Cody Taylor

How to gain creative control over your camera and bypass portrait mode (and still get great portraits).

After sending a private note to his MP opposing the proposed “three strikes” law currently being debated in France, Bourreau-Guggenheim found himself hauled into his boss’ office. He was shown a copy of his e-mail, and he was fired for “strategic differences” with his employer.

Every year the United States releases the Special 301 Report, which examines the intellectual property laws of important trading partners.

Cell phones are moving into more homes and pushing traditional landlines out the door.

bigmammoth writes “Xiph hackers have been hard at work improving the Theora codec over the past year, with the latest versions gaining on and passing h.264 in objective PSNR quality measurements. From the update: ‘Amusingly, it also shows test versions of Thusnelda pulling ahead of h.264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases. It’s important to note that PSNR is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. This is also data from a single clip. That said, it’s clear that the gap in the fundamental infrastructure has closed substantially before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.’ Momentum is building with a major Open Video Conference in June, the impending launch of Firefox 3.5 and excitement about wider adoption in a top-4 web site. It’s looking like free video codecs may pose a serious threat to the h.264 bait-and-switch plan to start charging millions for internet streaming of h.264 in 2010.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kristina at Science News writes “As part of the announcement of its proposed fiscal year 2010 budget, the Obama administration released a summary (called ‘Terminations, Reductions, and Savings: Budget of the US Government, Fiscal Year 2010’) that includes which science-related programs are getting cut. Two big programs are the nuclear waste storage project at Yucca Mountain in Nevada and a second prototype airborne laser missile-defense weapon.” Update: 05/07 23:03 GMT by T : On the other hand, reader Dusty writes, “The NASA budget for 2010 has been announced, up 5% on 2009. Human space flight plans to be reviewed.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

grepdisc writes “Newspapers in Boston are fawning over a report by the American Public Transportation Association that taking public transportation saves money over driving. How can one possibly save ,600 per year, when the inflated estimates of 15,000 miles per year at only 23.4 miles and .039 per gallon costs only ,310, and a high parking rate of 0 per month results in under 00. Is the discrepancy made up of tolls, repairs, the cost of buying a car and ignoring train station parking fees?” Everyone’s situation is different — and it’s easy to have a chip on one’s shoulder while estimating prices. But for those of you with the option, what kind of savings do you find (or would you expect) from taking one form of transport to work over another?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Mozilla Links “Mozilla has started a new project to make Firefox split in several processes at a time: one running the main user interface (chrome), and another or several others running the web content in each tab. Like Chrome or Internet Explorer 8 which have implemented this behavior to some degree, the main benefit would be the increase of stability: a single tab crash would not take down the whole session with it, as well as performance improvements in multiprocessor systems that are progressively becoming the norm. The project, which lacks a catchy name like other Mozilla projects (like TaskFox, Ubiquity, or Chocolate Factory) is coordinated by long time Mozillian, Benjamin Smedberg; and also integrated by Joe Drew, Jason Duell, Ben Turner, and Boris Zbarsky in the core team. According to the loose roadmap published, a simple implementation that works with a single tab (not sessions support, no secure connections, either on Linux or Windows, probably not even based on Firefox) should be reached around mid-July.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.