lurker-11 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Speeding Up the Broken Patent System (uspto.gov)

Submitted by

Panaqqa

on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @09:11AM

Panaqqa writes: "If you think too many bad patents are approved now, then just wait until the Patent Prosecution Highway gets going full steam. Yes that's its real name, and under PPH once either the US or the UK patent office determine that at least one claim in an application is patentable, the applicant can request fast tracking at the other office. Other countries may get involved also. Anybody want to guess how long it will take for companies to apply for patents first in the country with the most lenient examiners?"

Submission + - SPAM: How Boston College recovered from security breach

Submitted by alphadogg on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @09:04AM

alphadogg writes: The college's head of IT security explained this week how the school went about recovering from a breach, caused by a hack into a rogue server, that potentially put personal info on 100,000 alumni at risk. Part of the response thinking: "Boston College was founded by Jesuits, and the president of the university is a priest. That leads to a highly ethical culture, and it made processing a lot easier. We confessed to our guilt and asked people's [forgiveness]." [spam URL stripped]

RIAA Trying To Avoid a Jury Trial 183

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @08:02AM from the judges-are-friendlier dept.

Joe Elliot writes "Faced with a jury trial set to begin on October 1, the RIAA has filed a motion for summary adjudication of specific facts: that the RIAA owns the copyrights to the songs in a file-sharing case; that the registration is proper; and that the defendant wasn't authorized to copy or distribute the recordings. If the judge rules in their favor, Ars notes that it may turn into a Novell v SCO situation where the only thing left to be decided are the damages. There are some significant problems with the copyright registrations — they don't match up. 'Thomas argues that since she lacks the financial means to conduct a thorough examination of the ownership history (e.g., track the ownership of "Hysteria" from Mercury to UMG) for the songs she is accused of infringing the copyright to, her only opportunity to determine their true ownership is either via discovery or cross-examination at trial.' Ars also notes that the RIAA's biggest fear is of losing a case. 'A loss at trial would be catastrophic for the RIAA. It would give other defense attorneys a winning template while exposing the weaknesses of the RIAA's arguments. It would also prove costly from a financial standpoint, as the RIAA would have to foot the legal expenses for both itself and the defendant. Most of all, it would set an unwelcomed precedent: over 20,000 lawsuits filed and the RIAA loses the first one to go to a jury.'"

Submission + - House Approves Comprehensive Patent Overhaul (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by

George Demmy

on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @07:40AM

George Demmy writes: "The House yesterday passed the most comprehensive patent reform in half a century, delivering a victory for computer technology and financial services companies and leaving drug companies, small inventors, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office bracing for a bigger fight before the bill hits the Senate floor. The bill, which passed 225 to 175 with strong bipartisan support, is meant to reduce the mounting number of patent infringement cases by changing the ways patents are awarded and challenged."

Submission + - Reusable enzymes for washing machiines (newscientist.com)

Submitted by on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @05:23AM

An anonymous reader writes: Enzymes have long been added to washing powders to improve performance. But although they are catalysts and so can be re-used, in practice, they always get washed away which is rather wasteful. New Scientist is reporting on a Bosch patent in which enzymes are encapsulated in a polymer membrane that is permeable to washing liquids but impermeable to water. This allows them to carry out their job of catalysis without dissolving and so can be used again. Now there's no excuse for the pizza stain on your DEFCON t-shirt.

Submission + - DIY Data recovery. 1

Submitted by

jchillerup

on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @04:55AM

jchillerup writes: "The other day my aunt came up to me, terrified because her hard drive was "not working". I inspected the drive and it was clearly a head crash, and to make matters worse it had been running for quite a while afterwards. I tried a commercial program for Windows, GetDataBack, but it wasn't able to recover anything.

I googled a bit to get tips and tricks on lo-fi data recovery methods and read that if you put the drive in the freezer, your chance of getting data out is hightened, so I did that. After all, nothing *bad* can happen to the drive in the freezer (right?).

I'm considering dd_rescue, but before taking the drive out of the freezer, I figured I'd better "Ask Slashdot". Professional data recovery is beyond the budget, unfortunately."

Submission + - WTC Demolition Theory Collapses

Submitted by

CmdrGravy

on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @04:34AM

CmdrGravy writes: "A engineer from Cambridge University has hammered another nail into the coffin of conspiracy theorists who believe the World Trade Centre collapse could only have been caused by a controlled explosion.

Using a mathematical model Dr Keith Seffen has proved that once it was begun by the, well studied, structural failures caused by the planes impact and subsequent inferno the following collapse and pancaking were inevitable, his models showed that once begun the collapse would take around 9 seconds — only a little longer than a penny dropped from the top floor would take to fall to the ground.

Dr Keith sums up his experiment by saying

"In all senses, the collapse sequence was quite ordinary and natural. The World Trade Centre towers were designed to absorb an aircraft impact, but an accidental one with much less fuel and speed. It is widely acknowledged that the impacts on September 11th were extraordinary, which led to consequences well in excess of the design capacity for the buildings. The original design of both towers must be praised for standing as long as they did, saving more lives than might have been expected.""

