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Submission + - Michigan About To Ban Tesla Sales

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: It's a story we've come to see quite often: a state trying to ban Tesla's direct sales model. It seems something sneaky just happened in Michigan where Tesla sales are about to be banned. Bill HB 5606 originally intended to offer added protection to franchised dealers and consumers from price gouging by carmakers, and was passed by the Michigan House in September without any anti-Tesla language. However, once it hit the Senate wording was changed that might imply the legality of a manufacturer-owned dealership was removed. The modified bill was passed unanimously by the Senate on October 2, and then sent back to the House that day where it passed with only a single dissenting vote. The bill was modified without any opportunity for public comment. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has less than a week to sign the bill into law. Of course, Tesla's already fighting this legislation. It's already been said that in the end, Tesla will win all of these situations and that time is being wasted.

Submission + - Early childhood neglect associated with altered brain structure, ADHD (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Under the rule of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, thousands of Romanian children were placed in overcrowded orphanages with bleak conditions and minimal human contact, a legacy that continued even after the 1989 revolution. Only recently have research and public concern caused policy changes.

University of Washington research on children who began life in these institutions shows that early childhood neglect is associated with changes in brain structure. A paper published this month in Biological Psychiatry shows that children who spent their early years in these institutions have thinner brain tissue in cortical areas that correspond to impulse control and attention. “These differences suggest a way that the early care environment has dramatic and lasting effects for children’s functioning,” said lead author Katie McLaughlin, a UW assistant professor of psychology.

Since 2000, the Bucharest Early Intervention Project has worked to document and treat the children’s health. McLaughlin joined the team about six years ago to focus on brain development. This study is among the first in any setting to document how social deprivation in early life affects the thickness of the cortex, the thin folded layer of gray matter that forms the outer layer of the brain. The study provides “very strong support” for a link between the early environment and ADHD, McLaughlin said.

Submission + - Rosetta Stalks Dark Comet in Stunning New Space Selfie (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: At a distance of only 10 miles from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko’s surface, the European Rosetta mission has captured yet another dazzling self portrait with the dark comet lurking in the background. But the orbiter couldn’t have snapped this “selfie” without the help of a little friend — the attached Philae lander that is currently undergoing preparations for its historic comet surface landing in November.

Submission + - Smart battery tells you when it's about to explode (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Material scientists have found a clever way to alert users of damaged batteries before any hazard occurs. A typical lithium-ion cell consists of a lithium oxide cathode and a graphite anode, separated by a thin, porous polymer sheet that allows ions to travel between the electrodes. When the cell is overcharged, microscopic chains of lithium, called “dendrites,” sprout from the anode and pierce through the polymer separator until they touch the cathode. An electrical current passing through the dendrites to the cathode can short-circuit the cell, which causes overheating and, in some cases, fire. Attempts to stop dendrite formation have met with limited success, so the researchers tried something different. They built a “smart” separator by sandwiching a 50-nanometer thin copper layer between two polymer sheets and connecting the copper layer to a third electrode for voltage measurement. When the dendrites reach the separator, the voltage between the anode and the copper layer drops to zero, alerting users that they should change the damaged battery while it is still operating safely—disaster averted.
Idle

Submission + - PETA is not happy that Google used a camel to get a desert "StreetView" (kitsapsun.com)

Submitted by flopwich
flopwich writes: So Google used a camel-mounted camera to get a "street view" of a stretch of desert in the United Arab Emirates. PETA's director is all sniffy about it, saying they should have used jeeps. Oblivious to PETA's opinion, the camel in the video, munching food as it carries the camera, really doesn't look like it minds all that much.

Comment No Degree? (Score 1) 655

Ohh Dear Lord! No Degree at All? How do they know how to function without being taught in over priced schools by teachers that barely understood the technology that was already outdated by the time they realized it should be taught? (Sorry, it just bugs me when people imply that not having a degree means a person is stupid, lazy, or incompetent)

Comment Switchable Grpahics (Score 4, Interesting) 212

by PerlJedi (#40414119) Attached to: XBMC Developers Criticize AMD's Linux Driver
The video codecs are the least of my problems with linux support from both NVidia and AMD. Neither of them off any kind of support for switchable graphics under linux. I have laptops with modern graphics cards from each of these guys, and in both cases it has been a long up hill battle getting the graphics cards to work correctly.

Comment This has happened to me (Score 5, Insightful) 518

by PerlJedi (#40297895) Attached to: NewEgg: Installing Linux Breaks Laptop
This very same problem befell me about 1 year ago. I complained very loudly, including on a consumer review website. Within 24 hours of posting my detailed (and scathing) review I received a call from a newegg customer care representative, who assured me they would make it right. They did in fact allow me to exchange the laptop for a new one, and actually gave me a $100 gift card to make up for the trouble.
While I clearly can't say everyone will get that response, I personally feel that it is important that those of us who run Linux stand up and make it known that we cannot be ignored just because we are not giving our money to either Microsoft or Apple.
Your Rights Online

Submission + - War and Nookd - Ebook regex gone haywire (futureoftheinternet.org)

Submitted by
PerlJedi
PerlJedi writes: "

The Superior Formatting Publishing version isn’t a Barnes and Noble book, so this isn’t the work of a rogue Nook marketer from B&N. Rather, it’s likely that Superior Formatting Publishing ported its Kindle version of War and Peace over to the Nook — doing a search and replace to make sure that any Kindle references they’d inserted, such as in the advertising at the end of the book about their fine Kindle products, were simply changed to Nook.

"
DRM

Submission + - Sci-Fi publisher Tor ditches DRM. A positive step towards the removal of DRM? (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by FBeans
FBeans writes: "Science fiction publisher Tor UK is dropping digital rights management from its e-books alongside a similar move by its US partners."

"Tor UK, Tor Books and Forge are divisions of Pan Macmillan, which said it viewed the move as an "experiment"." s

With experiments, come results. Now users can finally read their books across multiple devices such as Amazon's Kindle, Sony Reader, Kobo eReader and Apple's iBooks. Perhaps we will see the *increase* of sales, because of the new unrestricted format, outweighs the decrease caused by piracy!? Time will tell...
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Mac Flashback attack began with Wordpress blogs (eweek.com)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: Alexander Gostev, head of the global research and analysis team at Kaspersky, says that “tens of thousands of sites powered by WordPress were compromised. How this happened is unclear. The main theories are that bloggers were using a vulnerable version of WordPress or they had installed the ToolsPack plug-in.”

Submission + - Alan Turing papers on code breaking released by GCHQ (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
peetm
peetm writes: "Two 70-year-old papers by Alan Turing on the theory of code breaking have been released by the government's communications headquarters, GCHQ.

It is believed Turing wrote the papers while at Bletchley Park working on breaking German Enigma codes.

A GCHQ mathematician said the fact that the contents had been restricted "shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations of our subject"."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Copyright For Dummies

Journal by kodiaktau

An interesting video was passed to a friend of a friend who subsequently passed it on to me about the original intent and virtues of copyright in America. Not surprisingly the video outlines the original intent of copyright to encourage the creators to bring new content and protect them for a period of time. As the video points out one of the largest instigators of the new rules on time privilege for creators was the Disn
Hardware

Submission + - Wind turbine can extract liters of water from air (geek.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Getting access to enough water to drink in a desert eveironment is a pretty tough proposition, but Eole Water may have solved the problem. It has created a wind turbine that can extract up to 1,000 liters of water per day from the air. All it requires is a 15mph wind to generate the 30kW's of power required for the process to happen. The end result is a tank full of purified water ready to drink at the base of each turbine.

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