No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings.

Science requires the exchange of ideas. Anything that impedes that exchange obstructs progress. Elsevier’s practices are anti-science.

As a researcher I’m public servant. Society pays me for education and research activities. Results belong to society.

Theoretically, this specification will enable multi-station WLAN throughput of at least 1 Gigabit per second and a maximum single link throughput of at least 500 megabits per second (500 Mbit/s).

Better WiFi security could soon be just a few rolls of wallpaper away. French researchers at Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, in cooperation with the Centre Technique du Papier, have developed a wallpaper that can block WiFi signals, preventing them from being broadcast beyond the confines of an office or apartment.

Unlike other types of signal-blocking materials, this one lets cellphones and other radio waves through. Ars Technica’s article mentions that the wallpaper should be available for sale sometime in 2013; I found out that the Finnish manufacturer licensing the technology is Ahlstrom.

BleachBit quickly frees disk space and tirelessly guards your privacy.

Speaking of deleting .DS_store files, BleachBit does that too. Available for Linux and Windows — it can be installed in Ubuntu via the Software Centre.

But the move has significant symbolism, because it’s the first time Google has openly backed a content company by taking an equity stake.

The LA Times‘s Ken Bensinger tells the fascinating, dirty story of American Airlines’s AAirpass, a too-good-to-be-true lifetime first-class-ticket-to-anywhere-anytime pass that the airline debuted in 1981 at $250,000.

The men who bought them — the article only mentions men — went a little bananas. They started flying everywhere, all the time. They’d pick random people out of the check-in line and give them free first-class upgrades. They’d fly to Japan for lunch and back to the States that night. One of them was costing the airline more than $1,000,000 a year.

You can read the orginal LA Times article here.

Piracy is a fact of life for game developers. I’m not stupid enough to think that 100 percent of pirated games are lost sales — there are, of course, some people who would not buy or play a game if it wasn’t available for free, but there are also some dishonest people who pirate things they would otherwise buy, just because they can.

Eloquently put and absolutely spot on. I don’t buy the “it costs too much, therefore I pirate” argument; even if an app or game a fraction of a cent, I’d be willing to bet that it would still be pirated due to the “just because I can” mentality.

Closure Compiler is a JavaScript optimizing compiler. It parses your JavaScript, analyzes it, removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what’s left. It also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls.

Very nifty. There’s also a web application if you don’t feel like using the JAR application directly.

The study, published by a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers in the latest issue of the journal Energy Efficiency, estimates that 100 million video game consoles sucked up nearly 16 terawatt-hours (TWh) of energy a year in the US in 2010.

Modern consoles have automatic shutoff options, but the study suggests that most people don’t turn them on.

If console makers were willing to push out a required firmware update that simply turned on such an automatic shutoff, the study estimates we could see a savings of 9.3 TWh of electricity usage every year, or $1.1 billion worth of energy spending.

And that’s just US numbers.

The story is centred on the death of Barry Fairweather, whose unexpected passing shocks the local villagers of Pagford.

Publishers Little, Brown & Co said: “Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty facade is a town at war.”

The monkeys accomplished their goal of recreating all 38 works of Shakespeare. The last work, The Taming Of The Shrew, was completed at 2 AM PST on October 6, 2011. This is the first time every work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced. Furthermore, this is the largest work ever randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere. This page shows what day each work of Shakespeare was completed on.

§ find . -name *.DS_Store -type f -exec rm {} \;

Very useful if you’ve moved documents from a Mac to Linux.

One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data.

A staggering amount of data: calls, emails, meetings, keystrokes and more. I wonder how all this data collection is being automated.