When Google Reader finally closed its doors, it shoved thousands of teary-eyed RSS fans into cyberspace, adrift, where we flailed around desperately for a suitable replacement. Many services rose to the challenge , but the incoming wave was a lot to handle. Too much for one of our favorite alternatives—The Old Reader—which is taking a page from Googs and shutting down as well. Read more…
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Even Google Reader Replacements Are Shutting Down
First time accepted submitter marshallr writes “Technical Information Release TIR 13-10 becomes effective in Massachusetts on July 31st, 2013. It requires software consultants to collect a 6.25% sales tax from their clients if they perform ‘computer system design services and the modification, integration, enhancement, installation or configuration of standardized software.’ TIR 13-10 was published to mass.gov on July 25th, 2013 to provide the public a few working days to review the release and make comments.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Massachusetts Enacts 6.25% Sales Tax On "Prewritten" Software Consulting
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a Chinese spy drone! Oh, and there’s another one! That’s what the Indian Army must’ve thought when they saw two specks of something “spying on them” in the sky. Instead, what India thought were Chinese spy drones turned out to be… Jupiter and Venus. Read more…
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India Thought Jupiter and Venus Were Actually Chinese Spy Drones
First time accepted submitter Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes “Reuters reports that under a cost-saving plan by the US Postal Service, millions of Americans accustomed to getting their mail delivered to their doors will have to trek to the curb and residents of new homes will use neighborhood mailbox clusters. ‘Converting delivery away from door delivery to either curb line or centralized delivery would enable the Postal Service to provide service to more customers in less time, ‘ says Postal Service spokeswoman Sue Brennan. More than 30 million American homes get door-to-door delivery and another 50 million get their mail dropped at their curbside mailboxes. But the Post Service, which is buckling under massive financial losses, sees savings in centralized mail delivery. Door-to-door delivery costs the Postal Service about $353 per address each year while curbside delivery costs $224, and cluster boxes cost $160 per address. But unions say it’s a bad idea to end delivery to doorsteps and will be disruptive for the elderly and disabled. ‘It’s madness, ‘ says Jim Sauber, chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers. ‘The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
cold fjord writes “I wish it was always this easy. Business Insider reports, ‘Iodized salt is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it. Few people know why it even exists. Iodine deficiency remains the world’s leading cause of preventable mental retardation. According to a new study (abstract), its introduction in America in 1924 had an effect so profound that it raised the country’s IQ. A new NBER working paper from James Feyrer, Dimitra Politi, and David N. Weil finds that the population in iodine-deficient areas saw IQs rise by a full standard deviation, which is 15 points, after iodized salt was introduced…. The mental impacts were unknown, the program was started to fight goiter, so these effects were an extremely fortunate, unintended side effect.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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US Gained a Decade of Flynn-Effect IQ Points After Adding Iodine To Salt
An anonymous reader writes “Still the most popular open source office suite, Apache OpenOffice 4 has been released, with many new enhancements and a new sidebar, based on IBM Symphony’s implementation but with many improvements. The code still has comments in German but as long as real new features keep coming and can be shared with other office suites no one is complaining.” The sidebar mentioned brings frequently used controls down and beside the actual area of a word-processing doc, say, which makes some sense given how wide many displays have become. This release comes with some major improvements to graphics handling, too; anti-aliasing makes for smoother bitmaps. In conjunction with this release, SourceForge (also under the Slashdot Media umbrella) has announced the launch of an extensions collection for OO. Extensions mean that Open Office can gain capabilities from outside contributors, rather than being wrapped up in large, all-or-nothing updates. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apache OpenOffice 4.0 Released With Major New Features
A great artist can make beauty out of any medium, no matter how limited. 97-year-old Hal Lasko embodies this concept. Instead of painting with dozens of expensive brushes or high-end software suites, Lasko uses a tool most of us have used and abandoned years ago—Microsoft Paint from Windows 95. Read more…
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This 97-Year-Old Makes Amazing Art Exclusively With Microsoft Paint
For people going blind from retinal degeneration, there are almost no therapies. Their vision dims and they lose their sight as doctors look on helplessly. But a new experiment involving retinas grown from stem cells promises a new direction for research — and, in the future, a possible treatment. Read more…
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Your replacement retinas might look like this
When Google introduced the new tabbed interface for Gmail , it also brought along some new ads under the Promotions tab. Read more…
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Gmail Has New Ads That Look Like Emails, Here’s How to Turn Them Off
sturgeon writes “Wired Magazine claims today that Google is now 25% of the North American traffic with a mostly unreported (and rapidly expanding), massive deployment of edge caching servers in almost every Internet provider around the world. Whether users are directly using a Google service (i.e. search, YouTube) or the devices are automatically sending data (e.g. Google Analytics, updates), the majority of end devices around the world will now send traffic to Google server during the course of an average day. It looks like Wired based their story on a report from cloud analytics and network management company DeepField.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google Now Serves 25% of North American Internet Traffic