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The Guardian has an article about id Software's status after being purchased by ZeniMax (Bethesda's parent company) not long ago. While id gained considerable financial stability out of the deal, it's clear that what Bethesda has to gain is access to top-of-the-line engine technology, which they've often needed to license. id's Todd Hollenshead said, "The videogames business is defined by technology, which is why guys like JC [John Carmack] are still so significant. Consumers may not be as in touch with the intricacies as they used to be, but you can still make significant, impactful change. We're confident Rage will be one of them..." He also mentions that "the PC market has receded in terms of significance," a sentiment evidenced by id's aggressive expansion into the iPhone games market.
Generating Power From Ocean Buoys and Kites - Sat Jul 4 06:26:02 2009
cheezitmike writes "Researchers at Oregon State University are testing a new type of wave-energy converter to generate electricity from ocean waves: 'Even when the ocean seems calm, swells are moving water up and down sufficiently to generate electricity. ... For decades the challenge has been to build a device that can withstand monster waves and gale-force winds, not to mention corrosive saltwater, seaweed, floating debris and curious marine mammals. ... In the most recent prototypes, a thick coil of copper wire is inside the first component, which is anchored to the seafloor. The second component is a magnet attached to a float that moves up and down freely with the waves. As the magnet is heaved by the waves, its magnetic field moves along the stationary coil of copper wire. This motion induces a current in the wire — electricity.'" Meanwhile, researchers at Stanford are working to design "turbine kites" that operate at 30,000 feet, where air currents flow much faster than they do close to the ground. Ken Caldeira, a Standford associate professor, said, "If you tapped into 1% of the power in high-altitude winds, that would be enough to continuously power all civilization."
Generating Power From Ocean Buoys and Kites - Sat Jul 4 06:13:55 2009
Half-pint HAL tips news of UK prosecution lawyers who are instructing police to study information on Wikipedia when preparing to give expert testimony in court. "Mike Finn, a weaponry specialist and expert witness in more than 100 cases, told industry magazine Police Review: 'There was one case in a Midlands force where police officers asked me to write a report about a martial art weapon. The material they gave me had been printed out from Wikipedia. The officer in charge told me he was advised by the CPS to use the website to find out about the weapon and he was about to present it in court. I looked at the information and some of it had substance and some of it was completely made up.' Mr. Finn, a former Metropolitan Police and City of London officer and Home Office adviser, added that he has heard of at least three other cases where officers from around the country have been advised by the CPS to look up evidence on Wikipedia."
UK Police Told To Use Wikipedia When Preparing For Court - Sat Jul 4 05:50:36 2009
djconrad was one of several readers to point out the latest major scandal in EVE Online, the space MMO notable for its large, player-driven economy and the entertaining stories it often generates. A player named Ricdic, chairman of a large in-game bank, decided to embezzle roughly 200 billion ISK (the game's currency). Ricdic exchanged the ISK for about $5,000 to pay off real-life debts. Massively has an in-depth write-up about how the theft affects the game and its players. Since the scandal became public, there's been a run on the virtual bank, and its executives are doing what they can to reassure people that it will continue to exist. Ricdic was banned, not for the embezzlement, but for trading 200 billion ISK for real currency, which is forbidden by EVE's EULA.
UK Police Told To Use Wikipedia When Preparing For Court - Sat Jul 4 04:17:36 2009
Half-pint HAL tips news of UK prosecution lawyers who are instructing police to study information on Wikipedia when preparing to give expert testimony in court. "Mike Finn, a weaponry specialist and expert witness in more than 100 cases, told industry magazine Police Review: 'There was one case in a Midlands force where police officers asked me to write a report about a martial art weapon. The material they gave me had been printed out from Wikipedia. The officer in charge told me he was advised by the CPS to use the website to find out about the weapon and he was about to present it in court. I looked at the information and some of it had substance and some of it was completely made up.' Mr. Finn, a former Metropolitan Police and City of London officer and Home Office adviser, added that he has heard of at least three other cases where officers from around the country have been advised by the CPS to look up evidence on Wikipedia."
Massive Bank Fraud In EVE Online - Sat Jul 4 03:19:47 2009
djconrad was one of several readers to point out the latest major scandal in EVE Online, the space MMO notable for its large, player-driven economy and the entertaining stories it often generates. A player named Ricdic, chairman of a large in-game bank, decided to embezzle roughly 200 billion ISK (the game's currency). Ricdic exchanged the ISK for about $5,000 to pay off real-life debts. Massively has an in-depth write-up about how the theft affects the game and its players. Since the scandal became public, there's been a run on the virtual bank, and its executives are doing what they can to reassure people that it will continue to exist. Ricdic was banned, not for the embezzlement, but for trading 200 billion ISK for real currency, which is forbidden by EVE's EULA.
Hawking Says Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution - Sat Jul 4 02:18:33 2009
movesguy sends us to The Daily Galaxy for comments by Stephen Hawking about how humans are evolving in a different way than any species before us. Quoting: "'At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information. I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said. In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, 'an external transmission phase,' where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. 'But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage,' Hawking says, 'has grown enormously. Some people would use the term evolution only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes.'"
Amazon Wants Patent For Inserting Ads Into Books - Sat Jul 4 00:08:16 2009
theodp writes "Three Amazon inventors set out to correct what they felt was a real problem: that 'out-of-print or rare books ... typically do not include advertisements ... the content is fixed and, therefore, has not been adapted to modern marketing.' Their solution is spelled out in newly-disclosed Amazon patent applications for On-Demand Generating E-Book Content with Advertising and Incorporating Advertising in On-Demand Generated Content. From the patent apps, here's what the future of reading may look like: 'For instance, if a restaurant is described on page 12, [then the advertising page], either on page 11 or page 13, may include advertisements about restaurants, wine, food, etc., which are related to restaurants and dining.' So, what would a delightfully-tacky-yet-unrefined Hooters ad do for your Hemingway experience?"
Fake Tamiflu "Out-Spams Viagra On Web" - Fri Jul 3 23:24:22 2009
cin62 writes "The number of Internet scammers offering fake versions of the anti-swine flu drug Tamiflu has surpassed those selling counterfeit Viagra, reports CNN. Since the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, was declared a global pandemic last month, there has been an increase in the number of Web sites and junk emails offering Tamiflu for sale. 'Every Web site that used to sell Viagra is now selling Tamiflu. We are pretty sure that the same people are making the Tamiflu as are making the Viagra,' said Director of Policy for the UK's Royal Pharmaceutical Society." This news fits in nicely with a report Wired ran a couple weeks ago about the hysteria behind H1N1.
Source Code of Several Atari 7800 Games Released - Fri Jul 3 22:27:21 2009
jadoon88 writes to share a series of old Atari 7800 games that have been unofficially open sourced. "Remember Dig Dug or Centipede or Robotron? They used to be favorites when Atari's 7800 series was still around. Since the era of those consoles is over, and a different world of interactive reality gaming has taken over, Atari has unofficially released source code of over 15 games for the coders and enthusiasts to admire the state-of-the-art (because this is what it was back then). During those times, nobody would have imagined in their wildest dreams the games that Atari's developers floated into the gaming thirsty market and instantly swept across continental boundaries. But things changed soon after that and a company once regarded as one of the most successful gaming console manufacturers and developers faded away in the pages of our technology's hall-of-fame."
How To Get Your Program Professionally Marketed? - Fri Jul 3 21:34:18 2009
one-man orchestra writes "I'm the sole programmer of a small, multi-platform, commercial audio program (a spectrogram editor). After over 6 months on the market, I realized that the program would never just sell itself, and that I need some real marketing done for it. Being a one-man orchestra is becoming increasingly difficult; I only can devote so much time to marketing, my skills in that department are lacking, and I'd much rather spend more time coding. Despite my lackluster part-time marketing effort, I still manage to make a modest living out of the sales. My logical assumption is that with someone competent taking care of that part, revenue could greatly scale up. But what's the right way to go about doing this? What type of people/company do I need to contact? What to expect? What to look out for?"
Professor Gets 4 Years in Prison for Sharing Drone Plans With Students - Fri Jul 3 20:42:27 2009
Hugh Pickens writes "Retired University of Tennessee Professor Dr. John Reece Roth has been sentenced to four years in prison after he allowed a Chinese graduate student to see sensitive information on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones. In 2004, the company Roth helped found, Atmospheric Glow Technologies, won a US Air Force contract to develop a plasma actuator that could help reduce drag on the wings of drones, such as the ones the military uses. Under the contract, for which Roth was reportedly paid $6,000, he was prohibited from sharing sensitive data with foreign nationals. Despite warnings from his university's Export Control Officer, in 2006, Roth took a laptop containing sensitive plans with him on a lecture tour in China and also allowed graduate students Xin Dai of China and Sirous Nourgostar of Iran to work on the project. 'The illegal export of restricted military data represents a serious threat to national security,' says David Kris of the US Department of Justice. 'We know that foreign governments are actively seeking this information for their own military development. Today's sentence should serve as a warning to anyone who knowingly discloses restricted military data in violation of our laws.' During his trial, Roth testified that he was unaware that hiring the graduate students was a violation of his contract. 'This whole thing has not helped me, it has not helped the university,' said Roth. 'And it has probably not helped this country, either.'"
Fermilab Detects "Doubly Strange" Particle - Fri Jul 3 20:07:53 2009
DynaSoar writes "While its cousin/competitor site, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, remains offline, Fermilab's Digital Hadron Calorimeter continues to produce significant results. Recently Fermilab announced discovery of the Omega-sub-b baryon, a 'doubly-strange' particle. This baryon, containing two strange quarks and one bottom quark, has six times the mass of a proton. 'The Omega-sub-b is the latest entry in the "periodic table of baryons." Baryons are particles formed of three quarks, the most common examples being the proton and neutron. ... The observation of this "doubly strange" particle, predicted by the Standard Model, is significant because it strengthens physicists' confidence in their understanding of how quarks form matter. In addition, it conflicts with a 2008 result announced by CDF's sister experiment, DZero. In August 2008, the DZero experiment announced its own observation of the Omega-sub-b based on a smaller sample of Tevatron data. This result contradicted some predictions of the Standard Model, suggesting a "new physics." The new result leads to the possibility that the prior results are not accurate.'"
Copyright Should Encourage Derivative Works - Fri Jul 3 19:56:14 2009
Techdirt has an interesting look at copyright and the idea that an author is the originator of a new work. Instead, the piece suggests that all works are in some way based on the works of others (even our own copyright law), and the system should be much more encouraging of "remixing" work into new, unique experiences. "Friedman also points back to another recent post where he discusses the nature of content creation, based on a blog post by Rene Kita. In it, she points out that remixing and creating through collaboration and building on the works of others has always been the norm. It's what we do naturally. It's only in the last century or so, when we reached a means of recording, manufacturing and selling music — which was limited to just those with the machinery and capital to do it, that copyright was suddenly brought out to 'protect' such things."
Open Source Facing a Difficult Battle for Cloud Relevance - Fri Jul 3 19:45:42 2009
A recent eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady caught the attention of Matt Asay, who breaks down the difficulty of this David and Goliath problem. "In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those 'horses,' in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging 'Goliath' are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business. Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is 'a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today.' He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds."
Open Source Facing a Difficult Battle for Cloud Relevance - Fri Jul 3 19:12:38 2009
A recent eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing by Redmonk analyst Sephen O'Grady caught the attention of Matt Asay, who breaks down the difficulty of this David and Goliath problem. "In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those "horses," in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging "Goliath" are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business. Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is "a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today." He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds."
Phoenix Lander Discovers Nighttime Snowfall on Mars - Fri Jul 3 18:07:29 2009
Many outlets are reporting on the recently released results of the various experiments and observations of NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander. Most notable is the discovery of nighttime snowfall on the planet, lending credibility to the idea of an active water cycle hypothesized based on earlier data collection. "The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings. The overall conclusion is that the northern pole has an active water cycle. This had been suggested by a variety of evidence from orbital sensors, as well early images returned from Phoenix. It's also not a huge shock, given the seasonal growth and retreat of the polar ice cap. Still, Phoenix provided some significant details on the cycling of water in the area where it landed."
Seattle Data Center Outage Disrupts E-Commerce - Fri Jul 3 17:45:17 2009
1sockchuck writes "A major power outage at Seattle telecom hub Fisher Plaza has knocked payment processing provider Authorize.net offline for hours, leaving thousands of web site unable to take credit cards for online sales. The Authorize site is still down, but its Twitter account attributes the outage to a fire, while AdHost calls it a 'significant power event.' Authorize.net is said to be trying to resume processing from a backup data center, but there's no clear ETA on when Fisher Plaza will have power again."
Seattle Data Center Outage Disrupts E-Commerce - Fri Jul 3 17:23:01 2009
1sockchuck writes "A major power outage at Seattle telecom hub Fisher Plaza has knocked payment processing provider Authorize.net offline for hours, leaving thousands of web site unable to take credit cards for online sales. The Authorize site is still down, but its Twitter account attributes the outage to a fire, while AdHost calls it a 'significant power event.' Authorize.net is said to be trying to resume processing from a backup data center, but there's no clear ETA on when Fisher Plaza will have power again."
XHTML 2 Cancelled - Fri Jul 3 16:18:44 2009
Jake Lazaroff writes "According to the W3 News Archive, the charter for the XHTML2 Working Group — set to expire on December 31st, 2009 — will not be renewed. What does this mean? XHTML2 will never be a W3C recommendation, so get on the HTML 5 bandwagon now. According to the XHTML FAQ, however, the W3C does 'plan for the XML serialization of HTML to remain compatible with XML.' Looks like with HTML 5, we'll get the best of both worlds."
XHTML 2 Cancelled - Fri Jul 3 15:56:58 2009
blackbearnh writes with this excerpt from O'Reilly Radar "Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's Encyclopedia iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison's open source application can browse and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or, as defined by AT&T coverage...)"
XHTML 2 Cancelled - Fri Jul 3 15:46:01 2009
Jake Lazaroff writes "According to the W3 News Archive, the charter for the XHTML2 Working Group — set to expire on December 31st, 2009 — will not be renewed. What does this mean? XHTML2 will never be a W3C recommendation, so get on the HTML 5 bandwagon now. According to the XHTML FAQ, however, the W3C does 'plan for the XML serialization of HTML to remain compatible with XML.' Looks like with HTML 5, we'll get the best of both worlds."
Squeezing a Wikipedia Snapshot Onto an 8GB iPhone - Fri Jul 3 14:53:32 2009
blackbearnh writes with this excerpt from O'Reilly Radar "Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's Encyclopedia iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison's open source application can browse and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or, as defined by AT&T coverage...)"
Emulated PC Enables Linux Desktop In Your Browser - Fri Jul 3 14:10:40 2009
Ianopolous writes "Classic DOOM and DSL Linux Desktop inside your Java-enabled browser! The latest JPC, the fast 100% Java x86 PC emulator, is now available with online demos and downloads. JPC is open source and is the most secure way of running x86 software ever — 2 layers (applet sandbox, JPC sandbox) of independently validated security make it the world's most secure means of isolating x86 software. Visit the website to try out some classic games and play around with Linux all within your web browser. Refresh = reboot!"
Emulated PC Enables Linux Desktop In Your Browser - Fri Jul 3 13:58:19 2009
Ianopolous writes "Classic DOOM and DSL Linux Desktop inside your Java-enabled browser! The latest JPC, the fast 100% Java x86 PC emulator, is now available with online demos and downloads. JPC is open source and is the most secure way of running x86 software ever — 2 layers (applet sandbox, JPC sandbox) of independently validated security make it the world's most secure means of isolating x86 software. Visit the website to try out some classic games and play around with Linux all within your web browser. Rrefresh = reboot!"
London Stock Exchange To Abandon Windows - Fri Jul 3 13:36:12 2009
BBCWatcher writes "Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that the London Stock Exchange is abandoning its Microsoft Windows-based trading platform: 'Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE's Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day .... Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect ...'"
iPhone Vulnerability Yields Root Access Via SMS - Fri Jul 3 13:14:49 2009
snydeq writes "Pwn2Own winner Charlie Miller has revealed an SMS vulnerability that could provide hackers with root access to the iPhone. Malicious code sent by SMS to run on the phone could include commands to monitor location using GPS, turn on the phone's microphone to eavesdrop on conversations, or make the phone join a DDoS attack or botnet, Miller said. Miller did not provide detailed description of the SMS vulnerability, citing an agreement with Apple, which is working to fix the vulnerability in advance of Black Hat, where Miller plans to discuss the attack in greater detail. 'SMS is a great vector to attack the iPhone,' Miller said, as SMS can send binary code that the iPhone processes without user interaction. Sequences can be sent to the phone as multiple messages that are automatically reassembled, thereby surpassing individual SMS message limits of 140 bytes."
US Couple Gets Prison Time For Internet Obscenity - Fri Jul 3 12:49:40 2009
angry tapir writes "The husband and wife owners of a California company that distributed pornographic materials over the Internet have been each sentenced to one year and one day in prison. Extreme Associates and owners Robert Zicari, also known as Rob Black, 35, and his wife, Janet Romano, aka Lizzie Borden, 32, pleaded guilty in March to a felony charge of conspiracy to distribute obscene material through the mail and over the Internet."
RC Submarine Lays Fiber Through Sewers In Italy - Fri Jul 3 12:04:48 2009
Francesco Fondi writes "An Italian Company is using RC scale model submarines to lay fiber through Milan's sewage system. The RC submarine used is the Neptune SB-1, produced by Taiwanese company Thunder Tiger. It costs ca $600 in US hobby shops." In Italian, but the pictures speak for themselves.
RC Submarine Lays Fiber Through Sewers In Italy - Fri Jul 3 11:53:25 2009
sheepweevil writes "IBM just released Milepost GCC, 'the world's first open source machine learning compiler.' The compiler analyses the software and determines which code optimizations will be most effective during compilation using machine learning techniques. Experiments carried out with the compiler achieved an average 18% performance improvement. The compiler is expected to significantly reduce time-to-market of new software, because lengthy manual optimization can now be carried out by the compiler. A new code tuning website has been launched to coincide with the compiler release. The website features collaborative performance tuning and sharing of interesting optimization cases."
RC Submarine Lays Fiber Through Sewers In Italy - Fri Jul 3 10:18:01 2009
Francesco Fondi writes "An Italian Company is using RC scale model submarines to lay fiber through Milan's sewage system. The RC submarine used is the Neptune SB-1, produced by Taiwanese company Thunder Tiger. It costs ca $600 in US hobby shops." In Italian, but the pictures speak for themselves.
RC Submarine Lays Fiber Through Sewers In Italy - Fri Jul 3 09:33:01 2009
Francesco Fondi writes "An Italian Italian Company is using RC scale model submarines to lay fiber through Milan's sewage system. The RC submarine used is the Neptune SB-1, produced by Taiwanese company Thunder Tiger. It costs ca $600 in US hobby shops." In Italian, but the pictures speak for themselves.
IBM Releases Open Source Machine Learning Compiler - Fri Jul 3 05:48:08 2009
sheepweevil writes "IBM just released Milepost GCC, 'the world's first open source machine learning compiler.' The compiler analyses the software and determines which code optimizations will be most effective during compilation using machine learning techniques. Experiments carried out with the compiler achieved an average 18% performance improvement. The compiler is expected to significantly reduce time-to-market of new software, because lengthy manual optimization can now be carried out by the compiler. A new code tuning website has been launched to coincide with the compiler release. The website features collaborative performance tuning and sharing of interesting optimization cases."
HTML Tags For Academic Printing? - Fri Jul 3 05:37:10 2009
BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."
HTML Tags For Academic Printing? - Fri Jul 3 04:32:31 2009
BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."
HTML Tags For Academic Printing? - Fri Jul 3 03:37:49 2009
BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."
Microsoft Changing Users' Default Search Engine - Fri Jul 3 01:51:03 2009
BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."
Microsoft Changing Users' Default Search Engine - Thu Jul 2 23:42:24 2009
BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught "Windows Search Helper" trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."
DOJ Confirms Google Antitrust Investigation - Thu Jul 2 23:28:50 2009
ericatcw writes "The inaugural NoSQL meet-up in San Francisco during last month's Yahoo! Apache Hadoop Summit had a whiff of revolution about it, like a latter-day techie version of the American Patriots planning the Boston Tea Party. Like the Patriots, who rebelled against Britain's heavy taxes, NoSQLers came to share how they had overthrown the tyranny of burdensome, expensive relational databases in favor of more efficient and cheaper ways of managing data, reports Computerworld."
DOJ Confirms Google Antitrust Investigation - Thu Jul 2 22:54:07 2009
An anonymous reader points to Digital Daily, writing "Looks like the fireworks have begun early in Mountain View. On Thursday afternoon, the Department of Justice officially notified Google that it is investigating its book deal for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act."
Enthusiasts Convene To Say No To SQL, Hash Out New DB Breed - Thu Jul 2 22:41:31 2009
Al writes "The AcceleGlove from AnthroTronix, is the first fully programmable glove that records hand and finger movements. Other gloves--like 5DT's Data Glove, which is used primarily in virtual reality--normally cost $1,000 to $5,000, but the AcceleGlove costs just $499. The AcceleGlove comes with software that lets developers use Java to program it for any application they wish. AnthroTronix initially developed the glove with the U.S. Department of Defense for robotic control but it could also be used in video games, sports training, or physical rehabilitation."
Enthusiasts Convene To Say No To SQL, Hash Out New DB Breed - Thu Jul 2 22:05:29 2009
ericatcw writes "The inaugural NoSQL meet-up in San Francisco during last month's Yahoo! Apache Hadoop Summit had a whiff of revolution about it, like a latter-day techie version of the American Patriots planning the Boston Tea Party. Like the Patriots, who rebelled against Britain's heavy taxes, NoSQLers came to share how they had overthrown the tyranny of burdensome, expensive relational databases in favor of more efficient and cheaper ways of managing data, reports Computerworld."
