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Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

+ - 116 France ends Minitel service->

Submitted by pays-vert
pays-vert writes "On Saturday, France will turn off the Minitel service. A forerunner of the world wide web, Minitel provided news, online banking and, yes, porn via a chic plug'n'play terminal. The service remained massively popular for a while even after the rise of the Internet, but ultimately has lost out to technological innovation."
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Open Source

+ - 143 Suggestions for stencil software for model building?->

Submitted by Vidorin
Vidorin writes "Hello everyone, I am asking the community here if anyone can point me in the right direction of a good hopefully open source/free software for stencil creation. I create models and props as a hobby and I'd like to do some custom decal work. Such as if I was to make a model of the NCC-1701 U.S.S. Enterprise a stencil would come in handy. Hopefully I can find a software that allows me to manipulate such things and translates the measurements such as 3.5 inches for a model and that can be translated to the program so it prints out correctly. Thank you in advance."
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AI

+ - 129 Meet Siri's Little Sister, Lola->

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes "Siri, the virtual personal assistant baked into the iPhone 4S, isn't actually an Apple creation — it was invented at the contract R&D outfit SRI International and spun out as a startup, which Apple purchased in 2010. Now SRI, working with Spanish banking giant BBVA, has come up with a speech-driven personal assistant that's far smarter than Siri, at least when it comes to questions about banking. Lola, which BBVA began testing on its website this week, connects to the bank's back end and can answer customers' spoken or typed questions about things like account balances and loan payment due dates. The two key innovations behind Lola, according to SRI, are deep integration with the bank's existing self-service infrastructure, as well as a new system for notating the user's intent (e.g., scheduling a mortgage payment) and intelligently maintaining (or abandoning) that context as Lola deals with successive questions. Like Siri, Lola is descended from a defense AI project called CALO, and could be the first in a series of 'vertical' personal assistants tailored for different industries. 'We felt we had to go beyond Siri because here we want a system that can really be an assistant, meaning software that knows us, knows what to do, knows how to do it, and then does it,' says Bill Mark, SRI's vice president of information and computer sciences."
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+ - 190 Comcast pays $800,000 to U.S. for hiding stand-alone broadband->

Submitted by
vu1986
vu1986 writes ""The Federal Communications Commission has settled with Comcast over charges that the cable company made it hard for consumers to find stand-alone broadband packages that don’t cost an arm and leg. As part of the settlement Comcast paid the U.S. Treasury $800,000 and the FCC extended the length of time Comcast had to provide such a service." http://gigaom.com/2012/06/27/comcast-pays-800000-to-u-s-for-hiding-stand-alone-broadband/"
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Idle

+ - 163 Dahea Sun's Cabbage-Dyed Dresses Change Color to Indicate Rain's pH ->

Submitted by fangmcgee
fangmcgee writes "Dahea Sun's silk dresses are dyed with anthocyanins (commonly found in red cabbage, eggplants, and blueberries) that change color in response to changes in environmental acidity. She also designed a smartphone app that allows people to scan and upload any color changes to a cloud-based database. Coupled with GPS technology, the app is able to map the crowd-sourced data to illustrate air-quality trends on a global scale."
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IT

+ - 148 Senator Grassley Pushes for Tougher H-1B Enforcement->

Submitted by mk1004
mk1004 writes "Computerworld says that the industry lobbying group TechNet is calling on Congress to eliminate the per-country cap on H-1B workers. Last year a bill was passed in the house, 389-to-15, to remove the cap. Grassley put a hold on the bill in the Senate, indicating that he would be willing to lift the cap if companies faced an annual audit. The US currently allows 140K H-1B workers, but allows only 7% of those to come from any one country."
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Science

+ - 141 Rabbits kept alive by oxygen microparticle injections-> 2

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes "Rabbits with blocked windpipes have been kept alive for up to 15 minutes without a single breath, after researchers injected oxygen-filled microparticles into the animals' blood. Oxygenating the blood by bypassing the lungs in this way could save the lives of people with impaired breathing or obstructed airways (abstract).
In the past, doctors have tried to treat low levels of oxygen in the blood, or hypoxaemia, and related conditions such as cyanosis, by injecting free oxygen gas directly into the bloodstream. But oxygen injected in this way can accumulate into larger bubbles and form potentially lethal blockages."
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Education

+ - 147 Ask Slashdot: How to Sync a Local Copy of Wikipedia/Wikibooks? 8

Submitted by jerquiaga
jerquiaga writes "I'm working on a project with a rural school in Africa that has limited bandwidth through satellite. What we'd like to do is be able to setup a local copy of Wikipedia and Wikibooks on a server for them so the kids can use those resources but not cut into their bandwidth to get to it. I can find plenty of info on downloading database dumps and setting those up, but I'm wondering if any Slashdot readers have come up with a good way to sync only the changes that happen after the initial dump (again, to save bandwidth). What say you, Slashdot readers?"
Microsoft

+ - 126 Microsoft Trying To Woo Businesses To Windows 8->

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes "Windows 8 is the most radical rewrite of Microsoft's operating system in decades — and most of the changes are aimed at consumers and new tablet form factors. Meanwhile, corporate IT is deeply suspicious. Over at Microsoft TechEd Europe, the company is gamely trying to explain to enterprises why they should switch, with easy-to-write enterprise apps and the ability to stream server-side x86 apps to Windows RT. Not everyone is convinced."
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Politics

