quizzicus - Slashdot User

Submission + - Hans Reiser Trial Update (wired.com)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @09:34PM

eldavojohn writes: "The Hans Reiser trial ended its second day today and the developments have been interesting. The prosecutor is alleging that Reiser convinced his son to help cover up Hans murdering Tina. Some of the most suspicious evidence against Hans arose at the very end of the day: "Hora ended the day's session by telling jurors that the defendant's small Honda Civic went missing for two weeks, until authorities discovered it after a lengthy manhunt two weeks after Nina Reiser vanished. "When they looked inside the car, it's missing the front passenger seat," Hora said. "It's gone. It's not there." In an impromptu news conference outside court, defense attorney DuBois said Reiser had removed the seat because his client was in financial straits and was living in the 1988 vehicle." Hopefully the real murderer of Nina can be found and convicted."

Submission + - Subliminal Advertising Being Used on Australian TV (abc.net.au)

Submitted by

Ben de Luca

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @08:55PM

Ben de Luca writes: "Channel 10 one of the 3 largest free to air commercial broadcasters has been using subliminal advertising through out its programing, mediawatch (http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2082405.htm) has a transcript of their program describing the advertising here. Subliminal advertising is illegal on Australian TV, but it seems likely that there will be few complaints due to its subliminal nature."

Submission + - Seagate's 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Drive Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by

MojoKid

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @08:47PM

MojoKid writes: "Seagate was surprisingly late to join the small, but elite club of storage manufacturers shipping one terabyte (1TB) class hard drives. First out of the gate was Hitachi, who made it to market several months beforehand with a high-density five-platter 1TB hard disk design. While Hitachi's performance, thermals, and acoustics have all been tested to be fairly solid, many high-end buyers have been waiting for other manufacturers, namely Western Digital and Seagate, to get into the mix as well. This review shows that, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 is one of the most advanced consumer level hard disks on the market. The drive showcases second generation perpendicular recording, 32 MB of cache, excellent multi-tasking performance, very light power consumption and noise production, and let's not forget the massive 1 TB amount of storage space."

Submission + - Did 'crowdsourcing' impede Fossett search?

Submitted by

netbuzz

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @07:33PM

netbuzz writes: "The much-publicized participation of 50,000 amateur searchers using Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" project may have been more than futile, it may actually have gotten in the way of professionals trying to find Steve Fossett's airplane, according to an officer in the civil air patrol. "In hindsight, I wish (they) hadn't been there," she says at the very bottom of a Wired story that otherwise focuses on the feelings of the virtual searchers that they may have been wasting their time. Believers in the wisdom of crowds sometimes forget that even the best-intentioned of them can be unruly.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/21640"

Submission + - FTC Announces Crackdown on Do Not Call Violators (techluver.com)

Submitted by

Tech.Luver

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @07:14PM

Tech.Luver writes: "The Federal Trade Commission today announced a law enforcement crackdown on companies and individuals accused of violating the requirements of the National Do Not Call (DNC) Registry, resulting in six settlements collectively imposing nearly $7.7 million in civil penalties, along with an additional complaint that will be filed in federal district court. The actions, brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on the FTC's behalf, are against companies ranging from adjustable bed seller Craftmatic Industries, Inc. (Craftmatic) to alarm-monitoring provider ADT Security Services (ADT) and lender Ameriquest Mortgage Company (Ameriquest), and bring to 34 the number of cases filed by the FTC to enforce the DNC Rule, which was implemented in 2003. To date, more consumers have put more than 145 million numbers on the Registry, indicating they do not want to receive calls from telemarketers at home. ( http://techluver.com/2007/11/07/ftc-announces-law-enforcement-crackdown-on-do-not-call-violators/ )"

Submission + - Google to launch free Psychonauts with ads (gigaom.com)

Submitted by

Wagner James Au

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @06:33PM

Wagner James Au writes: "Om Malik reports that "Google's (GOOG) long-rumored, game-focused advertising initiative is going to come to life later this month, according to sources familiar with the Mountain View, Calif-based company's plans... The second step in Google's game-focused advertising strategy will take place in December, when the company will, I'm told, will offer an ad-supported version of the PC game Psychonauts. The "gamer's game" from veteran adventure game designer Tim Schaefer and co-written by Erik "Old Man Murray" Wolpaw is now "out of print" and can only be downloaded via Valve's Steam network."

Submission + - Facebook is censoring Ron Paul

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @06:24PM

An anonymous reader writes: It appears that Facebook is censoring searches for "Ron Paul". Searches for presidential candidate "Ron Paul" in Facebook Groups yield zero results. The reason isn't because there aren't any Ron Paul groups — a search for "Paul" shows hundreds. For some reason, the search is blocked. Other candidate show up just fine. More than 500 groups show up for each of John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and others. TechCrunch has the story.

