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Privacy

Submission + - Google Reader shares private data, ruins Christmas (slashdot.org)

Felipe Hoffa writes: One week ago Google Reader's team decided showing your private data to all your GMail contacts. No need to opt-in, no way to opt-out. Complaints haven't been answered. Some users share their problems, including one family that won't be able to enjoy this Christmas due to this "feature". Will this start happening with all Google products?

You can check a summary of complaints or the whole thread.

Wii

Miyamoto Says He's Solved Co-op Issue In Mario Galaxy 60

In the fourth volume of the ongoing series of interviews between Nintendo's Iwata and the Mario Galaxy team, design legend Shigeru Miyamoto puts forth the opinion that he thinks he's nailed two-player Mario. That opinion is bolstered by Japanese sales figures, which shows the plumber doing quite well for his umpteenth outing. "Miyamoto: 'For every game I worked on, there were always times when I would keep discussing the issue of two-player simultaneous gameplay, and the staff also became conscious of the challenge, so every development team kept trying hard to solve it too. Though I think that might also have been because they thought if they didn't deal with it first, I'd come in and ask how it was coming along for sure! (laughs).'" Via Kotaku.

One SimCity Per Child 253

SimHacker writes "Electronic Arts has donated the original 'classic' version of Will Wright's popular SimCity game to the One Laptop Per Child project. SimCity is the epitome of constructionist educational games, and has been widely used by educators to unlock and speed-up the transformational skills associated with creative thinking. It's also been used in the Future City Competition by seventh- and eighth-grade students to foster engineering skills and inspire students to explore futuristic concepts and careers in engineering. OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name "Micropolis", which was SimCity's original working title. SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, called on game developers to create 'frameworks and scripting environments — tools with which children themselves could create their own content.' The long term agenda of the OLPC SimCity project is to convert SimCity into a scriptable Python module, integrate it with the OLPC's Sugar user interface and Cairo rendering library. Eventually they hope to apply Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's ideas about constructionist education and teaching kids to program."
Portables

Submission + - Lenovo Drops Thinkpad 2yrs ahead of schedule

Crash McBang writes: According to the Register, Lenovo will be dropping the Thinkpad brand two years ahead of schedule. No word on what will happen to the brand. What should Thinkpad users have as a Plan B? What would you suggest as an alternative to Thinkpad?

Feed Engadget: Boeing demonstrates a Hummer-mounted laser weapon (engadget.com)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

We first heard of Boeing's plan to mount a laser on a Humvee in July, but we weren't expecting results so soon -- yet here we are just two months later and the company is already blowing stuff up with a truck-based "directed energy weapon." The one-kilowatt laser is retrofitted on Boeing's existing Humvee-mounted Avenger missile system, and tests have already demonstrated its effectiveness at taking out IEDs from a safe distance. More excitingly for the boom-boom crowd, the Laser Avenger has also managed to eliminate grounded UAVs, and Boeing says it's working on being able to target low-flying drones as well. That's all well and good, but we just want to know: how is it at making popcorn?

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!


Movies

Submission + - Leonard Nimoy to play Spock in next Star Trek movi 1

mcgrew writes: "The AP (via the Chicago Tribune) is reporting that Leonard Nimoy will 'don his famous pointy ears again' in the next Star Trek movie, due out Christmas of next year.

"This is really going to be a great movie. And I don't say things like that lightly," Nimoy told a gathering of 6,500 fans Thursday at Comic-Con, the nation's largest pop-culture convention.

He greeted the crowd with a Vulcan salute.

Nimoy was joined by the newly named young Spock, "Heroes" star Zachary Quinto, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Nimoy.

Both Spocks were introduced by the film's director and co-producer, J.J. Abrams.
I've lost track, is this an even numbered Trek movie or an odd numbered one?"