Submission + - Reshaping the Architecture of Memory

Submitted by Nrbelex on Monday September 10, 2007 @10:54PM

Nrbelex writes: Stuart S. P. Parkin, an I.B.M. research fellow largely unknown outside a small fraternity of physicists, thinks he is poised to bring about a breakthrough that could increase the amount of data stored on a chip or a hard drive by a factor of a hundred. If he proves successful in his quest, he will create a "universal" computer memory, one that can potentially replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and flash memory chips, and even make a "disk drive on a chip" possible. It could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years, scientists say.

Submission + - Open Source storage: Top picks (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by

StonyandCher

on Monday September 10, 2007 @10:22PM

StonyandCher writes: "Combining "open source" and "storage" in the same sentence used to trigger a sardonic grin, but no longer. The availability of free and open software is as true today for storage as it is for operating systems and applications. Not only is it available, but this article talks about some of the best on offer."

Submission + - Eavesdropping Helpful Against Terrorist Plot (nytimes.com)

Submitted by AcidPenguin9873 on Monday September 10, 2007 @09:56PM

AcidPenguin9873 writes: The New York Times reports that the U.S. government's ability to eavesdrop on personal communications helped break up a terrorist plot in Germany. The intercepted phone calls and emails revealed a connection between the plotters and a breakaway cell of the terrorist group Islamic Jihad Union. What does this mean for the future of privacy in personal communications? From the article:

[McConnell's] remarks also represent part of intensifying effort by Bush administration officials to make permanent a law that is scheduled to expire in about five months. Without the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Mr. McConnell said the nation would lose "50 percent of our ability to track, understand and know about these terrorists, what they're doing to train, what they're doing to recruit and what they're doing to try to get into this country."

Submission + - US Army unmanned aircraft kills two insurgents (manchester.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Nobody on Monday September 10, 2007 @09:10PM

Anonymous Nobody writes: A very vague, spurious account of a US Army armed unmanned air vehicle directly attacking and killing two 'suspected insurgents.' I suppose this is somewhat different than previous lethal attacks against insurgents travelling in vehicles, but the claim that this is "the first time a fully-armed UAV had been launched" seems downright wrong.

Submission + - RIAA trying to avoid trial by jury next month (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Joe Elliot on Monday September 10, 2007 @09:02PM

Joe Elliot writes: Faced with a jury trial set to begin on October 1, the RIAA has filed a motion for summary adjudication of specific facts: that the RIAA owns the copyrights to the songs in a file-sharing case, that the registration is proper, and that the defendant wasn't authorized to copy or distribute the recordings. If the judge rules in their favor, Ars notes that it may turn into a Novell v SCO situation where the only thing left to be decided are the damages. There are some significant problems with the copyright registrations — they don't match up. 'Thomas argues that since she lacks the financial means to conduct a thorough examination of the ownership history (e.g., track the ownership of "Hysteria" from Mercury to UMG) for the songs she is accused of infringing the copyright to, her only opportunity to determine their true ownership is either via discovery or cross-examination at trial.' Ars also notes that the RIAA's biggest fear is that of losing a case. 'A loss at trial would be catastrophic for the RIAA. It would give other defense attorneys a winning template while exposing the weaknesses of the RIAA's arguments. It would also prove costly from a financial standpoint, as the RIAA would have to foot the legal expenses for both itself and the defendant. Most of all, it would set an unwelcomed precedent: over 20,000 lawsuits filed and the RIAA loses the first one to go to a jury.'

Submission + - Air force had early warning of pulsars

Submitted by

mbone

on Monday September 10, 2007 @08:52PM

mbone writes: "It turns out that the US Air Force may have detected Pulsars before Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish. According to a news story in Nature, Charles Schisler of the USAF detected radio pulses from the Crab Nebulae "months before the first scientific observation of a pulsar was published," in 1968 in the same journal. Schisler was bored working in Alaska at a BMEWS radar site, and used the large BMEWS antenna for the observations.

If true, this would have to be added to the list of astronomical phenomena first detected by the military, including radio waves from the Sun (during World War II) and gamma ray bursts (by the Vela satellites). The article also has an interesting list of other pre-discovery observations of pulsars, all of which seem to have been ignored by the observers. Hewish (but not Burnell) was awarded a Nobel prize for the discovery."

de lcaza calls OOXML a "Superb Standard" 615

Posted by kdawson on Monday September 10, 2007 @08:08PM from the say-it-ain't-so-miguel dept.

you-bet-it's-not-out-of-context writes "A blogger on KDE Developer's Journal has found an interesting post by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME and Mono, in a Google group dedicated to the discussion of his blog entries. Six days ago Miguel stated that 'OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with it.' In the same post he says that to avoid patent problems over Silverlight, when using or developing Mono's implementation (known as Moonlight), i's best to 'get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include patent coverage.'"

Submission + - Government Backsliding on Open Source Promises (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by

willdavid

on Monday September 10, 2007 @07:21PM

willdavid writes: "By Tash Shifrin (ComputerWorld UK): Parliamentary battle looms over failure to break proprietary software stranglehold. The Liberal Democrats have hit out at the government's failure to use more open source software, three years after it pledged to avoid 'lock-in' to proprietary systems. The government published a policy document, 'Open Source Software: use within UK government' in 2004, promising to consider open source alongside proprietary products in IT procurements. http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/it-business/services-sourcing/news/index.cfm?newsid=5081"

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