principle
Amazon S3 Price Reduction
aws.typepad.com
As you can tell from my recent post on Amazon S3 Growth for 2011, our customers are uploading new objects to Amazon S3 at an incredible rate. We continue to innovate on your behalf to drive down storage costs and pass along the resultant savings to you at every possible...
Single molecule circuit controlled through quantum interference
arstechnica.com
In typical electronic devices, temperature is the primary physical variable that controls conductivity. Resistance tends to increase with temperature. However, things are different on the nanoscale. Even at room temperature, the energy difference between quantum levels within a molecule can be much larger than the thermal energy. This means...
Your deleted Facebook photos might still be in the cloud, three years after flaw was discovered
www.theverge.com
Ars Technica has found that the photo deletion flaw it discovered on Facebook three years ago still exists, where images that users have supposedly deleted are still accessible to those with the link months or years later. The issue raises questions over the principle of who owns the data...
Anonymous downs Virgin Media website in response to The Pirate Bay blockage, as proxy wars continue
thenextweb.com
It’s hardly surprising that the site has fallen over at the hands of an organisation that is not keen on site blocking, aligns itself broadly with The Pirate Bay (TPB) and says “Expect Us”. The action has come about as Virgin Media complies with the latest court ruling that followed...
'Thermal cloak' hides from heat
www.bbc.co.uk
Researchers borrow ideas from the study of Harry Potter-style "optical cloaking" to create a thermal cloak that can in principle hide objects from heat....
Here’s a great (and hilarious) way to fight spammers and scammers
thenextweb.com
Last night I spent a few hours (seriously) reading the hilarious stories at DontEvenReply.com. The website’s author emails people who post classified ads. As he puts it: “My goal is to mess with them, confuse them, and/or piss them off”. He succeeds amazingly well. One story in particular was amusing....
Neutrinos can transmit messages through walls, mountains, planets
www.engadget.com
Neutrinos may not travel as fast as we first hoped, but then they have other special abilities to make up for it. Being almost massless, they can penetrate the thickest barriers, which ought to make them ideal message carriers. To illustrate the point, scientists sent the word "Neutrino" on...
Internet trolls targeted in new bill to tackle defamation online
www.guardian.co.uk
Websites will get greater protection from being sued if they help identify people posting defamatory messages under new plansMajor reforms of the libel laws will see a duty placed on internet service providers to try to identify internet trolls without victims needing to resort to costly legal action.Websites will also...
Ebooks shouldn't be restricted by European borders
www.guardian.co.uk
Why have ebooks if not to access them in an instant? Europe needs a digital single market for its ebook industryEurope, including the UK, would have a growing economy today if we had a real digital single market. Just look at the ebooks market. While ebooks are booming around the...
Seeing a power law in data doesn't make it real
arstechnica.com
An essential part of science involves finding correlations between two sets of measurements and seeking explanations for those correlations. However, relationships can be suggested by data even when they don't actually exist, and correlations may occur due to random fluctuations rather than a deep underlying principle (as the infamous...
Estimize Takes Stock Gamification One Step Further With Challenges
techcrunch.com
Estimize is a startup trying to discover the true “whisper number” of public stocks — not just the official analyst consensus, but what Wall Street really believes. To make that happen, it’s encouraging investors to post their own estimates — and they’re getting a little more incentive starting today, thanks...
Omron releases a pair of sleep monitoring gadgets that watch you slumber
www.engadget.com
Insomnia and a love of gadgets go hand-in-hand, so it's no surprise that more companies want a piece of Zeo's sleep-monitoring action. Omron's the latest to supply an offering with a pair of sensors to work out how much shut-eye your getting. Working on the principle that you stop...
Google, April 1, And The Trouble With Tricks You Know Are Coming
www.wired.com
April 1 is Google’s high holiday. Since its earliest days, Google has pulled pranks on its users. Once, as I relay in my book, Sergey Brin even tricked employees into thinking that shares of the company would soon be revalued, causing some to borrow money to buy their options...
Saga for iOS and Android: a virtual assistant to help improve your quality of life
www.theverge.com
Ever since we talked with Matias Duarte about Google Now at Google I/O last month we’ve been interested in the idea of a more proactive digital assistant; one that can make recommendations before we actually ask for help. Well, a Seattle company called ARO is looking to apply that...
Visit kiva.org/free To Microlend $1 Million of Reid Hoffman’s Money
techcrunch.com
Today you can help someone escape poverty by trying out microlending platform Kiva, and it won’t cost you a dime. Go to kiva.org/free where Reid Hoffman has put up $1 million of his money to let 40,000 people give $25 microloans to help those in need start farms and general...