First Fully Programmable Gesture-Recognition Glove, Cheap - Thu Jul 2 21:19:39 2009
Al writes "The AcceleGlove from AnthroTronix, is the first fully programmable glove that records hand and finger movements. Other gloves--like 5DT's Data Glove, which is used primarily in virtual reality--normally cost $1,000 to $5,000, but the AcceleGlove costs just $499. The AcceleGlove comes with software that lets developers use Java to program it for any application they wish. AnthroTronix initially developed the glove with the U.S. Department of Defense for robotic control but it could also be used in video games, sports training, or physical rehabilitation."
Judge Tentatively Dismisses Case Against Lori Drew - Thu Jul 2 20:42:35 2009
An anonymous reader writes "According to Wired, 'A federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, and issued a directed acquittal on the three misdemeanor charges.' A similar story in the L.A. Times notes that "The decision by U.S. District Judge George H. Wu will not become final until his written ruling is filed, probably next week."
200-Year-Old Cipher Finally Cracked - Thu Jul 2 19:59:09 2009
Attila Dimedici writes "A code expert just cracked a code used by a friend of Thomas Jefferson in a letter written to Jefferson some 200 years ago. This code is fairly easy to crack using a computer, but extremely difficult without one. I think it would have been much harder if the author had not included an indication as to what code algorithm he used in the letter accompanying the coded message."
HIV/AIDS Vaccine To Begin Phase I Human Trials - Thu Jul 2 19:25:40 2009
An anonymous reader writes "An HIV/AIDS vaccine developed in Ontario has applied for Phase 1 human trials. Safety and immunogenicity studies of the vaccine, dubbed SAV001-H, have already been completed on animals. Phase 1 human trials will check the safety of the vaccine on HIV positive volunteers. Phase 2 will then test immunogenicity."
Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs - Thu Jul 2 19:14:38 2009
snydeq writes "Major browser vendors have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, forcing the W3C to drop audio and video codecs from HTML 5, the forthcoming W3C spec that has been viewed as a threat to Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions on the situation, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' HTML 5 editor Ian Hickson wrote to the whatwg mailing list. Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>."
The Essentials of RPG Design - Thu Jul 2 18:59:10 2009
simoniker writes "As the latest in his Game Design Essentials series for Gamasutra, writer John Harris examines 10 games from the Western computer RPG (CRPG) tradition and 10 from the Japanese console RPG (JRPG) tradition, to figure out what exactly makes them tick. From the entry on Nethack: 'Gaining experience is supposed to carry the risk of harm and failure. Without that risk, gaining power becomes a foregone conclusion. It has reached the point where the mere act of spending time playing [most RPGs] appears to give players the right to have their characters become more powerful. The obstacles that provide experience become simply an arbitrary wall to scale before more power is granted; this, in a nutshell, is the type of play that has brought us grind, where the journey is simple and boring and the destination is something to be raced to. Nethack and many other roguelikes do feature experience gain, but it doesn't feel like grind. It doesn't because much of the time the player is gaining experience, he is in danger of sudden, catastrophic failure. When you're frequently a heartbeat away from death, it's difficult to become bored.' Harris' Game Design series has previously spanned subjects from mysterious games to open world games, unusual control schemes and difficult games."
Japanese Creating "Super Tuna" - Thu Jul 2 17:53:04 2009
motherpusbucket writes "The Telegraph reports that Japanese scientists hope to be breeding a so-called 'Super Tuna' within the next decade or so. They have about 60% of the genome mapped and expect to finish it in the next couple months. The new breed will grow faster, taste good, have resistance to disease and will totally kick your ass if you cross them."
Universal Lands Rights To Asteroids Movie - Thu Jul 2 17:24:44 2009
It seems Universal Studios has won the highly sought-after movie rights to the 1979 Atari game Asteroids. Disney's Matthew Lopez will be writing the adaptation, having previously worked on the scripts for Bedtime Stories, The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Race to Witch Mountain. The NY Times is skeptical about Hollywood's ability to do right by the 30-year-old game, already imagining what a director like Michael Bay would do with it: "In this $300 million, three-and-a-half hour spectacle, loud and expensive computer simulations of large boulders crashing into one another are briefly interrupted by the hilarious antics of Chip and Gravel, two living rocks with gold teeth who speak in hip-hop slang, and the nonstop shouting of John Turturro."
FDA Considers Banning Acetaminophen-Based Pain Killers - Thu Jul 2 17:12:57 2009
Greg George writes "The FDA has determined that Tylenol enhancing pain killers are dangerous enough to potentially be pulled from the market. Drugs including Vicodin, Hydrocodone, Lortab, Maxidone, Norco, Zydone, Tylenol with codeine, Percocet, Endocet, and Darvocet may be permanently banned from the US market, even if the patient has a prescription from a doctor. The problem is the key ingredient — acetaminophen — can easily damage or destroy a patient's liver if more than 2000 mg are used per day. In many cases that means if you take a pain killer and then take two extra strength Tylenol, you may have gone over the maximum dosage per day."
Land Rover Unveils "World's Toughest Phone" - Thu Jul 2 16:59:24 2009
Land Rover says their new S1 mobile is the world's strongest phone. Testing done by Land Rover and the staff at The Sun, showed the S1 would still work after being stepped on by an elephant, run over by a Land Rover, dropped from a second story window, buried in mud, soaked in a pint of beer, and roasted in an oven at 150 degrees centigrade. A forklift truck proved to be its match, and was able to crush the S1 under its three-tonne weight. The phone comes with 1,500 hours of battery life, a 2.0 megapixel camera, an extra loud ringtone and an unconditional three-year guarantee.
Safe Harbor Spells Win For Kaspersky In Malware Case Against Zango - Thu Jul 2 16:18:45 2009
suraj.sun writes to tell us that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of security company Kaspersky in the recent case questioning their classification of Zango software as malware. "The court ruled that Kaspersky Lab, which classified online media company Zango's software as malware and 'protected' users from it accordingly, could not be held liable for any actions it took to manufacture and distribute the technical means to restrict Zango software's access to others, as Kaspersky Lab deemed it 'objectionable material.' Zango sued Kaspersky Lab to force the Company to reclassify Zango's programs as nonthreatening and to prevent Kaspersky Lab's security software from blocking Zango's potentially undesirable programs. In the precedent-setting ruling for the anti-malware industry, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling that Kaspersky Lab is a provider of an 'interactive computer service' as defined in the Communications Decency Act of 1996 . Part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 states: 'No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of ... any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to [objectionable] material.'"
Secrets of Schizophrenia and Depression "Unlocked" - Thu Jul 2 15:56:21 2009
Oracle Goddess writes "According to the US National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, scientists have discovered a remarkable similarity between the genetic faults behind both schizophrenia and manic depression in a breakthrough that is expected to open the way to new treatments for two of the most common mental illnesses, affecting millions of people. Previously schizophrenia and depression were assumed to be two separate conditions, but the new research shows for the first time that both have a common genetic basis that leads people to develop one or the other of the two illnesses."
SolarNetOne Wants Stable Internet Connections For Developing Nations - Thu Jul 2 15:24:35 2009
There are many initiatives to bring tech to developing areas of the globe; things like OLPC, Geekcorps, and UN programs. One new approach from SolarNetOne strives to allow users in those developing areas to have access to an internet connection without having to depend on unreliable infrastructure. "Each SolarNetOne kit is a self-powered communications network. Energy is produced from a solar array sized to each locale's latitude and predominant weather conditions. The generated power is stored in a substantial battery array, and circuit breakers and electronics protect the gear from overloads and other perturbations. A basic kit includes five 'seats,' implemented as thin clients connected through a LAN to a central server. The networking gear also includes a long-range, omnidirectional WiFi access point, and a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) device. Each kit also includes all the cables and wires required to assemble the system, so few additional materials are required for an installation."
SolarNetOne Wants Stable Internet Connections For Developing Nations - Thu Jul 2 14:50:51 2009
There are many initiatives to bring tech to developing areas of the globe; things like OLPC, Geekcorps, and UN programs. One new approach from SolarNetOne strives to allow users in those developing areas to have access to an internet connection without have to depend on unreliable infrastructure. "Each SolarNetOne kit is a self-powered communications network. Energy is produced from a solar array sized to each locale's latitude and predominant weather conditions. The generated power is stored in a substantial battery array, and circuit breakers and electronics protect the gear from overloads and other perturbations. A basic kit includes five "seats," implemented as thin clients connected through a LAN to a central server. The networking gear also includes a long-range, omnidirectional WiFi access point, and a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) device. Each kit also includes all the cables and wires required to assemble the system, so few additional materials are required for an installation."
Your Browser History Is Showing - Thu Jul 2 14:06:21 2009
tiffanydanica writes "For a lot of us our browser history is something we consider private, or at least not something we want to expose to every website we visit. Web2.0collage is showing just how easy it is (with code!)for sites to determine what sites you visit. When you visit the site it sniffs your browser history, and creates a collage of the (safe for work) sites that you visit. It is an interesting application of potentially scary technology (imagine a job application site using this to screen candidates). You can jump right into having your history sniffed if you so desire. While the collages are cool on their own merit, they also serve as an illustration of the privacy implications of browser history sniffing."
NASA Suggests Nano Robots To Explore Mars - Thu Jul 2 13:23:41 2009
destinyland writes "'We're going to have to do extensive robotic exploration,' says the director of NASA's Ames Research Center, suggesting nanotechnology to build self-replicating robots on Mars. Genetically engineering extraction and construction microbes could 'grow' electrical components, and eventually convert carbon dioxide on Mars into oxygen. 'If we really want to settle Mars, and we don't want to have to carry millions of tons of equipment with us to duplicate the way we live on Earth, these technologies will be key.' This interview with Peter Worden, the director of NASA's Ames Research Center, was just featured in the summer issue of H+ magazine, and he also argues that robots will be necessary to first survey Mars for underground microbes and protect the unique Martian biosphere, since it may contain clues about earth's own first life forms. In fact, given the water and carbon that's been discovered on Mars, the possibility of underground microbes is still considered real, and Worden argues that Mars 'may already be supporting life.'"
NSA To Build 20 Acre Data Center In Utah - Thu Jul 2 12:09:00 2009
Hugh Pickens writes "The Salt Lake City Tribune reports that the National Security Agency will be building a one million square foot data center at Utah's Camp Williams. The NSA's heavily automated computerized operations have for years been based at Fort Meade, Maryland, but the agency began looking to decentralize its efforts following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and accelerated their search after the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA — Baltimore Gas & Electric's biggest customer — had maxed out the local grid and could not bring online several supercomputers it needed to expand its operations. The agency got a taste of the potential for trouble January 24, 2000, when an information overload, rather than a power shortage, caused the NSA's first-ever network crash taking the agency 3 1/2 days to resume operations. The new data center in Utah will require at least 65 megawatts of power — about the same amount used by every home in Salt Lake City so a separate power substation will have to be built at Camp Williams to sustain that demand. "They were looking at secure sites, where there could be a natural nexus between organizations and where space was available," says Col. Scott Olson, the Utah National Guard's legislative liaison. NSA officials, who have a long-standing relationship with Utah based on the state Guard's unique linguist units, approached state officials about finding land in the state on which to build an additional data center. "The stars just kind of came into alignment. We could provide them everything they need.""
TSA Asked to Ensure Safety Of Customer Data After Clear Closing - Thu Jul 2 06:50:11 2009
CWmike writes "The chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), has given the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) until July 8 to explain how the agency plans to ensure the security of private data collected by a recently shuttered company that offered a registered traveler program. In a letter to the TSA's acting assistant secretary, Thompson expressed his concern over the abrupt closure of Verified Identity Pass (VIP), which offered a service called Clear for a $199 annual fee that helped air travelers get through airport security checks faster by vetting their identities and backgrounds in advance. VIP has left open the possibility that the data could end up being acquired or sold to a third-party, but only if it was going to be used for a registered traveler program."
Bike Projector Makes Lane For Rider - Thu Jul 2 05:33:00 2009
hh4m writes "Whether it's San Francisco, New York, or any bicyclistic city in between, you're destined to witness biker after biker dancing with danger, especially at night when visibility is uncomfortably low. Alex Tee and Evan Gant's LightLane device was recently just a concept but is soon to enter reality as a much-needed visual declaration of personal biking space. With a dire shortage of dedicated lanes, LightLane provides urban cyclists with a solution that adapts to them and any route they make take. The compact projector mounts easily to the rear of a bike frame and projects a bike lane-inspired linear pattern that provides great visibility and a familiarity that helps catch a driver's attention."
Comets Probably Seeded Earth's Nitrogen Atmosphere - Thu Jul 2 04:50:32 2009
KentuckyFC writes "One of the biggest puzzles of astrobiology is the origin of the Earth's oceans and atmosphere. One favored theory is that our water is the leftovers from a bombardment of comets early in Earth's history. But the ratio of hydrogen and deuterium in the oceans doesn't match the ratio in the four comets measured so far (Halley's, Hyakutake, Hale-Bopp and C/2002 T7 LINEAR). Now a new analysis of the ratio of nitrogen-14 and 15 isotopes in these comets and on Earth places new limits on how much of our environment could have come from comets. On the one hand, the astronomers who did the work say that no more than a few percent of Earth's water could have come from comets. But on the other, they say that the ratio of nitrogen isotopes in these comets almost exactly matches the ratio in Earth's atmosphere. That suggests that while Earth's oceans must have come from somewhere else, Earth's early atmosphere was probably seeded by comets."
Comets Probably Seeded Earth's Nitrogen Atmosphere - Thu Jul 2 04:38:19 2009
Deag writes "A mega colony of one family of ants has spread all over the world. Previous mega colonies in California, Europe and Japan have been shown to be in fact one global colony. Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn't get on with those from the Iberian colony. But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends."
Comets Probably Seeded Earth's Nitrogen Atmosphere - Thu Jul 2 04:05:35 2009
KentuckyFC writes "One of the biggest puzzles of astrobiology is the origin of the Earth's oceans and atmosphere. One favored theory is that our water is the leftovers from a bombardment of comets early in Earth's history. But the ratio of hydrogen and deuterium in the oceans doesn't match the ratio in the four comets measured so far (Halley's, Hyakutake, Hale-Bopp and C/2002 T7 LINEAR). Now a new analysis of the ratio of nitrogen-14 and 15 isotopes in these comets and on Earth places new limits on how much of our environment could have come from comets. On the one hand, the astronomers who did the work say that no more than a few percent of Earth's water could have come from comets. But on the other, they say that the ratio of nitrogen isotopes in these comets almost exactly matches the ratio in Earth's atmosphere. That suggests that while Earth's oceans must have come from somewhere else, Earth's early atmosphere was probably seeded by comets."
Ant Mega-Colony Covers the World - Thu Jul 2 03:53:44 2009
Deag writes "A mega colony of one family of ants has spread all over the world. Previous mega colonies in California, Europe and Japan have been shown to be in fact one global colony. Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn't get on with those from the Iberian colony. But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends."
Ant Mega-Colony Covers the World - Thu Jul 2 03:42:43 2009
mmmscience writes "While fertility studies lately seem to have been exclusively focused on in vitro fertilization [IVF], new data coming out of Australia may help with unaided successful conceptions. The study has found that men who have ejaculate daily produce sperm with less damaged DNA. While such actions decrease sperm concentration, it does increase motility, meaning healthier sperm have a better chance of making it all the way to the egg. Good news, as another report has found severe chromosome abnormalities in over 90% of IVF eggs, meaning artificial insemination is just now discovering a whole new field of problems."
Ant Mega-Colony Covers the World - Thu Jul 2 03:20:08 2009
Deag writes "A mega colony of one family of ants has spread all over the world. Previous mega colonies in California, Europe and Japan have been shown to be in fact one global colony. Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn't get on with those from the Iberian colony. But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends."
Ant Mega-Colony Covers the World - Thu Jul 2 03:09:20 2009
mmmscience writes "While fertility studies lately seem to have been exclusively focused on in vitro fertilization [IVF], new data coming out of Australia may help with unaided successful conceptions. The study has found that men who have ejaculate daily produce sperm with less damaged DNA. While such actions decrease sperm concentration, it does increase motility, meaning healthier sperm have a better chance of making it all the way to the egg. Good news, as another report has found severe chromosome abnormalities in over 90% of IVF eggs, meaning artificial insemination is just now discovering a whole new field of problems."
Ant Mega-Colony Covers the World - Thu Jul 2 02:04:31 2009
Deag writes "A mega colony of one family of ants has spread all over the world. Previous mega colonies in California, Europe and Japan have been shown to be in fact one global colony. Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn't get on with those from the Iberian colony. But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends."
Daily Sex Helps Improve Fertility - Thu Jul 2 01:42:13 2009
mmmscience writes "While fertility studies lately seem to have been exclusively focused on in vitro fertilization [IVF], new data coming out of Australia may help with unaided successful conceptions. The study has found that men who have ejaculate daily produce sperm with less damaged DNA. While such actions decrease sperm concentration, it does increase motility, meaning healthier sperm have a better chance of making it all the way to the egg. Good news, as another report has found severe chromosome abnormalities in over 90% of IVF eggs, meaning artificial insemination is just now discovering a whole new field of problems."
Record-breaking Solar Cells Tailored To Location - Thu Jul 2 00:57:17 2009
Urchin writes "The quality of sunlight varies depending on where you live, but off-the-shelf solar cells are all identical. A new solar cell designed by UK firm Quantasol is easily tuned to adapt to the local light conditions, which boosts its long-term performance. Its short-term performance isn't bad though — the single junction solar cell has a peak efficiency greater than any previous device, beating a world record that's stood for 21 years."
Record-breaking Solar Cells Tailored To Location - Thu Jul 2 00:10:21 2009
Urchin writes "The quality of sunlight varies depending on where you live, but off the shelf solar cells are all identical. A new solar cell designed by UK firm Quantasol is easily tuned to adapt to the local light conditions, which boosts it's long term performance. It's short-term performance isn't bad though — the single junction solar cell has a peak efficiency greater than any previous device, beating a world record that's stood for 21 years."
US Sets Up Emergency Multi-Band Radio Project - Wed Jul 1 23:13:19 2009
coondoggie writes "Looking to help eliminate the dangerous and inefficient hodgepodge of communication and network technology used by emergency response personnel, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today said it had picked 14 groups from across the country to pilot an ambitious Multi-Band Radio project. In 2008, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate awarded a $6.2 million contract to Thales Communications to demonstrate the first-ever portable radio prototype that lets emergency responders--police, firefighters, emergency medical personnel and others--communicate with partner agencies, regardless of the radio band they operate on."
Virtualbox 3.0 Announces Opengl/Direct3D Support - Wed Jul 1 22:36:48 2009
bl8n8r writes "Apparently, Virtualbox 3.0 released today (2009-07-01) brings with it 'OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests; and experimental support for Direct3D 8/9 applications on Windows guests.' Maybe we can finally game in a VM?"
New AES Attack Documented - Wed Jul 1 22:05:05 2009
avxo writes "Bruce Schneier covers a new cryptanalytic related-key attack on AES that is better than brute force with a complexity of 2^119. According to an e-mail by the authors: 'We also expect that a careful analysis may reduce the complexities. As a preliminary result, we think that the complexity of the attack on AES-256 can be lowered from 2^119 to about 2^110.5 data and time. We believe that these results may shed a new light on the design of the key-schedules of block ciphers, but they pose no immediate threat for the real world applications that use AES.'"
Images of Apollo Landing Sites Soon Available - Wed Jul 1 21:54:03 2009
eric.brasseur writes "The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has entered lunar orbit in perfect shape. From a height of 50 km, it will image the Moon in high resolution. The hardware left by the Apollo missions will be clearly visible. The Soviet automatic probes will also be photographed. Previous best images were made by the Japanese probe Kaguya and showed a white patch where the dust had been blown away by the blast of the LM engine."
Images of Apollo Landing Sites Soon Available - Wed Jul 1 21:39:23 2009
Al writes "Technology Review discusses what a US carbon trading scheme could learn from the flawed European experience. Advocates of carbon-trading schemes like to point to Europe's cap-and-trade program as a model worthy of emulation, but the reality has been less than perfect. A glut of pollution credits, distributed without cost during both the first, transitional phase of the program and the current working phase, drove down the value of the EUAs. As a result, Europe's carbon dioxide emissions remain priced well below 20 euros per ton. With the price of pollution so low, economists say, industries that generate and consume energy have no incentives to change their habits; it is still cheaper to use fossil fuels than to switch to technologies that pollute less. Establishing a carbon price in the U.S. system now, and tightening the system later could send a dangerously wrong signal to financial markets looking to invest in new energy technologies."
Images of Apollo Landing Sites Soon Available - Wed Jul 1 21:12:56 2009
eric.brasseur writes "The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has entered lunar orbit in perfect shape. From a height of 50 km, it will image the Moon in high resolution. The hardware left by the Apollo missions will be clearly visible. The Soviet automatic probes will also be photographed. Previous best images were made by the Japanese probe Kaguya and showed a white patch where the dust had been blown away by the blast of the LM engine."
What the US Can Learn From Europe's Pollution Credit System - Wed Jul 1 20:26:26 2009
Al writes "Technology Review discusses what a US carbon trading scheme could learn from the flawed European experience. Advocates of carbon-trading schemes like to point to Europe's cap-and-trade program as a model worthy of emulation, but the reality has been less than perfect. A glut of pollution credits, distributed without cost during both the first, transitional phase of the program and the current working phase, drove down the value of the EUAs. As a result, Europe's carbon dioxide emissions remain priced well below 20 euros per ton. With the price of pollution so low, economists say, industries that generate and consume energy have no incentives to change their habits; it is still cheaper to use fossil fuels than to switch to technologies that pollute less. Establishing a carbon price in the U.S. system now, and tightening the system later could send a dangerously wrong signal to financial markets looking to invest in new energy technologies."
