Today Amazon agreed to a no-bid, $16.5 million contract with the U.S. State Department to provide 2,500 Kindle Touches for the government’s overseas language-education programs.

The document released today identifies the State Department’s need for a program that provides “a secure, centrally managed content distribution and management platform to centrally manage an unlimited number of e-reader/tablet devices.” and unfortunately Apple’s iPad falls short of this requirement, according to the State Department.

IT spending in Europe will virtually grind to a halt this year and next due to economic uncertainty over the euro currency, according to a Forrester Research report.

“The most likely result is either near-zero growth or economic recession in 2012, depending on the country,” Forrester analyst and lead report author Andrew Bartels wrote. “The worse case is a possible collapse of the euro and a resulting depression.”

Ray Bradbury's fiction looks set to enter the structure of the internet, after a software developer has proposed a new HTTP status code inspired by Fahrenheit 451.

Tim Bray, a fan of Bradbury's writing, is recommending to the Internet Engineering Task Force, which governs such choices, that when access to a website is denied for legal reasons the user is given the status code 451.

And then came cyberpunk—Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling. It was subversive and gritty, a poetry-kaleidoscope trip into the for-profit future. Faceless corporations loomed over the ant-sized dramas of human endeavors, moving billions of dollars and yen around the globe while the human beings of the story scrapped it out on the streets.

It was cyberspace and console cowboys, leather jackets, Zeiss eye implants, modded Russian knockoff prostheses, extinct horses, mirrorshades. The future was bizarre and threatening—and also strangely real.

The cloud is supposed to be "push button receive bacon", and in practice I have found Office 365 to be anything but.

Microsoft's cloudy email offering does basic email very well. You can buy a licence for a new user with ease, set up an email address for them and connect up your client of choice. A few clicks and email starts flowing; it just works. But it's 2012. At this point, sendmail "just works" too, and it ships with virtually every Linux distribution known to man. You can even download fully operational real-boy mail servers as virtual appliances, put them on VMWare's freebie ESXi, and then build them into a wall. They'll run for the next decade or so without you having to fret about them.

Sendmail, however, has the added bonus of supporting certain highly demanded features like mail merges; Office 365 places severe restrictions (that you cannot control or change) on the amount and frequency of outbound mail. This makes running the corporate newsletter a no-go.

Italien sitzt auf einem riesigen Schuldenberg, und jeder Fünfte hinterzieht Steuern. Die Regierung setzt nun auf das Überwachungsprogramm Serpico, das jedes Bankkonto filzt und jede Ausgabe registriert. Die Finanzkontrolle ist total, der Protest erstaunlich leise.

Ich bin vom Verein "Gegen Pro-Diebstahl" und suche Unterstützer für eine Sammelklage gegen die MA28.
Mir wurde vor einiger Zeit mein Rad gestohlen, die Diebe haben eindeutig deren Verkehrswege genutzt.
Es kann nicht sein, dass die öffentliche Hand ENTGEGEN der Interessen der Bürger die Infrastruktur für KRIMINELLES VERHALTEN schafft und dieses damit MUTWILLIG unterstützt!

Ich vertraue darauf, dass die Gerichte die Verantwortung der MA28 aussprechen und betonen werden, dass meine Interessen angemessen berücksichtigt werden.

Ich habe die MA28 als Musterbeispiel ausgesucht. Das Urteil soll ein Exempel für künftige Rechtsansprüche statuieren. (Asfinag, ÖBB-Infrastruktur, etc.)

Some cosmic ray particles enter the heliosphere and we can see them here from Earth. But a slower type has a hard time entering the heliosphere. Last month, the sum of those slower particles, suddenly ticked up about 10 percent, "the fastest increase we've seen," Stone says. But an uptick does not mean Voyager has crossed over, though it does mean we're getting close. When Voyager does finally leave and enter the space "out there where all the particles are," the level will stop rising. The rising itself means that Voyager is not out there, yet. "But," cautions Stone, "we don't know. I mean this is the first time any spacecraft has been there." Since nothing's ever been there before, we don't know what it will look like, which makes it a little hard to recognize "it" at all. "That's the exciting thing," he continues.

Phil Zimmermann released PGP for free, but he's planning to charge about $20 a month for his new Silent Circle encryption service. It's unlikely to be applauded by encryption-wary law enforcement agencies.

We used to read SF to get the heady high of a big vision, the "eyeball kick" as Rudy Rucker describes it, of seeing something brain-warpingly different and new for the first time. But today you don't need to read SF to get a sense of wonder high: you can just browse "New Scientist". We're living in the frickin' 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980. (Definitely than in 1970.) We're carrying out this Mind Meld via the internet, and if that isn't a 1980s cyberpunk vision that's imploded into the present, warts and all, I don't know what is.

