Cody Taylor

Ant writes with this depressing story about how public schools sometimes work: “This six-page Los Angeles Times article shares its investigation to find ‘the process [of firing poor teachers] so arduous that many school principals don’t even try (One-page version) of the article), except in the very worst cases. Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can’t teach is rare …'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

kanewm writes with a snippet from Portable-Ebook-Reader.NET: “Samsung’s new, highly portable e-book reader, dubbed ‘Papyrus,’ will be available in Korea in June 2009 and in the UK and North America sometime later (likely within several months).” As the site notes, though, this lacks some features of the Kindle, the obvious choice for comparison in the American market.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vincent West writes with this excerpt from The Register: “Spy chiefs are already spending hundreds of millions of pounds on a mass internet surveillance system, despite Jacqui Smith’s announcement earlier this week that proposals for a central warehouse of communications data had been dumped on privacy grounds. The system — uncovered today by The Register and The Sunday Times — is being installed under a GCHQ project called Mastering the Internet (MTI). It will include thousands of deep packet inspection probes inside communications providers’ networks, as well as massive computing power at the intelligence agency’s Cheltenham base, ‘the concrete doughnut.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the Napa Wineries in California to the vineyards of Australia and France, the beautiful designs of these wine maker’s websites embody the spirit of the vine. Trends for winery websites have been leaning towards a dynamic Flash introduction, animation and beautiful graphics, which would give the best representation of the products.

Sometimes it’s simply overwhelming how many gorgeous photos there are on Flickr (Flickr reviews) – sifting through them to find a picture to use on your blog or to just admire can be a chore. Luckily for us however, Flickr has an API, meaning that some creative developers have built alternative Flickr search engines.

W3Counter.com just releasted their april market share stats and linux passed 2.16% for the first time ever.

The gadgets you love don’t always love you back—at least when it comes to battery life. But you can get more from your laptop, your iPod, your phone, and other devices with these 10 techniques.

Google has a patent, which was issued on March 24, 2009, on how to scan books faster than was previously possible.

French legislators reconsidered a bill Wednesday that would punish people who illegally download music and films by cutting off their Internet connections.

Hugh Pickens writes “Scientists say that sedimentary deposits from more than 20 cores in New York and New Jersey indicate a huge wave crashed into the New York City region 2,300 years ago, dumping sediment and shells across Long Island and New Jersey and casting wood debris far up the Hudson River. Steven Goodbred, an Earth scientist at Vanderbilt University, says that size and distribution of material would require a high velocity wave and strong currents to move it, and it is unlikely that short bursts produced in a storm would suffice. “If we’re wrong, it was one heck of a storm,” says Goodbred. An Atlantic tsunami is rare but not inconceivable, says Neal Driscoll, a geologist from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who is not associated with the research. The 1929 Grand Banks tsunami in Newfoundland killed more than two-dozen people and snapped many transatlantic cables, and was set in motion by a submarine landslide set off by an earthquake.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.