PostgreSQL 8.4 Out - Wed Jul 1 19:40:17 2009
TheFuzzy writes "PostgreSQL version 8.4 is now out and available for download. The main cool features in this version are: recursive queries (for doing trees etc.), windowing functions (for doing reports) column-level permissions, parallel database restore, a beta in-place upgrade tool, and a host of administrative improvements. And, of course, better performance, mainly on reporting queries. Some of the over 200 new or enhanced features are listed here."
Firefox 3.5 Benchmarked, Close To Original Chrome - Wed Jul 1 19:13:30 2009
CNETNate writes "The tests prove it: It's the third-fastest browser in the world, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3. In terms of Javascript performance, Firefox 3.5's new rendering engine places it squarely above Opera 10's beta and Internet Explorers 7 and 8 (based on previous benchmarks), plus it's getting on for being almost as quick as the original version of Google Chrome. Also, the new location-awareness feature was testing in central London, and pinpointed yours truly to within a few hundred meters — easily enough for, say, a Starbucks Web site to tell you where your nearest Starbucks is."
Flapping NAV Performs Controlled Hovering Flight - Wed Jul 1 18:48:01 2009
An anonymous reader writes "AeroVironment, Inc. was awarded a Phase II contract extension in April from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to design and build a flying prototype for the Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) program. As part of this program AV has accomplished a technical milestone never before achieved: the controlled hovering flight of an air vehicle system with two flapping wings (video) that carries its own energy source and uses only the flapping wings for propulsion and control. Two wings for propulsion and control, nothing else."
stoolpigeon writes "Microblogging service Twitter has undeniably been a hit, with growth rates that were at times in excess of 1400%. The growth was rapid enough that the site became well known for its periodic, and, at times, extensive downtime. Even with these issues, the service continued to grow rapidly, and with celebrities getting into the mix Twitter was quickly on the radar of mainstream media. The ubiquity of twitter and ever-increasing coverage of 'tweets' has also brought the inevitable backlash. As with anything that gains high-profile popularity, there are plenty of Twitter haters out there, though the role Twitter has played in the recent Iranian elections seems to have brought more legitimacy to Twitter in the eyes of many. With popularity come books, and quite a few are already out there about and for Twitter, but my favorite so far is The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein." Read below for the rest of JR's review.
Kemeno writes "Blizzard has announced that they will be dropping LAN support for Starcraft II, citing piracy and quality concerns. Instead, all multiplayer games will be hosted through their new Battle.net service. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this move, but wasn't LAN play how the original Starcraft became popular? Blizzard said, 'More people on Battle.net means more even more resources devoted to evolving this online platform to cater to further community building and new ways to enjoy the game online. World of Warcraft is a great example of a game that has evolved beyond anyone's imagination since their Day 1 and will continue to do so to better the player experience for as long as players support the title. ... We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.'"
stoolpigeon writes "Microblogging service Twitter has undeniably been a hit, with growth rates that were at times in excess of 1400%. The growth was rapid enough that the site became well known for its periodic, and, at times, extensive downtime. Even with these issues, the service continued to grow rapidly, and with celebrities getting into the mix Twitter was quickly on the radar of mainstream media. The ubiquity of twitter and ever-increasing coverage of 'tweets' has also brought the inevitable backlash. As with anything that gains high-profile popularity, there are plenty of Twitter haters out there, though the role Twitter has played in the recent Iranian elections seems to have brought more legitimacy to Twitter in the eyes of many. With popularity come books, and quite a few are already out there about and for Twitter, but my favorite so far is The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein." Read below for the rest of JR's review.
Kemeno writes "Blizzard has announced that they will be dropping LAN support for Starcraft II, citing piracy and quality concerns. Instead, all multiplayer games will be hosted through their new Battle.net service. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this move, but wasn't LAN play how the original Starcraft became popular? Blizzard said, 'More people on Battle.net means more even more resources devoted to evolving this online platform to cater to further community building and new ways to enjoy the game online. World of Warcraft is a great example of a game that has evolved beyond anyone's imagination since their Day 1 and will continue to do so to better the player experience for as long as players support the title. ... We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.'"
Willfro sends in a piece by Evgeny Morozov at the Boston Review about the hyperbole and the reality of "cyber war." Quoting: "At the end of May, President Obama called cyber-security 'one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.' His words echo a flurry of gloomy think-tank reports. Unfortunately, these reports are usually richer in vivid metaphor — with fears of 'digital Pearl Harbors' and 'cyber-Katrinas' — than in factual foundation. So why is there so much concern about 'cyber-terrorism?' Answering a question with a question: who frames the debate? Much of the data are gathered by ultra-secretive government agencies — which need to justify their own existence — and cyber-security companies — which derive commercial benefits from popular anxiety. Journalists do not help. Gloomy scenarios and speculations about cyber-Armaggedon draw attention, even if they are relatively short on facts."
An anonymous reader writes "If you have children that play on the popular virtual world game Neopets, you might want to warn them of a social engineering scam gleefully targeting 12-year-old kids. Neopets users looking for rare items are sent private messages from the scammers, who direct them to sites hosting keyloggers & trojans. They then use the infected PC as a means to get to data the parents might have stored there, be it credit card details, Paypal accounts or online banking. Seeing the screenshots of some of these people talking about putting these children into botnets is just unbelievable — if ever you wanted proof that people up to no good online will go to any lengths to get their hands on some money (or even just feel good about outsmarting a 12-year-old), here it is."
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, since gas consumption is going down and fuel efficient cars are becoming more popular, the government is looking into a new form of taxation to create revenue for transportation projects. This new system is a 'by-the-mile tax,' requiring GPS in cars so it can track the mileage. Once a month, the data gets uploaded to a billing center and you are conveniently charged for how much you drove. 'A federal commission, after a two-year study, concluded earlier this year that the road tax was the "best path forward" to keep revenues flowing to highway and transportation projects, and could be an important new tool to help manage traffic and relieve congestion. ... The commission pegged 2020 as the year for the federal fuel tax, currently 18.5 cents a gallon, to be phased out and replaced by a road tax. One estimate of a road tax that would cover the current federal and state fuel taxes is 1 to 2 cents per mile for cars and light trucks.'"
jasoncart writes "Veteran gaming man Dave Perry has shown off his OnLive-rivalling, cloud gaming service called Gaikai in a new video that is drawing a lot of attention. As you can see from the video, Perry plays World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Mario Kart 64, Spore and more — all running on a bog-standard computer through the Gaikai website, itself running in a normal version of Firefox." More details about the service are available at Perry's website. He spoke about Gaikai in an interview a few months ago, and he seems confident that this will work better than OnLive (which we've discussed in the past).
angry tapir writes "Mobile carriers may start giving away netbooks for free, and Linux-based application stores could help them profit by doing so, the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin argued at a recent forum in Beijing. 'Selling discounted netbooks to users who buy a mobile data subscription would extend a sales strategy widely used for mobile phones. Carriers often sell phones for below retail price and let a user's subscription fees make up for any loss. AT&T already sells subsidized 3G netbooks in the US, and China Mobile has announced similar plans. Carriers worldwide are likely considering the option, which lets them charge for added services like downloads of music, videos and software, said [analyst Jack Gold]. Those downloads could come from platforms like the iPhone App Store that target mainly mobile phones today. Competition could push netbook prices down as more carriers subsidize them, which would make putting Linux on the laptops an attractive way to cut costs, said Zemlin.'"
Shipud writes "Mammalian genomes have been shrinking for about 65 million years, roughly since the dinosaur extinction. Why? And why were ancient mammalian genomes three times larger than they are today? A new article in Genome Biology and Evolution tries to explain this bizarre finding, and why the genomes of mammals (but not of other living groups) are still shrinking. 'Once [the dinosaurs] were gone, mammals started to radiate, fill those niches, and a whole new level of competition arose. The selective advantage of not having a genome encumbered by potentially damaging mobile DNA elements has probably become critical at this "be ye fruitful and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein" stage. In effect, the genomes of mammals has been shrinking by removing mobile DNA elements, just after the KT boundary. And according to the model presented in this study, this process is still ongoing: mammalian genomes are not at an equilibrium size. Unlike flies, mammals are still cleaning up.'"
ozydingo writes "The RIAA has scored a victory in a decision on a copyright case that they filed back in 2007. US District Judge Harold Baer ruled in favor of the music industry on all its main theories: that Usenet.com is guilty of direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement. In addition, and perhaps most important for future cases, Baer said that Usenet.com can't claim protection under the Sony Betamax decision stating that companies can't be held liable of contributory infringement if the device is 'capable of significant non-infringing uses.' Bear noted that Usenet.com differed from Sony in that the sale of a Betamax recorder was a one-time deal, while Usenet.com's interaction with its users was an ongoing relationship. The RIAA stated in a brief note, 'We're pleased that the court recognized not just that Usenet.com directly infringed the record companies' copyrights but also took action against the defendants for their egregious litigation misconduct.'"
IamTheRealMike writes "It's been a few months since we last checked in on how the Blu-Ray group was doing in their fight against piracy. In December 2008, a new generation of BD+ programs had stopped both SlySoft AnyDVD HD and the open source effort at Doom9. At the start of January, SlySoft released an update that could handle the new BD+ programs, meaning that Blu-Ray discs could not be decrypted for a period of time about the same length as SlySoft's worst case scenario. The BD+ retaliation was swift, but largely ineffective, consisting of a unique program for every Blu-Ray master. Users had to upload log files to SlySoft for every new movie/region. They would then support that unique variant in their next update, usually released a few days later. Despite that, the open source effort never did manage to progress beyond the Winter 2008 programs and is currently stalled completely; SlySoft is the only group remaining. This situation remained for several months, but starting around the same time as Paramount joined Fox in licensing BD+, a new set of programs came out which have once again made Blu-Ray discs unrippable. There are currently 19 movies that cannot be decrypted. It appears neither side is able to decisively gain the upper hand, but one thing seems clear — only full-time, for-profit professionals are able to consistently beat BD+."
e9th writes "Despite a bump or two along the way, it seemed that compulsory ID cards were a done deal in the UK. Now, the Financial Times is reporting that the scheme has been shelved. Unfortunately, it seems that this was more a matter of convenience than of concern for citizens' privacy."
Sega has recently taken a few attempts at developing games for the Wii that were targeted at adults rather than kids. House of the Dead: Overkill and Madworld haven't been incredibly popular, but they've done well enough to turn a profit. In Sega's eyes, this makes mature-themed games for the Wii a successful experiment, or at least one they're willing to continue. Other companies are looking to get into the act as well. EA will be releasing M-rated Dead Space: Extraction for the Wii, and Bethesda has a project in the works too.
andy1307 writes "Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, announced on Tuesday a new Web site designed to track more than $70 billion in government IT spending, showing all contracts held by major firms within every agency. The (Flash-heavy) site, USAspending.gov, shows detailed information about whether IT contracts are being monitored and budgets being met. The data also show which contracts were won through a competitive process or in a no-bid method (the latter approach is criticized by good-government advocates for excluding firms from business opportunities). Each prime contractor is listed as well as the status of that project; sub-contractors are not yet shown."
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that dozens of users of the recently released iPhone 3GS have reported overheating issues, with some iPhone owners unable to pick up the device because the handset gets so hot to the touch, while others say the casing turns pink with the heat. 'I am definitely experiencing issues with the iPhone running warm and quick battery life lost,' writes Tom Goldstein on one discussion board. 'The phone seems to warm up almost immediately if I am doing anything that pulls data over the network.' Some users have said the device has been too hot to put to their ear while making a phone call, and others say the overheating seems to occur when owners are using the iPhone's mapping software, which uses the handset's built-in GPS technology. Melissa J. Perenson writes at PC World: 'I became aware the handset had become very hot. Very, very hot — not just on the back, but the entire length of the front face, too.' Some gadget experts believe faulty batteries could be the cause of overheating and poor battery life. 'My guess is there's going to be a whole lot of batteries affected because these [iPhones] are from very large production runs,' said Aaron Vronko, who fixes iPods and iPhones. 'If you have a problem in the design of a series of batteries, it's probably going to be spread to tens of thousands [of device], if not hundreds of thousands, and maybe more.'"
We occasionally discuss the complaints from video game publishers and developers about how used game sales are hurting them, and how they've been testing out countermeasures disguised as features to compensate. Now, industry analyst Michael Patcher has released a report which attempts to quantify that damage. Patcher estimates that used game sales and trades number around 100 million each year in the US. However, despite the immense number of transactions, he doesn't think the used game market is as detrimental to sales of new games as the publishers think. "The vast majority of used games are not traded in until the original new game purchaser has finished playing, typically well beyond the window for a full retail priced new game sale. Thus, while there may be some limited substitution of used game purchases when GameStop employees 'push' used merchandise upon consumers lined up to buy new games, the vast majority of used game purchases occur more than two months after a new game is released. ... To the extent that there is a substitution effect, we estimate that fewer than 5% of new game sales are impacted."
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that dozens of users of the recently released iPhone 3GS have reported overheating issues, with some iPhone owners unable to pick up the device because the handset gets so hot to the touch, while others say the casing turns pink with the heat. 'I am definitely experiencing issues with the iPhone running warm and quick battery life lost,' writes Tom Goldstein on one discussion board. 'The phone seems to warm up almost immediately if I am doing anything that pulls data over the network.' Some users have said the device has been too hot to put to their ear while making a phone call, and others say the overheating seems to occur when owners are using the iPhone's mapping software, which uses the handset's built-in GPS technology. Melissa J. Perenson writes at PC World: 'I became aware the handset had become very hot. Very, very hot — not just on the back, but the entire length of the front face, too.' Some gadget experts believe faulty batteries could be the cause of overheating and poor battery life. 'My guess is there's going to be a whole lot of batteries affected because these [iPhones] are from very large production runs,' said Aaron Vronko, who fixes iPods and iPhones. 'If you have a problem in the design of a series of batteries, it's probably going to be spread to tens of thousands [of device], if not hundreds of thousands, and maybe more.'"
We occasionally discuss the complaints from video game publishers and developers about how used game sales are hurting them, and how they've been testing out countermeasures disguised as features to compensate. Now, industry analyst Michael Patcher has released a report which attempts to quantify that damage. Patcher estimates that used game sales and trades number around 100 million each year in the US. However, despite the immense number of transactions, he doesn't think the used game market is as detrimental to sales of new games as the publishers think. "The vast majority of used games are not traded in until the original new game purchaser has finished playing, typically well beyond the window for a full retail priced new game sale. Thus, while there may be some limited substitution of used game purchases when GameStop employees 'push' used merchandise upon consumers lined up to buy new games, the vast majority of used game purchases occur more than two months after a new game is released. ... To the extent that there is a substitution effect, we estimate that fewer than 5% of new game sales are impacted."
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that dozens of users of the recently released iPhone 3GS have reported overheating issues, with some iPhone owners unable to pick up the device because the handset gets so hot to the touch, while others say the casing turns pink with the heat. 'I am definitely experiencing issues with the iPhone running warm and quick battery life lost,' writes Tom Goldstein on one discussion board. 'The phone seems to warm up almost immediately if I am doing anything that pulls data over the network.' Some users have said the device has been too hot to put to their ear while making a phone call, and others say the overheating seems to occur when owners are using the iPhone's mapping software, which uses the handset's built-in GPS technology. Melissa J. Perenson writes at PC World: 'I became aware the handset had become very hot. Very, very hot — not just on the back, but the entire length of the front face, too.' Some gadget experts believe faulty batteries could be the cause of overheating and poor battery life. 'My guess is there's going to be a whole lot of batteries affected because these [iPhones] are from very large production runs,' said Aaron Vronko, who fixes iPods and iPhones. 'If you have a problem in the design of a series of batteries, it's probably going to be spread to tens of thousands [of device], if not hundreds of thousands, and maybe more.'"
Gamasutra has an interesting article about how the push toward realistic graphics and extremely lifelike characters in modern games is making the term "murder simulator" — once laughed off for referring to pixelated dying Nazis — a concept to take more seriously. The author is careful to simply explore the issue, and not come to a specific conclusion; he doesn't say that we should or shouldn't prevent it from happening, only that it's worth consideration. (One section is even titled "Forget the kids," saying that decisions for what children play fall under parental responsibility.) Quoting: "We should start rethinking these issues now before we all slide down the slope together and can't pull ourselves back up again. Or, even worse, before governments step in and dictate what can and can't be depicted or simulated in video games via legislation. ... Obviously, what makes an acceptable game play experience for each player is a personal choice that should be judged on a person-by-person basis (or on a parent to child basis), and I believe it should stay that way. As for me, I'm already drawing the line at BioShock — I can barely stomach the game as it is. Sure, I could play it more and desensitize myself, but I don't want to. And that's just me. It's up to you and a million other adult gamers to decide what's best for yourselves and to draw the line on virtual violence where you feel most comfortable."
1sockchuck writes "Yahoo has come up with a data center design called the Yahoo Computing Coop, which it says will make its new data center in Lockport, NY one of the most efficient on earth. The design features 120-foot by 60-foot metal prefabricated facilities with louvers on the side to support free cooling, and a peaked roof to manage the release of waste heat from the hot aisle. Chief Yahoo David Filo said the name was adopted 'because it looks like something chickens live in.' The $150 million data center in Western New York, which was announced earlier today, will run on cheap hydro power from the Niagara River."
Gamasutra has an interesting article about how the push toward realistic graphics and extremely lifelike characters in modern games is making the term "murder simulator" — once laughed off for referring to pixelated dying Nazis — a concept to take more seriously. The author is careful to simply explore the issue, and not come to a specific conclusion; he doesn't say that we should or shouldn't prevent it from happening, only that it's worth consideration. (One section is even titled "Forget the kids," saying that decisions for what children play fall under parental responsibility.) Quoting: "We should start rethinking these issues now before we all slide down the slope together and can't pull ourselves back up again. Or, even worse, before governments step in and dictate what can and can't be depicted or simulated in video games via legislation. ... Obviously, what makes an acceptable game play experience for each player is a personal choice that should be judged on a person-by-person basis (or on a parent to child basis), and I believe it should stay that way. As for me, I'm already drawing the line at BioShock — I can barely stomach the game as it is. Sure, I could play it more and desensitize myself, but I don't want to. And that's just me. It's up to you and a million other adult gamers to decide what's best for yourselves and to draw the line on virtual violence where you feel most comfortable."
1sockchuck writes "Yahoo has come up with a data center design called the Yahoo Computing Coop, which it says will make its new data center in Lockport, NY one of the most efficient on earth. The design features 120-foot by 60-foot metal prefabricated facilities with louvers on the side to support free cooling, and a peaked roof to manage the release of waste heat from the hot aisle. Chief Yahoo David Filo said the name was adopted 'because it looks like something chickens live in.' The $150 million data center in Western New York, which was announced earlier today, will run on cheap hydro power from the Niagara River."
An anonymous reader sends news from The Washington Post's Security Fix blog of a new Trojan horse program that takes click fraud to the next level. The Trojan, dubbed FFsearcher by SecureWorks, was among the pieces of malware installed by sites hacked with the Nine-Ball mass compromise, which attacked some 40,000 Web sites this month. The Trojan takes advantage of Google's "AdSense for Search" API, which allows Web sites to embed Google search results alongside the usual Google AdSense ads. (SecureWorks' writeup indicates that Yahoo search is targeted too, but the researchers saw no evidence if the malware redirecting Yahoo searches.) While most search hijackers give themselves away on the victim's machine by redirecting the browser through some no-name search engine, FFsearcher "...converts every search a victim makes through Google.com, so that each query is invisibly redirected through the attackers' own Web sites, via Google's Custom Search API. Meanwhile, the Trojan manipulates the victim's PC and browser so that the victim never actually sees the attacker-controlled Web site that is hijacking the search, but instead sees the search results as though they were returned directly from Google.com (and with Google.com in the victim browser's address bar, not the address of the attacker controlled site). Adding to the stealth is the fact that search results themselves aren't altered by the attackers, who are merely going after the referral payments should victims click on any of the displayed ads. What's more, the attackers aren't diverting clicks or ad revenue away from advertisers or publishers, as in traditional click fraud: They are simply forcing Google to pay commissions that it wouldn't otherwise have to pay." If FFSearcher were the only piece of malware on the machine, it would have a better chance of staying under the radar.
An anonymous reader sends news from The Washington Post's Security Fix blog of a new Trojan horse program that takes click fraud to the next level. The Trojan, dubbed FFsearcher by SecureWorks, was among the pieces of malware installed by sites hacked with the Nine-Ball mass compromise, which attacked some 40,000 Web sites this month. The Trojan takes advantage of Google's "AdSense for Search" API, which allows Web sites to embed Google search results alongside the usual Google AdSense ads. (SecureWorks' writeup indicates that Yahoo search is targeted too, but the researchers saw no evidence if the malware redirecting Yahoo searches.) While most search hijackers give themselves away on the victim's machine by redirecting the browser through some no-name search engine, FFsearcher "...converts every search a victim makes through Google.com, so that each query is invisibly redirected through the attackers' own Web sites, via Google's Custom Search API. Meanwhile, the Trojan manipulates the victim's PC and browser so that the victim never actually sees the attacker-controlled Web site that is hijacking the search, but instead sees the search results as though they were returned directly from Google.com (and with Google.com in the victim browser's address bar, not the address of the attacker controlled site). Adding to the stealth is the fact that search results themselves aren't altered by the attackers, who are merely going after the referral payments should victims click on any of the displayed ads. What's more, the attackers aren't diverting clicks or ad revenue away from advertisers or publishers, as in traditional click fraud: They are simply forcing Google to pay commissions that it wouldn't otherwise have to pay." If FFSearcher were the only piece of malware on the machine, it would have a better chance of staying under the radar.
snydeq writes "Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP a year ago today, no longer selling new copies in most venues. Yet according to a report from InfoWorld, various downgrade paths to XP are keeping the operating system very much alive, particularly among businesses. In fact, despite Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, according to data provided by community-based performance-monitoring network of PCs. Microsoft recently planned to further limit the ability to downgrade to XP now that Windows 7 is in the pipeline, but backlash against the licensing scheme prompted the company to change course, extending downgrade rights on new PCs from April 2010 to April 2011."
