Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Judge: IP Address Not a Person And Can't Identify a BitTorrent Pirate

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Florida District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro has dismissed a lawsuit brought by Malibu Media against an alleged BitTorrent pirate. Though Malibu Media explained how they geolocated the download site and verified that the IP address was residential rather than a public wifi hotspot, the judge reasoned that the 'Plaintiff has not shown how this geolocation software can establish the identity of the Defendant....Even if this IP address is located within a residence, the geolocation software cannot identify who has access to that residence’s computer and who would actually be using it to infringe Plaintiff’s copyright.' Judge Ungaro's ruling is not the first of its kind, but it could signal a growing legal trend whereby copyright lawsuits can no longer just hinge on the acquisition of an IP address.

Submission + - More on the Disposable Tech Worker (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by Jim_Austin
Jim_Austin writes: At a press conference this week, in response to a question by a Science Careers reporter, Scott Corley, the Executive Director of immigration-reform group Compete America, argued that retraining workers doesn't make sense for IT companies. For the company, he argued, H-1B guest workers are a much better choice. "It's not easy to retrain people," Corley said. "The further you get away from your education the less knowledge you have of the new technologies, and technology is always moving forward."

Submission + - Spacecraft Returns Seven Particles From Birth of the Solar System (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: After a massive, years-long search, researchers have recovered seven interstellar dust particles returned to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft. The whole sample weighs just a few trillionths of a gram, but it’s the first time scientists have laid their hands on primordial material unaltered by the violent birth of the solar system.

Once the sample panel was back on Earth, the problem quickly became finding any collected particles embedded in the aerogel. Out of desperation, Stardust team members called on 30,714 members of the general public. The “dusters” of the Stardust@home project volunteered to examine microscopic images taken down through the aerogel. They used the world’s best pattern-recognition system—the human eye and brain—to pick out the telltale tracks left by speeding particles.

Submission + - The FBI Accidentally Told Us It Had Three Drones As of 2010 (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: It’s been four and a half months since a federal judge ordered the FBI to release thousands of documents on the agency’s use of drones. At 800 pages released so far, the Bureau has done its damnedest to scrub out particulars about its unmanned inventory, past and present.

But even FBI redaction artists slip up and accidentally divulge some hard figures once in awhile.

After months of anticipation, we finally know approximately how many drones the FBI had. In 2010.

In a December 2010 submission to the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI asserted that its three drones [“UAS,” or unmanned aerial system, in the above] were safe to fly in domestic skies. In an otherwise heavily redacted document, this one number escaped the censors’ gaze.

Submission + - Second Bitcoin 'bank' is Wiped Out

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Joining MtGox, Flexcoin today announce they have had their vault wiped out, some 896 BTC (about $615,000) by hackers. "On March 2nd 2014 Flexcoin was attacked and robbed of all coins in the hot wallet. The attacker made off with 896 BTC, dividing them into these two addresses: 1NDkevapt4SWYFEmquCDBSf7DLMTNVggdu 1QFcC5JitGwpFKqRDd9QNH3eGN56dCNgy6 As Flexcoin does not have the resources, assets, or otherwise to come back from this loss, we are closing our doors immediately".

Submission + - A New State of Matter Has Been Discovered (gizmocrazed.com)

Submitted by Diggester
Diggester writes: The days when solid, liquid and gas were the only three states of matter were over when newer states such as plasma and superficial fluid were discovered. It seems like science students will be updating their course notes in the near future, thanks to the discovery of a yet another state of matter. Say hello to Dropleton which comes across as a new sort of puny particle that may possess the postulates of the liquid state of matter.

Submission + - Sulfur Polymers Could Enable Long-Lasting, High-Capacity Batteries (acs.org)

Submitted by MTorrice
MTorrice writes: Lithium-sulfur batteries promise to store four to five times as much energy as today’s best lithium-ion batteries. But their short lifetimes have stood in the way of their commercialization. Now researchers demonstrate that a sulfur-based polymer could be the solution for lightweight, inexpensive batteries that store large amounts of energy. Battery electrodes made from the material have one of the highest energy-storage capacities ever reported

Submission + - Rolls Royce said to be developing drone cargo ships

Submitted by kc123
kc123 writes: From Bloomberg: Rolls-Royce’s Blue Ocean development team has set up a virtual-reality prototype at its office in Alesund, Norway, that simulates 360-degree views from a vessel’s bridge. Eventually, the London-based manufacturer of engines and turbines says, captains on dry land will use similar control centers to command hundreds of crewless ships. Drone ships would be safer, cheaper and less polluting for the $375 billion shipping industry that carries 90 percent of world trade, Rolls-Royce says.

Submission + - Converting cars to ammonia-based fuel (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A high school student makes a great case for moving fossil-fuel based cars to an ammonia-based fuel--a mix anywhere from 10% ammonia to 80% ammonia. This is a pretty compelling article that examines not only ammonia as a fuel, but how it can be produced in such a way that the carbon dioxide emissions coming out of your car would be close to zero. The technology already exists!

Submission + - Obama to Propose $1 Billion Climate Resilience Fund (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: President Barack Obama yesterday used a visit to drought parched California to announce that his 2015 budget request to Congress, to be released in early March, will include a proposal to create a $1 billion “Climate Resilience Fund.” It is not yet clear exactly how much of the proposed funding would be entirely new money, how much would be shifted from cancelled programs, and how much is already earmarked for programs that would be folded into the new fund. White House officials have also been vague about which agencies, programs and activities would be included in the fund. Some hints, however, can be gleaned from a report released this past March by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). In a letter to Obama, PCAST suggested that the Department of Homeland Security might be put in charge of developing domestic “climate preparedness plans,” while the Department of Defense could play “the lead role for involving events overseas that affect our national security.”

Submission + - What Would You Do With the World's Most Powerful Laser? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: This week, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced an important milestone on the road to achieving ignition, which could lead to producing controlled fusion reactions here on Earth. But NIF isn’t just about harnessing the energy of the stars—it’s about learning how stars produce their energy in the first place. In fact, pushing matter to extreme pressures and temperatures lets scientists explore all sorts of unanswered questions. At the annual meeting of AAAS in Chicago four physicists sat down with Science Magazine to discuss NIF’s basic science potential and what experiments they would do if they had the laser all to themselves.

Submission + - House Threatens Legal Basis of NSA Surveillance (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: The author of the Patriot Act has warned that the legal justification for the NSA’s wholesale domestic surveillance program will disappear next summer if the White House doesn’t restrict the way the NSA uses its power. Section 215 of the Patriot Act will expire during the summer of 2015 and will not be renewed unless the White House changes the shocking scale of the surveillance programs for which the National Security Administration (NSA) uses the authorization, according to James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), an original author of the Patriot Act and its two reauthorizations, stated Washington insider-news source The Hill. “Unless Section 215 gets fixed, you, Mr. Cole, and the intelligence community will get absolutely nothing, because I am confident there are not the votes in this Congress to reauthorize it,” Sensenbrenner warned Deputy Attorney General James Cole during the Feb. 4 hearing. Provisions of Section 215, which allows the NSA to collect metadata about phone calls made within the U.S., give the government a “very useful tool” to track connections among Americans that might be relevant to counterterrorism investigations, Cole told the House Judiciary Committee. The scale of the surveillance and lengths to which the NSA has pushed its limits was a “shock” according to Sensenbrenner, who also wrote the USA Freedom Act, a bill to restrict the scope of both Section 215 and the NSA programs, which has attracted 130 co-sponsors. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has sponsored a similar bill in the Senate.

Slashdot Top Deals

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -- Niels Bohr

Close