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Submission + - The NFL wants you to think these things are illegal (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Professional sports have become a minefield of copyright and trademark issues, and no event more than the Super Bowl. Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge has an article debunking some of the things the NFL has convinced people they can't do, even through they're perfectly legal. For example, you've probably heard the line where "descriptions" and "accounts" of the game are prohibited without the NFL's consent. That's all hogwash: "The NFL would be laughed out of court for trying to prevent them from doing so—just because you have a copyright in a work doesn't mean you can prevent people from talking about it. Copyright simply doesn't extend that far." Recording the game and watching it later is just fine, too.

So, will you be paying attention to the game today? Ignoring it? Practicing your cultivated disinterest?
NASA

NASA Looking At Nuclear Thermal Rockets To Explore the Solar System 282

Posted by Soulskill from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.
MarkWhittington writes: Officially, NASA has been charged with sending astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s. Toward that end, according to a story in Universe Today, space agency engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center are looking at an old concept for interplanetary travel, nuclear thermal engines. "...according to the report (cached), an NTP rocket could generate 200 kWt of power using a single kilogram of uranium for a period of 13 years – which works out of to a fuel efficiency rating of about 45 grams per 1000 MW-hr. In addition, a nuclear-powered engine could also provide superior thrust relative to the amount of propellant used." However, some doubts have been expressed whether NASA will be granted the budget to develop such engines.

Comment Re:Create a $140 billion business out of nothing? (Score 1) 458

by dgatwood (#48948897) Attached to: How, and Why, Apple Overtook Microsoft

That is indeed what he said, but I suspect that was just spin.

I'm about 99% sure it wasn't. As evidence, I cite the fact that the head of the iPod team left Apple for Palm and started an OS that was web-based just like iOS was originally going to be. I think it was more that the people Rubinstein left behind clung on to the iPod mentality of a closed architecture that allowed only a handful of developers to write code for it for a very long time before finally giving up.

Comment Re:Create a $140 billion business out of nothing? (Score 1) 458

by dgatwood (#48948869) Attached to: How, and Why, Apple Overtook Microsoft

I think the iPhone was successful before they supported 3rd party apps.

Not particularly. The pre-app-store iOS market coincides precisely with the original iPhone's sales. Apple sold only 6.1 million of them over the course of about a year. The iPhone 3G sold a million in the first three days. And yes, the original iPhone hardware was behind the times, so that contributed to the difference somewhat, but there's little doubt that the App Store is a big part of why iOS is a success.

Want to know how I know this? Palm WebOS. Notice where Palm's top engineering management came from. Yup, you guessed it. Apple. They followed Apple's original plan, and they completely cornered the market... no, wait, that other thing... tanked.

Chromebooks have the advantage of four more years of improvements in web browser technology. With that said, remember that the #1 thing people do with their phones is play games, and that games are pretty high on the list for laptops as well. Without native apps, gaming isn't very practical, which is why the Chromebook is still just a low single-digit percentage of laptop sales, and why a web-only phone would be pretty much DOA even in today's market, with today's technology.
Open Source

Inkscape Version 0.91 Released 134

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
Bryce writes: Four years since the last major Inkscape release, now news is out about version 0.91 of this powerful vector drawing and painting tool. The main reason for the multi-year delay is that they've switched from their old custom rendering engine to using Cairo now, improving their support for open source standards. This release also adds symbol libraries and support for Visio stencils, cross platform WMF and EMF import and export, a native Windows 64-bit build, scads of bug fixes, and much more. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X.

Comment Re:Create a $140 billion business out of nothing? (Score 3, Insightful) 458

by dgatwood (#48948715) Attached to: How, and Why, Apple Overtook Microsoft

It wasn't Apple that killed Nokia; it was Android. Their big niche was cheap feature phones. When Android came along, suddenly, there were cheap smartphones, and nobody wanted cheap feature phones when they could get cheap smartphones. To be fair, Apple had a lot to do with forcing the UI changes in Android that made it popular, but the mere existence of Android in any form would have pretty much cut the legs out from under Nokia.

As for Blackberry, Apple didn't really start killing them until much later, as iPhone hardware wasn't really all that welcome in the business world until after Apple started adding stuff like mobile device management. I always found it odd that they were a hardware manufacturer, given that their hardware was fairly boring, and most of their interesting creations involved software and services. I'd expect them to reinvent themselves as a software and services company fairly handily, and freed from the shackles of having to build their own hardware, I'd expect them to do fairly well.

Ericsson got bought out by Sony, who still builds plenty of phones and other devices. Given Sony's size, I wouldn't count them out just yet. But if somebody does drive them out of the market, it will be Samsung, by undercutting them.
Education

Can Students Have Too Much Tech? 198

Posted by Soulskill from the maybe-4th-graders-don't-need-weaponized-roombas dept.
theodp writes: In a NY Times Op Ed, developmental psychologist Susan Pinker goes against the conventional White House wisdom about the importance of Internet connectivity for schoolchildren and instead argues that students can have too much tech. "More technology in the classroom has long been a policy-making panacea," Pinker writes. "But mounting evidence shows that showering students, especially those from struggling families, with networked devices will not shrink the class divide in education. If anything, it will widen it." Tech can help the progress of children, Pinker acknowledges, but proper use is the rub. As a cautionary tale, Pinker cites a study by Duke economists that tracked the academic progress of nearly one million disadvantaged middle-school students against the dates they were given networked computers. The news was not good. "Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores," the economists wrote, adding that license to surf the Internet was also linked to lower grades in younger children.