An anonymous reader brings us another bump on the bumpy road of Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which we discussed a week ago. Now the Times (UK) is reporting on a dustup between Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Recently Gladwell reviewed, or rather deconstructed, Anderson's book in the New Yorker. Anderson has responded with a blog post that addresses some, but by no means all, of Gladwell's criticisms, and The Times is inclined to award the match to Gladwell on points. Although their reviewer didn't notice that Gladwell, in setting up the idea of "Free" as a straw man, omitted a critical half of Stewart Brand's seminal quote.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The NY Times reports that farmers and ranchers oppose a government program to identify livestock with microchip tags that would allow the computerized recording of livestock movements from birth to the slaughterhouse. Proponents of the USDA's National Animal Identification System say that computer records of cattle movements mean that when a cow is discovered with bovine tuberculosis or mad cow disease, its prior contacts can be swiftly traced. Ranchers say the extra cost of the electronic tags places an onerous burden on a teetering industry. Small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities. The ranchers also note that there is no Internet connection on many ranches for filing to a regional database. 'Lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture,' says Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms. The notion of centralized data banks, even for animals, has also set off alarms among libertarians who oppose NAIS. One group has issued a bumper sticker that reads, 'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon.' 'They can't comprehend the vastness of a ranch like this,' says Jay Platt, the third-generation owner of a 22,000 acre New Mexico ranch. 'This plan is expensive, it's intrusive, and there's no need for it.'"
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines would-be Microsoft Office competitors SoftMaker Office and OpenOffice.org and finds the results surprising. OpenOffice.org — frequently cited as the most viable Office competitor — has pushed for Office interoperability in version 3.1, adding import support for files in Office 2007's native Open XML format. But, as Kennedy found in Office-compatibility testing, that support remains mostly skin deep. 'Factor in OpenOffice's other well-documented warts — buggy Java implementation, CPU-hogging auto-update system, quirky font rendering — and it's easy to see why the vast majority of IT shops continue to reject this pretender to the Microsoft Office throne,' Kennedy writes. SoftMaker Office, however, 'shows that good things often still come in small packages.' Geared more toward mobile computing, the suite's 'compact footprint and low overhead make it ideal for underpowered systems, and its excellent compatibility with Office 2003 file formats means it's a safe choice for heterogeneous environments where external data access isn't a priority.'" Note that SoftMaker Office is not free software — it costs $79.95 — and there is no version for Macintosh.
The_AV8R writes "In a recent interview, Peter Van Loan, the new Canadian Public Safety minister, says ISPs should be able to provide private user information without a warrant. (The only example he gave was cases of child pornography; the interviewer pointed out that in these cases ISPs are already at liberty to divulge customer information without a warrant, but that the proposed rules would make that mandatory whenever the police ask.) He was adamant that in regard to IP addresses, names, cell phone numbers, and email addresses: '...that is not the kind of information about which Canadians have a legitimate expectation of privacy.' The minister denied — even when presented with an audio clip proving otherwise — that his predecessor had promised never to allow the police to wiretap the Internet without a warrant."
Glyn Moody writes "Detractors of free software like to point out it's not really 'free,' and claim that its Total Cost of Ownership is often comparable with closed-source solutions if you take everything into account. And yet, despite their enthusiasm for including all the costs, they never include a very real extra that users of Microsoft's products frequently have to pay: the cost of cleaning up malware infections. For example, the UK city of Manchester has just paid out nearly $2.5 million to clean up the Conficker worm, most of which was 'a £1.2m [$2million] bill in the IT department, including £600,000 [$1 million] getting "consultancy support" to fix the problems, which including drafting in experts from Microsoft.' To make the comparisons fair, isn't it about time these often massive costs were included in TCO calculations?"
As IBM continues to build out, Jazz, their community-oriented development site, technical lead Dr. Erich Gamma has offered to answer questions about Jazz or anything else in his realm of expertise. Among his many accomplishments, Erich worked for Kent Beck on the Java unit testing framework, JUnit, and was actively involved until JUnit 4. Dr Gamma was also one of the fathers of Eclipse and the original lead on the Eclipse Java development tools. Feel free to fire away on Eclipse, Java, JUnit, the Rational suite, the Jazz site, or anything else you think Erich might be able to answer. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.
superbubba writes "The Moblin steering committee is happy to release the Moblin v2.0 beta for netbooks and nettops for developer testing. With this release, developers can begin to experience and work with the source code of the visually rich, interactive user interface designed for Intel Atom based netbooks."
SailorSpork sends in a BBC report that "China is delaying a controversial plan requiring all new computers sold in the country to be equipped with an Internet filtering software, state media says. The filter, called Green Dam Youth Escort, was to have been required from Wednesday, but the ministry of industry said computer makers needed more time." The submitter adds: "Except of course for Sony, who as reported earlier lacked the moral fiber to hold off installing the spyware, which reportedly is ridden with security holes and uses stolen code. Sony actually managed to ship ahead of the schedule."
An anonymous reader writes "Kudos to NASA and the Japanese trade ministry for mapping 99% of the Earth's surface, surpassing their previous effort, with which the new data will be amalgamated. Apparently, the data will be free to download and use."
Designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau have created a clock that is powered by "eating" bugs. The clock traps insects on flypaper stretched across a roller system and then drops them into a vat of bacteria. The insects are then "digested" and the ensuing chemical reaction is transformed into power that keeps the rollers moving and the LCD clock working. The two offer another version that is powered by mice and an even cooler machine that picks insect fuel from spiderwebs with the help of a robotic arm and a video camera.
Michael writes "Part of our business at my work involves transferring mission critical files across a 2 mbit microwave connection, into a government-run telecommunications center with a very dodgy internal network and then finally to our own server inside the center. The computers at both ends run Windows. What sort of protocols or tools are available to me that will guarantee to get the data transferred across better than a straight Windows file system copy? Since before I started working here, they've been using FTP to upload the files, but many times the copied files are a few kilobytes smaller than the originals."
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has published Linux filesystem benchmarks comparing XFS, EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs and NILFS2 filesystems. This is the first time that the new EXT4 and Btrfs and NILFS2 filesystems have been directly compared when it comes to their disk performance though the results may surprise. For the most part, EXT4 came out on top."
Rand Huck writes "Amazon.com has now added Rhode Island to its blacklist of affiliates in response to its proposed budget changes to enforce a tax on Internet sales, which includes commissions on their affiliate program by content providers based in Rhode Island. The first state to be blacklisted was North Carolina, for the same reason. If you go to a Rhode Island-based or North Carolina-based website that advertises Amazon.com goods as an affiliate, that website will no longer have the goods available because otherwise Amazon.com would be forced to pay sales tax to the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations or the State of North Carolina. The state's rationale is, if someone clicks to buy a good from Amazon.com via a site based in Rhode Island, it's equivalent to buying a good from a brick and mortar chain store located in Rhode Island."
AaronParsons writes "An interesting NY Times article describes currently available programs for post-consumer electronics. One of the many interesting points in the article is that electronics manufacturers should be held responsible for recycling their products post-consumer: 'Maybe since they have some responsibility for the cleanup, it will motivate them to think about how you design for the environment and the commodity value at the end of the life.'"
Sudheer writes "The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes. Some of the key new features include: namespaces, late static binding, closures, optional garbage collection for cyclic references, new extensions (like ext/phar, ext/intl and ext/fileinfo), over 140 bug fixes and much more."
johndmartiniii writes "Farhad Manjoo has a review of Firefox 3.5 at Slate.com this week. From the article: 'Lately I've been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.' The worried tone in the beginning of the review gives way to excitement over the HTML5 features being implemented, saying that thus far Firefox 3.5 'offers the best implementation of the standard — and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language.'" The final version could be here at any time; Firefox 3.5 is still shown as a release candidate at Mozilla's home page.
RickRussellTX writes "Comcast plans to offer 4 megabits/sec WiMAX services to customers in Portland, Oregon starting tomorrow. Branded as 'Comcast High-Speed 2go' and '4G,' the service will require a $44.99 per month subscription in addition to existing Comcast home service. For $69.99 they will offer a dual-mode card with access to both Comcast WiMAX and Sprint's national 3G wireless network. Future rollouts are planned for Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. Say what you will about Comcast (and I know many Slashdot readers have plenty to say about Comcast), this is a daring attempt to bypass entrenched cell phone companies with a direct-to-consumer wireless service."
paulraps writes "The Pirate Bay is to be bought for $7.8 million by Global Gaming Factory X, a Swedish company specializing in internet café management software, the company has announced. As well as taking over the controversial brand, GGF has also bought Peerialism, a small IT company with roots at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, which has developed a new file sharing technology. The acquisitions mean that GGF will be at the heart of 'the international digital distribution market,' allowing it to introduce a new pay model for file sharing." Reader pyzondar adds "However, the press statement also states that the deal will only go through 'if GGF and its Board of Directors can use the asset in a legal and appropriate way.'"
Kotaku has an opinion piece by Leigh Alexander singing the praises of classic, button-rich controllers for the level of precision and complexity they offer. While the Wii Remote and upcoming motion-control offerings from Microsoft and Sony are generating a lot of interest, there will always be games for which more traditional input devices are better suited. Quoting: "With all this talk about new audiences — and the tech designed to serve them — it's easy to get excited. It's also easy to feel a little lost in the shuffle. For gamers who've been there since before anyone cared about making games 'for everyone,' having that object in our hands was more than a way to access the game world — it was half the appeal. Anyone who's ever pulled off a chain of combos in a console fighter can tell you about the joy of expertise and control. ... Gamers may suffer some kind of identity crisis as the familiar markers of their beloved niche evolve — or disappear entirely. The solution to that one's easy: Get over it. Like it or not, it's clear that gaming's not a 'niche' anymore, and its shape will change. The more pressing issue is whether or not controller-less gaming will truly make the medium richer. Making something 'more accessible' doesn't necessarily make it better."
Dotnaught writes "Sony is now shipping computers in China with Green Dam installed, in advance of the Chinese government's July 1 deadline. But the company is disclaiming responsibility for any damage caused by the Web filtering software. Documents posted by Hong Kong-based media studies professor Rebecca MacKinnon also suggest that the Chinese government is considering similar filtering requirements for mobile phones."
A report from a Japanese business publication says Sony is currently making plans to develop a cell phone with gaming capabilities in order to compete with the iPhone. "Sony plans to set up a project team as early as July to develop a new product that combines functions of its portable game player and Sony Ericsson's mobile phones, the Nikkei said." This comes shortly after news that the new PSP Go will be open to "non-gaming applications."
Hugh Pickens writes "Cosmologist Adrian Mellott has an article in Seed Magazine discussing his search for the mechanism behind the mass extinctions in earth's history that seem to occur with a period of about 62 million years. Scientists have identified nearly 20 mass extinctions throughout the fossil record, including the end-Permian event about 250 million years ago that killed off about 95 percent of life on Earth. Mellott notes that as our solar system orbits the Milky Way's center, it oscillates through the galactic plane with a period of around 65 million years. 'The space between galaxies is not empty. It's actually full of rarefied hot gas,' says Mellott. 'As our galaxy falls into the Local Supercluster, it should disturb this gas and create a shock wave, like the bow shock of a jet plane,' generating cascades of high-energy subatomic particles and radiation called 'cosmic rays.' These effects could cause enhanced cloud formation and depletion of the ozone layer, killing off many small organisms at the base of the food chain and potentially leading to a population crash. So where is the earth now in the 62-million year extinction cycle? '[W]e are on the downside of biodiversity, a few million years from hitting bottom,' writes Mellott."
A Blizzard representative today announced that they're working on a service for players to switch factions in World of Warcraft, going from Horde to Alliance or vice versa. "There's still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm. Players who ended up creating and leveling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we're pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it." They also said there would be "some rules involved with when and how the service can be used."
Hugh Pickens writes "Cosmologist Adrian Mellott has an article in Seed Magazine discussing his search for the mechanism behind the mass extinctions in earth's history that seem to occur with a period of about 62 million years. Scientists have identified nearly 20 mass extinctions throughout the fossil record, including the end-Permian event about 250 million years ago that killed off about 95 percent of life on Earth. Mellott notes that as our solar system orbits the Milky Way's center, it oscillates through the galactic plane with a period of around 65 million years. 'The space between galaxies is not empty. It's actually full of rarefied hot gas,' says Mellott. 'As our galaxy falls into the Local Supercluster, it should disturb this gas and create a shock wave, like the bow shock of a jet plane,' generating cascades of high-energy subatomic particles and radiation called 'cosmic rays.' These effects could cause enhanced cloud formation and depletion of the ozone layer, killing off many small organisms at the base of the food chain and potentially leading to a population crash. So where is the earth now in the 62-million year extinction cycle? '[W]e are on the downside of biodiversity, a few million years from hitting bottom,' writes Mellott."
An anonymous reader tips us that researchers at Toyota have developed a brain-machine interface system that allows for control of a wheelchair using thought. The system processes brain thought patterns (such as the thought of moving one's left foot) and can turn them into left, right, and forward movements of the wheelchair with a delay as short as one-eighth of a second. That's a big improvement over existing systems, which can take as long as several seconds to analyze and react to the user's thoughts. "The system has an emergency stop that can be activated by the user puffing his cheeks. The BMI adjusts itself over time to the characteristics of each driver's brainwaves. If a person dedicates three hours a day to using the system, the BMI can reach 95% accuracy in a week, researchers said."
A Blizzard representative today announced that they're working on a service for players to switch factions in World of Warcraft, going from Horde to Alliance or vice versa. "There's still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm. Players who ended up creating and leveling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we're pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it." They also said there would be "some rules involved with when and how the service can be used."
An anonymous reader tips us that researchers at Toyota have developed a brain-machine interface system that allows for control of a wheelchair using thought. The system processes brain thought patterns (such as the thought of moving one's left foot) and can turn them into left, right, and forward movements of the wheelchair with a delay as short as one-eighth of a second. That's a big improvement over existing systems, which can take as long as several seconds to analyze and react to the user's thoughts. "The system has an emergency stop that can be activated by the user puffing his cheeks. The BMI adjusts itself over time to the characteristics of each driver's brainwaves. If a person dedicates three hours a day to using the system, the BMI can reach 95% accuracy in a week, researchers said."
Sue Williams has been awarded a £20,000 grant by the Arts Council of Wales, to "explore cultural attitudes towards female buttocks". Sue plans to examine racial attitudes towards bottoms in Europe and Africa and create plaster casts of women's behinds to try to understand their place in contemporary culture. And here I've been studying the issue all these years for free like a sucker!
fast66 writes "After hearing about Nokia-Siemens sale of Internet-monitoring software to Iran, US Senators Schumer and Graham want to bar them from receiving federal contracts. They planned the action after hearing about a joint venture of Nokia Corp. of Finland and Siemens AG of Germany that sold a sophisticated Internet-monitoring system to Iran in 2008. According to Nextgov.com, Schumer and Graham's bill would require the Obama administration to identify foreign companies that export sensitive technology to Iran and ban them from bidding on federal contracts, or renew expiring ones, unless they first stop exports to Iran."
Immutate and several other readers noted that Cablevision will be allowed to go ahead with deploying a remote-storage DVR system, when the US Supreme Court declined (without comment) to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that went against movie studios and TV networks. (We discussed this case a few months back.) "Cable TV operators won a key legal battle against Hollywood studios and television networks on Monday as the Supreme Court declined to block a new digital video recording system that could make it even easier for viewers to bypass commercials. The justices declined to hear arguments on whether Cablevision Systems Corp.'s remote-storage DVR system would violate copyright laws. That allows the... company to proceed with plans to start deploying the technology this summer."
selven ws one of several readers to send in the news that Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison. "Bernard Madoff's victims gasped and cheered when he was sentenced to 150 years in prison, but they walked away knowing little more about how he carried out the biggest robbery in Wall Street history. In one of the most dramatic courtroom conclusions to a corporate fraud case, the 71-year-old swindler was unemotional as he was berated by distraught investors during the 90-minute proceeding. Many former clients had hoped he would shed more light on his crime and explain why he victimized so many for so long. But he did not. Madoff called his crime 'an error of judgment' and his 'failure,' reiterating previous statements that he alone was responsible for the $65 billion investment fraud. His victims said they did not hear much new from Madoff in his five-minute statement. They also said they did not believe anything he said. As he handed down the maximum penalty allowed, US District Judge Denny Chin... [said], 'I simply do not get the sense that Mr. Madoff has done all that he could or told all that he knows.'"
AI writes with a story from the NY Times about a 7-month-long effort, largely successful, to keep news of a Times reporter's kidnapping off of Wikipedia. The Christian Science Monitor, the reporter David Rohde's previous employer, takes a harder look at the issues of censorship and news blackout, linking to several blogs critical of Wikipedia's actions. Rohde escaped from a Taliban compound, along with his translator, on Saturday. "For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia. ... A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia's page on Mr. Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing — a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping... The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times."
Al writes "The Mozilla foundation is to adopt a new standard to help web site's prevent cross site scripting attacks (XSS). The standard, called Content Security Policy, will let a website specify what Internet domains are allowed to host the scripts that run on its pages. This breaks with Web browsers' tradition of treating all scripts the same way by requiring that websites put their scripts in separate files and explicitly state which domains are allowed to run the scripts. The Mozilla Foundation selected the implementation because it allows sites to choose whether to adopt the restrictions. 'The severity of the XSS problem in the wild and the cost of implementing CSP as a mitigation are open to interpretation by individual sites,' Brandon Sterne, security program manager for Mozilla, wrote on the Mozilla Security Blog. 'If the cost versus benefit doesn't make sense for some site, they're free to keep doing business as usual.'
KentuckyFC writes "The density of magnetic memory depends on the size of the magnetic domains used to store bits. The current state-of-the-art uses cobalt-based grains some 8nm across, each containing about 50,000 atoms. Materials scientists think they can shrink the grains to 15,000 atoms but any smaller than that and the crystal structure of the grains is lost. That's a problem because the cobalt has to be arranged in a hexagonal close packing structure to ensure the stability of its magnetic field. Otherwise the field can spontaneously reverse and the data is lost. Now a group of German physicists say they can trick a pair of cobalt atoms into thinking they are in a hexagonal close packing structure by bonding them to a hexagonal carbon ring such as graphene or benzene. That's handy because the magnetic field associated with cobalt dimers is calculated to be far more stable than the field in a cobalt grain. And graphene and benzene rings are only 0.5 nm across, a size that could allow an increase in memory density of three orders of magnitude."
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the 'hacker ethic' synonymous with computer programing in American society is enough for developers to succeed in today's economy. To be sure, self-taught 'cowboy coders' — the hallmark of today's programming generation in America — are technically proficient, McAllister writes, 'but their code is less likely to be maintainable in the long term, and they're less likely to conform to organizational development processes and coding standards.' And though HTC's Vineet Nayar's proclamation that American programmers are 'unemployable' is overblown, there may be wisdom in offering a new kind of computer engineering degree targeted toward the student who is more interested in succeeding in industry than exploring computing theory. 'American software development managers often complain that Indian programmers are too literal-minded,' McAllister writes, but perhaps Americans have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. In other words, are we 'too in love with the hacker ideal of the 1980s to produce programmers who are truly prepared for today's real-life business environment?'"
Hugh Pickens writes "Findings of a new study show that underweight people and those who are extremely obese die earlier than people of normal weight — but those who are only a little overweight actually live longer than people of normal weight. 'It's not surprising that extreme underweight and extreme obesity increase the risk of dying, but it is surprising that carrying a little extra weight may give people a longevity advantage,' said one of the coauthors of the study. 'It may be that a few extra pounds actually protect older people as their health declines, but that doesn't mean that people in the normal weight range should try to put on a few pounds.' The study examined the relationship between body mass index and death among 11,326 adults in Canada over a 12-year period. The study showed that underweight people were 70 percent more likely than people of normal weight to die, and extremely obese people were 36 percent more likely to die. But overweight individuals defined as a body mass index of 25 to 29.9 were 17 percent less likely to die than people of a normal weight defined as a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9. The relative risk for obese people was nearly the same as for people of normal weight. The authors controlled for factors such as age, sex, physical activity, and smoking. 'Overweight may not be the problem we thought it was,' said Dr. David H. Feeny, a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research. 'Overweight was protective.'"
BBC Magazine convinced 13-year-old Scott Campbell to trade in his iPod for a Walkman for a week and see what he thought. Scott thinks the iPod wins when it comes to sound quality, color, weight, and shuffle feature. The Walkman however offers two headphone sockets making it much easier to listen to music with a friend. My favorite part of the review is, "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."
InformationWeek is reporting that the Chinese government has declared a ban on the sale of virtual goods for real currency. This move is poised to shut down a several billion yuan a year business that has been growing by leaps and bounds every year. "The trading of virtual currency for real cash employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually, according to a 2008 survey conducted by Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester. He estimates that between 80% and 85% of gold farmers are based in China. [...] Game companies typically forbid gold farming but committed virtual currency traders find ways around such rules. Some game companies have recognized the futility of trying to ban the practice and have built virtual commerce into their game infrastructure."
The New York Times is reporting that Google is making the case that they just aren't that big, especially from an anti-trust point of view. While they certainly corner the market in search, advertising, and online video, Dana Wagner, Google's "senior competition counsel," is working hard to convince the public that "competition is a click away." "None of the investigations take aim at Google's core advertising business. And unlike other technology giants in years past, Google has not been accused of anticompetitive tactics. But the investigations and carping from competitors and critics have Google fighting to dispel the notion that it has a lock on its market, even as it increases its share of search and online advertising. Eyes are rolling, especially in reaction to the idea that Google is a relatively small player in a giant market. 'They describe where they are in a market under a kind of a fairy-tale spun gloss that doesn't reflect their dominance of key sectors,' said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. 'Google search is an absolute must-have for every marketer in the world.'"
Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the potential challengers to Apple's phenomenally popular iPhone, perhaps the one with the best prospects is Google's Android, which is not a mobile phone per se, but rather an open-source platform that the company encourages phone manufacturers to deploy in their own products. Similarly, Google encourages computer programmers to develop applications for the Android environment. But learning how to create such applications is daunting to the uninitiated, particularly for developers who have never before worked with the user interface controls, Web services, and other resources involved. A recently published book, Unlocking Android, is designed to help such developers." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.
The New York Times is reporting that Google is making the case that they just aren't that big, especially from an anti-trust point of view. While they certainly corner the market in search, advertising, and online video, Dana Wagner, Google's "senior competition counsel," is working hard to convince the public that "competition is a click away." "None of the investigations take aim at Google's core advertising business. And unlike other technology giants in years past, Google has not been accused of anticompetitive tactics. But the investigations and carping from competitors and critics have Google fighting to dispel the notion that it has a lock on its market, even as it increases its share of search and online advertising. Eyes are rolling, especially in reaction to the idea that Google is a relatively small player in a giant market. 'They describe where they are in a market under a kind of a fairy-tale spun gloss that doesn't reflect their dominance of key sectors,' said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. 'Google search is an absolute must-have for every marketer in the world.'"
ScienceDaily is reporting that the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor has been created by a team led by Yale University researchers. "Working with a group of theoretical physicists led by Steven Girvin, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics & Applied Physics, the team manufactured two artificial atoms, or qubits ('quantum bits'). While each qubit is actually made up of a billion aluminum atoms, it acts like a single atom that can occupy two different energy states. These states are akin to the '1' and '0' or 'on' and 'off' states of regular bits employed by conventional computers. Because of the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics, however, scientists can effectively place qubits in a 'superposition' of multiple states at the same time, allowing for greater information storage and processing power."
Comics writer Mark Sable was detained by security at Los Angeles International Airport because he was carrying a script for a new issue of his comic miniseries, Unthinkable. Unthinkable follows members of a government think tank that was tasked with coming up with 9/11-type "unthinkable" terrorist scenarios that now are coming true. Sable wrote about his experience saying, "...I was flagged at the gate for 'extra screening'. I was subjected to not one, but two invasive searches of my person and belongings. TSA agents then 'discovered' the script for Unthinkable #3. They sat and read the script while I stood there, without any personal items, identification or ticket, which had all been confiscated. The minute I saw the faces of the agents, I knew I was in trouble. The first page of the Unthinkable script mentioned 9/11, terror plots, and the fact that the (fictional) world had become a police state. The TSA agents then proceeded to interrogate me, having a hard time understanding that a comic book could be about anything other than superheroes, let alone that anyone actually wrote scripts for comics. I cooperated politely and tried to explain to them the irony of the situation. While Unthinkable blurs the line between fiction and reality, the story is based on a real-life government think tank where a writer was tasked to design worst-case terror scenarios. The fictional story of Unthinkable unfolds when the writer's scenarios come true, and he becomes a suspect in the terrorist attacks." It's too bad that the TSA can't protect us from summer blockbuster movies and not just graphic novels.
k33l0r writes "The European Commission is confident that all major cellphone companies have reached an agreement on a standard cellphone charger for consumers within the EU. 'People will not have to throw away their charger whenever they buy a new phone,' said EU Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Apple, LG, NEC, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung and Texas Instruments have all signed the agreement."
miller60 writes "Advertising networks are being cited as the major bottlenecks in performance woes experienced by major news sites during the crush of Internet traffic Thursday as news broke about the death of pop star Michael Jackson. An analysis by Keynote found that many news sites delivered their own content promptly, only to find their page delivery delayed by slow-loading ads. The inclusion of third-party content on high-traffic pages is a growing challenge for site operators. It's not just ads, as social media widgets are also seeing wider usage on commercial sites. How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs?"
DynaSoar writes "NASA is soliciting ideas from the public on how best to catalog and digitize the collected notes of Werner von Braun. "We're looking for creative ways to get it out to the public," said project manager Jason Crusan. "We don't always do the best with putting out large sets of data like this." The PDF notes are those of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the fist director of NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and are typed with copious hand written notes in the margin. According to the official request for information, NASA needs ideas on what format to use, how to index the notes and how to create a useful database. The unique nature and historical value of the data, literally discovered in boxes six months ago, is what motivated NASA to ask the public for ideas."
Nancy Atkinson writes "Even though the Spirit rover is stuck in loose soil on Mars, she has an overabundance of electrical power due to a wind event that cleaned off her solar panels. While MER scientists and engineers are having the rover take pictures of her surroundings in an effort to figure a way to get her dislodged, there also is enough power (since the rover isn't moving anywhere) to do something extra: keep the rover "awake" at night and run her heaters so she can take images of the night sky on Mars. "Certainly, a month or more ago, no one was considering astronomy with the rovers," said Mark Lemmon, planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover team. "We thought that was done. With the dust cleanings, though, everyone thinks it is better to use the new found energy on night time science than to just burn it with heaters.""
Death Metal writes "Iranians seeking to share videos and other eyewitness accounts of the demonstrations that have roiled their country since disputed elections two weeks ago are using an Internet encryption program originally developed by and for the U.S. Navy. Designed a decade ago to secure Internet communications between U.S. ships at sea, The Onion Router, or TOR, has become one of the most important proxies in Iran for gaining access to Web sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook." A related story was submitted anonymously about the efforts of hactivists to keep the information flowing inside the data-locked nation.
Death Metal writes "Iranians seeking to share videos and other eyewitness accounts of the demonstrations that have roiled their country since disputed elections two weeks ago are using an Internet encryption program originally developed by and for the U.S. Navy. Designed a decade ago to secure Internet communications between U.S. ships at sea, The Onion Router, or TOR, has become one of the most important proxies in Iran for gaining access to Web sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook." A related story was submitted anonymously about the efforts of hactivists to keep the information flowing inside the data locked nation.
For those with a Windows PC and some time for TV, DeviceGuru writes "Which is the best Internet media streaming application for a media-center PC? Boxee, Zinc, or the new Hulu Desktop? A post at DeviceGuru.com reviews these three media streaming platforms and draws some interesting conclusions. Key pros and cons are tabulated and numerous screenshots are included. Interestingly, despite lots of Boxee hype, Zinc already has a number of valuable features that Boxee is scrambling to add to its next version, due out in the fall. On the other hand, Boxee boasts far more third-party content-access applications support."
Majesco Entertainment has announced that Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD will be coming to Xbox Live this fall, and to the PC sometime later. It's a remake of the original game using the CroTech engine, and it will support up to four player co-op. Joystiq has some screenshots, including a comparison between the old graphics and the new look. "The textures are sharper and cleaner than before. The original's perfectly flat lawns are now replaced with individual blades of grass — and look at that foliage, rendered with some classy Crysis-styled soft focus. Notice the dynamic shadows over our pumpkin-wearing, chainsaw-wielding friend? Now, imagine this level of detail on hundreds of on-screen enemies."
CWmike writes "European customers will pay up to twice as much for Windows 7 compared with US users, even though the new operating system will ship without a browser in Europe. Some of the money Microsoft stands to make on the European editions of Windows 7 comes from the weak dollar. Last week, for instance, the dollar fell against the euro the most in a month, hitting $1.41 per euro. For example, Windows 7 Professional, the key retail edition for businesses, will sport a price tag of 285 euros, or $400.60, and £189.99, or $313.84, at Saturday's exchange rate. In other words, EU customers will pay twice the $199.99 U.S. price; U.K. buyers will pay 57% more. And depending on your view on bundling IE, Europe's customers will be paying more for less, with Microsoft's decision to yank IE8 from Windows 7 in an effort to head off EU antitrust regulators, who may still force the company to take more drastic measures."
Majesco Entertainment has announced that Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD will be coming to Xbox Live this fall, and to the PC sometime later. It's a remake of the original game using the CroTech engine, and it will support up to four player co-op. Joystiq has some screenshots, including a comparison between the old graphics and the new look. "The textures are sharper and cleaner than before. The original's perfectly flat lawns are now replaced with individual blades of grass — and look at that foliage, rendered with some classy Crysis-styled soft focus. Notice the dynamic shadows over our pumpkin-wearing, chainsaw-wielding friend? Now, imagine this level of detail on hundreds of on-screen enemies."
CWmike writes "European customers will pay up to twice as much for Windows 7 compared with US users, even though the new operating system will ship without a browser in Europe. Some of the money Microsoft stands to make on the European editions of Windows 7 comes from the weak dollar. Last week, for instance, the dollar fell against the euro the most in a month, hitting $1.41 per euro. For example, Windows 7 Professional, the key retail edition for businesses, will sport a price tag of 285 euros, or $400.60, and £189.99, or $313.84, at Saturday's exchange rate. In other words, EU customers will pay twice the $199.99 U.S. price; U.K. buyers will pay 57% more. And depending on your view on bundling IE, Europe's customers will be paying more for less, with Microsoft's decision to yank IE8 from Windows 7 in an effort to head off EU antitrust regulators, who may still force the company to take more drastic measures."
Majesco Entertainment has announced that Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD will be coming to Xbox Live this fall, and to the PC sometime later. It's a remake of the original game using the CroTech engine, and it will support up to four player co-op. Joystiq has some screenshots, including a comparison between the old graphics and the new look. "The textures are sharper and cleaner than before. The original's perfectly flat lawns are now replaced with individual blades of grass — and look at that foliage, rendered with some classy Crysis-styled soft focus. Notice the dynamic shadows over our pumpkin-wearing, chainsaw-wielding friend? Now, imagine this level of detail on hundreds of on-screen enemies."
randalotto writes "I'm in France for the summer and have been listening to Pandora at work. I tried logging on tonight and was greeted with a surprising message: 'We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the US. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative. ... The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.' I'm not sure what the deal is or what licensing requirements suddenly changed, but Pandora in France is no more..." Note: the above link redirects to the main site, for those inside the US.
Slatterz writes "After a year's research, Lenovo boffins have decided the time is right to install larger Delete and Escape keys on their updated ThinkPad laptop T400s range. While it is a small change, it is fairly radical to tinker with an area of hardware which has been largely unchanged since the 19th century. What convinced them to make the size-change was doing some tests on users to see which keys they use the most. They found that on average, people used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only non-letter keys that Lenovo hasn't made any bigger." The article says Caps Lock may be next on the agenda; death is too good for Caps Lock.
Slatterz writes "Web giant Google has admitted it thought the sudden spike in searches for Michael Jackson on Thursday was a massive, coordinated internet attack, leading it to post an error page on Google News. The company's director of product management, RJ Pittman, explained that search volume began to increase around 2pm PDT on Thursday and 'skyrocketed' by 3pm, finally stabilising at around 8pm. According to Pittman, last week also saw one of the largest mobile search spikes ever seen, with 5 of the top 20 searches about Jackson. Google wasn't the only site caught out by the extraordinary events. The Los Angeles Times web site also crashed soon after it broke the news of Jackson's death."
pitterpatter writes "A researcher trying to find a use for them claims that after being heated enough to carbonize, chicken feathers hold as much hydrogen as carbon nanotubes do. So chicken feather charcoal might solve the storage problem for the new hydrogen economy. One problem down, half a zillion to go."
spaceman375 writes "Like many slashdotters, I've given up on landlines and have only a cell account. The problem: when I am home I don't want to carry my phone on my person, AND I don't want to have to run (possibly up or down stairs) to answer a call. Landlines solved this with extensions. I could go buy an xlink or other Bluetooth-to-POTS solution, but that takes money for equipment. My desktop has Bluetooth, as do my laptop and cell. All I want is a program that can use my cell's Bluetooth to make and receive calls from my Linux PC. I can do this with asterisk or related programs, but that is like buying UPS when I just need a taxi ride. Yet all I can find are programs that either use 'presence' to shift other-sourced calls to my cell, or ways to use a Bluetooth headset when receiving a call on a PC. Has anyone found a way to use their desktop to make and receive calls through their cell via Bluetooth?"
pitterpatter writes "A researcher trying to find a use for them claims that after being heated enough to carbonize, chicken feathers hold as much hydrogen as carbon nanotubes do. So chicken feather charcoal might solve the storage problem for the new hydrogen economy. One problem down, half a zillion to go."
spaceman375 writes "Like many slashdotters, I've given up on landlines and have only a cell account. The problem: when I am home I don't want to carry my phone on my person, AND I don't want to have to run (possibly up or down stairs) to answer a call. Landlines solved this with extensions. I could go buy an xlink or other Bluetooth-to-POTS solution, but that takes money for equipment. My desktop has Bluetooth, as do my laptop and cell. All I want is a program that can use my cell's Bluetooth to make and receive calls from my Linux PC. I can do this with asterisk or related programs, but that is like buying UPS when I just need a taxi ride. Yet all I can find are programs that either use 'presence' to shift other-sourced calls to my cell, or ways to use a Bluetooth headset when receiving a call on a PC. Has anyone found a way to use their desktop to make and receive calls through their cell via Bluetooth?"
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "One thing you don't see too much of in RIAA litigation is a defendant moving for summary judgment, but that is what just occurred in federal court in Westchester, in Lava Records v. Amurao II. The RIAA had brought suit against Rolando Amurao, a middle aged man who knew nothing about file sharing. After haranguing him for 2 years, they dropped the case and sued his daughter, Audrey, who had used LimeWire years ago. When the RIAA moved for summary judgment against Audrey, however, she surprised them with a summary judgment motion of her own, calling for dismissal of the complaint on the grounds that the statute of limitations had run out on the RIAA's claims. The brief filed by her attorney (PDF) also points out some of the other infirmities in the RIAA's case, such as the inadmissibility of its evidence, the legal nonexistence of a claim for 'making available,' and the unconstitutionality of its damages theory. According to sources, the RIAA is unhappy about Audrey's motion, and is preparing a letter to send the Judge asking the Judge not to allow her to make it. Meanwhile, Audrey's father's case, Lava Records v. Rolando Amurao, is on appeal in the US Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit over the issue of whether the RIAA should have to reimburse Mr. Amurao for his attorneys fees. Although the appeal was fully briefed and scheduled for argument May 19th, the RIAA has been asking for postponements of the argument."
theodp writes "While the White House has invited the nation to Join the National Online Discussion on Health Care Reform, it is currently only accepting 20-30 second YouTube video responses — text comments have been disabled. Which raises a question: Should a video camera be the price of admission for participating in an open government discussion, especially when issues may hit those with lower incomes the hardest? BTW, the response-to-date has been underwhelming — 101 video responses and counting — and is certainly a mixed-bag, including a one-finger salute, a talking butt, a woman "Showing my Apples", and other off-topic rants and unrelated videos."
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "One thing you don't see too much of in RIAA litigation is a defendant moving for summary judgment, but that is what just occurred in federal court in Westchester, in Lava Records v. Amurao II. The RIAA had brought suit against Rolando Amurao, a middle aged man who knew nothing about file sharing. After haranguing him for 2 years, they dropped the case and sued his daughter, Audrey, who had used LimeWire years ago. When the RIAA moved for summary judgment against Audrey, however, she surprised them with a summary judgment motion of her own, calling for dismissal of the complaint on the grounds that the statute of limitations had run out on the RIAA's claims. The brief filed by her attorney (PDF) also points out some of the other infirmities in the RIAA's case, such as the inadmissibility of its evidence, the legal nonexistence of a claim for 'making available', and the unconstitutionality of its damages theory. According to sources, the RIAA is unhappy about Audrey's motion, and is preparing a letter to send the Judge asking the Judge not to allow her to make it. Meanwhile, Audrey's father's case, Lava Records v. Rolando Amurao, is on appeal in the US Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit over the issue of whether the RIAA should have to reimburse Mr. Amurao for his attorneys fees. Although the appeal was fully briefed and scheduled for argument May 19th, the RIAA has been asking for postponements of the argument."
jra writes "For over 5 years, various people both inside and retired from NASA have been engaged in a quest. They were looking for the long-lost original slow-scan video tapes from the Apollo 11 moon landing, which went missing in a record-keeping snafu, covered in unreasonable detail in a Wired article a couple years ago. Well now, according to the UK's Sunday Express newspaper, some tapes may or may not have been found which may or may not be the Apollo video. Apparently — I love the British press — the NASA boffins are a bit put out that it leaked; they were hoping to blow everyone's minds with the scoop themselves."
An article at TechCrunch discusses a blog post from Richard Posner, a US Court of Appeals judge, about the struggling newspaper industry. Posner explains why he thinks the newspapers will continue to struggle, and then comes to a rather unusual conclusion: "Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion."
Late last year we discussed news that the Entertainment Merchants Association was pondering a plan to develop technology that requires games and movies to be "activated" when they are sold at retail outlets, primarily to reduce theft and piracy. Now, the EMA claims a study they commissioned has indicated that employing such a system for video games, DVDs, and Blu-ray products would generate an additional $6 billion in revenues each year. Critics of the idea are skeptical about the numbers, pointing out that the majority of game piracy comes from downloading PC games, which this plan won't even affect. There are other problems as well: "In order for benefit denial to work, the EMA would presumably require the three major consoles to have some sort of activation verification function to ensure that games were legally purchased. It will be interesting to see if Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft agree to that. There is also a lucrative market for used video games to consider. After some gamers complete a title, they sell it back to the retailer. How will benefit denial handle that situation?"
Oracle Goddess writes "As part of a project to issue ID cards for all 1.1 billion of its citizens, India has announced plans to place information on every single citizen in what will be the world's second largest citizens' database. The government believes the scheme will aid the delivery of vital social services to the poorest people who often lack sufficient identification papers. It also sees the scheme as a way to tackle increasing amounts of identity fraud and theft, and, at a time of increased concern over the threat of militant violence, to boost national security and help police and law officials. 'This could be used as a security measure by the government which leaves migrant workers, refugees and other stateless people in India in limbo, without access to public services, employment and basic welfare,' said Charu Lata Hogg, an associate fellow of the Asia program at Chatham House."
Jim Hall writes "The FreeDOS Project turns 15 years old today! PD-DOS (later, 'FreeDOS') was announced to the world on June 28 1994 as a free replacement for MS-DOS, which Microsoft had announced would go away the following year, with the next release of Windows. There's more history available at the FreeDOS 'About' page and my blog. Today, FreeDOS is used by people all around the world. You can find FreeDOS in many different places: emulators, playing old DOS games, business, ... even bundled with laptops and netbooks. FreeDOS is still under active development, and recently released a new version of its kernel. A 'FreeDOS 1.1' distribution is planned."
Matt Asay writes "Walk the halls of any open-source conference and you'll see a large percentage of attendees with ironically non-open-source Apple laptops and iPhones. One reason for this seeming contradiction can be found in reading Matthew Thomas' classic 'Why free software usability tends to suck.' Open-source advocates like good design as much as anyone, but the open-source development process is often not the best way to achieve it. Open-source projects have tended to be great commoditizers, but not necessarily the best innovators. Hence, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently stated that Red Hat is "focused on commoditizing important layers in the stack." This is fine, but for those that want open source to push the envelope on innovation, it may be unavoidable to introduce a bit more cathedral into the bazaar. Without an IBM, Red Hat, or Mozilla bringing cash and discipline to an open-source project, including paying people to do the 'dirt work' that no one would otherwise do, can open source hope to thrive?"
paimin writes "A struggle is breaking out in San Francisco over whether the developer of a publicly-funded installation of real-time tracking for the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency has a right to control the use of data from the system. The situation is not totally clear, but this sure seems like an attempt to use patent threats to hijack public data. The city paid for the system, and the developer claims he lost money on the deal, so now he's shutting down applications like Routesy and Munitime that use data from the system unless they license the 'copyrighted' data from him."
DesScorp writes "Investigators working with the wreckage of Air France flight 447 believe the aircraft suffered cascading system failures with the on-board computers, eliminating the automation the aircraft needed to stay aloft. 'Relying on backup instruments, the Air France pilots apparently struggled to restart flight-management computers even as their plane may have begun breaking up from excessive speed,' reports the Wall Street Journal. Computer malfunctions may not be an isolated incident on the Airbus A330, as the NTSB is now investigating two other flights 'in which airspeed and altitude indications in the cockpits of Airbus A330 aircraft may have malfunctioned.'"
Rock, Paper, Shotgun is running an opinion piece which asks why the majority of MMOs force users to spend a fair portion of their time traveling around a virtual world. At what point does moving from one location to another become a chore? From the article: "I love big, explorable worlds. They're by far one of my most favourite things about games. Running off in a direction without any idea what I might encounter is a rare pleasure, and one far more likely to result in an exciting discovery in a game's world than the real one. ... Not knowing what's coming up is huge and exciting, and I'd not want to take it away from gaming, not ever. But you know what? Once I've been there, that moment's gone. I've discovered it already. I did the exploring. I don't need to spend half an hour of my time that I've allocated for playing games trudging at whatever stupidly slow speed a game's decided to impose upon me. There is no good reason, whatsoever, to not just let me be there."
DesScorp writes "Investigators working with the wreckage of Air France flight 447 believe the aircraft suffered cascading system failures with the on-board computers, eliminating the automation the aircraft needed to stay aloft. 'Relying on backup instruments, the Air France pilots apparently struggled to restart flight-management computers even as their plane may have begun breaking up from excessive speed,' reports the Wall Street Journal. Computer malfunctions may not be an isolated incident on the Airbus A330, as the NTSB is now investigating two other flights 'in which airspeed and altitude indications in the cockpits of Airbus A330 aircraft may have malfunctioned.'"