DepositFiles Settles Multi Million Dollar Piracy Lawsuit
torrentfreak.com
As one of the largest files-sharing sites on the Internet, DepositFiles is visited by millions of users per day. After the Megaupload shutdown the cyberlocker appeared to be one of the top alternatives. Aside from attracting new users, the site also grabbed the attention of Hollywood with the MPAA describing...
South Korean KT Corp blocks internet access for Samsung Smart TVs
www.theverge.com
Smart TVs were one of the big trends at CES this year, but all those apps and streaming videos can take up quite a bit of bandwith. That's what South Korea's largest broadband provider, KT, is arguing, as it acts quickly to throttle the bandwidth of connected sets. After...
Erasing a bit shown to boost entropy
arstechnica.com
In 1961 Rolf Landauer linked information and thermodynamic entropy by showing that erasing or combining bits of memory must be accompanied by an increase in entropy. For the first time since then, a team of physicists have experimentally verified this principle. According to Landauer’s principle, any logically irreversible transformation of...
Facebook stock tumbles nearly ten percent: how low can it go?
www.theverge.com
Shares of Facebook fell 9.62 percent today, to $28.84, continuing the downward slide the company has been on since it went public two weeks ago at $38 a share. The steady decline has many investors wondering where the bottom is. If Facebook traded at the same price-to-earnings ratio as...
Apple Refuses To Sell Book That Links To Amazon Store
techcrunch.com
Apple may be a big dog in music and movie sales and rentals, but it’s definitely not a big dog in ebooks. That’s what makes this note from Seth Godin particularly galling. In a post on PaidContent, Godin writes that Apple has refused to sell his new book Stop Stealing...
FTC flexes muscles, warns that sharing can’t be ‘forced’ on social websites
thenextweb.com
In an apparent bid to boost its profile, establish a more serious position in the industry, and begin to chart a stronger direction for its activities, the FTC is in the news again, this time with a warning. According to The Hill, this morning the FTC’s commissioner Julie Brill admitted that...
Libertarians make the case: net neutrality is unconstitutional
arstechnica.com
The 2011 FCC Order established net neutrality as a matter of national policy. Since, companies like Verizon have been trying to fight it. Taramisu A group of well-known libertarian organizations has filed an amicus brief (PDF) to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in support of...
SkyDrive APIs – Bring your data to any app, any platform, any device
windowsteamblog.com
On Monday, we released preview versions of SkyDrive for Windows and Mac, along with updates for iOS and Windows Phone. With SkyDrive on your desktop, you can now access files in the cloud right from any of your PC or Mac apps. And since we launched our API, we’ve been...
Shared Mobile Data Plans: Who Benefits?
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
Verizon and AT&T, the two biggest mobile carriers in the United States, are offering shared data plans, which will allow customers to pay for a single pool of data and share it across multiple smartphones, tablets and laptops. The concept of sharing sounds good in principle, but the costs of...
Why MIT’s Technology Review is going digital first
gigaom.com
Magazines and newspapers of all kinds have been experimenting with paywalls, iPad apps and other methods of handling the ongoing disruption that the web and digital media have produced, but very few have taken a fully “digital first” approach. MIT’s well-respected Technology Review magazine has become the latest to...
One week with IE9: A firsthand look at Microsoft’s browser
thenextweb.com
Our in-depth look at Bing was popular enough that we have taken another crack at the same principle, this time with Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft’s current browser. Be honest, when was the last time that you fired up Internet Explorer in the morning, with the intent of using it for...
Microsoft-developed on{X} is a flexible automation tool for Android
www.theverge.com
Our phones are capable of collecting so much information (for good or ill) that it's a shame not to use it to make our lives easier. That's the reasoning behind on{X}, a programming tool that lets you to set automatic actions for your Android phone. Similar in principle to...
Scientists measure heat produced by erasing a single bit of information
www.theverge.com
In 1961 physicist Rolf Landauer claimed that resetting a single bit of information, like setting a binary digit to zero in computer memory regardless of its initial state, must release a certain amount of heat. Half a century later, reseachers claim that they have proven Landauer's principle, according to...
Fusion-io SDK gives developers native memory access, keys to the NAND realm
www.engadget.com
Thought your SATA SSD chugged along real nice? Think again. Fusion-io has just released an SDK that will allow developers to bypass all the speed draining bottlenecks that rob NAND memory of its true potential (i.e. the kernel block I/O layer,) and tap directly into the memory itself. In...
Mastery And Mimicry
www.avc.com
The Internet is an amazing place. Last weekend an email arrived in my inbox with the subject line "Hello From MIT". That got me to open it. Turns out it was from Sep Kamvar, a faculty member at the MIT Media Lab, and before that the Stanford computer science department....
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