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When Joseph Schumpeter described capitalism as a process of creative destruction more than 70 years ago, he couldn’t have conceived of the miracle that is 3D printing. Yet this hair-raising technology is about to tear apart existing structures in a way that would undoubtedly have shocked even Schumpeter, a great economist struck by the free market’s revolutionary, anti-conservative tendencies. Remarkably, 3D printing allows actual objects to be designed and created (or “printed”) surprisingly quickly with a computer connected to a printer-like device, using special material (often plastic, but increasingly almost anything) as “ink” and “paper”. With the costs of the...

SNIPPET: "Muslim convert Richard Dart declared “judging is only for Allah” and refused to stand in the dock as he was jailed for six years for terrorism yesterday." SNIPPET: "Mr Justice Simon said the three held “radical Islamist beliefs” and showed they were “committed to acts of terrorism”. Dart, 30, of Ealing, west London, was jailed for six years; Mahmood, 22, from Northolt, west London for nine years and nine months, and Alom, 26, of Stratford, east London, for four years and six months." SNIPPET: "Dart and Alom travelled to Pakistan to try to get terrorist training, and took advice...

An 18-year-old Aurora man was arrested Friday night before he tried making his way to Syria to join a ‘jihadist militant’ group, federal authorities said. Abdella Ahmad Tounisi was taken into custody without incident late Friday at O’Hare Airport by members of the Chicago FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force as he attempted to board a flight destined for Istanbul, Turkey, according to the FBI’s Chicago office. Tounisi, a U.S. citizen, appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Daniel G. Martin Saturday for allegedly attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He appeared on Saturday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Tounisi,...

The controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) just passed the U.S. House, and will now head to the upper Senate chamber for further deliberation. Rinse and repeat. This isn't the first time this has happened, but it still poses a major threat to Fourth Amendment rights, according to civil liberties campaigners. The bill was passed 288-127 in favor of the bill after two days of debate and discussion on the House floor. Only 18 members of the House abstained from the vote. CISPA will allow private sector firms to search personal and sensitive user data of ordinary U.S....

Patches 42 security holes Oracle has released a major security update for the version of Java programming language that runs inside Web browsers. The patch fixes 42 vulnerabilities within Java, including "the vast majority" of those that have been rated as the most critical. Oracle Executive Vice President Hasan Rizvisaid that a series of big security flaws in the Java plug-in for browsers have been uncovered in the past year by researchers and hackers, and some have been used by criminal groups. One hacking campaign infected computers using Microsoft Windows and Apple software inside hundreds of companies.Earlier this year the US Department...

Microsoft may recant its Windows 8 design theology, bloggers reported Tuesday, by offering Windows 8 users an option to bypass the "Modern" UI and by restoring the Start button and menu to the beleaguered operating system. A pair of longtime Microsoft hands, Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet and Tom Warren of The Verge, citing unnamed sources and messages on Windows discussion forums, said Microsoft was considering those tweaks for an upcoming update, called "Windows Blue" by some and "Windows 8.1" by others. The upgrade, the first of a planned faster development and release tempo, is allegedly slated for an October...

If you are old enough to have experienced it, you probably had that moment in the ’90s or early 2000s when you realized everything was about to change. The sweeping Internet was changing music, reading, how we processed information, even the words we used to communicate. The change was fundamental and it happened so quickly, many of us had to catch our breath and keep ourselves from getting dizzy when we realized its significance. It may sound like hype, and I’ll try to avoid overstating it, but a lot of us who write about where technology is going are starting...

PC sales certainly haven’t been good over the past year or so, but this past quarter was record-setting bad. Shipments of PCs fell 14% worldwide last quarter, according to IDC. It was the worst yearly decline since IDC began tracking the data in 1994. … Bob O’Donnell, a vice president at IDC, said in the company’s report that “the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market.” …

The same material that formed the first primitive transistors more than 60 years ago can be modified in a new way to advance future electronics, according to a new study. Chemists at The Ohio State University have developed the technology for making a one-atom-thick sheet of germanium, and found that it conducts electrons more than ten times faster than silicon and five times faster than conventional germanium. The material's structure is closely related to that of graphene—a much-touted two-dimensional material comprised of single layers of carbon atoms. As such, graphene shows unique properties compared to its more common multilayered counterpart,...

