New submitter rnmartinez writes "As the Project Manager for a non-profit looking to implement a tech project, I am running into a few dilemmas, and as a casual Slashdotter I could really use some help. I'll start with a brief explanation of the project. We research issues in Canadian Immigrants, and found that there was a lack of recent, unaggregated information. As we dug further, we found that some data was available, but there was no central repository. Therefore, we are building a web based service to collect this data, with the intent of having it display in Google Maps and then be downloadable as a CSV file that is readable in GIS software such as ESRI Arcsoft, so that data may be visualized." The dilemma: "...It seems that MS SQL offers more functions with regards to geometry built in then MySQL, and my developers (good guys, but MS guys at heart) want me to switch to .net NUKE/MSSQL and ditch the open source stuff." Read on for further details.

SpuriousLogic writes with a preliminary ruling in the ITC case between Apple and Motorola. Quoting eWeek: "Motorola is celebrating an initial triumph over Apple, after a U.S. International Trade Commission administrative law judge issued an initial determination (PDF) finding that Motorola Mobility has not violated any of the three patents listed in an October 2010 lawsuit Apple filed against the Droid maker. ... The determination isn't the final say ... in March, the ruling will be reviewed by a six-member ITC panel that will announce the ultimate ruling. However, according to Zacks Equity Research, it's unusual for the ITC panel, which has the power to block device imports, to contradict a judge's determination."

pigrabbitbear writes with an excerpt from an article at Motherboard.tv about a non-evil use for unmanned aircraft: "Ask anyone in Nome, Alaska right now how they feel about surveillance drones and you'll likely get unequivocally high praise. Had a remotely-piloted surveillance aircraft not been monitoring Bering Sea ice flows over the past week an emergency shipment of 1.3 million gallons of oil may not have reached the iced-in, snow-drifted town as soon as it did. ... The drone, which was launched from Nome's shores by University of Alaska – Fairbanks Geophysical Institute researchers, isn't the sort of eye-in-the-sky most often associated with the U.S.'s various hulking, 40-foot wing-spanning reconnaissance planes ... The Aeryon Scout micro unmanned aerial vehicle resembles a 'smoke detector with wings and legs,' according to the Anchorage Daily News, and is part and parcel of a rapidly expanding fleet of mid- to micro-sized sky robots being flown domestically for all manner of tedious or risky intelligence gathering gigs."

angry tapir writes "China's Internet population passed the half billion mark at the end of 2011 after the country added 28 million new users during the second half of the year. At the end of December, the country had 513 million Internet users, according to a report issued Monday by the China Internet Network Information Center. The number of users accessing the Internet from their mobile phones has also grown, reaching 355 million — more than the entire population of the U.S."

alphadogg writes "Last year's industry-shaking RSA Security breach has resulted in customers' CEOs and CIOs engaging much more closely with the vendor to improve their organizations' security, according to the head of RSA. Discussing the details of the attack that compromised its SecurID tokens has made RSA sought after by companies that want to prevent something similar from happening to them, Executive Chairman Art Coviello said in an interview with Network World. 'If there's a silver lining to the cloud that was over us from April through over the summer it is the fact that we've been engaged with customers at a strategic level as never before,' Coviello says, 'and they want to know in detail what happened to us, how we responded, what tools we used, what was effective and what was not.'"

ananyo writes "The German chemical giant BASF is moving its transgenic plant operations from Europe to the U.S., it says, because of widespread opposition to the technology. The company on 16 January announced that it would move its plant science headquarters from Limburgerhof, Germany to Raleigh, North Carolina and no longer develop plants solely for cultivation in Europe. The division employs 157 people in Limburgerhof, plus another 63 at facilities elsewhere in Europe. BASF said it would relocate 123 of those jobs to the North Carolina facility. In statement, Stefan Marcinowski, a member of BASF's Board of Executive Directors, cited 'a lack of acceptance for this technology in many parts of Europe – from the majority of consumers, farmers and politicians.' The company instead plans to focus on plant biotechnology markets in the Americas and Asia."

An anonymous reader writes "The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by Yale's Stephen L. Carter entitled 'The Iraq War, the Next War, and the Future of the Fat Man.' He provides a retrospective on the War in Iraq and discusses the ethical and legal implications of the War on Terror and 'anticipatory self-defense' in the form of drones and targeted killings going forward. He writes: 'Iraq was war under the beta version of the Bush Doctrine. The newer model is represented by the slaying of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen deemed a terror threat. The Obama Administration has ratcheted the use of remote drone attacks to unprecedented levels — the Bush Doctrine honed to rapier sharpness. The interesting question about the new model is one of ethics more than legality. Let us assume the principal ethical argument pressed in favor of drone warfare — to wit, that the reduction in civilian casualties and destruction of property means that the drone attack comports better than most other methods with the principle of discrimination. If this is so, then we might conclude that a just cause alone is sufficient to justify the attacks. ... But is what we are doing truly self-defense?'"

