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Submission + - Ancestry.com sold (usatoday.com)

Submitted by LeadSongDog
LeadSongDog writes: The staggering family history collection of ten billion records at Ancestry.com has just been sold to Permira Funds (a European private equity firm), along with subscriber records for two million users.

If anyone is still using their mother's maiden name as a security question, it's wake-up time.
Politics

Submission + - Living Under Drones (livingunderdrones.org)

Submitted by umarkalim
umarkalim writes: In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is false. Following nine months of intensive research—including two investigations in Pakistan, more than 130 interviews with victims, witnesses, and experts, and review of thousands of pages of documentation and media reporting—this report presents evidence of the damaging and counterproductive effects of current US drone strike policies. ... This report is the result of nine months of research by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School (Stanford Clinic) and the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law (NYU Clinic).

Submission + - Defending a Patent Troll - can anyone help or recommend an affordable attorney? (pandodaily.com) 1

Submitted by trollfood
trollfood writes: The troll suit against my web site got itself "consolidated" with PayPal, Amazon, Adobe, and a half dozen other megacorporations. I'm one guy, and I "just get by" from my site, and the tiny part of it they sued me for is quite obviously not infringing, and earns only a few coffee's worth of daily income anyhow.

Can anyone recommend an *affordable* attorney?

Are you, or anyone you know, interested in getting into patent defence in the Eastern District of Texas? If you're able to do me a sweet deal on fees, you will get to join the 48-attorney (no joke) joint defence group, and enjoy full uncensored first-hand inside access to an enormous troll suit: you'll learn how to attack patents, how to attack trolls, and the intimate details of how the worlds most famous patent court works... all while winning my case for me (*should* be easy, since noninfringement is quite obvious).

Surely that experience is worth something to someone? It would look good on a CV probably? If nothing else, saving one good guy (me) from being eaten by trolls is (IMHO!) a fight to be proud of taking on :-)

All help/suggestions gratefully received!
Open Source

Submission + - HoloDome - Open Source Volumetric Display (pozible.com)

Submitted by
JuzzFunky
JuzzFunky writes: "Introducing the HoloDome, the worlds first consumer Swept Surface Volumetric Display. Over the last four years a friend and I have designed, built and successfully tested a prototype of the display and are now ready to launch a Pozible project to raise the funds necessary to bring this exciting new technology into the living room. We realise that the success of this project depends on the content it can display. Because of this, we are launching an Open Source community where we will detail the technical workings of the device, how to build one and explain how to program it. Technically minded people who enjoy the challenge of building and designing hardware will have enough information, and our full support if they wish to make their own device, but others may wish to purchase a fully working version, ready to plug in and enjoy. More information can be found here OpenVolumetric.org"

Comment Re:safe deposit box (Score 1) 326

by UnNickname (#40951537) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best On-Site Backup Plan?
Definitely have something offsite. I've known more than one person who've had their homes burglarized and their backup hard drives were also stolen. I can't imagine the loss of everything I own digitally. I've also known someone who had a huge expensive looking safe that wasn't bolted down stolen and opened.
Hardware

Submission + - Speed of Sound Is Too Slow for the Olympics 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "For decades sports-event organizers have placed speakers behind athletes (swimmers, runners, speed skaters, etc.) to convey the sound of an actual pistol but they found that even though the noise came through the speakers all at once, athletes continued to wait for the "real" sound, ignoring the sounds that came through the speakers ever-so-slightly slowing down the farthest athlete from the gun. Now Rebecca Rosen writes that when the Olympic runners take to their positions on the track later this week, they'll crouch on the ground, ears pricked, and wait for the starting beep played by a "pistol" that's not a pistol at all, but something more akin to an electronic instrument with only one key. The pistol itself is silent. A conversation with sprinter Michael Johnson at the Sydney Olympics caused Peter Hürzeler of OMEGA Timing to realize that even with speakers, the speed of sound was still slowing down the farthest athletes. Johnson's reaction time, Hurzeler said, "was 440 thousandths of a second. Normally athletes leave between 130 and 140 thousandths of a second. ... I asked him, why did you have such a bad starting time?" Turned out, Johnson was in the ninth position, and the sound of the gun was reaching him too slowly. In addition after a four year developmental process, a new false start detection system is being introduced this year that will abandon movement in exchange for “measurement” of pound-force against the back block to determine sprinters reaction times. “We are measuring the time between the starting gun and when the athlete is moving because to leave the starting block they had to push against and this power is very high" says Hurzeler. “We did a test last year with Asafa Powell and he was pushing 240 kilograms (529 lbs.) [so] as soon as he gives the time to push against the starting block, it means he will like to leave and we are measuring this in thousandths of seconds and if somebody is leaving before one hundredth thousandth of second, it’s automatically a recall, it’s a false start.” In track every event is timed to 1/10,000th of a second, and Omega takes 2,000 pictures per second from right before the start of a race to its finish, as backup. New touch pads, starting blocks, and timers have also been introduced for swimming."
Science

Submission + - M-Carbon: 50yro mystery solved (yale.edu) 1

Submitted by slew
slew writes: Unlike its more famous carbon cousins: diamonds and fullerenes, you've probably never heard of M-Carbon, but this form of compressed graphite which is as hard as diamonds has baffled researcher for half a century. Over the past few years, many theoretical computations have suggested at least a dozen different crystal structures for this phase of carbon, but new experiments showed that only one crystal structure fits the data: M-carbon.
Science

Submission + - Scientists Sequence Entire Genome of 91 Sperm From One Man, Vast DNA Differences (medicaldaily.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have sequenced the entire genomes of 91 human sperm from a 40-year-old man and revealed valuable insights into the infinite genetic variation that naturally occurs in a single individual.

Researchers at Stanford University said that the study, published in the journal Cell, is the first to completely map out the whole-genome of a human gamete, cells passed by parent to offspring that determine a child's physical characteristics.

The latest findings confirmed what scientists already know, that every sperm is different because of the way the DNA passed down from a parent is shuffled in the process known as recombination.
United Kingdom

Submission + - Tom Watson calls for inquiry into Murdoch/NDS payments to police (afr.com)

Submitted by
Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: "The AFR is reporting that Tom Watson, the British MP who has been investigating the News International phone hacking scandal, is calling for an investigation into an NDS police informants fund which paid a total of £15,023 to British police.

The bulk of the £15,023 was paid in cash. In internal NDS emails, Ray Adams, a former commander in the Metropolitan Police who was European chief of NDS Operational Security, described how he made sure there was no paper trail for payments and boasted of being able to obtain confidential information about airport arrivals and to track rental cars in the UK.

Any inquiry would complicate things for News Corp in the US."
Debian

Submission + - Debian Wheezy GNU/kFreeBSD: Slower Than Linux (phoronix.com)

Submitted by alancronin
alancronin writes: With Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" set to be frozen soon, I took the opportunity to run some new benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Debian OS variant using the FreeBSD kernel rather than Linux, to compare it to Debian GNU/Linux as well as Ubuntu Linux and PC-BSD/FreeBSD 9.0.

Submission + - MIT Researchs Ampilfy Invisible Detail in Video (mit.edu) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: MIT researchers have invented an algorithm which is able to amplify motion in video that is invisible to the naked eye — such as the motion of blood pulsing through a person's face, or the breathing of an infant. The algorithm — which was invented almost by accident — could find applications in safety, medicine, surveillance, and other areas.

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