alphadogg writes “San Jose is casting a vote of confidence in municipal Wi-Fi from the heart of Silicon Valley, planning a new, free network just a few years after such networks were declared all but dead. The California city of about 1 million intends to offer high-speed Wi-Fi throughout its downtown, covering an area of 1.5 square miles in the middle of this year. But unlike earlier municipal Wi-Fi initiatives, such as a Google-sponsored network that would have covered San Francisco, the San Jose system will be able to pay for itself entirely by helping the government do its job. In the middle of the past decade, ambitious projects in several cities, including parts of San Jose, promised to blanket outdoor areas with Wi-Fi and provide built-in sources of revenue. Home broadband subscriptions, browser-based advertising or small-business use would help to pay for equipment and operations. But those complicated business models depended on assumptions that often proved unfounded.”

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San Jose Plan Reintroduces Large-Scale Municipal Wi-Fi Coverage

Twin Creeks Technologies is a new startup that says it has sliced the price of producing solar panels in half—using an ion cannon. According to the company, it can produce solar cells for about 40 cents per watt compared to the 80 cents it costs now. More »

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Half-Price Solar Panels Thanks to An Ion Cannon [Science]

A 23-year old student from Sheffield Hallam University in the north of England is bound for America. That wouldn’t be unusual—except that Richard O’Dwyer won’t go voluntarily. The UK Home Secretary has today agreed to extradite O’Dwyer over US copyright infringement charges for running a “linking site” called TVShack.

Back in June 2010, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized O’Dwyer’s tvshack.net domain name after a closed, one-sided hearing before a judge. (All domains ending in .net and .com are seizable by US law enforcement, regardless of where their owners are located.) But O’Dwyer soon had the site back up at a new address, TVShack.cc, which did not require a US-based domain name registrar. He slapped a notice to the top of the new site urging users to update their bookmarks.

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Copyright wars heat up: US wins extradition of college kid from England

When Megaupload fell overnight, one of the biggest complaints was that users were immediately shut out of their document storage. That includes plenty of US Government officials—something Kim Dotcom is helping to rectify. More »

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Megaupload Working to Recover Thousands of US Government Documents [Megaupload]

Bad news if you’ve recently acquired either of ASUS’ gorgeous Zenbooks, as alleged spec sheets for their successors have just surfaced. According to documents obtained by The Verge, the upcoming refresh will be significant for both the 11.6-inch UX21 and 13.3-inch UX31. Dubbed the UX21A and UX31A, respectively, both supposedly make do with Ivy Bridge silicon (spanning from Core i3s all the way to i7s) which also means a free update to Intel’s HD Graphics 4000. Brawny internals aside, most interesting are the optional 1080p IPS panels on both, which should be particularly gorgeous and pixel-dense in the smaller 11.6-inch beaut. Also rumored is the inclusion of WiDi, alongside backlit keyboard decks — all stuffed into the same svelte footprints as their predecessors. Naturally, there’s no word on when they’ll land, but you’ll know more when we do. Catch the full spill at the source link below.

ASUS Zenbooks to get Ivy Bridge refresh, optional 1080p and backlit keyboards in tow? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS Zenbooks to get Ivy Bridge refresh, optional 1080p and backlit keyboards in tow?

AT&T’s 4G LTE isn’t the new kid on the wireless block anymore, but that’s not to say the network’s leapfrogged its growing pains. With almost two years to go before it reaches that end-of-year 2013 expansion target, the carrier’s flipping the switch on an additional eleven markets across the US, as well as completing coverage in New York City. With a phased rollout in place that’s set to begin next month and terminate at some undisclosed point in early summer, subscribers in Cleveland, Akron and Canton, Ohio; Naples, Florida; Bloomington, Lafayette and Muncie, Indiana; Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana; St. Louis, Missouri; Bryan-College Station, Texas and Staten Island will get to benefit from those 700MHz waves. Check out the official presser below for the finer details.

Continue reading AT&T continues 4G LTE expansion, plans to light up eleven markets by early summer

AT&T continues 4G LTE expansion, plans to light up eleven markets by early summer originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T continues 4G LTE expansion, plans to light up eleven markets by early summer

New submitter An dochasac writes “Everyone knows incandescent lights are inefficient little space heaters which happen to convert 5% of their incoming energy to light. Compact Fluorescents (CFLs) are more efficient, but they contain toxic, brain-eating mercury and emit a greenish light. LEDs are also efficient and last longer, but if their blueish ‘white’ light doesn’t mess up your melatonin balance, their price is high enough to wreck your checking account balance and give you the blues. A company called Vu1 has come up with something called Electron Stimulated Luminance (ESL) lights which claim to solve the mercury and price problem with a light based on Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) technology. These lights have the warm color balance of incandescents and are compatible with dimmer switches. The article has further ESL details along with an explanation of why it’s still a bad idea to say these are ‘trash can safe.'”

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ESL — a CRT-Based Replacement For CFL Lights Without the Mercury

Are you working for the fastest shrinking industry in the United States? You are, if you’re working
for a newspaper according to this study by LinkedIn and the Council of
Economic Advisors.

The fastest-growing industries include renewables (+49.2%), internet
(+24.6%), online publishing (+24.3%), and e-learning (+15.9%). Fastest-shrinking
industries were newspapers (-28.4%), retail (-15.5%), building materials
(-14.2%), and automotive (-12.8%).

Instead of the growth in percentage terms, we also examined the
volume of job gain / loss by industry, as indicated by the largest bubbles
in the figure above. Our data show that even through the recession,
the industries with the largest volume of employment growth (the largest
circles on the figure above) were internet, hospitals & healthcare,
health, wellness & fitness, oil & energy, IT and renewables.
On the other side of the story, retail, construction, telecommunications,
banking, and automotive had the largest volume of job losses between
2007 and 2011.

Link
– via The
Atlantic

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Newspaper: America’s Fastest Shrinking Industry

iPad: The Khan Academy provides over 3,000 free educational videos, exercises, and lectures covering the span of everything from math, physics, finance, and history. It’s one of our favorite places to get a free education online, and now its complete library is available on-the-go on your iPad. More »

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Khan Academy for iPad Puts World-Class Educational Lectures in Your Hand [Ipad Downloads]

Microsoft is giving Windows Azure customers a 33 percent credit on their entire monthly bills because of an outage on Feb. 29 caused by a “leap day bug.” Azure executive Bill Laing announced the credit Friday night in a post that also offered further details on how the leap day bug took down Azure.

We’ve already noted that core parts of Azure were inaccessible to many customers for more than 12 hours, due to the service’s inability to calculate the correct date while trying to inspect SSL certificates. Laing now offers a more thorough root cause analysis.

New “transfer” certificates are generated when virtual machines are created, ensuring that application details are encrypted, he wrote. “When the GA (guest agent) creates the transfer certificate, it gives it a one year validity range,” Laing wrote. “It uses midnight UST of the current day as the valid-from date and one year from that date as the valid-to date. The leap day bug is that the GA calculated the valid-to date by simply taking the current date and adding one to its year. That meant that any GA that tried to create a transfer certificate on leap day set a valid-to date of February 29, 2013, an invalid date that caused the certificate creation to fail.”

Storage clusters and SQL Azure remained unaffected, but the outage did affect Windows Azure Compute, the Access Control Service, Azure Service Bus, SQL Azure Portal, and Data Sync Services. Because of the “extraordinary nature” of the outage, Microsoft is providing a “33% credit to all customers of Windows Azure Compute, Access Control, Service Bus and Caching for the entire affected billing month(s) for these services, regardless of whether their service was impacted.”

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Microsoft details leap day bug that took down Azure, refunds customers