Slashdot Mirror

daria42 writes "Remember how Australia's planning to censor its Internet? Well, it looks as though the country's second-largest ISP, Optus, has made a stumble right out of the gate. Optus today confirmed you could circumvent its filtering technology simply by setting your PC to use a different DNS server than the default. Yup, it's really that easy. Oops." And why would anyone want to change their DNS settings? angry tapir writes "While the Australian Government has extolled the virtues of its currently under construction National Broadband Network (NBN) in delivering e-health and government agency services to every Australian, adult content will be the major driver of consumer adoption."

South Korea plans to spend $2.4 billion buying tablets for students and digitizing materials in an effort to go completely digital in the classroom by 2015. From the article: "This move also re-ignites the age-old debate about whether or not students learn better from screens or printed material. Equally important, there's the issue of whether or not devices with smaller form factors are as effective as current textbooks, which tend to have significantly more area on each page."

Hugh Pickens writes "NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden says that the future is bright and promises that one day humans will land on Mars. 'American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we've laid the foundation for success,' the nation's space chief said in a speech at the National Press Club. 'When I hear people say that the final shuttle flight marks the end of U.S. human space flight, you all must be living on another planet. We are not ending human space flight. We are recommitting ourselves to it.' Bolden says within a year private companies can take over the process of sending cargo shipments into orbit and by 2015 industry can take over astronaut transport, freeing NASA to focus on the long-term goals of reaching beyond Earth's shadow. 'Do we want to keep repeating ourselves or do we want to look at the big horizon?' says Bolden. 'My generation touched the moon today, NASA, and the nation, wants to touch an asteroid, and eventually send a human to Mars.' A group of former astronauts and other critics have blasted the agency and the Obama administration for ending the 30-year-old shuttle program, once the cornerstone of NASA. 'NASA's human spaceflight program is in substantial disarray with no clear-cut mission in the offing. We will have no rockets to carry humans to low-Earth orbit and beyond for an indeterminate number of years,' write Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan. 'After a half-century of remarkable progress, a coherent plan for maintaining America's leadership in space exploration is no longer apparent.'"

An anonymous reader writes "After six months of financial blockade by Visa and MasterCard, during which they claim to have lost over $15,000,000 in donations, WikiLeaks and Datacell are filing a complaint against the two financial giants, with plans to litigate should the block not be lifted. WikiLeaks stated, 'On June 9th the law firms Bender von Haller Dragested in Denmark and Reykjavik Law Firm in Iceland acting on behalf of DataCell and WikiLeaks told the companies that if the blockade is not removed they will be litigated in Denmark and a request for prosecution will be filed with the EU Commission.'"

daria42 writes "After four long years of debate about whether Australia will receive a mandatory Internet filter, finally some action has been taken. Yesterday the country's largest ISP, Telstra, started filtering all customers' connections for child pornography. The filter is DNS-based, meaning it's easy to circumvent, but you can't opt out of it — if you sign up to a plan with Telstra, your connection will be filtered for certain web addresses whether you like it or not. "

jfruhlinger writes "A lot of Japan's infrastructure was knocked offline by this year's massive earthquake and tsunami, but its data centers by and large stayed running. How'd they pull it off? Good architecture and good planning, for the most part. But the data centers still face challenges in post-quake Japan, not least a new law mandating reductions in power use."

An anonymous reader writes "Bringing the real world into the brain scanner, researchers say they can now determine the action a person was planning, mere moments before that action is actually executed. In the study at the University of Western Ontario, human subjects had their brain activity scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they performed one of three hand movements. By using the signals from many brain regions, the researchers could predict, better than chance, which of the actions the volunteer was merely intending to do, seconds later."

itwbennett writes "Why should consumers care about the AT&T/T-mobile merger? Already, Verizon has dropped unlimited data plans and the US trails Japan, South Korea, and others in variety and performance of mobiles. Don't think for a second that those aren't the direct result this new monopoly, says blogger Tom Henderson. '...Those pesky State agencies that used to have regulatory authority has been usurped by the US Federal Government,' writes Henderson. 'This wasn't an accident. Who would you rather deal with, 43 different state regulatory authorities, or those convenient people on Capitol Hill?'"

Lucas123 writes "In what is likely to be a strong rival to NAND flash memory, IBM today announced it has been able to successfully store more than one bit of data per cell in a more stable non-volatile memory called phase-change memory (PCM). Unlike NAND, Previously, PCM couldn't contend with flash because of its low capacity points. PCM does not require that data be erased before new data is written to it, which reduces write amplification or wear out and it has 100 times the write performance of flash. IBM researchers say they plan to license the technology to memory manufacturers instead of producing it themselves."

coondoggie writes "NASA's role as commercial space entrepreneur is going well and the four companies it is funding to build future spacecraft that could take astronauts to and from the International Space Station and other destinations are moving forward. That was the chief observation in a status report the space agency issued this week entitled 'NASA's return on investment report.' You may recall that in April NASA split $270 million between Boeing ($92 million), Space Exploration Technologies (Space X--$75 million), Sierra Nevada ($80 million) and Blue Origin ($22 million) to continue development of commercial rockets and spacecraft capable of safely flying astronauts into orbit and to the International Space Station." Gubers33 pointed out another article about NASA's upcoming plans for Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon.

snydeq writes "The fact that Oracle has handed over the keys to two major open source projects in recent weeks has some questioning the fate of other prominent open source projects Oracle took on in the wake of its 2010 acquisition of Sun. But while OpenOffice.org and Hudson provided little commercial opportunity for Oracle, it appears that Oracle has plans to keep rein on NetBeans, MySQL, and GlassFish contrary to expectations, analysts contend."

dutchwhizzman writes "A team of scientists has submitted a formal request to test the remains of William Shakespeare for drugs. Notably, for marijuana, since remains of clay pipes found in his garden have been tested positive for pot."

Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that the Humane Pet Acquisition Proposal is on its way to the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco. It would ban the sale of any animal that walks, flies, swims, crawls or slithers — unless you plan to eat it. Representatives of the $45-billion to $50-billion-a-year pet industry call the San Francisco proposal 'by far the most radical ban we've seen' nationwide and argue that it would force small operators to close. Animal activists say it will save small but important lives, along with taxpayer money, and end needless suffering. 'From Descartes on up, in the Western mindset, fish and other nonhuman animals don't have feelings, they don't have emotions, we can do whatever we want to them,' says Philip Gerrie, coauthor of the proposal. 'If we considered them living beings, we would deal with them differently.'"

macwhizkid writes "I'm traveling to Canada for a week in July with youth group, and need a way to post blog updates on the trip and send back photos. I'll be staying on an island accessible only by boat, so a hard-wired connection is out of the question. I have a Verizon voice + data plan, and I've heard all the horror stories of multi-thousand dollar international data roaming charges. What I'd like to do is get 1-2 GB of data (5 GB would be great) to use on a Canadian provider's network for a reasonable fee (say, less than $100 total) as a wireless hotspot set-up. I have both a CDMA iPhone and a GSM iPad, so I really just need a micro-SIM or a way to register the IMIE. It appears that both Rogers and Bell offer 'pay as you go' data plans (Rogers has a particularly attractive iPad option), but there are conflicting reports as to whether a U.S. credit card can be used to buy service. I can't believe I'm the first U.S. citizen to want mobile data in Canada. So, has anyone done this successfully? Is there another option I'm not considering?"

Shipud writes "The Max Planck society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Wellcome Trust have announced their plans for a new journal for biomedical and life science research to be launched summer 2012. From the joint press release: 'The journal will employ an open and transparent peer review process in which papers will be accepted or rejected as rapidly as possible, generally with only one round of revisions, and with limited need for modifications or additional experiments. For transparency, reviewers' comments will be published anonymously.' The journal will be online-only and open access too, and they promise 'an opportunity to create a journal and article format that will exploit the potential of new technologies to allow for improved data presentation.' Especially valuable is the 'limited need for modifications or additional experiments,' especially since even Nature has recently published a scathing opinion piece about reviewers' almost reflexive demands for additional experiments from manuscript authors."

mikejuk writes "Wikipedia has a cunning plan to make wikipedians nicer to each other — its all about WikiLove. They can click on the Love button to make each other feel good about contributing anything from an article to an edit. The idea is that this will encourage newbie editors to stay and contribute rather than slink away into the rest of the web because their contributions get deleted and derided. Perhaps all we need for world peace is a big enough love button."

Hugh Pickens writes "Elisabeth Rosenthal writes that cable setup boxes and DVRs have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, causing an increase of over $10/month for a home with many devices, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator. The set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are running full tilt, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use. 'People in the energy efficiency community worry a lot about these boxes, since they will make it more difficult to lower home energy use,' says John Wilson, a former member of the California Energy Commission. 'Companies say it can't be done or it's too expensive. But in my experience, neither one is true. It can be done, and it often doesn't cost much, if anything.' The perpetually 'powered on' state is largely a function of design and programming choices made by electronics companies and cable and Internet providers, which are related to the way cable networks function in the United States. Similar devices in some European countries can automatically go into standby mode when not in use, cutting power drawn by half and go into an optional 'deep sleep,' which can reduce energy consumption by about 95 percent (PDF) compared with when the machine is active. Although the EPA has established Energy Star standards for set-top boxes and has plans to tighten them significantly by 2013, cable providers and box manufacturers like Cisco Systems, Samsung and Motorola currently do not feel consumer pressure to improve box efficiency."

dkd903 writes "KDE 4.7 is almost here and brings along with it a number of features and performance improvements such as a better Dolphin with a faster file search, ability of KWin to run on Mobile devices, Grub2 integration in KDM and offline search support in the KDE virtual globe, Marble." Here's KDE's own announcement of the release candidate; the final release is planned for July 27. Reader jrepin quotes the KDE announcement: "With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing last-minute showstopper bugs and finishing translation and documentation that comes along with the releases."

Attila Dimedici writes "Tesla has announced that their business model has failed. Their basic idea was to sell a boutique electric car to fund the development of a regular consumer electric car. With this announcement they are saying that they did not sell enough of the Roadster to make producing it profitable. If that is the case, it is only a matter of time until Tesla closes its doors. I thought their approach was the most likely to create a successful fully electric car. Although it is possible that the technology they have developed will allow the existing car companies to develop successful fully electric cars, it is a shame that Tesla has failed to become a successful car manufacturer." CT: As a huge number of you pointed out, the linked article is not nearly as doom and gloom as the submitter: Tesla isn't locking the doors and throwing away the keys, they plan on selling a $80k sedan in 2012 with a 300 mile range.

thewebblogger writes "In a move that more resembles 'me too' behavior rather than a well planned release, Best Buy has announced their own music cloud service, called simply Best Buy Music Cloud. The functionality is not complete yet; iOS / Android applications are not available at this point, and the only part that works is the Web Player. The premium version will cost $3.99/month and you'll have to upload your own music. iTunes is mandatory."