+ - 157 Majority of Americans Think Obama Is Better Suited to Handle an Alien Invasion-> 1

Submitted by
Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes "At last, a public opinion poll that gets the opinions of ordinary Americans on the issues that matter! Apparently, two thirds of Americans polled think that Barrack Obama is better suited to defend against an alien invasion than Mitt Romney, according to a survey from National Geographic Channel, done to tout their upcoming TV series "chasing UFOs".
In follow-up questioning, Americans would rather call on the Hulk (21%) than either Batman (12%) or Spiderman (8%) to step to save the day.
No word on which candidate is most fit to defend America against shambling hordes of undead seeking to destroy civilization in the zombie apocalypse (perhaps that will be brought out in the debates)."
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+ - 162 Sugars in Mummies Survive Thousands of Years->

Submitted by
carmendrahl
carmendrahl writes "The natural carbohydrates that serve to protect human proteins can survive for millenia in the preserved flesh of natural mummies such as Ötzi the Iceman. (These types of mummies differ from Egyptian mummies- in these cases the corpse encounters some extreme conditions that allow it to be preserved). Researchers reported this discovery last month at a mass spectrometry conference. It's a surprising finding- experts expected the sugars to have degraded long ago. The researchers who made the discovery hope to use their technique to learn more about the evolution of blood types, which are dictated by the carbohydrates attached to blood proteins."
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Censorship

+ - 185 Legal Firm Threatens Citizens Advice Bureau->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that RLP, a legal firm that sues shoplifters on behalf of retail groups, has shown its ignorance of the Streisand Effect by attempting to censor The Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and other consumer websites. RLP has accused CAB of harassment and is demanding that they and other consumer websites remove all 'defamatory posts' and publications. This is the latest salvo in a long running battle and although organisations like CAG (Consumer Action Group) have removed some offending posts, CAB and the Legal Beagles website are refusing to remove content and have accused RLP of trying to stifle reporting of adverse court judgements against them."
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Government

+ - 115 Ministry Handling Assange's Asylum Uses Wide Open Video Conf System->

Submitted by
chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes "With Wikileaks founder Julian Assange anxiously awaiting word from the government of Ecuador on his request for political asylum, a security researcher warns that the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is handling the Assange asylum request, is using a video conferencing system that is vulnerable to online snooping.

Ecuador's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) relies on a video conferencing system that is accessible from the public Internet and doesn't require a password to use, according to security researcher Dillon Beresford, who said he discovered the vulnerable conferencing system when searching online."
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Government

+ - 96 US retires famous Red Storm supercomputer->

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes "The supercomputer at Sandia National Lab with a vast and hugely successful history is now history itself. The Sandia-designed and Cray-built supercomputer known as Red Storm was decommissioned recently but it left behind a history that saw it perform all manner of high-profile tasks, from helping calculate the successful missile interception of a defective spy satellite to figuring out how old the glass was in King Tut's tomb."
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Science

+ - 100 Particle Accelerator Sets Record For Hottest Man-Made Temperature: 7.2 Trillion ->

Submitted by
quantr
quantr writes ""It’s hot out there, but not as hot as it could be. Indeed, few things are any match for the recently announced Guinness World Record for hottest temperature ever achieved by humankind: An unfathomably scorching 7.2 trillion degrees fahrenheit (4 trillion degrees celsius), attained by a particle accelerator on Long Island in New York.

That temperature is nearly 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun.""
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Space

+ - 250 Probing an 'Invisible' Exoplanet's Atmosphere->

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes "To study the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system, astronomers have had two choices: pick one that flies across the face of its parent star relative to Earth's perspective (an event known as a transit), or wait for a new generation of more sensitive space telescopes that can directly capture the planet's faint light. Now, there's a third option. Using a cryogenically-cooled infrared detector on a telescope in Chile, astronomers ferreted out beams of light coming directly from Tau Boötis b, a massive planet about 50 light-years from Earth."
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Software

+ - 179 Minnesota Supreme Court rejects DUI challenges based on buggy software->

Submitted by bzzfzz
bzzfzz writes "In a case with parallels to the Diebold Voting Machine fiasco, the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the reliability of the Intoxilyzer 5000EN breath testing machine on a narrow 4-3 vote. Source code analysis during the six-year legal battle revealed a number of bugs that could potentially affect test results. Several thousand DUI cases that were pending the results of this appeal will now proceed.

The ruling is one in a series of DUI-related court victories for police and prosecutors. Other recent cases upheld a conviction of a person with no evidence that the vehicle had been driven and convictions based solely on urine samples that may only show impairment hours before driving.

The Intoxilyzer 5000EN is now considered obsolete, and replacement devices are being rolled out with the last jurisdictions in the state scheduled to retire their 5000ENs by the end of the year."
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+ - 165 Carl Sagan papers donated by 'Family Guy' creator->

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes "Seth MacFarlane once included a gag on his animated TV comedy "Family Guy" about an "edited for rednecks" version of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos," featuring an animated Sagan dubbed over to say that the earth is "hundreds and hundreds" of years old.
Jokes aside, his admiration for Sagan runs deep.
The Library of Congress announced Wednesday that, thanks to MacFarlane's generosity, it has acquired the personal papers of the late scientist and astronomer, who spoke to mass audiences about the mysteries of the universe and the origins of life. While MacFarlane never owned Sagan's papers, he covered the undisclosed costs of donating them to the library."
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I only know what I read in the papers. -- Will Rogers

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