48837037
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
In a new Rasmussen poll, 75% of American adults would rather read a book in traditional print format than in an ebook format. Only 15% prefer the ebook format (the other 10% are undecided). The latter is a drop from the 23% that preferred the ebook format in Rasmussen's 2011 poll. In addition, more say they buy their books from a brick and mortar store that say they buy books online (35% from brick and mortar, 27% online). I suspect that the 27% who buy online buy more books, but these results are interesting and suggest that the brick and mortar bookstore is not necessarily doomed.
46382311
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
I am in the process of implementing a Email Encryption Gateway for my company. I checked with my various contacts in the industry and came away with Voltage as the best solution. However, as I have been working with them to implement a solution, I have been sadly disappointed by their lack of professionalism. Every time I think I am one question away from being ready to pull the trigger, I discover something that my contact with them had not mentioned before that has to be ironed out by the various stakeholders on my end. So, my question for Slashdot Users is this, what is your experience with implementing an Email Encryption Gateway for your company and who what solution would you recommend?
33509559
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
The House Appropriations Committee is considering a draft report that would forbid the Library of Congress to allow bulk downloads of bills pending before Congress. The Library of Congress currently has an online database called THOMAS (for Thomas Jefferson) that allows people to look up bills pending before Congress. The problem is that THOMAS is somewhat clunky and it is difficult to extract data from it. This draft report would forbid the Library of Congress from modernizing THOMAS until a task force reports back. I am sorry that I cannot write a better summary of these articles, but I think this is an important issue about improving the ability of people to understand what Congress is doing. I am pretty sure that the majority of people on slashdot agree that being able to better understand how the various bills being considered by Congress interact would be good for this country.
27515036
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
I came across a an article this morning that suggests that the Nook and the Kindle have changed things in such a way that schools are becoming obsolete. His premise is that the ideal way to teach children is by a tutor. Schools arose because those who were not well enough off to afford tutors pooled their resources to hire a tutor (teacher) for all of their children. Schools further developed because they offered the opportunity for society to indoctrinate children in the values society considered important. Until today, the indoctrination has become more important than the education.
The author's premise is that the Nook and the Kindle have allowed large amounts of written material on many different subjects to become accessible enough that parents can tutor their children at a price that just about everyone can afford.
22573990
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
Massachusetts wants to establish a database with the information gathered by license plate scanners installed in police cars. The scanners will scan license plates of every car the police car passes and transmit that information (along with the location) to a database that will be made available to various government agencies. The data wil be kept indefinitely.
21839168
submission
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 think this is a shame because I thought their approach was the most likely to create a successful fully electronic car. Although it is possible that the technology they have developed will allow the existing car companies to develop successful fully electronic cars, it is a shame that Tesla has failed to become a successful car manufacturer.
21154752
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to Link text ">announce a new regulation requiring all vehicles to contain a "black box". Not only that, but the devices would be designed to make it difficult (possibly illegal) to modify what information these devices collect or to disbale them even though the courts have ruled that the owner of the vehicle owns the data. The courts have also ruled that authorities may access that data (to what degree and whether a warrant is necessary depends on the state).
20323982
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
In 2005 the UN said that by 2010 there would be 50 million climate refuges. They even provided a map of where they would come from. However since that original story was posted the UN has taken down that page. They apparently don't know about Google cache.
16959752
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
This article says that the Chevy Volt is not what GM claimed it was, an Extended Range Electric Vehicle. Instead the Volt is a plug in hybrid. Instead of a vehicle that is only driven with the electric drive train that uses a gasoline engine to charge the batteries, the Volt actually uses the gasoline engine to drive the front wheels at speeds above 70 miles per hour or when the batteries run down. http://jalopnik.com/5661051/how-gm-lied-about-the-electric-car
Additionally, the Volt gets nowhere near the 230 mpg thatGM was claiming for it. If this is all true, why did GM lie about this car? The facts as stated in this article make the Volt a pretty decent competitor to the Prius and other hybrids already on the market.
8671774
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
This story does a great job of showing how statistics are misused by comparing the incidence of voting for Democrats to the incidence of cancer. While the story has a strong ideological bias, it does a great job of poking fun at the way politicians (and others) misuse statistics. http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/voting_democrat_causes_cancer.html
5720361
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
According to Cloudmark 419 spammers are using the democrat.org domain to forward email and bypass spam filters. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/28/democratic_party_419_abuse/
The Democratic Party website has a page which allows anyone to send an email with no verification step to prevent bots from using it.
5071151
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
A code expert just cracked a code used by a friend of Thomas Jefferson in a letter written to THomas Jefferson some 200 years ago. This code is fairly easy to crack using a computer, but extremely difficult without one. I think it would have been much harder if the author had not included an indication as to what code algorithm he used in the letter accompanying the coded message. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124648494429082661.html?mod=yhoofront
3304249
submission
Attila Dimedici writes:
Charles Babcock of Information Week published an interesting article suggesting that Microsoft will have to at least to some degree take Windows Open Source if they want to stay in business http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212903501 .
He suggests that the money to be made from the things MS builds on top of Windows (Office, Server, SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc) is so much greater than what can be made from Windows itself that MS will have to give up the revenue stream from Windows in order to maintain these other, more valuable, revenue streams.