Rock, Paper, Shotgun is running an opinion piece which asks why the majority of MMOs force users to spend a fair portion of their time traveling around a virtual world. At what point does moving from one location to another become a chore? From the article: "I love big, explorable worlds. They're by far one of my most favourite things about games. Running off in a direction without any idea what I might encounter is a rare pleasure, and one far more likely to result in an exciting discovery in a game's world than the real one. ... Not knowing what's coming up is huge and exciting, and I'd not want to take it away from gaming, not ever. But you know what? Once I've been there, that moment's gone. I've discovered it already. I did the exploring. I don't need to spend half an hour of my time that I've allocated for playing games trudging at whatever stupidly slow speed a game's decided to impose upon me. There is no good reason, whatsoever, to not just let me be there."
christian.einfeldt writes "The Munich decision to move its 14,000 desktops to Free Open Source Software created a big splash back in 2003 as news circulated of the third-largest German city's defection from Microsoft. When it was announced in 2003, the story garnered coverage even in the US, such as an extensive article in USA Today on-line. Currently, about 60% of desktops are using OpenOffice, with the remaining 40% to be completed by the end of 2009. Firefox and Thunderbird are being used in all of the city's desktop machines. Ten percent of desktops are running the LiMux Debian-based distro, and 80% will be running LiMux by 2012 at the latest. Autonomy was generally considered more important than cost savings, although the LiMux initiative is increasing competition in the IT industry in Munich already. The program has succeeded because the city administration has been careful to reach out to all stakeholders, from managers down to simple end users."
Rock, Paper, Shotgun is running an opinion piece which asks why the majority of MMOs force users to spend a fair portion of their time traveling around a virtual world. At what point does moving from one location to another become a chore? From the article: "I love big, explorable worlds. They're by far one of my most favourite things about games. Running off in a direction without any idea what I might encounter is a rare pleasure, and one far more likely to result in an exciting discovery in a game's world than the real one. ... Not knowing what's coming up is huge and exciting, and I'd not want to take it away from gaming, not ever. But you know what? Once I've been there, that moment's gone. I've discovered it already. I did the exploring. I don't need to spend half an hour of my time that I've allocated for playing games trudging at whatever stupidly slow speed a game's decided to impose upon me. There is no good reason, whatsoever, to not just let me be there."
christian.einfeldt writes "The Munich decision to move its 14,000 desktops to Free Open Source Software created a big splash back in 2003 as news circulated of the third-largest German city's defection from Microsoft. When it was announced in 2003, the story garnered coverage even in the US, such as an extensive article in USA Today on-line. Currently, about 60% of desktops are using OpenOffice, with the remaining 40% to be completed by the end of 2009. Firefox and Thunderbird are being used in all of the city's desktop machines. Ten percent of desktops are running the LiMux Debian-based distro, and 80% will be running LiMux by 2012 at the latest. Autonomy was generally considered more important than cost savings, although the LiMux initiative is increasing competition in the IT industry in Munich already. The program has succeeded because the city administration has been careful to reach out to all stakeholders, from managers down to simple end users."
Giant Bomb notes that Obsidian Entertainment has officially stopped work on the Aliens RPG they had been working on. In a post on their forums, an Obsidian employee confirmed rumors that development was no longer underway, and Sega later indicated that they were looking do so something else with the IP. "The Aliens franchise offers us so much content to choose from that we feel it important to take a step back and carefully consider the type of game we want to release." Aliens: Colonial Marines appears to still be in development, though it won't be out this year.
sdasher writes "Ksplice has started offering Ksplice Uptrack for Ubuntu Jaunty, a free service that delivers rebootless versions of all the latest Ubuntu kernel security updates. It's currently available for both the 32 and 64-bit generic kernel, and they plan to add support for the virtual and server kernels by the end of the month, according to their FAQ. This makes Ubuntu the first OS that doesn't need to be rebooted for security updates. (We covered Ksplice's underlying technology when it was first announced a year ago.)"
ehud42 writes "Slashdot readers generally agree that voting machines such as those from Diebold are a bad idea. Well, what about online voting? That is what the Vancouver Sun is reporting. Given that voter turnout in our most recent election was the worst on record, Elections Canada is kicking around the idea of allowing voters to register online, update registration information online, and maybe even vote online."
theodp writes "CNET reports that less than two weeks before the EPA formally submitted its pro-carbon dioxide regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty 'decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.' In an e-mail message (pdf) to a staff researcher on March 17, the EPA official wrote: 'The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.' The employee was also ordered not to 'have any direct communication' with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic. In a statement, the EPA took aim at the credentials of the report's author, Alan Carlin (BS Physics-Caltech, PhD Econ-MIT), describing him as 'not a scientist.' BTW, the official who chastised Carlin also found himself caught up in a 2005 brouhaha over mercury emissions after top EPA officials ordered the findings of a Harvard University study stripped from public records."
gigne writes "I'm in the market for a new in car GPS/sat nav. I am preferably looking for one that has live, up-to-date traffic information and route planning that doesn't make you want to cry. I'm not quite dumb enough to drive off a cliff, but something that doesn't even try and lead me to watery doom is preferable. The only thing I absolutely must have is the ability to hack it. It would be preferable if it ran GNU/Linux, but given a convincing argument, I would be swayed to another OS. Without wanting the Moon on a stick, what is the best device that would offer a decent modding community and a good feature set?"
theodp writes "CNET reports that less than two weeks before the EPA formally submitted its pro-carbon dioxide regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty 'decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.' In an e-mail message (pdf) to a staff researcher on March 17, the EPA official wrote: 'The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.' The employee was also ordered not to 'have any direct communication' with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic. In a statement, the EPA took aim at the credentials of the report's author, Alan Carlin (BS Physics-Caltech, PhD Econ-MIT), describing him as 'not a scientist.' BTW, the official who chastised Carlin also found himself caught up in a 2005 brouhaha over mercury emissions after top EPA officials ordered the findings of a Harvard University study stripped from public records."
gigne writes "I'm in the market for a new in car GPS/sat nav. I am preferably looking for one that has live, up-to-date traffic information and route planning that doesn't make you want to cry. I'm not quite dumb enough to drive off a cliff, but something that doesn't even try and lead me to watery doom is preferable. The only thing I absolutely must have is the ability to hack it. It would be preferable if it ran GNU/Linux, but given a convincing argument, I would be swayed to another OS. Without wanting the Moon on a stick, what is the best device that would offer a decent modding community and a good feature set?"
theodp writes "CNET reports that less than two weeks before the EPA formally submitted its pro-carbon dioxide regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty 'decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.' In an e-mail message (pdf) to a staff researcher on March 17, the EPA official wrote: 'The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.' The employee was also ordered not to 'have any direct communication' with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic. In a statement, the EPA took aim at the credentials of the report's author, Alan Carlin (BS Physics-Caltech, PhD Econ-MIT), describing him as 'not a scientist.' BTW, the official who chastised Carlin also found himself caught up in a 2005 brouhaha over mercury emissions after top EPA officials ordered the findings of a Harvard University study stripped from public records."
gigne writes "I'm in the market for a new in car GPS/sat nav. I am preferably looking for one that has live, up-to-date traffic information and route planning that doesn't make you want to cry. I'm not quite dumb enough to drive off a cliff, but something that doesn't even try and lead me to watery doom is preferable. The only thing I absolutely must have is the ability to hack it. It would be preferable if it ran GNU/Linux, but given a convincing argument, I would be swayed to another OS. Without wanting the Moon on a stick, what is the best device that would offer a decent modding community and a good feature set?"
coondoggie writes "If you can squish all the processing power of, say, an IBM Roadrunner supercomputer inside a 19-inch box and make it run on about 60 kilowatts of electricity, the government wants to talk to you. The extreme scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week issued a call for research that might develop a super-small, super-efficient super beast of a computer. Specifically DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) desires will require a new system-wide technology approaches specifically including hardware and software co-design to minimize energy dissipation per operation and maximize energy efficiency, with a 50GFLOPS per watt goal."
poundhard writes "Some two years ago, it was mentioned on TorrentFreak and Slashdot that The Pirate Bay team were working on a YouTube competitor. At the oral proceedings of the Spectrial, I believe it was Peter Sunde, aka Brokep, who said to the prosecutor that it was one of those side projects that failed. A few days ago though, he appeared over Skype at the Open Video Conference in New York, and apparently said that they were about to launch something new. It has been speculated in Norway that it will be the IPREDator. But I checked out The Video Bay, and hey, it is about to go live! This is what they write: 'To stay in the spirit on which TPB was founded and using the Latest Technology, TVB aims to use the new HTML5 features, more specificly the <video> and <audio> tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats. This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don't bug us too much if the site ain't working properly.'"
coondoggie writes "If you can squish all the processing power of, say, an IBM Roadrunner supercomputer inside a 19-inch box and make it run on about 60 kilowatts of electricity, the government wants to talk to you. The extreme scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week issued a call for research that might develop a super-small, super-efficient super beast of a computer. Specifically DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) desires will require a new system-wide technology approaches specifically including hardware and software co-design to minimize energy dissipation per operation and maximize energy efficiency, with a 50GFLOPS per watt goal."
poundhard writes "Some two years ago, it was mentioned on TorrentFreak and Slashdot that The Pirate Bay team were working on a YouTube competitor. At the oral proceedings of the Spectrial, I believe it was Peter Sunde, aka Brokep, who said to the prosecutor that it was one of those side projects that failed. A few days ago though, he appeared over Skype at the Open Video Conference in New York, and apparently said that they were about to launch something new. It has been speculated in Norway that it will be the IPREDator. But I checked out The Video Bay, and hey, it is about to go live! This is what they write: 'To stay in the spirit on which TPB was founded and using the Latest Technology, TVB aims to use the new HTML5 features, more specificly the <video> and <audio> tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats. This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don't bug us too much if the site ain't working properly.'"
twitter writes "There's been a lot of fuss about mono lately. After SCO and MS suing over FAT patents, you would think avoiding anything MS would be a matter of common sense. RMS now steps into the fray to warn against a serious mistake: 'Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use. .... This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. ... [writing and using applications in mono] is taking a gratuitous risk.'" Update: 06/27 20:22 GMT by T : Read on below for one Mono-eschewing attempt at getting the (excellent) Tomboy's functionality, via a similar program called Gnote.
Barence writes "Microsoft is reportedly considering offering Windows 7 on USB thumb drives to allow netbook owners to upgrade their machines. Windows has, until now, only been distributed on DVDs or via download. However, netbooks don't have optical drives and the Windows 7 ISO weighs in at 2.3GB, which would take several hours to download on an average broadband connection and potentially do serious damage to a customer's broadband data cap."
twitter writes "There's been a lot of fuss about mono lately. After SCO and MS suing over FAT patents, you would think avoiding anything MS would be a matter of common sense. RMS now steps into the fray to warn against a serious mistake: 'Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use. .... This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. ... [writing and using applications in mono] is taking a gratuitous risk.'"
twitter writes "There's been a lot of fuss about mono lately. After SCO and MS suing over FAT patents, you would think avoiding anything M$ would be a matter of common sense. RMS now steps into the fray to warn against a serious mistake: 'Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use. .... This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. ... [writing and using applications in mono] is taking a gratuitous risk.'"
twitter writes "There's been a lot of fuss about mono lately. After SCO and M$ suing over FAT patents, you would think avoiding anything M$ would be a matter of common sense. RMS now steps into the fray to warn against a serious mistake: 'Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use. .... This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. ... [writing and using applications in mono] is taking a gratuitous risk.'"
Dusty writes "After several false alarms, the Ulysses Mission is finally ending. According to the Spacecraft Operations Manager's latest status report, the last track will be on 30th June 2009 from 15:25 until 20:20 UTC. 'We've tried to bolster our dwindling tracking allocation with some success by grabbing antenna time released on short notice (mostly by the Spitzer Project). However, weekly data return figures are now typically 10% or less. And soon, even 512 bps from 70m antennas will be a thing of the past.' Further details about Ulysses' 18-year mission are available from NASA and the ESA. We discussed the failing spacecraft last summer when it looked like its fuel was going to freeze, but through clever engineering, experts managed to squeeze out another year.
CNet has a series of interviews with former hackers who ran afoul of the law in their youth, but later turned their skills toward a profession in security consulting. Adrian Lamo discusses taking "normal every day information resources and [arranging] them in improbable ways," describing a time when he broke into Excite@Home's system and ended up answering help desk questions from their users. Kevin Mitnick, famous for gaining access to many high-profile systems, warns today's young hackers not to follow in his footsteps, saying, "A lot of pen testers today have done unethical things in their past during their learning process, especially the older ones because there was no opportunity to learn about security. Back in the '70s and '80s, it was all self-taught. So a lot of the old-school hackers really learned on other people's systems. And at the time, I couldn't even afford my own computer." Mark Abene explains how he got interested in phone phreaking, and how it led to a prison term and a career in computer security. Like Mitnick, he says that easy access to powerful modern computers removes part of the motivation for breaking into other systems.
A story at Wired delves into the ongoing struggle between Google and Facebook to establish their competing visions for the future of the internet. "For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms — rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this 'social graph' to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire — rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now." A related article at ReadWriteWeb suggests that while Facebook's member base is enormous, the company hasn't taken advantage of its influence as well as it should have, though the capability for it to do so still exists.
Xeger writes "University of Chicago researchers have found that streams of sand can behave in a similar manner to liquids, forming water-like droplets when poured from a funnel. To obtain these results, they dropped their expensive high-speed camera from a height of several meters and observed the sand forming into droplets — something that shouldn't happen without surface tension. These findings suggest that conventional engineering wisdom about sand, dirt and other grainy materials needs to be rethought, and that it might be possible to apply fluid dynamics to some solids problems."
A story at Wired delves into the ongoing struggle between Google and Facebook to establish their competing visions for the future of the internet. "For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms — rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this 'social graph' to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire — rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now." A related article at ReadWriteWeb suggests that while Facebook's member base is enormous, the company hasn't taken advantage of its influence as well as it should have, though the capability for it to do so still exists.
Xeger writes "University of Chicago researchers have found that streams of sand can behave in a similar manner to liquids, forming water-like droplets when poured from a funnel. To obtain these results, they dropped their expensive high-speed camera from a height of several meters and observed the sand forming into droplets — something that shouldn't happen without surface tension. These findings suggest that conventional engineering wisdom about sand, dirt and other grainy materials needs to be rethought, and that it might be possible to apply fluid dynamics to some solids problems."
Hugh Pickens writes "Over the last couple of weeks, those who believe in the transformative power of technology to battle an oppressive state have pointed to Iran as a test case. However, as Farhad Manjoo writes on Slate, the real conclusion about news now coming out of Iran is that for regimes bent on survival, electronic dissent is easier to suppress than organizing methods of the past. Using a system installed last year, built in part by Nokia and Siemens, the government routes all digital traffic in the country through a single choke point, using the capabilities of deep packet inspection to monitor every e-mail, tweet, blog post, and possibly even every phone call placed in Iran. 'Compare that with East Germany, in which the Stasi managed to tap, at most, about 100,000 phone lines — a gargantuan task that required 2,000 full-time technicians to monitor the calls,' writes Manjoo. The effects of this control have been seen over the past couple days, with only a few harrowing pictures and videos getting through Iran's closed net. For most citizens, posting videos and even tweeting eyewitness accounts remains fraught with peril, and the same tools that activists use can be used by the government to spread disinformation. The government is also using crowdsourcing by posting pictures of protesters and asking citizens for help in identifying the activists. 'If you think about it, that's no surprise,' writes Manjoo. 'Who said that only the good guys get to use the power of the Web to their advantage?'"
Brian Stretch writes with a story about the Mini Utility Vehicle prototype from XP Vehicles, an electric car that is partly inflatable. The recent struggles of the auto industry and a political climate that supports the development of alternative energy vehicles have given the car a better chance at actually hitting the market. Quoting: "Building a car takes many years and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars traditionally. XP is able to cut a lot of the costs and timeframe because its car has 70 percent less parts than a regular car, and the company is using novel materials that require simpler factory devices, and production and manufacturing processes that lower the cost to deploy. ... The seat is inflatable, the dashboard is inflatable, and the internal structure and carrying racks are inflatable, or a mesh suspension. Instead of requiring six-axis robots, XP uses radio frequency welders that look like giant waffle irons. The factory equipment is much less expensive and the car simply has less parts that could fail. The motors are built into the rear wheels in most XP prototypes. The first cars to reach the market will have two rear hub motors and a motor controller, that's it."
Hugh Pickens writes "Over the last couple of weeks, those who believe in the transformative power of technology to battle an oppressive state have pointed to Iran as a test case. However, as Farhad Manjoo writes on Slate, the real conclusion about news now coming out of Iran is that for regimes bent on survival, electronic dissent is easier to suppress than organizing methods of the past. Using a system installed last year, built in part by Nokia and Siemens, the government routes all digital traffic in the country through a single choke point, using the capabilities of deep packet inspection to monitor every e-mail, tweet, blog post, and possibly even every phone call placed in Iran. 'Compare that with East Germany, in which the Stasi managed to tap, at most, about 100,000 phone lines — a gargantuan task that required 2,000 full-time technicians to monitor the calls,' writes Manjoo. The effects of this control have been seen over the past couple days, with only a few harrowing pictures and videos getting through Iran's closed net. For most citizens, posting videos and even tweeting eyewitness accounts remains fraught with peril, and the same tools that activists use can be used by the government to spread disinformation. The government is also using crowdsourcing by posting pictures of protesters and asking citizens for help in identifying the activists. 'If you think about it, that's no surprise,' writes Manjoo. 'Who said that only the good guys get to use the power of the Web to their advantage?'"
Brian Stretch writes with a story about the Mini Utility Vehicle prototype from XP Vehicles, an electric car that is partly inflatable. The recent struggles of the auto industry and a political climate that supports the development of alternative energy vehicles have given the car a better chance at actually hitting the market. Quoting: "Building a car takes many years and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars traditionally. XP is able to cut a lot of the costs and timeframe because its car has 70 percent less parts than a regular car, and the company is using novel materials that require simpler factory devices, and production and manufacturing processes that lower the cost to deploy. ... The seat is inflatable, the dashboard is inflatable, and the internal structure and carrying racks are inflatable, or a mesh suspension. Instead of requiring six-axis robots, XP uses radio frequency welders that look like giant waffle irons. The factory equipment is much less expensive and the car simply has less parts that could fail. The motors are built into the rear wheels in most XP prototypes. The first cars to reach the market will have two rear hub motors and a motor controller, that's it."
The Guardian's games blog convened a panel of engineers and other experts to talk about the current state of video game physics. A great deal of research is currently going on to make better use of multiple cores so that advanced physics tools and engines can take advantage of all the processing power available in modern computers. Many of those tools are being put to work these days to find more realistic ways of breaking things, and game developers are trying to wrap their heads around destructible environments. Mike Enoch, lead coder at Ruffian Games, said, "This idea of simulating interactions and constructing the game world similar to how you would construct the real world generates more emergent gameplay, where the game plays out in a unique way for each player, and the player can come up with solutions to problems that the designer might not have thought of." Another area that still sees a lot of attention is making game characters more human, in terms of moving and looking as realistic as possible, as well as how a game's AI perceives what's happening. "The problem is not necessarily in having the most advanced path-finding technique with large-scale awareness; we need to have more micro behaviors, with a proper physics awareness of the environment," said software engineer George Torres.
Brian Stretch writes with a story about the Mini Utility Vehicle prototype from XP Vehicles, an electric car that is partly inflatable. The recent struggles of the auto industry and a political climate that supports the development of alternative energy vehicles have given the car a better chance at actually hitting the market. Quoting: "Building a car takes many years and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars traditionally. XP is able to cut a lot of the costs and timeframe because its car has 70 percent less parts than a regular car, and the company is using novel materials that require simpler factory devices, and production and manufacturing processes that lower the cost to deploy. ... The seat is inflatable, the dashboard is inflatable, and the internal structure and carrying racks are inflatable, or a mesh suspension. Instead of requiring six-axis robots, XP uses radio frequency welders that look like giant waffle irons. The factory equipment is much less expensive and the car simply has less parts that could fail. The motors are built into the rear wheels in most XP prototypes. The first cars to reach the market will have two rear hub motors and a motor controller, that's it."
The Guardian's games blog convened a panel of engineers and other experts to talk about the current state of video game physics. A great deal of research is currently going on to make better use of multiple cores so that advanced physics tools and engines can take advantage of all the processing power available in modern computers. Many of those tools are being put to work these days to find more realistic ways of breaking things, and game developers are trying to wrap their heads around destructible environments. Mike Enoch, lead coder at Ruffian Games, said, "This idea of simulating interactions and constructing the game world similar to how you would construct the real world generates more emergent gameplay, where the game plays out in a unique way for each player, and the player can come up with solutions to problems that the designer might not have thought of." Another area that still sees a lot of attention is making game characters more human, in terms of moving and looking as realistic as possible, as well as how a game's AI perceives what's happening. "The problem is not necessarily in having the most advanced path-finding technique with large-scale awareness; we need to have more micro behaviors, with a proper physics awareness of the environment," said software engineer George Torres.
Brian Stretch writes with a story about the Mini Utility Vehicle prototype from XP Vehicles, an electric car that is partly inflatable. The recent struggles of the auto industry and a political climate that supports the development of alternative energy vehicles have given the car a better chance at actually hitting the market. Quoting: "Building a car takes many years and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars traditionally. XP is able to cut a lot of the costs and timeframe because its car has 70 percent less parts than a regular car, and the company is using novel materials that require simpler factory devices, and production and manufacturing processes that lower the cost to deploy. ... The seat is inflatable, the dashboard is inflatable, and the internal structure and carrying racks are inflatable, or a mesh suspension. Instead of requiring six-axis robots, XP uses radio frequency welders that look like giant waffle irons. The factory equipment is much less expensive and the car simply has less parts that could fail. The motors are built into the rear wheels in most XP prototypes. The first cars to reach the market will have two rear hub motors and a motor controller, that's it."