It looks like Apple’s days of blowing people away with new features and functions has cooled now that solid platforms like Ice Cream Sandwich and Windows Phone exist.

Die Medien- und Unterhaltungsindustrie hat sich bis jetzt noch jedem größeren Versuch entgegen gestemmt, dass audiovisuelle Inhalte aus Archiven im Netz öffentlich zugänglich zu werden, auch wenn diese Inhalte unter einem gesetzlichen Auftrag und völlig rechtskonform produziert und sogar mit öffentlichem Geld bezahlt wurden. Gemeint sind die riesigen Archive der Öffentlich-Rechtlichen von der BBC, ARD, ZDF bis hin zum ORF.

I have seen the future, and if it turns out the way it is headed, I am opposed. I fear our free and continual access to information and services is doomed to be replaced by tightly controlled gardens of exclusivity. It is time to rethink the present, for it determines the future.

Harte Klänge, Schweiß und Partystimmung sind Dinge, die man mit Österreichs größtem Rockfestival, dem Nova Rock, verbindet. Personenzählsensoren und Personenverfolgung via Bluetooth und Mobilfunkdaten hingegen bislang nicht. Doch diese Methoden kommen heuer in Nickelsdorf zum Einsatz – um eine erhöhte Sicherheit der Besucher zu gewährleisten, wie die Verantwortlichen betonen. Hans Zeger von der ARGE Daten hat dennoch Bedenken bezüglich des Schutzes der Privatsphäre.

Verwundert hat mich jedoch, dass man die Haltung, eine gemeinsame Obsorge zu verweigern, auch nur im Entferntesten mit Feminismus in Verbindung bringt. Feminismus heißt doch, einen aktiven Vater einzufordern, sich als gleichberechtigt zu sehen, um gerade nicht auf die Mutterrolle reduziert zu werden. Völlig unbegreiflich ist jedoch die Haltung des Frauenministeriums. Soweit ich sehe, wäre man allenfalls dann bereit, in eine verpflichtende gemeinsame Obsorge einzuwilligen, wenn die Gleichstellung der Frau erreicht ist. So überfällig Letzteres ist - ein Kind zu diesem Zweck als politisches Pfand zu instrumentalisieren ist obszön.

Twitter's Dan Webb and Angus Croll had an interesting slide deck at Fluent. They explained that functional mixins rock and that you should make good use of JavaScript's biggest strength: functions.

Thousands of Web developers worldwide use jQuery to innovate on their websites and stay up to date on trends. This surge has been influenced by several jQuery gurus who have helped make jQuery what is today. I would like to personally thank these guys and gals for their hard work and would like to do my part to spread the news about JavaScript and jQuery. In this article, we’ll show you over 50 of jQuery’s most renowned functions, demonstrated with live visual examples. The jQuery library is comprehensive, so hopefully seeing these most frequently used functions in action will improve your understanding of how they can work together to produce excellent results.

„Österreich ist neben Malta und der Slowakei das einzige Land in Europa, in dem Kindergartenpädagogen nicht in FH und Universitäten, sondern in berufsbildenden höheren Schulen ausgebildet werden“, beklagt Aigner. „Das ist letztlich eine Entwertung eines Berufsfeldes, das für mich der wichtigste und anspruchsvollste pädagogische Bereich überhaupt ist.“ Die Geisteshaltung, wonach die Betreuung von Kindern nur etwas für Frauen – am besten für Mütter – sei, sei noch immer vorherrschend. „Ein Irrweg, auf dem viel Potenzial verloren geht. Kinder brauchen Männer und umgekehrt“, so der Psychologe. Wenn Kinder bei ihrer Ausbildung fast ausschließlich von Frauen betreut werden, gebe man ihnen ein fragwürdiges Männerbild mit auf den Weg. „Es fehlen dadurch die Auseinandersetzungsmöglichkeiten.“ Kinder würden so den Eindruck bekommen, dass die Sorge um sie nur Frauensache sei.

My friends who work in aerospace tell me the old guys who built the industry all grew up reading Heinlein and Clarke, and went into aerospace to turn those crazy things they read as kids into practical realities as adults. Well, I work in supercomputing, and I can assure you that this industry is full of young geniuses who grew up reading Gibson, Vinge, and Rucker — and yes, me — and they went into this field to do the same thing.

We don’t quite live in the world that cyberpunk fiction predicted. But we live in the world that the kids who grew up reading cyberpunk fiction built, and that is a very cool thing indeed.

It was after reading this story that I resolved that I would one day read Poe, become a writer, find a Scary House, and own a robotic Orang-Utan that would do my bidding. I have been fortunate in achieving at least three of these goals.