Submission + - Expansion of Fair Use is Key to Copyright Reform

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @02:10PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Gigi Sohn, President of Public Knowledge, presented a six-step program for reforming outdated US copyright laws in a speech at the New Media conference at Boston University expressing no patience with the "disconnect between the law and the technology" of media production and distribution. Sohn puts Fair Use at the top of the list for changes that will help return balance to copyright laws that have limited innovation, scholarship, creativity and free speech. In addition to the four-part legal test for fair use currently on the books, Sohn recommends that Congress add incidental, transformative and non-commercial personal uses to the list of fair uses enumerated in copyright law and expressly provide that making a digital copy for the purpose of indexing searches is not an infringement. In additional to Fair Use reform, Sohn advocates protecting a manufacturer of a technology from liability for the infringing activity of others if the technology has substantial non-infringing uses, punishing a copyright holder who "knowingly or recklessly" sends out false takedown notices, promoting fair and accessible licensing of copyrighted works, limiting damages for the use of orphan works, and requiring copyright holders to provide notice of any limitations on users' ability to make fair or lawful uses of their products."

Drug Testing Entire Cities at Once 562

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @08:59PM from the be-careful-where-you-go dept.

Ellis D. Tripp writes "Researchers have developed a technique for determining what illicit drugs people might be consuming in a given area, by testing a sample from the local sewage treatment plant. As little as a teaspoonful of untreated wastewater can reveal drug use patterns in a given community. Obviously, any drugs found can't be tied to any specific user, but how much longer until the drug warriors want to deploy automatic sampling units farther upstream of the sewage treatment plant?" From the article: "one fairly affluent community scored low for illicit drugs except for cocaine. Cocaine and ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and drop on weekdays, she said, while methamphetamine and prescription drugs were steady throughout the week."

Submission + - How to silence free speech silently (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by

quizzicus

on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @08:56PM

quizzicus writes: "The Washington Post writes today about a sensitive White House document detailing how to screen for, silence, and remove protesters who show up at the President's public appearances. Obtained by an ACLU subpoena in the Rank v. Jenkins case, the Presidential Advance Manual (pdf) lays out strategies such as searching audience members at the door for hidden protest material, strategically placing "rally squads" throughout the crowd to intercept and shout down hecklers, and forcefully removing dissenters who cannot be squelched. The manual advises, however, that staff should "decide if the solution would cause more negative publicity than if the demonstrators were simply left alone.""

Submission + - 1UP Goes Hands-on With Spore

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @08:27PM

An anonymous reader writes: At the Leipzig Games Convention 1UP was able to get its hands on Spore for the very first time and delivered some great impressions. The game is apparently entirely finished and EA is using the rest of the time before its release to polish it. "Almost immediately I realize just how overwhelming this can be. Why? Because I have to be willing to concede that experimentation is simply part of the game... Unlike, say, a Nintendo Mii, the choices I make aren't merely cosmetic — they ultimately greatly affect my gameplay...I'm facing creatures I'm not ready to experience quite yet and I need to back off. But it's then that it occurs to me: I'm interacting with creatures that other people have created (obviously better than I have)...I've experienced so much — I've gotten such a great taste for the game — and yet I realize I haven't even scratched its surface."

Submission + - Could black holes be portals to other universes?

Submitted by

David Shiga

on Friday April 27, 2007 @04:50PM

David Shiga writes: "Astronomers have identified many objects out there that they think are black holes. But could they be portals to other universes called wormholes, instead? According to a new study by a pair of physicists, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. They have discovered that wormholes with the right shape would look identical to black holes from the outside. But while a trip into a black hole would mean certain death, a wormhole might spit you out into a parallel universe with its own stars and planets. Exotic effects from quantum physics might produce wormholes naturally from collapsing stars, one of the physicist says, and they might even be produced in future particle accelerator experiments."

Submission + - The distributed search for Jim Grey

Submitted by on Saturday February 03, 2007 @01:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: The search continues for Jim Grey, with a collaboration between Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and NASA. A combination of sattelite, radar, and aerial footage has been collected over the past several days, and volunteers have been asked to sift through this data SETI@Home style using first Google Earth, then Amazon's Mechanical Turk — looking for anything that looks like Grey's boat. It pays to have good connections, but more importantly I believe this could lay the groundwork for making such innovative search efforts generally available. This is an application of distributed computing/thinking that could really save some lives.

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