The Guardian's games blog convened a panel of engineers and other experts to talk about the current state of video game physics. A great deal of research is currently going on to make better use of multiple cores so that advanced physics tools and engines can take advantage of all the processing power available in modern computers. Many of those tools are being put to work these days to find more realistic ways of breaking things, and game developers are trying to wrap their heads around destructible environments. Mike Enoch, lead coder at Ruffian Games, said, "This idea of simulating interactions and constructing the game world similar to how you would construct the real world generates more emergent gameplay, where the game plays out in a unique way for each player, and the player can come up with solutions to problems that the designer might not have thought of." Another area that still sees a lot of attention is making game characters more human, in terms of moving and looking as realistic as possible, as well as how a game's AI perceives what's happening. "The problem is not necessarily in having the most advanced path-finding technique with large-scale awareness; we need to have more micro behaviors, with a proper physics awareness of the environment," said software engineer George Torres.
puroresu writes "I currently reside in the UK. In recent years I've seen privacy, free expression and civil liberties steadily eroded, and I can't see anything changing for the better any time soon. With people being banned from the UK for expressing (admittedly reprehensible) opinions, the continuing efforts to implement mandatory ID cards and the prospect of a Conservative government in the near future, I'm seriously considering emigrating to a less restrictive country. Which countries would you recommend in terms of freedom and privacy? Distance is not an issue, though a reasonable level of stability and provision of public services would be a bonus."
The Guardian's games blog convened a panel of engineers and other experts to talk about the current state of video game physics. A great deal of research is currently going on to make better use of multiple cores so that advanced physics tools and engines can take advantage of all the processing power available in modern computers. Many of those tools are being put to work these days to find more realistic ways of breaking things, and game developers are trying to wrap their heads around destructible environments. Mike Enoch, lead coder at Ruffian Games, said, "This idea of simulating interactions and constructing the game world similar to how you would construct the real world generates more emergent gameplay, where the game plays out in a unique way for each player, and the player can come up with solutions to problems that the designer might not have thought of." Another area that still sees a lot of attention is making game characters more human, in terms of moving and looking as realistic as possible, as well as how a game's AI perceives what's happening. "The problem is not necessarily in having the most advanced path-finding technique with large-scale awareness; we need to have more micro behaviors, with a proper physics awareness of the environment," said software engineer George Torres.
puroresu writes "I currently reside in the UK. In recent years I've seen privacy, free expression and civil liberties steadily eroded, and I can't see anything changing for the better any time soon. With people being banned from the UK for expressing (admittedly reprehensible) opinions, the continuing efforts to implement mandatory ID cards and the prospect of a Conservative government in the near future, I'm seriously considering emigrating to a less restrictive country. Which countries would you recommend in terms of freedom and privacy? Distance is not an issue, though a reasonable level of stability and provision of public services would be a bonus."
A class action lawsuit has been initiated against Square Enix over the fees they charge for subscription-based MMO Final Fantasy XI. The court filing alleges "deceptive advertising, unfair practices, and fraudulent concealment" of information about the game's pricing model, essentially saying Square Enix doesn't clearly advertise that there is a monthly fee, and that failure to pay can result in late fees and account termination. The plaintiff is seeking a settlement in excess of $5,000,000 and including "all persons who purchased or played the online games four years prior to the filing of this lawsuit."
etherlad writes "MythBusters' Adam Savage got a bill charging him $11,000 for 'a few hours' of Web surfing while in Canada, using his AT&T USB Mercury modem. AT&T gave him a quote on the data rate: '.015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb.' Looks like AT&T didn't learn from Verizon's inability to do math. AT&T is also claiming Savage downloaded over 9 GB, which he calls 'frakking impossible.' Savage's huge following on twitter got him a speedy response by AT&T."
A class action lawsuit has been initiated against Square Enix over the fees they charge for subscription-based MMO Final Fantasy XI. The court filing alleges "deceptive advertising, unfair practices, and fraudulent concealment" of information about the game's pricing model, essentially saying Square Enix doesn't clearly advertise that there is a monthly fee, and that failure to pay can result in late fees and account termination. The plaintiff is seeking a settlement in excess of $5,000,000 and including "all persons who purchased or played the online games four years prior to the filing of this lawsuit."
etherlad writes "MythBusters' Adam Savage got a bill charging him $11,000 for 'a few hours' of Web surfing while in Canada, using his AT&T USB Mercury modem. AT&T gave him a quote on the data rate: '.015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb.' Looks like AT&T didn't learn from Verizon's inability to do math. AT&T is also claiming Savage downloaded over 9 GB, which he calls 'frakking impossible.' Savage's huge following on twitter got him a speedy response by AT&T."
A class action lawsuit has been initiated against Square Enix over the fees they charge for subscription-based MMO Final Fantasy XI. The court filing alleges "deceptive advertising, unfair practices, and fraudulent concealment" of information about the game's pricing model, essentially saying Square Enix doesn't clearly advertise that there is a monthly fee, and that failure to pay can result in late fees and account termination. The plaintiff is seeking a settlement in excess of $5,000,000 and including "all persons who purchased or played the online games four years prior to the filing of this lawsuit."
etherlad writes "MythBusters' Adam Savage got a bill charging him $11,000 for 'a few hours' of Web surfing while in Canada, using his AT&T USB Mercury modem. AT&T gave him a quote on the data rate: '.015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb.' Looks like AT&T didn't learn from Verizon's inability to do math. AT&T is also claiming Savage downloaded over 9 GB, which he calls 'frakking impossible.' Savage's huge following on twitter got him a speedy response by AT&T."
KentuckyFC writes "One of the puzzles of Earth's climate history is an apparent 140-million-year cycle in the climate record. Various astronomers think this can be explained by the passage of the Sun through the spiral arms of the Milky Way, which also seems to have had a period of about 140 million years. The thinking is that in regions of denser star populations, supernovas would have been more common, bathing the Earth in cosmic rays more often. These cosmic rays would then have seeded the formation of clouds that cool the planet. But in recent years, astronomers have mapped out the structure of the galaxy in much more detail. And now a pair of US astronomers have reanalyzed this climate change idea in light of the new evidence. Their conclusion is that the climate change cycle cannot possibly have coincided with the movement of the Sun through the spiral arms. So whatever caused the 140-million-year climate change cycle on Earth, it wasn't the Sun's passage through the galaxy."
MadAnalyst writes "The long-running $1,000,000 competition to improve on the Netflix Cinematch recommendation system by 10% (in terms of the RMSE) may have finally been won. Recent results show a 10.05% improvement from the team called BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, a merger between some of the teams who were getting close to the contest's goal. We've discussed this competition in the past."
N!NJA writes with this excerpt from PCWorld: "A tectonic shift has taken place for the digital age: ad rates for popular shows like The Simpsons and CSI are higher online than they are on prime-time TV. If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com, it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers. Online viewers have to actively seek out the program they want to watch, so advertisers end up with a guaranteed audience for their commercial every time someone clicks play on Hulu or TV.com. Online programs also have an average of 37 seconds of commercials during an episode, while prime-time TV averages nine minutes of ads."
netczar writes "Former US cybersecurity chief Rod Beckstrom has been selected as the new ICANN president and CEO. The decision was publicly announced during ICANN's 35th meeting in Sydney, Australia on Friday. Beckstrom will be replacing Dr. Paul Twomey, who had been serving this position since March 2003 and announced his resignation earlier this year. Beckstrom recently made headlines for his sudden resignation from his post at NCSC, criticizing the lack of funding from the NSA and its move to try to 'rule over' the NCSC." Reader darthcamaro notes a story which quotes Beckstrom as saying, "The system on [the] whole is healthy, but also strained, and part of the strains are natural and part of the democratic process. The process may be noisy, but a stable Internet is what has come out of ICANN. This is massively complex — wouldn't run well top-down. We would not reach the same balance of decisions to propagate through the network. All of us are humbled by the process. No one is in control, so everyone is in control."
Michael_Curator writes to tell us that mobile phones now have a "reality overlay" app that combines a smartphone's camera, GPS, and compass to augment a user's view of a particular location with metadata. "It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each [commercial] partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers."
MojoKid writes "Recently, at the Pepcom Digital Experience show in New York, NVIDIA demonstrated the capabilities of the upcoming Lenovo S12 netbook, which features a single-core Atom CPU and an NVIDIA ION graphics processor. However, probably more interesting to some, NVIDIA was also showing off its new Tegra system-on-a-chip CPU, which will be powering the recently-announced Zune HD portable media player. The device was being demonstrated in a netbook form-factor and was streaming full quality 720p HD video over HDMI. On the networking front, Belkin was displaying its Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit — a speedy alternative to wireless networking."
MojoKid writes "Recently, at the Pepcom Digital Experience show in New York, NVIDIA demonstrated the capabilities of the upcoming Lenovo S12 netbook, which features a single-core Atom CPU and an NVIDIA ION graphics processor. However, probably more interesting to some, NVIDIA was also showing off its new Tegra system-on-a-chip CPU, which will be powering the recently-announced Zune HD portable media player. The device was being demonstrated in a netbook form-factor and was streaming full quality 720p HD video over HDMI. On the networking front, Belkin was displaying its Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit - a speedy alternative to wireless networking."
CWmike writes "When FreeLegoPorn.com began publishing pornographic images created with Lego toys, Lego acted quickly. "The content available on the site consisted of animated mini-figures doing very explicit things. We were not amused," says Peter Kjaer, an attorney for Denmark-based Lego. Lego didn't go to court. Instead it filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization, which ruled in its favor. The domain registrar for FreeLegoPorn.com, GoDaddy.com, eventually shut down the site and transferred the domain name to Lego under ICANN rules. But it's not just Lego and Verizon that are suffering. Green energy is a hot topic, so cybersquatters have been targeting wind and solar energy start-ups. And malicious sites can create havoc with a brand's reputation. Cybersquatting activity rose by 18% last year, with a documented 440,584 cybersquatting sites in the fourth quarter of last year alone, according to MarkMonitor's annual Brandjacking Index report. And WIPO cited an 8% jump in dispute filings in 2008, to 2,329 complaints — a new record. Now, ICANN is preparing to open a potentially unlimited number of new top-level domains as early as the first quarter of 2010."
Amazon.com has reportedly cut off all affiliates in North Carolina as a preemptive response to the sales tax change being pushed through the state legislature. The Seattle-based online retailer warned affiliates last week that such a move might be necessary, but the early shutoff seems to be a move in hopes of swaying opinion on the proposed legislation. "Local affiliates say they were "blind-sided" by the company's action. 'I got this e-mail at 4:30 this morning,' said James Barrett, a technology consultant from Winston-Salem. 'It wasn't saying your account will be shut down. It said it is shut down. That just blew me up right there.' Barrett said that he is frustrated at lawmakers for considering the tax, but equally aggravated with Amazon. 'They're trying to tick off all their associates and get them to call down to Raleigh,' Barrett said. 'I think that is pretty tacky. That's not the way to use people who are referring business to your business.'"
Al writes "A company called PolyPlus has developed lithium metal-air batteries that have 10 times the energy density of regular lithium-ion batteries. The anode is made up entirely of lithium metal, and the surrounding air acts as the cathode, making the batteries incredibly energy dense. Previous efforts to make lithium metal batteries have been stymied by the sensitivity of lithium to water in the air. The new batteries use a sophisticated membrane to protect the lithium anode and PolyPlus has even created a version that works underwater, by drawing oxygen through the membrane. Lithium metal-air batteries could be light-weight power sources for demand for plug-in hybrid vehicles and consumer electronics; IBM also recently announced that it would develop lithium metal-air batteries for the energy grid and for transportation."
Amazon.com has reportedly cut off all affiliates in North Carolina as a preemptive response to the sales tax change being pushed through the state legislature. The Seattle-based online retailer warned affiliates last week that such a move might be necessary, but the early shutoff seems to be a move in hopes of swaying opinion on the proposed legislation. "Local affiliates say they were "blind-sided" by the company's action. 'I got this e-mail at 4:30 this morning,' said James Barrett, a technology consultant from Winston-Salem. 'It wasn't saying your account will be shut down. It said it is shut down. That just blew me up right there.' Barrett said that he is frustrated at lawmakers for considering the tax, but equally aggravated with Amazon. 'They're trying to tick off all their associates and get them to call down to Raleigh,' Barrett said. 'I think that is pretty tacky. That's not the way to use people who are referring business to your business.'"
Another question of search engine "legality" is being addressed with a recent court case in the UK over a video search engine. Techdirt's coverage questions the long-standing tradition of how to evaluate contributory infringement claims for sites like search engines based on the highly subjective "I know it when I see it" test. "Take for example, the situation going on in the UK, where Anton Benjamin Vickerman and his wife Kelly-Anne Vickerman decided to do something that makes a lot of sense: create a search engine for videos online, indexing a variety of different sites. This was as a part of their company Scopelight, and the search engine itself was called Surfthechannel. This is certainly a useful product. But, of course, the search engine's algorithm has no way of knowing if that video has been put up by the copyright holder on purpose or if it's unauthorized. Even more tricky, how does it determine fair use? So, it did the reasonable thing: it includes everything. Lots of the videos are legal. Plenty are potentially unauthorized. Apparently that wasn't good enough for a UK-based anti-piracy group UK-FACT, who had Scopelight's premises raided, claiming the site is illegal, since people can find unauthorized content via it. Of course, you can find unauthorized content on Google as well. But you know who's liable for that? Whoever actually put it online. Not the search engine that pointed you to it."
Virtual_Raider writes "Wired is running a story about a new twist in the never-ending quest to prove P. T. Barnum's adage. Old: Scammers are creating fake news sites that look almost like the real thing. New: They are advertising on real news sites, making it difficult for unwary readers to catch on they are being duped with fake coverage of get-rich-quick scams. Among those running the scam "news" ads are the Huffington Post and Salon. From the article: 'The story has art, it has a sidebar, there's weather, supposed reader comments — even ads. Steadman is described as "a mother from San Francisco" — at least, when I read the article. Thanks to cutting-edge reporting techniques perfected by News 5, she will automatically move to the geolocation of your internet IP address when you read it. Look, she lives right in your neighborhood!'" Forbes also wrote about the scam news sites a couple of weeks back.
An anonymous reader notes a story up at Ars on the FBI's continuing penchant for secrecy. "Clearly, the FBI isn't ready to give up its Bush-era secrecy addition just yet. ...in the case of Doe v. Holder, the FBI is carrying out a secret investigation using secret guidelines on what is and is not constitutional, and as part of that investigation they've compelled the secrecy of a service provider and are using a secret justification to argue that nobody's First Amendment rights are being violated."
It's the tripnaut! writes "The BBC reports that Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around 'as high as a kite', a government official has said. 'The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,' says Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania. 'Then they crash,' she added."
malkavian writes "This community has complained long and loudly about the very one-sided approach to copyright, and the not-so-slow erosion of the public domain. On top of the corporate lobbying to remove increasingly larger parts of the public domain, there is now an growing pattern whereby works are directly taken from the public domain and effectively stolen by a single company leveraging protections provided under copyright law. The Register's article is based on a paper by Jason Mazzone at the Brooklyn Law School, which starkly details the problems that are now becoming evident as entities grab control over public domain works. The paper proposes some possible solutions, such as amending the Copyright Act. From the abstract: 'Copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are in fact entitled to use for free. While falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act, prosecutions are extremely rare. These circumstances have produced fraud on an untold scale, with millions of works in the public domain deemed copyrighted, and countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free.'"
narramissic writes "Earlier this week, the Clear airport security screening service ceased operations, leaving many to wonder what would become of the personal information, including credit card numbers, fingerprints, and iris scans, of Clear's customers. And now we know. The information could be sold to the provider of a similar service. Until then, Clear has erased PC hard drives at its airport screening kiosks and is wiping employee computers, but the information is retained on its central databases (managed by Lockheed Martin). Clear customer David Maynor, who is CTO with Errata Security in Atlanta, wants Clear to delete his information but that isn't happening, the company said in a note posted to its Web site Thursday. 'They had your social security information, credit information, where you lived, employment history, fingerprint information,' said Maynor. 'They should be the only ones who have access to that information.'"
vigmeister writes "Swiss adventurer Bertrand Picard has unveiled a prototype of the solar-powered plane he hopes eventually to fly around the world. The initial version, spanning 61m but weighing just 1,500kg, will undergo trials to prove it can fly at night. Dr. Picard, who made history by circling the globe non-stop in a balloon in 1999, says he wants to demonstrate the potential of renewable energies. He expects to make a crossing of the Atlantic in 2012. The HB-SIA has the look of a glider but is on the scale of a modern airliner. The airplane incorporates composite materials to keep it extremely light and uses super-efficient solar cells, batteries, motors, and propellers to get it through the dark hours. The public unveiling on Friday of the HB-SIA took place at Dubendorf airfield near Zürich."
phyrebyrd writes "Brooke Greenberg is the size of an infant, with the mental capacity of a toddler. She turned 16 in January. Brooke hasn't aged in the conventional sense. Dr. Richard Walker of the University of South Florida College of Medicine, in Tampa, says Brooke's body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync. She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why. Brooke's hair and her nails are the only two things that grow, Howard said. 'She has pajamas and outfits that are 10 or 12 years old,' he said."
phyrebyrd writes "Brooke Greenberg is the size of an infant, with the mental capacity of a toddler. She turned 16 in January. Brooke hasn't aged in the conventional sense. Dr. Richard Walker of the University of South Florida College of Medicine, in Tampa, says Brooke's body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync. She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why. Brooke's hair and her nails are the only two things that grow, Howard said. "She has pajamas and outfits that are 10 or 12 years old," he said." jamie found this roundup on the status of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which is about to be voted on by the US House of Representatives. (The article notes that if the majority Democrats can't see the 218 votes needed for passage, they will probably put off the vote.) The AP has put together a FAQ that says, "[The bill, if passed,] fundamentally will change how we use, produce and consume energy, ending the country's love affair with big gas-guzzling cars and its insatiable appetite for cheap electricity. This bill will put smaller, more efficient cars on the road, swap smokestacks for windmills and solar panels, and transform the appliances you can buy for your home." The odds-makers are giving the bill a marginal chance of passing in the House, with tougher going expected in the Senate.
jamie found this roundup on the status of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which is about to be voted on by the US House of Representatives. (The article notes that if the majority Democrats can't see the 218 votes needed for passage, they will probably put off the vote.) The AP has put together a FAQ that says, "[The bill, if passed,] fundamentally will change how we use, produce and consume energy, ending the country's love affair with big gas-guzzling cars and its insatiable appetite for cheap electricity. This bill will put smaller, more efficient cars on the road, swap smokestacks for windmills and solar panels, and transform the appliances you can buy for your home." The odds-makers are giving the bill a marginal chance of passing in the House, with tougher going expected in the Senate.
A piece at GameSetWatch questions whether modern game companies are taking accessibility a step too far in their rush to attract people who don't typically play video games. This worry was inspired, in part, by the news that Nintendo's New Super Mario Bros. Wii would have the capability to play itself in order to let a human player get past a tricky part. Quoting: "Bigger audiences finishing more games is certainly a worthy goal, and Nintendo has shown that accessibility is the servant of engagement. History has rarely — if ever — dared to disprove the wisdom of Miyamoto's foresight. History has also never disproven, however, the principle that any medium and any message degrades the wider an audience it must reach. Art was never served by generalization, nor language by addressing all denominators. Entertainment for the masses ultimately becomes empty. There must exist an absolute point beyond which greater accessibility means less engagement. Making a game so easy it can play itself for you at the push of a button just might be that point."
miller60 writes "Major news sites struggled to remain online yesterday evening as news of Michael Jackson's death triggered huge waves of Internet traffic. TMZ.com broke the news and was quickly overwhelmed, while Twitter turned off features to handle its load. They weren't alone. Keynote Systems reports that ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, and Yahoo! News all experienced performance problems between 6:15 and 9 pm Eastern time, when the average availability of news sites tracked by Keynote dropped from almost 100% to 86%. The cloud computing crowd immediately jumped on the traffic jams to argue their case. 'Not have a cloud bursting strategy in the age of cloud computing isn't just wrong — it's idiotic,' wrote one cloud blogger."
EA Digital Illusions CE has quietly opened up the beta of Battlefield Heroes, their long-delayed, free-to-play shooter. After gradually scaling up the number of players in the closed beta, they've now made the game available to everyone and lifted the NDA. EA has not yet mentioned this in an official announcement, probably hoping to keep their servers from being overwhelmed. The game's website is now accepting signups. IGN ran a hands-on preview of Battlefield Heroes back in April.
BBCWatcher writes "Microsoft has long claimed that the mainframe is dead, slain by the company's Windows monopoly. Yet, apparently without any mirror nearby, Microsoft is now complaining through the Microsoft-funded Computer & Communications Industry Association that not only are mainframes not dead, but IBM is so anticompetitive that governments should intervene in the hyper-competitive server market. The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is worried that the trend toward cloud computing is introducing competition to the Windows franchise, favoring better-positioned companies including IBM and Cisco. HP now talks about almost nothing but the IBM mainframe, with no Tukwila CPUs to sell until 2010. The global recession is encouraging more mainframe adoption as businesses slash IT costs, dominated by labor costs, and improve business execution. In 2008, IBM mainframe revenues rose 12.5% even whilst mainframe prices fell. (IBM shipped 25% more mainframe capacity than in 2007. Other server sales reports are not so good.) IBM mainframes can run multiple operating systems concurrently, including Linux and, more recently, OpenSolaris."
Gamasutra is running a few articles about this year's Social Gaming Summit, a conference dedicated to how the increasingly popular social media market is influencing the design of games and how they are played. It's a unique market, in which relatively unknown games can attract millions of players over mere weeks, and where the players themselves often become the distributors. When discussing platform support and compatibility, Sebastian de Halleux, COO of developer Playfish, said, "For us, the next-generation platform is Facebook." However, Facebook's own Gareth Davis thinks the future of gaming will rely heavily on compatibility across many different devices, from conventional consoles to devices like the iPhone. Christian Nutt, the Gamasutra writer who attended the Summit, is optimistic about the possibilities this will open up, but is worried that creativity and fun will get bogged down by traffic analysis, marketing, and micro-transactions. He mentions one company who "spent $2 million developing a game called Guild of Heroes, but never launched it because 'it didn't drive the right metrics.' This makes business sense; these kinds of decisions are made everywhere all of the time. The disquieting thing is that the topics of fun or creativity — or any of the virtues most in the game industry like to inject into their commercial products — were rarely if ever addressed."
