Android models will get the new feature when they are launched in this quarter. Google...
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Unless they're incredibly quiet or potentially explosive, you won't find us waxing poetic (or even prosaic) about leaf blowers. But if a company that produced leaf blowers made a motorized calendar that tore off its own pages? We'd tell you about that in...
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Considering the fact that Windows XP is still the most-used OS worldwide, anyone considering swapping out their old hard drives for a new one should heed this advice: be careful. You may want to even consider not doing it. More »
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Jim Delaney submits: Recent findings that certain scientists were being ostracized for disagreeing with the widely circulated and publicized theory that Mother Earth was warming at an alarming rate are evidence that human nature is fiercely competitive...
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photo: Yusuke Kawasaki via flickr. The US has agreed to back an international ban on trade in critically endangered bluefin tuna, and now the European Union nations will do so as well, with Malta being the only dissenting vote. That still leaves us with...
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Photo: John Perivolaris / DrJohn2005 Recently out of Virginia's public school system, youngster James Stephenson writes in to say that being a kid sucks. So what's new? A gauntlet of cameras, invasive searches and authoritarian security theatrics that...
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Mar 11th 2:52pm by Nicholas Watt, Charles Guthrie
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Quietly, and with little fanfare, the shadow defence secretary has killed off ministerial ambitions of retired army chiefWhen you achieve victory – of the complete, earth-scorching variety – it is always best to avoid crowing. "In war: resolution; in...
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Android/Windows Mobile/BlackBerry: Opera's Mini browser isn't the same as its Turbo-sporting Mobile, but it's still got a neat start page, smart image controls, desktop syncing, and fast rendering. All of that has just landed in the Android Market....
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Mar 11th 2:28pm by ars@lasarletter.net (Matthew Lasar)
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A newly revised version of a House bill requiring the government to inventory the nation's radio spectrum would give Federal agencies and private license owners a national security pass on publicly disclosing information about their spectrum holdings or...
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This Australian production/advertising agency, Umeric, has created two of the best commercials I've seen. The first, for MTVNHD (MTV Nickelodeon High Definition) is my favorite—anyone else reminded of War of the Worlds when watching it?...
19.
Google has added an iPad-friendly version of its RSS aggregator, called Google Reader Play. According to the Official Google Reader Blog, the new full-screen slide-show is for people who “aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set...
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Before the iPad and before the Slate, the most exciting touchy tablety thing in our lives was Toshiba's JournE multimedia tablet. Now that the Japanese compu-maker has seen what the competition has on offer, it's proudly proclaimed itself back in the...
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If you’ve never been to Hong Kong, and you’ve heard legends about the busy streets of the city, you can now see how it looks for yourself without leaving your comfy chair, as Google has launched its Street View service for Hong Kong.The huge...
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Comparative performance that can be measured – and good practice copied – is a valuable response to those who want to merge things to make them 'more efficient'If the levels of police stop and search activities against black and south Asian Britons...
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Do you remember to the days of college, when you were required to sort through your curriculum and career goals with your designated college advisor? Education startup MyEdu aims to replace this by helping students virtually access their academic...
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Green Chip Review submits:By Sam HopkinsI traveled to Britain in the spring of 2006 to see first-hand what I had been reading at the BBC — that Scotland was becoming a pivotal part of a worldwide energy economy in transition from fossil fuels to...
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Your one stop pundit shop. Marleine Bastien, noting the commemoration of International Women's Day on Monday, says of Haiti: Women are the backbone of Haiti's economy, yet, they are not represented in the nation's decision-making process. By historically...
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Animator/composer Cyriak just posted this surreal video featuring infinite giant teddy bears climbing out of the sea at the Worthing shore and crossing the road. You'd think that this would be thin gruel for three minutes' worth of animation, but you'd...
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Images by B. Alter It's been Fairtrade Fortnight, and in celebration Starbucks has released a special new Fairtrade coffee from Rwanda. It's part of their complete switch-over last year to selling only 100% Fairtrade espresso-based coffees in the UK and...
28.
The latest beta version of Opera Mini for Androids is now out as of today, with a new interface and multi-tabs support thrown in. It's not entirely dissimilar to Opera Mobile 10 on Symbian and WinMo, though. More »
29.