Submission + - Nuclear safety push to be softened after U.S. objections (reuters.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: The United States looks set to succeed in watering down a proposal for tougher legal standards aimed at boosting global nuclear safety, according to senior diplomats.

Diplomatic wrangling will come to a head at a 77-nation meeting in Vienna next month that threatens to expose divisions over required safety standards and the cost of meeting them, four years after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Switzerland has put forward a proposal to amend the Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS), arguing stricter standards could help avoid a repeat of Fukushima, where an earthquake and tsunami sparked triple nuclear meltdowns, forced more than 160,000 people to flee nearby towns and contaminated water, food and air.
Graphics

GeForce GTX 980 and 970 Cards From MSI, EVGA, and Zotac Reviewed 66

Posted by Soulskill from the price-vs.-performance-vs.-really-loud-fans dept.
MojoKid writes: In all of its iterations, NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture has proven to be a good performing, power-efficient GPU thus far. At the high-end of the product stack is where some of the most interesting products reside, however. When NVIDIA launches a new high-end GPU, cards based on the company's reference design trickle out first, and then board partners follow up with custom solutions packing unique cooling hardware, higher clocks, and sometimes additional features. With the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980, NVIDIA's board partners were ready with custom solutions very quickly. These three custom GeForce cards, from enthusiast favorites EVGA, MSI, and Zotac represent optimization at the high-end of Maxwell. Two of the cards are GTX 980s: the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G and the Zotac GeForce GTX 980 AMP! Omgea, the third is a GTX 970 from EVGA, their GeForce GTX 970 FTW with ACX 2.0. Besides their crazy long names, all of these cards are custom solutions, that ship overclocked from the manufacturer. In testing, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 was the fastest, single-GPU available. The custom, factory overclocked MSI and Zotac cards cemented that fact. Overall, thanks to a higher default GPU-clock, the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G was the best performing card. EVGA's GeForce GTX 970 FTW was also relatively strong, despite its alleged memory bug. Although, as expected, it couldn't quite catch the higher-end GeForce GTX 980s, but occasionally outpaced the AMD's top-end Radeon R9 290X.
Linux Business

Dell Continues Shipping Fresh Linux Laptops 123

Posted by Soulskill from the permanent-penguin dept.
jones_supa writes: In its latest move, Dell will be bringing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to its top-of-the-line Precision M3800 workstation laptop and the latest model of the Dell XPS 13. Both systems will be running Ubuntu 14.04.1. According to Barton George, Dell's Director of Developer Programs, programmers had been asking for a better, officially-supported Ubuntu developer laptop. This came about from a combination of the efforts of Dell software engineer Jared Dominguez and enthusiastic feedback. Specs of M3800: 15.6" LCD @ 3840x2160, Intel i7 quad core CPU, NVIDIA Quadro GPU, up to 16 GB RAM. The bad news is, as Dominguez explained on his blog, this version of the M3800 doesn't support its built-in Thunderbolt 2 port out of the box. However, thanks to the hardware-enablement stack in Ubuntu, starting with upcoming Ubuntu 14.04.2, you will be able to upgrade your kernel to add some Thunderbolt support.

Submission + - Is there a modern IP Webcam that lets the user control the output? 4

Submitted by Tronster
Tronster writes: Owners of a local shop have a menu that changes daily and wanted an IP webcam to update an image on their web-site. After a frustrating 2 hours of a "Hikvision" refusing to behave, I threw in the towel and looked for a better camera to recommend. The biggest issue today is that the new webcams that come out don't support FTP, they all support sending images/video direct to a "private cloud" (e.g., Simplicam, Dropcam, etc...)

Google has been no help; all the sites are either outdated in terms of ranking or the most recent ones recommend a Foscam. They previously tried one of these and it's image quality was too poor.

While security systems and home automation has been discussed recently, I haven't found any recent discussions on webcams that give a user control of where the content is sent. Does anyone in the Slashdot community have recommendations, reputable sites that are up-to-date in rankings, and/or hacks to have control over some of these newer cameras?

Submission + - Physicists Made a Mobius Strip from Dualing Beams of Light

Submitted by rossgneumann
rossgneumann writes: A group of physicists has successfully manipulated beams of laser light into an optical mobius strip. The shape, a classic mindfuck all but nonexistent in nature, has never before been seen in such an immaterial form. Making a simple mobius strip from a strip of paper is as easy as the result is vexing. Twist once and tape the thing end to end. Ta da: a structure with just one side and one edge. Its single boundary is a closed circle; that is, to get from one "side" of the strip to the other, just follow an edge, which will eventually reveal itself to be the same edge as every other edge found on the mobius strip. Fun.

Comment Re:How (Score 1) 277

by Solandri (#48947741) Attached to: Indian Woman Sues Uber In the US Over Alleged New Delhi Taxi Rape

if you ever are the victim of a newsworthy accident/ crime, you will get cold called by a number of lawyers, who want to represent you pro bono

because such cases gild their CV, get their name out there. free advertising

They represent you pro bono because they think you have a good chance of winning, and standard lawyer's fee is 33% of any award or settlement. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. The dozen or so lawyers in the $200 billion tobacco company master settlement became instant billionaires.

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