FleaPlus writes "Apollo 11 astronaut (and MIT Astronautics Sc.D.) Buzz Aldrin suggests a bolder plan for NASA (while still remaining within its budget), which he will present to the White House's Augustine Commission; he sees NASA heading down the wrong path with a "rehash of what we did 40 years ago" which could derail future exploration and settlement. For the short-term, Aldrin suggests canceling NASA's troubled and increasingly costly Ares I, instead launching manned capsules on commercial Delta IV, Atlas V, and/or SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. In the medium-term, NASA should return to the moon with an international consortium, with the ultimate goal of commercial lunar exploitation in mind. Aldrin's long term plan includes a 2018 comet flyby, a 2019 manned trip to a near-earth asteroid, a 2025 trip to the Martian moon Phobos, and one-way trips to colonize Mars."
narramissic writes "In an interview on stage at GigaOm's Structure conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's VP of technical operations, told Om Malik that the latest generations of server processors from Intel and AMD don't deliver the performance gains that 'they're touting in the press.' 'And we're, literally in real time right now, trying to figure out why that is,' Heiliger said. He also had some harsh words for server makers: 'You guys don't get it,' Heiliger said. 'To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient.' Heiliger added that Google has done a great job designing and building its own servers for this kind of use."
bonch writes "A Swedish court has ruled that the judge in the PirateBay trial is unbiased and there will be no retrial. Stockholm District Court defended the judge's membership in copyright organizations as a necessity to 'keep up with developments in the field' and that merely endorsing the idea of copyright law was not grounds for a mistrial. The defendants must now rely on the appeal process, while one defendant has written on his Twitter account that the PirateBay will also be suing Sweden for human rights violations."
mcgrew writes "CNN reports that 'A Tennessee man is facing charges of aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor for what authorities say are three pictures — none of them featuring an actual child's body. Instead, according to testimony presented at Michael Wayne Campbell's preliminary hearing in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Wednesday, the photos feature the faces of three young girls placed on the nude bodies of adult females, CNN affiliate WDEF reported.'"
FTL writes "While in orbit a metal knob floated between a window and the dashboard of Atlantis. Once back on Earth, the shuttle contracted, wedging the knob firmly in place and damaging the window. Initial attempts to free the knob have failed and engineers may need six months to disassemble that section of the orbiter. Given that the shuttle program will probably end next year anyway, such a delay might mean scrapping Atlantis early rather than repairing it. Efforts to remove the knob using less invasive techniques continue."
mcgrew writes "CNN reports that 'A Tennessee man is facing charges of aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor for what authorities say are three pictures — none of them featuring an actual child's body. Instead, according to testimony presented at Michael Wayne Campbell's preliminary hearing in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Wednesday, the photos feature the faces of three young girls placed on the nude bodies of adult females, CNN affiliate WDEF reported.'"
FTL writes "While in orbit a metal knob floated between a window and the dashboard of Atlantis. Once back on Earth, the shuttle contracted, wedging the knob firmly in place and damaging the window. Initial attempts to free the knob have failed and engineers may need six months to disassemble that section of the orbiter. Given that the shuttle program will probably end next year anyway, such a delay might mean scrapping Atlantis early rather than repairing it. Efforts to remove the knob using less invasive techniques continue."
FTL writes "While in orbit a metal knob floated between a window and the dashboard of Atlantis. Once back on Earth, the shuttle contracted, wedging the knob firmly in place and damaging the window. Initial attempts to free the knob have failed and engineers may need six months to disassemble that section of the orbiter. Given that the shuttle program will probably end next year anyway, such a delay might mean scrapping Atlantis early rather than repairing it. Efforts to remove the knob using less invasive techniques continue."
yuna49 writes "The US Supreme Court today ruled 8-1 that the strip search of a 13-year-old girl by officials in an Arizona middle school was unconstitutional. However, by a vote of 7-2, the Court also ruled that the individual school officials could not be held personally liable. A suit for damages against the school district itself is still going forward. We discussed this case at length back in March when the Court decided to hear the case on appeal."
Read 6054 More Bytes... 36 comments Comments: 36
Games: Blizzard Confirms No LAN Support For Starcraft 2 on Wednesday July 01, @01:05PM
from the also-no-telegraph-compatibility-mode dept.
The Twitter Book - Wed Jul 1 17:48:26 2009
Read 6054 More Bytes... 8 comments
Games: Blizzard Confirms No LAN Support For Starcraft 2 on Wednesday July 01, @01:05PM
from the also-no-telegraph-compatibility-mode dept.
Blizzard Confirms No LAN Support For Starcraft 2 - Wed Jul 1 17:16:57 2009
The Hysteria of the Cyber-Warriors - Wed Jul 1 16:29:32 2009
Scammers Target Neopets Users - Wed Jul 1 16:08:14 2009
GPS-Based System For Driving Tax Being Field Tested - Wed Jul 1 15:46:16 2009
Dave Perry Shows Off Cloud Gaming Service "Gaikai" - Wed Jul 1 15:34:04 2009
Jim Zemlin Pitches Linux App Stores For Telcos - Wed Jul 1 15:19:18 2009
The Incredible Shrinking Genome - Wed Jul 1 14:40:40 2009
RIAA Victory Over Usenet.com In Copyright Case - Wed Jul 1 14:23:40 2009
BD+ Resealed Once Again - Wed Jul 1 13:40:11 2009
UK Compulsory ID Plan Shelved - Wed Jul 1 12:54:44 2009
Sega Not Giving Up On Mature Wii Games - Wed Jul 1 12:30:34 2009
US Gov. Launches Web Site To Track IT Spending - Wed Jul 1 12:13:38 2009
100 Million Used Games Traded Each Year In the US - Wed Jul 1 12:00:51 2009
100 Million Used Games Traded Each Year In the US - Wed Jul 1 11:33:12 2009
100 Million Used Games Traded Each Year In the US - Wed Jul 1 11:08:57 2009
100 Million Used Games Traded Each Year In the US - Wed Jul 1 10:45:44 2009
Some Overheating 3GS iPhones Glow Pink - Wed Jul 1 09:14:18 2009
On Realism and Virtual Murder - Wed Jul 1 07:05:31 2009
On Realism and Virtual Murder - Wed Jul 1 06:54:01 2009
On Realism and Virtual Murder - Wed Jul 1 05:55:41 2009
Yahoo's "Chicken Coop" Data Center Design - Wed Jul 1 03:49:59 2009
New Click-Fraud Attack Is Stealthiest Yet - Wed Jul 1 02:51:17 2009
New Click-Fraud Attack Is Stealthiest Yet - Wed Jul 1 01:47:10 2009
One Year Later, "Dead" XP Still Going Strong - Tue Jun 30 23:48:57 2009
Malcolm Gladwell Challenges the Idea of "Free" - Tue Jun 30 23:07:44 2009
Ranchers Have Beef With USDA Program To ID Cattle - Tue Jun 30 22:05:00 2009
SoftMaker Office 2008 vs. OpenOffice.org 3.1 - Tue Jun 30 21:21:25 2009
In Canada, No Expectation of Privacy On the Net - Tue Jun 30 20:42:48 2009
The Hidden Cost of Using Microsoft Software - Tue Jun 30 19:47:23 2009
Ask Jazz Technical Lead Dr. Erich Gamma - Tue Jun 30 18:56:51 2009
Moblin V2.0 Beta For Netbooks and Nettops - Tue Jun 30 18:44:59 2009
China Delays "Green Dam" Internet Filter - Tue Jun 30 18:10:52 2009
Most Complete Topographical Map of Earth Complete - Tue Jun 30 17:26:41 2009
Carnivorous Clock Eats Bugs - Tue Jun 30 16:44:30 2009
Guaranteed Transmission Protocols For Windows? - Tue Jun 30 16:32:36 2009
EXT4, Btrfs, NILFS2 Performance Compared - Tue Jun 30 16:10:59 2009
Rhode Island Affiliates Banned From Amazon.com Sales - Tue Jun 30 15:59:35 2009
States Push Makers' Role In Disposing of Electronic Waste - Tue Jun 30 15:13:29 2009
PHP 5.3 Released - Tue Jun 30 14:51:13 2009
Firefox 3.5 Reviewed; Draws Praise for HTML5, Speed - Tue Jun 30 14:29:52 2009
Comcast Bringing Metropolitan WiMAX To Subscribers - Tue Jun 30 13:47:47 2009
Pirate Bay Announces Sale to Swedish Company For $7.8 Million - Tue Jun 30 13:24:14 2009
In Defense of the Classic Controller - Tue Jun 30 13:08:52 2009
Sony Begins Shipping PCs With Green Dam In China - Tue Jun 30 12:45:16 2009
Sony Pondering Game/Phone Hybrid - Tue Jun 30 11:09:17 2009
Galactic Origin For 62M-Year Extinction Cycle? - Tue Jun 30 10:56:16 2009
Galactic Origin For 62M-Year Extinction Cycle? - Tue Jun 30 10:38:08 2009
Galactic Origin For 62M-Year Extinction Cycle? - Tue Jun 30 09:34:43 2009
Faction Changes Coming To World of Warcraft - Tue Jun 30 09:17:35 2009
Faction Changes Coming To World of Warcraft - Tue Jun 30 07:49:04 2009
Toyota Demonstrates Brain Control of Wheelchair - Tue Jun 30 06:35:19 2009
Artist Wins £20,000 Grant To Study Women's Butts - Tue Jun 30 04:34:38 2009
Senators Want To Punish Nokia, Siemens Over Iran - Tue Jun 30 03:41:07 2009
High Court Allows Remote-Storage DVR System - Tue Jun 30 01:43:34 2009
Madoff Sentenced To 150 Years - Mon Jun 29 23:16:17 2009
Wikipedia Censored To Protect Captive Reporter - Mon Jun 29 23:03:26 2009
New Firefox Standard Aims to Combat Cross-Site Scripting - Mon Jun 29 22:19:16 2009
Graphene Could Make Magnetic Memory 1000x Denser - Mon Jun 29 21:32:20 2009
Does the 'Hacker Ethic' Harm Today's Developers? - Mon Jun 29 20:48:55 2009
Being Slightly Overweight May Lead To Longer Life - Mon Jun 29 20:11:04 2009
13-year-old Trades iPod For a Walkman For a Week - Mon Jun 29 19:57:30 2009
China Bans Gold Farming - Mon Jun 29 19:25:27 2009
Unlocking Android - Mon Jun 29 19:08:38 2009
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Technology: Google Claims They "Just Aren't That Big" on Monday June 29, @01:46PM
from the please-send-a-check-that-is-just-as-not-big dept.
Google Claims They "Just Aren't That Big" - Mon Jun 29 17:55:56 2009
First Electronic Quantum Processor Created - Mon Jun 29 17:24:12 2009
Comic Artist Detained For Having Script Containing 9/11 Type Scenarios - Mon Jun 29 16:48:48 2009
Standard Cellphone Chargers For Europeans - Mon Jun 29 16:26:47 2009
Ad Networks the Laggards In Jackson Traffic Spike - Mon Jun 29 15:09:46 2009
NASA Requests Help With Von Braun's Notes - Mon Jun 29 14:34:22 2009
Spirit Rover Begins Making Night Sky Observations - Mon Jun 29 14:04:34 2009
The Technology Keeping Information Flowing in Iran - Mon Jun 29 13:28:25 2009
The Technology Keeping Information Flowing in Iran - Mon Jun 29 13:13:39 2009
Boxee vs. Zinc vs. Hulu - Mon Jun 29 12:26:46 2009
Exchange Rates Spell High Prices for WIndows 7 In the EU - Mon Jun 29 12:07:07 2009
Exchange Rates Spell High Prices for WIndows 7 In the EU - Mon Jun 29 11:13:14 2009
Exchange Rates Spell High Prices for WIndows 7 In the EU - Mon Jun 29 10:57:00 2009
Exchange Rates Spell High Prices for WIndows 7 In the EU - Mon Jun 29 09:20:12 2009
Serious Sam Remake Coming In Fall - Mon Jun 29 07:34:04 2009
Licensing Issues Shut Down Pandora Outside US - Mon Jun 29 06:19:06 2009
Lenovo Tinkers WIth Larger Delete and Escape Keys - Mon Jun 29 03:22:45 2009
Google Mistook Jackson Searches For Net Attack - Mon Jun 29 00:19:08 2009
Chicken Feathers May Hold Key To Hydrogen Storage - Sun Jun 28 23:54:33 2009
Chicken Feathers May Hold Key To Hydrogen Storage - Sun Jun 28 23:42:58 2009
Chicken Feathers May Hold Key To Hydrogen Storage - Sun Jun 28 22:59:36 2009
Desktop As a Cellphone Extension? - Sun Jun 28 21:54:40 2009
Text Comments Out In YouTube "National Discussion" of Health Care - Sun Jun 28 21:43:46 2009
Text Comments Out In YouTube "National Discussion" of Health Care - Sun Jun 28 20:42:12 2009
RIAA Defendant Moves For Summary Judgment - Sun Jun 28 19:57:00 2009
Has NASA Found the Lost Moon Tapes? - Sun Jun 28 18:37:24 2009
Judge Thinks Linking To Copyrighted Material Should Be Illegal - Sun Jun 28 17:27:22 2009
Study Claims Point-of-Sale Activation Could Generate Billions In Revenue - Sun Jun 28 16:55:44 2009
India To Put All Citizen Info In a Central Database - Sun Jun 28 16:20:37 2009
FreeDOS Turns 15 Years Old Today - Sun Jun 28 15:08:43 2009
The Open Source Design Conundrum - Sun Jun 28 14:46:43 2009
Controversy Over San Francisco Public Transportation Data - Sun Jun 28 13:28:07 2009
Investigators Suspect Computers Doomed Air France Jet - Sun Jun 28 13:17:23 2009
Investigators Suspect Computers Doomed Air France Jet - Sun Jun 28 13:03:12 2009
Investigators Suspect Computers Doomed Air France Jet - Sun Jun 28 12:10:08 2009
Why Don't MMOs Allow Easier Transportation? - Sun Jun 28 11:56:35 2009
Why Don't MMOs Allow Easier Transportation? - Sun Jun 28 11:44:41 2009
Why Don't MMOs Allow Easier Transportation? - Sun Jun 28 10:48:01 2009
The State of Munich's Ongoing Linux Migration - Sun Jun 28 09:01:58 2009
Aliens RPG Cancelled - Sun Jun 28 07:34:55 2009
Ksplice Offers Rebootless Updates For Ubuntu Systems - Sun Jun 28 05:55:10 2009
Canada Considering Online Voting In Elections - Sun Jun 28 03:06:22 2009
EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming - Sun Jun 28 02:01:36 2009
EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming - Sun Jun 28 01:47:45 2009
EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming - Sun Jun 28 00:52:34 2009
EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming - Sun Jun 28 00:38:30 2009
EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming - Sun Jun 28 00:04:36 2009
Hackable In-Car GPS Unit? - Sat Jun 27 22:59:17 2009
DARPA Wants a 19" Super-Efficient Supercomputer - Sat Jun 27 22:46:45 2009
DARPA Wants a 19" Super-Efficient Supercomputer - Sat Jun 27 22:31:33 2009
DARPA Wants a 19" Super-Efficient Supercomputer - Sat Jun 27 21:51:49 2009
The Video Bay, Now In Beta - Sat Jun 27 20:54:35 2009
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Science: Ulysses Space Mission Finally Coming To An End on Saturday June 27, @01:27PM
from the four-more-year-four-more-years dept.
Microsoft To Offer Windows 7 On USB Thumb Drives? - Sat Jun 27 19:40:26 2009
Richard Stallman Says No To Mono - Sat Jun 27 19:27:18 2009
Richard Stallman Says No To Mono - Sat Jun 27 19:03:50 2009
Richard Stallman Says No To Mono - Sat Jun 27 18:39:19 2009
Ulysses Space Mission Finally Coming To An End - Sat Jun 27 17:34:31 2009
The Path From Hacker To Security Consultant - Sat Jun 27 16:16:48 2009
The Battle Between Google and Facebook - Sat Jun 27 15:52:31 2009
The Battle Between Google and Facebook - Sat Jun 27 15:37:46 2009
The Battle Between Google and Facebook - Sat Jun 27 15:08:49 2009
Researchers Discover That Sand Behaves Like Water - Sat Jun 27 13:50:40 2009
The Internet Helps Iran Silence Activists - Sat Jun 27 13:32:34 2009
The Internet Helps Iran Silence Activists - Sat Jun 27 13:21:14 2009
The Internet Helps Iran Silence Activists - Sat Jun 27 12:22:02 2009
Alternative Energy Policies a Boon For Inflatable Electric Car - Sat Jun 27 11:49:56 2009
Alternative Energy Policies a Boon For Inflatable Electric Car - Sat Jun 27 11:32:08 2009
Alternative Energy Policies a Boon For Inflatable Electric Car - Sat Jun 27 10:43:51 2009
Alternative Energy Policies a Boon For Inflatable Electric Car - Sat Jun 27 10:28:59 2009
Alternative Energy Policies a Boon For Inflatable Electric Car - Sat Jun 27 09:18:41 2009
The State of Video Game Physics - Sat Jun 27 08:12:29 2009
The State of Video Game Physics - Sat Jun 27 07:54:23 2009
The State of Video Game Physics - Sat Jun 27 06:27:08 2009
Emigrating To a Freer Country? - Sat Jun 27 04:13:36 2009
Square Enix Facing Class Action Suit Over FFXI "Hidden Fees" - Sat Jun 27 03:49:18 2009
Square Enix Facing Class Action Suit Over FFXI "Hidden Fees" - Sat Jun 27 03:37:52 2009
Square Enix Facing Class Action Suit Over FFXI "Hidden Fees" - Sat Jun 27 03:26:35 2009
Square Enix Facing Class Action Suit Over FFXI "Hidden Fees" - Sat Jun 27 03:15:30 2009
Square Enix Facing Class Action Suit Over FFXI "Hidden Fees" - Sat Jun 27 03:03:56 2009
AT&T's Bad Math Strikes MythBusters' Savage - Sat Jun 27 02:10:50 2009
Milky Way's Spiral Arms Could Not Have Caused Climate Change - Sat Jun 27 01:16:30 2009
Netflix Prize May Have Been Achieved - Sat Jun 27 00:32:39 2009
The Simpsons Worth More Per Viewer On Hulu Than On Fox - Fri Jun 26 23:27:24 2009
Rod Beckstrom Named New ICANN CEO - Fri Jun 26 22:44:24 2009
Smartphones Get "Reality Overlay" App - Fri Jun 26 21:56:56 2009
Pepcom Show Touts 720p Zune, New NVIDIA Toys, And Phones Galore - Fri Jun 26 21:24:19 2009
Pepcom Show Touts 720p Zune, New NVIDIA Toys, And Phones Galore - Fri Jun 26 21:11:06 2009
Domain-Name Wars, Rise of the Cybersquatters - Fri Jun 26 20:37:16 2009
New Lithium-Air Battery Delivers 10 Times the Energy Density - Fri Jun 26 20:22:16 2009
New Lithium-Air Battery Delivers 10 Times the Energy Density - Fri Jun 26 19:49:14 2009
Amazon Cuts Of North Carolina Affiliates - Fri Jun 26 18:59:58 2009
Another Question Of Search Engine Legality and Infringement - Fri Jun 26 18:16:51 2009
Fake News Scam Sites Advertising On Real News Sites - Fri Jun 26 17:44:53 2009
FBI Files a Secret Justifications of a Gag Order - Fri Jun 26 16:54:41 2009
Stoned Wallabies Make Crop Circles - Fri Jun 26 16:43:15 2009
Copyfraud Is Stealing the Public Domain - Fri Jun 26 16:19:41 2009
Out of Business, Clear May Sell Customer Data - Fri Jun 26 15:44:44 2009
Solar Plane To Make Public Debut - Fri Jun 26 15:21:09 2009
Doctors Baffled, Intrigued By Girl Who Doesn't Age - Fri Jun 26 14:59:44 2009
Doctors Baffled, Intrigued By Girl Who Doesn't Age - Fri Jun 26 14:38:53 2009
Link To Original Source
US House May Pass "Cap & Trade" Bill - Fri Jun 26 14:25:58 2009
US House May Pass "Cap & Trade" Bill - Fri Jun 26 13:57:16 2009
Can Video Game Accessibility Go Too Far? - Fri Jun 26 13:40:30 2009
News Sites Slammed By Michael Jackson Traffic - Fri Jun 26 13:02:29 2009
Battlefield Heroes Goes Into Open Beta - Fri Jun 26 12:50:25 2009
Microsoft-Backed Firm Says IBM Is Anticompetitive - Fri Jun 26 12:32:36 2009
Social Networks As Gaming Platforms - Fri Jun 26 09:22:15 2009
Buzz Aldrin's Radical Plan For NASA - Fri Jun 26 06:32:51 2009
Facebook VP Slams Intel's, AMD's Chip Performance Claims - Fri Jun 26 03:32:50 2009
Pirate Bay Retrial Denied, Judge Declared Unbiased - Fri Jun 26 00:29:20 2009
Tennesee Man Charged In "Virtual Pornography" Case - Thu Jun 25 23:02:20 2009
Tennesee Man Charged In "Virtual Pornography" Case - Thu Jun 25 22:49:53 2009
Tennesee Man Charged In "Virtual Pornography" Case - Thu Jun 25 22:25:54 2009
Stuck Knob Causes Serious Window Damage To Atlantis - Thu Jun 25 21:41:44 2009
Stuck Knob Causes Serious Window Damage To Atlantis - Thu Jun 25 21:29:42 2009
Middle-School Strip Search Ruled Unconstitutional - Thu Jun 25 20:44:37 2009