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Movies

Submission + - 3D Cinema Doesn't Work And Never Will (suntimes.com)

circletimessquare writes: "Walter Murch, one of the most technically knowledgeable film editors and sound designers in the film industry today, argues, via Rogert Ebert's journal in the Chicago Sun-Times, that 3D cinema can't work, ever. Not just today's technology, but even theoretically. Nothing but true holographic images will do. The crux of his argument is simple: 600 million years of evolution has designed eyes that focus and converge in parallel, at the same distance. Look far away at a mountain, and your eyes focus and converge far away, at the same distance. Look closely at a book, and your eyes focus and converge close, at the same distance. But the problem is that 3D cinema technology asks our eyes to converge at one distance, and focus at another, in order for the illusion to work, and this becomes very taxing, if not downright debilitating, and even, for the eyes of the very young, potentially developmentally dangerous. Other problems (but these may be fixable) include the dimness of the image, and the fact that the image tends to "gather in," even on Imax screens, ruining the immersive experience."
Security

Submission + - Spam Levels Lowest Since 2009 (securityweek.com)

wiredmikey writes: Global Spam have Declined to the Lowest Level Since March 2009. Following a two-week dramatic decline in spam levels, spam now accounts for 78.6 percent of all email traffic, the lowest rate since March 2009, when the global spam rate was 75.7 percent of all email traffic, according to Symantec'(TM)s January 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report released today. The volume of spam in circulation in January 2011 was 65.9% lower than for the same period one year ago in January 2010, when the spam rate was 83.9% of all email traffic.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft sues TiVo (bloomberg.com) 1

doperative writes: "oeWe remain open to resolving this situation through an intellectual property licensing agreement, and we look forward to continued negotiations with TiVo"
Hardware

Submission + - High school teacher creates microfluidic devices u (gizmag.com)

Phoghat writes: "Microfluidic technology, in which liquid is made to pass through “microchannels” that are often less than a millimeter in width, has had a profound effect on fields such as physics, chemistry, engineering and biotechnology. In particular, it has made “lab-on-a-chip” systems possible.
Joe Childs, a high school teacher, along with Harvard University nhas found a quick, easy and inexpensive means for creating them"

Crime

Submission + - PayPal Most Phished, Facebook Most Blocked (net-security.org)

Orome1 writes: OpenDNS released statistics about which websites were commonly blocked — and which websites users were frequently given access to — in 2010. The report additionally details the companies online scammers targeted in 2010, as well as where the majority of phishing websites were hosted. Facebook is both one of the most blocked and the most allowed websites, reflecting the push/pull of allowing social sites in schools and the workplace. On the other hand, 45 percent of all phishing attempts made in 2010 were targeting PayPal.
Open Source

Submission + - LibreOffice 3.3 released today (i-programmer.info)

mikejuk writes: Only four months after the formation of the Document Foundation by leading members of the OpenOffice.org community, it has launched LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of its alternative Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
Since the fork was announced at the end of September the number of developers "hacking" LibreOffice has gone from fewer than twenty to well over one hundred, allowing the Document Foundation to make its first release ahead of schedule.
The split of a large open source office suite comes at a time when it isn't even clear if there is a long term future for office suites at all. What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.

Submission + - Third Of Content On Popular BT Portals Are Fake (itproportal.com)

siliconbits writes: A study published by a group of researchers, most of them based in Europe, analysed the publishers of content on two major BitTorrent portals, Pirate Bay and MiniNova, and found out that almost a third of all files on the two sites were fake.
The Courts

Submission + - ACS: Law withdraws pursuing illegal file-sharers (bbc.co.uk)

Necroloth writes: As mentioned previously on Slashdot, ACS: Law has been sending out letters to thousands of alleged file-sharers on behalf on it's client, MediaCAT. However, solicitor, Andrew Crossley, has now ceased all work on such cases citing criminal attacks and death threats. Judge Birss doesn't seem to be taken by this and comments "I am getting the impression with every twist and turn since I started looking at these cases that there is a desire to avoid any judicial scrutiny".
Judge Birss is expected to deliver his judgement on the case later in the week... perhaps all is not lost in the British judicial system.

Social Networks

Submission + - Banned from Facebook for having famous name (bbc.co.uk)

Andrew Smith writes: Reports the BBC: A mother from Kent has been told she cannot use her Facebook account because she shares a name with Prince William's fiancee. Kate Middleton, from Pembury, said the social networking site had accused her of impersonating her famous namesake. Ms Middleton, who set up her account two years ago, said she was shocked at the decision. Facebook said it made the occasional mistake and would seek to resolve the issue.

Submission + - Obama Nominates RIAA Lawyer for Solicitor General (wired.com)

Xiph1980 writes: President Barack Obama on Monday nominated former Recording Industry Association of America lawyer Donald Verrilli Jr. to serve as the nation’s solicitor general.

The solicitor general is charged with defending the government before the Supreme Court, and files friend-of-the court briefs in cases in which the government believes there is a significant legal issue. The office also determines which cases it would bring to the Supreme Court for review.

Verrilli is best known for leading the recording industry’s legal charge against music- and movie-sharing site Grokster. That 2003 case ultimately led to Grokster’s demise when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the RIAA’s verdict.