Feed Engadget: Apple CFO hints at possibly big "product transitions" before September (engadget.com)

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Laptops, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Apple is notorious for providing extremely conservative guidance to investors. Still, with Mac sales on the rise, iPods doing their thing, and the ability to begin posting revenue from an expected 1 million iPhones in the new quarter don't you think that a guidance of just 65 cents per share (after a record 92) is just a tad, say, absurd? That point was certainly not lost on UBS analyst, Benjamin Reitzes, who kicked off Apple's Q&A yesterday with the following: "You just guided 66 cents and came up with 92. Why should we believe that this 65 cents this time when you've been so conservative? Are you really that worried about component costs or is there something else going on with regard to an upcoming price cut for a product?" Apple's CFO, Peter Oppenheimer, cited the following three factors as the reason: Apple's "expensive" back to school promotion which will run most of the quarter, higher component costs, and most intriguingly, "some product transitions." As Forbes opines, that could translate into the operating costs required to cover a pretty significant product shakeup this fiscal quarter. So don't be surprised when new iMacs, iLife and a touchscreen video iPod are announced in the next few months. And perhaps, if you're really good, you'll see a flash-based 12-inch MacBook Pro and new iPhone version(s) make their way to retail in the quarter ending September 30th -- ok, probably not but you can hope now can't you fanboy?

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!


Feed Engadget: TiVo HD review roundup (engadget.com)

Filed under: Home Entertainment


A critical eye is peering in on TiVo's personal-flotation-device known as the TiVo HD, a $300 entry-level option into the company's DVR world, and we've got the roundup to prove it. The box, which TiVo hopes will attract thriftier (read, any) users to the previously pricey platform, features HDMI and component outs up to 1080i, dual CableCARD and M-Card compatibility, and Series3-style ATSC and NTSC tuners. It appears that the general feeling on the little black box is positive, with almost everyone loving the price-point, the CableCARD functionality, and all the standard TiVo amenities, though we wouldn't go so far to say that everyone is a 100% pleased. Most of the reviews take issue with the device's sluggish UI, lack of TiVo ToGo, and the tempting, yet inactive eSATA port (which the company says it's planning to activate down the road). Browse on over to the read links for the full reviews.

Read -- PC Magazine (4.5 out of 5)
Read -- CNET (7.7 out of 10)
Read -- PC World (88 out of 100)

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!


Feed Engadget: Georgia Tech researchers develop gesture-recognizing watch (engadget.com)

Filed under: Wearables

This isn't the first time we've seen some gesture-based technology come out of Georgia Tech, but it looks like they've made some fairly significant improvements, now touting it not just as a game interface, but as a means to control all your various gadgets. Unlike that previous system, which simply relied on a cellphone camera to track movement, this new system makes use of five infrared sensors to pick up on your gestures, which then get interpreted and sent to the device you're trying to control via Bluetooth. No word when you'll actually be able to do that yourself, of course, although the researches don't seem to see any limits to the technology's potential, even touting it as a means for doctors to control medical devices during an operation.

[Via SlashGear]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!


Communications

Submission + - Richard Stallman talks on Copyright V. The People 5

holden writes: "Richard M. Stallman recently gave a talk entitled Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club. The talk looks at the origin of copyright, and how it has evolved overtime from something that originally served the benefit of the people to a tool used against them. In keeping with his wishes to use open formats, the talk and qa are available in ogg theora only."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Would you use SVG or XAML? 2

We are currently in the middle of a multi-million dollar energy management project at the University of North Carolina. There are many aspects of it, including creating generic web-service gateways to a variety of underlying low-level protocols (BACnet, LON, Sigma, KNX) and aggregating them up to a central monitoring system we call the Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS).

Networking

Submission + - Multi-gigabit wireless "within three years" (pressesc.com)

Anonymous Howard writes: "Multi-gigabit wireless technology using of extremely high radio frequencies (RF) to achieve broad bandwidth and high data transmission rates over short distances will be ready within three years making wired computers and peripherals obsolete, a team of Georgia Tech scientists announced today. These wireless data connections will able to transfer an entire DVD in seconds. I wonder what MAFIAA will say about that."
Power

Submission + - Cheap Solar Cells that can be Painted on Plastic (sciencedaily.com)

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets. According to the lead researcher, "Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations." The team combined carbon nanotubes with tiny carbon buckyballs (fullerenes) to form snake-like structures. Add sunlight to excite the polymers, and the buckyballs will grab the electrons. The article abstract is available through the Journal of Materials Chemistry, with an illustration of the technology."

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