“Over the next five years,” says technology fortuneteller Daniel Burrus, “we are going to see a transformation in how we sell, market, communicate, elaborate, innovate, train and educate people.” Burrus has been following and (accurately) predicting technology trends for more than 30 years. He says when he was “talking about social media in the early ’90s, before the first Web browser.” When he talks, the technology industry listens. So what kind of “transformation” is Burrus talking about now? He starts by explaining a change in marketing. When the Monty Python franchise was lagging on DVD sales a few years back,...

Enlarge Image Turn on. A computer simulation of the expected result from a biological AND gate (top) and the actual data (bottom). Credit: J.Bonnet et al., Science (28 March, 2013) For the first time, synthetic biologists have created a genetic device that mimics one of the widgets on which all of modern electronics is based, the three-terminal transistor. Like standard electronic transistors, the new biological transistor is expected to work in many different biological circuit designs. Together with other advances in crafting genetic circuitry, that should make it easier for scientists to program cells to do everything from monitor...

Got this for $350 when taxes are included. Has Windows 8. I have not opened the box yet and will wait until Sunday to see if there isn't some thing better out there at Best Buy, Staples, Office Depot etc... So what do freepers think of this model? The CPU comes in at above 2100 on CPU benchmark site and I will be adding 4gb memory soon to make 8gb. This cpu is Ivy Bridge which is the latest

Laboratory advance shows that nano-imprinting could help the hard drive industry meet its long-term goals for data storage capacity. Researchers at HGST, a major manufacturer of hard disk drives, have shown that an emerging fabrication technology called nano-imprinting could be used to double the data storage capacity of today’s hard disks. They say the patent-pending work, done in collaboration with a company called Molecular Imprints, could lead to a cost-effective manufacturing process by the end of the decade. Hard disk drives store data in magnetic material on the surface of a spinning disk. During production, this material is deposited as...

IDC readjusted its PC sales forecast after seeing weak shipments in February. Weaker than expected February PC shipments prompted International Data Corporation to reassess the market and adjust its expectation for the first quarter. Whereas IDC previously expected PC shipments to decline by 7.7 percent in Q1, the market research firm now says the drop could hit double digits, followed by a mid-single-digit decline in the second quarter before a recovery is in sight.

our pc finally kicked the bucket need advice on cheap or free computers.... had just started working from home and this threw a giant monkey wrench in that.

Cyber-attacks and cyber-espionage pose a greater potential danger to U.S. national security than Al Qaeda and other militants that have dominated America's global focus since Sept. 11, 2001, the nation's top intelligence officials said Tuesday. For the first time, the growing risk of computer-launched foreign assaults on U.S. infrastructure, including the power grid, transportation hubs and financial networks, was ranked higher in the U.S. intelligence community's annual review of worldwide threats than worries about terrorism, transnational organized crime and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The world’s largest search engine is now experimenting with jewelry that would eliminate the need to remember dozens of passwords. As part of research into doing away with typed passwords, Google has built rings that not only adorn a finger but also can be used to log in to a computer or online account. The search and ad company first revealed its plans to put an end to passwords in an academic paper published online in January (see “Google’s Alternative to the Password”). The effort focused on having people plug a small USB key that provides their credentials into a...

A federal appeals court on Friday said the Border Patrol cannot confiscate or download every laptop or electronic device brought into the U.S., ruling that people have an expectation their data are private and that the government must have “reasonable suspicion” before it starts to do any intensive snooping. In a broad ruling, the court also said merely putting password protection on information is not enough to trigger the government’s “reasonable suspicion” to conduct a more intrusive search — but can be taken into account along with other factors. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges said it was...

Summary: In the first day of the Pwn2Own cracking contest, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10, Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox web browsers have all gone down in flames. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Networking | March 7, 2013 -- 18:20 GMT (10:20 PST) In the eternal war between crackers and security professionals, the hackers have won the latest battle. ZDI_Twitter_AvatarIn ZDI's Pwn2Own hacker competition one browser after another fell. At the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, Canada, the HP Zero Day Initiative's (ZDI) annual Pwn2Own competition has ended its first day of competition and Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 10,...

Looking to spend $400-$700 for a decent notebook to be used primarily for software development and graphics. Need some speed and horsepower, and durability. These things typically last me about five years, and this one here (a Sony Vaio) is nearing the end of the line. Brands you'd recommend? Lenovo is highly regarded but very, very Chinese. I'd like to stay away from that. And I hate Apple with a passion. This will be running Linux.