Submission + - Ancient puzzle gets new lease of 'geomagical' life (newscientist.com)

techbeat writes: An ancient mathematical puzzle has found a new lease of life, reports New Scientist. The magic square is the basis for Sudoku, pops up on the back of a turtle in Chinese legend and provides a playful way to introduce children to arithmetic. But all this time it has been concealing a more complex geometrical form, says recreational mathematician Lee Sallows. He recently released dozens of examples of his "geomagic squares" online. "To come up with this after thousands of years of study of magic squares is pretty amazing," blogged author Alex Bellos. Magic squares are used to help create codes for transmitting information and in the design of drug trials so geomagic ones may have real-world uses, says mathematician Peter Cameron. New Scientist has also put up a gallery of the geomagic squares.
Movies

Submission + - Hollywood's falling confidence in 3D: in posters (denofgeek.com)

brumgrunt writes: After the release of Avatar, the 3D films that followed boasted posters that screamed loud and proud about the 3D element of the movies concerned. Yet do more recent movie posters demonstrate that the Hollywood marketing machine is losing faith with 3D? http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/743530/how_movie_posters_reflect_hollywoods_falling_confidence_in_3d.html
Businesses

Submission + - Obama Jobs Chief's 2004 US IT Job Elimination Plan

theodp writes: Last Friday, President Obama made a show of appointing General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to head his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, traveling all the way to a federal and state-funded GE battery facility in Schenectady, NY to make the announcement. It's definitely outside-of-the box thinking to charge Immelt with putting Americans back to work, since GE's IT offshoring effort is considered a textbook example of how to put Americans out of work. And back in 2004, Immelt graced a presentation on how GE was banking on 'growth driven by smart resource decisions' in India and China. A slide on "GE's Indian IT Strategy" boasted how GE's decision to 'outsource coding' was paying off handsomely, and noted the company was also 'significantly growing remote monitoring and maintenance.' Intellectual sourcing in India, explained GE CIO Gary Reiner, offered 'significant savings over all other English speaking countries.' A beaming photo of Immelt accompanied his testimonial that software development centers in India were 'lowering GE's cost of operations.' The presentation also included a bullet point on GE's mandated 70/70/70 rules: 70% of your processes should be outsourced; 70% of the outsourced processes should be offshore; 70% of the offshore outsourced processes should be done in India (a year later GE discussed moving '80% to 85%' of GE's outsourced IT work offshore, preferably to even-lower-cost China). Still, Obama says he's 'confident' that 'Jeff's leadership' is what's needed to 'attract the best jobs and businesses to America rather than seeing them spring up overseas.'
Facebook

Submission + - Running for Office? Hand over your passwords! (theglobeandmail.com)

innocent_white_lamb writes: Prospective candidates for the New Democratic Party in the Canadian province of British Columbia are being asked by the party brass to hand over their usernames and passwords for all social media accounts, blogs and everything else that may be posted by them in any private forums on the Internet.

Submission + - Poll: Favourite legacy port

quantumphaze writes: Poll: Favourite legacy port
  1. Parallel port
  2. Serial/RS-232 port
  3. Game port
  4. AT keyboard port
  5. 10BASE2 BNC
  6. 120/240VAC
  7. CowboyNeal's port
Debian

Submission + - Debian derivatives census (debian.org)

An anonymous reader writes: The Debian Project would like to invite representatives of distributions derived from Debian to participate in a census of Debian derivatives. In addition we would like to invite representatives of distributions derived from Debian to join the Debian derivatives front desk. Debian encourages members of derivative distributions to contribute their ideas, patches, bug reports to Debian and to the upstream developers of software included in Debian.
Microsoft

Submission + - How Microsoft plans to market against the iPad (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Even though Microsoft’s public stance, when asked about the impact of Apple’s slate is “iPad? What iPad?”, the Redmondians are preparing the company’s partners for battle in 2011.

Microsoft is making available to its reseller partners marketing collateral to help them defend against the iPad’s encroachment into the enterprise market. I had a chance to check out a PowerPoint dated December 2010 on “Microsoft Commercial Slate PCs” that the company is offering to its partners to help them explain Microsoft’s slate strategy to business users.

The Internet

Submission + - 2/3 of U.S. Internet users lack fast broadband (networkworld.com)

jbrodkin writes: Two-thirds of U.S. Internet connections are slower than 5 Mbps, putting the United States well behind speed leaders South Korea, where penetration of so-called "high broadband connectivity" is double the rate experienced in the United States. The United States places ninth in the world in access to high broadband connectivity, at 34% of users, including 27% of connections reaching 5 Mbps to 10 Mbps and 7% reaching above 10 Mbps, Akamai says in its latest State of the Internet Report. That's an improvement since a year ago, when the United States was in 12th place with only 24% of users accessing fast connections. But the United States is still dwarfed by South Korea, where 72% of Internet connections are greater than 5 Mbps, and Japan, which is at 60%. The numbers illustrate the gap between expectation and reality for U.S. broadband users, which has fueled the creation of a government initiative to improve access. The U.S. government broadband initiative says 100 million Americans lack any broadband access, and that faster Internet access is needed in the medical industry, schools, energy grid and public safety networks.
Java

Submission + - Is Oracle confining Java's future to enterprise? (computerworld.com.au)

angry tapir writes: "Oracle is limiting the development of Java by focusing the future development of the language on enterprise use, to the detriment of a wider, more diverse Java community, according to analysts at Forrester Research. "Sun had a very broad focus for Java, including enterprise middleware but also PCs, mobile devices, and embedded systems. Oracle's focus will be on enterprise middleware first and foremost, because that's where the money is," concluded the report, authored by Forrester analysts Jeffrey Hammond and John Rymer. But... but... what does this mean for Minecraft?."

Submission + - Refusing to show ID and recording TSA is legal (techdirt.com) 1

Cowmonaut writes: TechDirt is reporting that Phillip Mocek has been acquitted by a jury. For those of you who do not know, Mocek refused to show his ID to the TSA to board a flight, as his legal right. The TSA disputed this and charged him with four misdemeanors (disorderly conduct, concealing his identity, refusing to obey a police officer, and criminal trespass) when he persisted and recorded the incident. It's sad that its news when someone stands up to something as basic as the TSA thuggery, and more depressing that its news when its upheld in court.

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