169233
story
Spy Handler writes
"Researchers analyzing bullet fragments from the 1963 Kennedy assassination using new techniques say that the government's 1976 conclusion that the bullets came from only one gun (Oswald's) is wrong. 'Using new guidelines set forth by the National Academy of Sciences for proper bullet analysis, Tobin and his colleagues at Texas A&M re-analyzed the bullet evidence used by the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations, which concluded that only one shooter, Oswald, fired the shots that killed Kennedy in Dallas. The committee's finding was based in part on the research of now-deceased University of California at Irvine chemist Vincent P. Guinn. He used bullet lead analysis to conclude that the five bullet fragments recovered from the Kennedy assassination scene came from just two bullets, which were traced to the same batch of bullets Oswald owned.'"
169303
submission
Cris writes:
An on line community has gathered around helpfindmaddie.wiki-site.com, a site dedicated to join efforts to help find misseed 4 y.o. Madeleine Mccann.
The aim of this 'wikipedia' like is to propose tasks that eventually would be performed by someone able to do it.
The site administrators encourage the use of open source software to accomplish this. For instance, they propose Gimp for image editing of Maddie pictures and Blender for 3D models creation.
Not to forget, also, that the site infrastructure is provided by the well known MediaWiki framework.
Further developments regarding open source contribution in this field are expected soon.
166127
submission
MsManhattan writes:
Microsoft's patent claims will hit start-ups and other small businesses based on the open-source model the hardest, legal experts and open-source advocates say. Even if the company pursues licensing arrangements instead of legal action, as it has indicated it would prefer, "There's no way a small company ... can compete against the patent portfolio of any big company. The very people that Microsoft's trying to collect from are the people least likely to be able to pay them any significant amount of money," says Matt Asay, vice president of business development for open-source developer Alfresco Software Inc. In general, open-source supporters view Microsoft's actions this week as "an attempt to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt and make people hesitant to use open source as an alternative to commercial products" and to mask the lackluster reception for Vista, Office 2007 and other under-performing products. And some have suggested that Microsoft will suffer a backlash effect. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, notes "The same threat ... Microsoft is holding over open-source users' heads could be turned on the software giant, which itself has used open-source or freely available technology to develop its own commercial products. In fact, there is just as much potential patent infringement in Windows than there is in open source."