Now.Imperfect writes "In its last day of session, the Supreme Court has definitively clarified the meaning of the Second Amendment. The confusion is whether the Second Amendment allows merely for the existence of a state militia, or the private ownership of guns. This ruling is in response to a case regarding the 32-year-old Washington DC ban on guns." This is one of the most-watched Supreme Court cases in a long time, and Wikipedia's page on the case gives a good overview; the actual text of the decision (PDF) runs to 157 pages, but the holding is summarized in the first three. There are certainly other aspects of the Second Amendment left unaddressed, however, so you can't go straight to the store for a recently made automatic rifle.

snydeq writes "The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear an antitrust case that alleges AT&T squeezed out small ISPs by charging too much for wholesale access to its phone network. The case, originally brought to US District Court in 2003, had been appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But AT&T requested the case be heard by the Supreme Court on the grounds that prior conflicting appeals court decisions in this area should be resolved at that level. As part of the case, the Supreme Court will likely also ascertain whether AT&T could be held to violate antitrust law without setting its retail prices below its own cost."

Specter writes "The GPL version 3 is getting some attention in legal circles, especially as it relates to its interaction with proprietary software and patents. Edmund J. Walsh penned an article for Law.com discussing the GPLv3 and the risks it poses for hardware and software companies."

Roland Piquepaille alerts us to work by US and Israeli researchers who have developed software that can identify the subject of an image characterized using only 256 to 1024 bits of data. The researchers said this "could lead to great advances in the automated identification of online images and, ultimately, provide a basis for computers to see like humans do." As an example, they've picked up about 13 million images from the Web and stored them in a searchable database of just 600 MB, making it possible to search for similar pictures through millions of images in less than a second on a typical PC. The lead researcher, MIT's Antonio Torralba, will be presenting the research next month at a conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

Slashdot reader stoolpigeon wrote about the start of summer blockbuster season, and the latest comic book to make it to the big screen. He says "Iron Man is an entertaining movie, as they go. I never was really into comic books — so I have no knowledge or concerns as it relates to following the original story line. I can't address that. The film has good action and some very humorous moments. The serious side of the film is not its strong suit. It's not horrible, but it really doesn't make too much sense. It was interesting to see how they tried to set up an anti-war message without being critical of the US military. It's really a comic book put to film. Not high art or anything, but a whole lot of fun. The film keeps up a fast pace throughout and never bogs down. Some of the product placements were so blatant that they kind of jarred me out of being into the film. The special effects were phenomenal. It was awesome in that regard. Like any movie, it is not everyone's cup of tea If you do go see it in the theater, and you are a big comic books fan, do not leave until after all the credits have run. And I mean all of them." I gotta get a sitter. Man I'm old.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Janus particles, which take their name from a Roman god with two faces, are microscopic 'two-faced' spheres whose halves are physically or chemically different. Now, U.S. researchers have shown that some of these Janus microparticles can move like stealthy submarines when an alternating electrical field is applied to liquid surrounding them. This could lead to new kinds of self-propelling microsensors or means of targeted drug delivery."

Klatoo55 writes "Various artists are considering lawsuits in order to press for their share of the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars the RIAA has obtained from settlements with services such as Bolt, KaZaA, and Napster. According to TorrentFreak's report on the potential action, there may not even be much left to pay out after monstrous legal fees are taken care of. The comments from the labels all claim that the money is on its way, and is simply taking longer due to difficulties dividing it all up."

sigzero writes "Short but sweet: RMS is stepping down as Emacs Maintainer: 'From: Richard Stallman, Subject: Re: Looking for a new Emacs maintainer or team, Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:57:22 -0500 Stefan and Yidong offered to take over, so I am willing to hand over Emacs development to them."

1shooter writes "news.com reports that Microsoft is withdrawing SP1 for Vista. Nick White, Microsoft product manager blogged 'We've heard a few reports about problems customers may be experiencing as a result of KB937287,' wrote White. 'Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes.'"

Lally Singh sends us to the inside-the-Beltway blog Wonkette for a quick take on a letter Ron Paul sent to his supporters. In this analysis, Dr. Paul has basically called it quits. "Late Friday night, Dr. Congressman Ron Paul posted a letter to his fans basically saying it's over, but he will continue talking about his message, and plus it would be completely embarrassing for him if he also lost his congressional seat."

The Star reports on this inventor breaking all the laws of physics as far as free energy goes. It even provoked interest from "esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Markus Zahn". I would like to know how this seemingly backyard enthusiast's experimental set up has not been tried a million times over the years. It seems so simple and too good to be true. The article has links to a multi-part video demo of the device accelerating an electric motor under load for free!

Ponca City, We Love You writes "When government officials announced last month that a top-secret spy satellite would come falling out of the sky they said little about the satellite itself. They didn't need to. Spotters equipped with little more than a pair of binoculars, a stop watch and star charts, had already uncovered some of the deepest of the government's expensive secrets and shared them on the Internet. Thousands of people form the spotter community. Many look for historical relics of the early space age, working from publicly available orbital information. Still others are drawn to the secretive world of spy satellites, with about a dozen hobbyists doing most of the observing. When a new spy satellite is launched the hobbyists will collaborate on sightings around the world to determine its orbit, and even guess at its function. They often share their information on their web site, satobs.org."

On January 15th we asked you for tech-oriented questions we could send to the various presidential candidates, and you responded like mad. The candidates were the exact opposite: not a single one answered emails we sent to their "media inquiry" links or email addresses. Slashdot has more readers than all but a handful of major daily papers, so that's kind of strange. Maybe they figure our votes aren't worth much or that hardly any of us vote. In any case, the Ron Paul campaign finally responded, due to some string-pulling by a Slashdot reader who knows some of Ron Paul's Texas campaign people. Perhaps other Slashdot readers -- like you (hint hint) -- can pull a few strings with some of the other campaigns and get them to communicate with us. Use this email address, please. But first, you'll probably want to read the Ron Paul campaign's answers to your questions (below).

eldavojohn writes "Doctors Without Borders is reporting that four patents for tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, a key AIDS/HIV drug, have been revoked on grounds of prior art. This is potentially good news for India & Brazil who need this drug to be cheap; if the US action leads to the patent being rejected in these countries, competition could drastically lower prices. But the ruling bad news for Gilead Sciences. The company has vowed to appeal. We discussed this drug before."

An anonymous reader writes "According to numerous posts on Apple's discussion forums (several threads of which have been deleted by Apple), as well as a number of popular video editing blogs, Apple's recent QT 7.4 update does more than just enable iTunes video rentals — it also disables Adobe's professional After Effects video editing software. Attempting to render video files after the update results in a DRM permissions error. Unfortunately, it is not possible to roll back to a previous version of QT without doing a full OSX reinstall. Previous QT updates have also been known to have severe issues with pro video editing apps."