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British Government Instituted 3-Month Deletion Policy, Apparently To Evade FOIA

An anonymous reader writes: In late 2004, weeks before Tony Blair’s Freedom of Information (FOI) act first came into force, Downing Street adopted a policy of automatically deleting emails more than three months old (paywalled). The IT decision has resulted in a “dysfunctional” system according to former cabinet officials, with Downing Street workers struggling to agree on the details of meetings in the absence of a correspondence chain. It is still possible to preserve an email by dragging it to local storage, but the relevance of mails may not be apparent at the time that the worker must make the decision to do so. Former special adviser to Nick Clegg Sean Kemp said: “Some people delete their emails on an almost daily basis, others just try to avoid putting anything potentially interesting in an email in the first place.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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British Government Instituted 3-Month Deletion Policy, Apparently To Evade FOIA

Sprint stops throttling heavy users to avoid net neutrality complaints

Sprint has stopped throttling its heaviest data users, even when its network is congested, to avoid potential violations of the Federal Communications Commission’s new net neutrality rules that ban throttling. Instead, Sprint will manage congestion with a policy aimed at giving all customers a solid connection to the network. “Sprint said it believes its policy would have been allowed under the rules, but dropped it just in case,” The Wall Street Journal reported . “Sprint doesn’t expect users to notice any significant difference in their services now that we no longer engage in the process,” Sprint told the newspaper. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint stops throttling heavy users to avoid net neutrality complaints

The world’s thinnest light bulb is made from graphene

Forget LED light bulbs… in the future, your lighting may be made from carbon . Columbia University researchers have built a light bulb chip that superheats graphene to produce illumination. While that’s the same basic concept that you see in an incandescent bulb, the graphene filament measures just one atom thick — this is the world’s thinnest light bulb, and may be close to being the thinnest possible . It’s transparent, too, which could suit it to see-through displays . The technology should have uses beyond lighting things up, too. Generating this kind of heat on a small scale could lead to “micro-hotplates” that heat up chemicals for the sake of studying chemical reactions. Also, creating light at this scale is key to developing photonic processors that are much faster than conventional chips. The light will need to switch on and off much faster for any computing uses, but it’s a realistic possibility. [Image credit: Myung-Ho Bae/KRISS] Filed under: Displays , Household , Science Comments Source: Columbia University , Nature

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The world’s thinnest light bulb is made from graphene

Rearranging jellyfish limbs may lead to self-healing robots

Normally when a jellyfish loses a limb, say to the jaws of a hungry sea turtle, it simply regenerates the lost appendage, no big deal. However, a Caltech research team has been studying a certain jellyfish species that doesn’t regrow its limbs but rather rearranges the remaining ones to maintain symmetry. They think that this body-modifying trick could one day help robots repair themselves after similar injuries. In a paper published June 15th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the team described its work with the moon jellyfish. They amputated the various numbers of limbs from anesthetized jellies and then monitored their recovery. While the jellies healed in a couple of hours (as they normally do), the team noticed that rather than beginning to regrow their limbs the jellies instead shifted their remaining appendages around to restore their symmetry. What’s really wild is that mechanical forces created by the jelly’s own muscle contractions appear to be behind its reorganization. “This is a different strategy of self-repair, ” Caltech assistant professor of biology Lea Goentoro said in a statement. “Some animals just heal their wounds, other animals regenerate what is lost, but the moon jelly ephyrae [juveniles] don’t regenerate their lost limbs. They heal the wound, but then they reorganize to regain symmetry.” This discovery could lead to new advances in robotics . “Symmetrization may provide a new avenue for thinking about biomaterials that could be designed to ‘heal’ by regaining functional geometry rather than regenerating precise shapes, ” Goentoro continued. “Other self-repair mechanisms require cell proliferation and cell death-biological processes that aren’t easily translated to technology. But we can more easily apply mechanical forces to a material.” Soon, injured robots may not drag their broken limbs behind them like this little guy , but simply rearrange their other legs instead. [Image Credit: Getty Images/Vetta (top); Caltech (inline)] Filed under: Science Comments Source: Caltech

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Rearranging jellyfish limbs may lead to self-healing robots

Here’s how Xbox One backward compatibility works

The Xbox 360 had a dedicated spot in millions of living rooms, bedrooms and offices for nearly 10 years, and during that time, players purchased massive libraries of games. However, when the Xbox One launched in 2013, it didn’t include the ability to play or transfer Xbox 360 games, a disappointment for many fans. That’s why Microsoft’s announcement at its E3 showcase was so exciting: The Xbox One is getting backward compatibility this holiday, with a lineup of more than 100 fan-requested Xbox 360 games to start and more to be added as demand warrants. Xbox One backward compatibility runs an Xbox 360 emulator right on the console, which is no easy feat, Microsoft General Manager of Games Publishing Shannon Loftis explains during a chat at E3. Are you pleased with the response to the announcement of backward compatibility on Xbox One? It’s something that I, as a gamer, have been wanting. Actually, the genesis of backwards compatibility is that gamers asked for it. It took some time for us to figure out how to do it, but we did and the response has been amazingly positive. How does it work, technologically? It wasn’t easy. It took some pretty dedicated engineering effort and very talented engineers. What they did was they created a software-based 360 emulation within the Xbox One architecture. So, when you put your disc in the drive, we’re actually loading up an emulator, and then we put up a little portion of the Xbox 360 dashboard and you use that dashboard to launch into your game. You still have access though to all the great Xbox One features: game streaming, game DVR, screenshots. It works for digital games as well and your saved games do transfer. Gamers have put so much into 360 games, so much passion, energy, time, money, and that value I think is important for us to bring into the Xbox One story. Will every Xbox 360 game eventually be available via backward compatibility? It’s up to gamers to tell us what they want . We do all the work, but there is a little bit of work and part of that involves talking with the publisher and making sure that this is consistent with their goals for the game as well. So, as gamers ask us, we will deliver. Check here for everything happening at E3 2015! Filed under: Gaming , HD , Microsoft Comments

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Here’s how Xbox One backward compatibility works