Whatever happened to that dreamy Line 6 / Apple tie-up? Who knows, right? While those two sort out their future behind the scenes, Paul Reed Smith Guitars is stepping up to take advantage of an obvious market opportunity. The newly announced Guitarbud is...
30.
Opera Mini 5 Beta was first introduced about 5 months ago, but owners of Android-based smartphones had to wait until now to get their hands on Opera’s nifty mobile browser.This version is nearly identical to the Opera Mini 5 Beta for other handsets;...
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A coffee cup as a plant pot, coke cans for Halloween cape, a detergent bottle as worm harvester or washing tablet net bags for toy storage; these are all things people have done with the packaging they found in their daily lives. Reuse is often better...
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A far left, punitively revisionist look at America as a consistently evil nation. (And don't miss Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd debating the merits of Stone's series on PJTV's Poliwood.)
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The use of the "N-word" on campus TV has set off a fierce First Amendment debate.
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No response whatsoever from the agencies, who appear to have no good way out of this. (This is a three-part series. Read Parts One and Two.)
35.
Vice President Joe Biden condemns a new Israeli settlement plan.
36.
Lucid Imagination, the startup that commercially distributes the open source Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Shasta Ventures with Granite Ventures and Walden International participating in...
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PrimeSense was formed in 2005, and unless you're a sickly obsessed silicon junkie, you've probably never heard of them. All that changes today. We sat down with the company at GDC to learn more about the chip that it produces, and we left with an...
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Sure, Opera Mini may (or may not) already be the most popular mobile browser in the world -- but why stop there? Following up on the Android release of Opera Mobile 4 just over a year ago, Opera has just launched Opera Mini 5 for Android into public...
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Yet, I work for the largest private Public Relations firm in the world, Edelman. Luckily however, I was hired on the Digital team which doesn’t require a whole buncha’ public relations knowledge. And, to be completely transparent (since that is the...
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Researchers at Australia's Deakin University have published a paper in the British Journal of Nutrition showing evidence that human beings can taste fat -- that is, they can distinguish between two flavourless solutions in which one has more fat than the...
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A former TSA analyst has been indicted for computer crimes after being allegedly caught tampering with various terrorist watchlists (his work duties involved keeping these databases up to date). He'd been given notice that he was being fired before the...
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Pioneer is known to make digital mixers that leave us drooling and wishing for some DJ skills. First they gave us the CDJ-2000 with its beautiful LCD screen, and now they've given us the DJM-2000, a multitouch screen-having per-frequency-mixing beauty....
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Last week, an App Store error got the latest version of Foursquare for the iPhone into a few users hands a little bit early.That hiccup resulted in the app briefly disappearing from the App Store before finally returning early yesterday. Now the newly...
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It doesn't matter if the machine you are using is a massive crane or a tiny smartphone: You will always curse in the same way when it crashes. The deafening noise, however, won't be the same. More »
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Pace Beck and Krauthammer, attention must be paid to Wilders. He is a highly intelligent man on the front lines of the struggle for a secular and free Europe and should not be dismissed — or misunderstood. (And don't miss Bill Whittle's interview with...
46.
Mar 11th 7:30am by peter.bright@arstechnica.com (Peter Bright)
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A rather surprising article hit the front page of the BBC on Tuesday: the next generation of hard disks could cause slowdowns for XP users. Not normally the kind of thing you'd expect to be placed so prominently, but the warning it gives is a worthy one,...
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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft...
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Six cores. Twelve threads. A new flagship processor in Intel's stable. Here at GDC in San Francisco, the world's most widely recognized chip maker is dishing out its latest desktop CPU, and to say it's a niche device would be greatly understating things....
49.
At Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, co-editor of Dissent Michael Walzer writes Missing the Movement: This is an incrementalist time, and the crucial thing is to get the increments right. The economic crisis and the two wars that Obama inherited make this...
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Mar 11th 6:23am by segphault@arstechnica.com (Ryan Paul)
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Amazon's patent on one-click shopping has survived the scrutiny of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In an official notice published this month, the USPTO declared its intent to issue a reexamination certificate affirming the validity of...