While at CES, Timothy Lord talked with Pixel Qi Chief Operating Officer John Ryan about how the company, which was originally founded to make screens for the One Laptop Per Child project, is now moving into the commercial market for laptop and tablet screens. Pixel Qi screens are not only inexpensive to make, but are easier to read in sunlight than standard LCDs -- and use less power, too. What they're doing now, says Timothy in the video, is "pretty cool," so check it out.

twdorris writes "With a stoichiometric ratio far lower than that of gasoline (much lower than the price difference), buying the E85 ethanol fuel blend instead of gasoline was already hard to justify. Unless you raced your car on a track where E85 provided a great alternative to race fuel, it really didn't make financial sense. And there are other reasons not to buy E85, too. Like the impact corn-based ethanol is having on food prices or the questionable emissions results (PDF). So, now that the ethanol subsidies provided by the U.S. federal government are scheduled to end this summer, it's going to be even harder to justify E85 (at least in the U.S.). This change will basically make a gallon of E85 cost the same or slightly more than gasoline. With so many things working against it, are the days numbered for readily available E85 at your local gas station? And should it have ever even been made available to begin with? How much did all that government-backed R&D and tax credits cost us for something that was pretty clearly questionable to begin with?"

New submitter Simon321 writes "BBC News has an interesting article about the top predictions for life 100 years from now. The highlights include extensive farming of the ocean, wiring all sorts of computers to our brains, space elevators, and the break-up of the United States. 'There are some indications already that California wants to split off and such pressures tend to build over time. It is hard to see this waiting until the end of the century. Maybe an East Coast cluster will want to break off too. Pressures come from the enormous differences in wealth generation capability, and people not wanting to fund others if they can avoid it.'"

tomhudson writes "AllThingsD is reporting that Facebook has agreed to share users' private data with Politico. Quoting: 'Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users' private status messages and comments. Every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate's name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool.' Yes, they claim it will be anonymized, but we've seen that doesn't really work in real life."

First time accepted submitter twofishy writes "After an undeniably rocky start, which saw high profile resignations from the JCP, including Doug Lea (who remains active in the OpenJDK), and the Apache Software Foundation, Oracle is making significant efforts to re-engage with the wider Java ecosystem, a theme which it talked up at the most recent JavaOne conference. The company is working hard to engage with the Java User Group leaders and Java Champions, membership of the OpenJDK project is growing, and the company is making efforts to reform the Java Community Process to improve transparency. The firm has also published a clear, well-defined Java roadmap toward Java 8 and Java 9."

Hugh Pickens writes "Roni Caryn Rabin says patients have a legal right to their medical records, though access can prove difficult. But what would happen if patients were encouraged not just to see their medical records but to take them home, study them and really own them? A research collaboration called OpenNotes set out to answer this question, publishing the first results of a study on physician and patient attitudes toward shared medical records and demonstrating that for patients, at least, shared medical records seems to be an idea whose time has come. 'That's the great challenge in medicine: getting patients to be more active in their own care,' says Dr. Tom Delbanco, a principal investigator of the study. 'What we're doing is opening the black box and letting you look inside.' Dr. Delbanco and his colleagues recruited more than 100 primary care doctors who were already using electronic health records to volunteer to share their medical notes with patients. Patients were enthusiastic: 90 percent thought they would be more in control of their care if they saw the notes. They weren't worried about being confused and most said seeing the record would help them take better care of themselves helping them better remember their treatment plan, understand it and take their medication. The goal is to engage patients more fully in their own health. 'Knowledge is power,' says Jan Walker, the study's senior author. 'A patient goes to the doctor only once in a while, but in between visits, you're making all kinds of decisions that affect your health every single day.'"

mdsolar writes "The Japanese government is investigating how radioactive concrete ended up in a new apartment complex in the Fukushima Prefecture, housing evacuees from a town near the crippled nuclear plant. The contamination was first discovered when dosimeter readings of children in the city of Nihonmatsu, roughly 40 miles from the reactors at Fuksuhima Dai-ichi, revealed a high school student had been exposed to 1.62 millisieverts in a span of three months, well above the annual 1 millisievert limit the government has established for safety reasons."

theodp writes "Google remembers Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. not only with its Doodles, but also with its patents. 'Right around the Martin Luther King Holiday,' explained Google in its application for a recently-granted patent on Discovery of Short-Term and Emerging Trends in Computer Network Traffic, 'there may be many searches about "Martin Luther King"...Thus, it would be useful to have better methods of detecting short term trends for the purposes of caching search results to making them more readily available to users.' You may call the invention of detecting and caching 'MLK Day Sale' search results patently obvious, but the USPTO calls it U.S. Patent No. 8,082,342. Hey, at least it's arguably better than the patents issued to Microsoft and Google for avoiding walking or driving down Martin Luther King Boulevard!"