Forums: Electronic Commerce

These new billboards have been popping up along 75 Central in Dallas, replacing the older "paper" billboards. They are bright but unreadable at times. Just asking.

A suspected looter in this week’s riots and his mother are being thrown out of their council home. In the first case of its kind, Daniel Sartain-Clarke, 18, and his mother have been served with an eviction notice as council bosses seek to turf them out of their £225,000 taxpayer-subsidised flat. Sartain-Clarke is charged with violent disorder and attempting to steal electronic goods from the Currys store at Clapham Junction, South London, on Monday night.

A new report published in the journal Nature describes the new machine created by Jonathan Rothberg of Ion Torrent Systems which uses semiconductors to decode DNA and takes them one step closer to being able to reach the goal of a $1000 human genome test. Their current machine consists of a silicon chip that has 1.2 million sensors consisting of miniature wells. These wells are filled with beads containing the DNA strands to be sequenced. Detectors in the well directly measure the hydrogen ions that are produced during DNA replication. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, was the first to have...

Kill switches are changing the conduct and politics of warIN THE 1991 Gulf war Iraq’s armed forces used American-made colour photocopiers to produce their battle plans. That was a mistake. The circuitry in some of them contained concealed transmitters that revealed their position to American electronic-warfare aircraft, making bomb and missile strikes more precise. The operation, described by David Lindahl, a specialist at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, a government think-tank, highlights a secret front in high-tech warfare: turning enemy assets into liabilities. The internet and the growing complexity of electronic circuitry have made it much easier to install what...

BEIJING — If anyone wonders whether the Chinese government has tightened its grip on electronic communications since protests began engulfing the Arab world, Shakespeare may prove instructive. A Beijing entrepreneur, discussing restaurant choices with his fiancée over their cellphones last week, quoted Queen Gertrude’s response to Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The second time he said the word “protest,” her phone cut off. He spoke English, but another caller, repeating the same phrase on Monday in Chinese over a different phone, was also cut off in midsentence. A host of evidence over the past several weeks shows...

Obama health IT guru leaving his post2.4.11 | Chris Seper Health IT change in Washington. Dr. David Blumenthal, who has overseen President’s Obama’s health IT around the adoption of electronic medical records, is leaving to return to Harvard. “He’s helped bring the industry back to life when it seemed to be failing, and he gave the industry a jolt of energy it lacked,” Betty Otter-Nickerson, president of Sage Health, told Kaiser Health News. Some are concerned about the impact of changing leaders in the midst of the national EMR adoption.

Listen, it usually never occurs to me to even check if my phone is charged because I very rarely, if ever, talk to anyone on the phone. My life is entirely lived via the computer and email. I only rarely text. If I knock out more than two HB posts on the phone, I drain the battery. So there are many things in life I miss capturing on film because I just don’t have a charged-up recording device on my person. I’ve yet to find a remedy to this, but since I live in Chicago and am surrounded by so...

The problem is that we are spending so much time with contrived entertainments that we tend to become addicted to exciting electronic images. Worse, we become addicted to excitement itself, and we have difficulty distinguishing artificial images from reality. When I was a kid, I looked out the car window when my family went for a drive. The view of small towns and farms wasn’t exciting. But there was nothing else to do, so I got used to not being excited all the time. I learned about the lives of ordinary people. I learned to see the farmer in bib...

ATM hacked to make it spew cash New Zealand computer security expert Barnaby Jack has shown "hacking" into an automatic teller machine can be easy with the right software. Jack, director of security testing at Seattle-based computer security consultant IOActive Inc, hauled two ATMs on to a Las Vegas conference stage and demonstrated how, with the press of a button, an ATM could spew out all its cash. "I hope to change the way people look at devices that from the outside are seemingly impenetrable," Jack told the Black Hat computer security conference, CBS reported. The 32-year-old Aucklander - currently...

Spurred by a newspaper's report that California's welfare debit cards can be used to withdraw cash in more than half the casinos in the state, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday issued an immediate ban on state-provided cash assistance at ATMs in gambling establishments. The Los Angeles Times disclosed that Electronic Benefit Transfer cards work in automated teller machines at 32 of 58 tribal casinos and 47 of 90 state-licensed poker rooms. The report also found the state Department of Social Services published a list of useable ATMs where the EBT cards that work like debit cards could be cashed. That...

Traditional bifocals could become a thing of the past with the invention of electronic glasses that automatically adjust to let their wearer view objects at different distances.The spectacles, which are due to be launched in the US this year and the UK next year, use lenses that change their strength when a small electrical current passes through them. A layer of liquid crystal sandwiched inside each lens alters its refractive properties according to the current applied, adapting the focal length according to where the wearer is looking. Traditional bifocals, which use two lenses of different strengths in front of each...

After five years of testing, the U.S. Navy is finally entering the digital age for navigation. Five years ago, the first all digital navigation system was installed, in the USS Cape St. George (a cruiser). Called the Voyage Management System (VMS), this version used 29 CDs containing the 12,000 paper nautical charts that were stored in several large filing cabinets on the Cape St. George. The current version of VMS puts all the electronic charts on one high density DVD, or a portable hard drive. The navy has been working on VMS since the 1990s, and the first thing they...

When it comes to computer technology, thin is always in. It’s indisputable that the thinner, lighter, clearer, the better when dealing with the latest computer gadget. This keyboard is the epitome of the high standards expected of the technological version of the fashion industry. It’s based on image as well, that is, image recognition technology.

U.S. Air Force is concerned about American dependence on space satellites, particularly the GPS birds. The air force believes China is developing the ability to carry out a major attack on American military satellites. Their proposed solution is to take GPS out of orbit, and make it portable. High flying aircraft, UAVs or blimps would take over satellite communications, surveillance and navigation (GPS) chores, although for smaller areas. This would make GPS, and other satellite functions, more resilient to attack. This is part of a trend in which military satellites are getting priced out of the market by cheaper manned...

CONTINGENCY OPERATING BASE ADDER, Iraq, Jan. 11, 2010 – Iraq may not be ready for PayPal, but with the help of the U.S. Army, the southern Iraqi provinces of Dhi Qar, Maysan and Al Muthanna are moving closer to a cashless system in order to deal with the mounting costs of dealing with cash. Iraqi workers finish the last steps of construction of the Al Warka Bank at Contingency Operating Base Adder's Iraq-Based Industrial Zone near Nasiriyah, Iraq, Jan. 1, 2010. Once complete, the bank will significantly aid in the transition to electronic funds transfer payments to Iraqi businessmen who...