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Submission + - Patent Troll Targets Samsung and RIM with Emoticon Button Patent (justia.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Apparently the Samsung and Apple patent hoedown has received some uninvited guests that wish to troll with the big trolls — all over a built in button for an emoticon. According to Varia Holdings (don't bother googling, you won't find anyone trying to license their patents to you) "by asserting [its European] emoticon patent against Apple, Samsung has recognized the value of the type of invention embodied in [Varia's] ‘731 Patent." And, thusly, Varia feels this provides grounds to sue Samsung and RIM. Techdirt provides commentary on the obviousness of said patent while raking the USPTO examiner over the coals (although curiously gives Samsung a free pass).
Piracy

Submission + - Pirate Bay Financier Won't Face Jail Time (itproportal.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The man responsible for providing a large portion of the funding for torrent search website The Pirate Bay will not be going to jail, instead spending his four month sentence in a Swedish apartment with an electronic tag. While the main three Pirate Bay founders could soon be finding themselves locked up behind bars for several months, the fourth defendant and early days financier of the site, Carl Lundström, has things a little better. Whilst hoping to have his sentence abolished by an appeals court — no doubt somewhat because of the near $7 million fine attached — it was upheld, though now at least spent in swankier accommodation than a jail cell.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What are your top work-from-home tips? 2

Submitted by
ichard
ichard writes: "In a couple of months I'm going to start working from home full-time. I've been thinking about the obvious things like workspace ergonomics, but I'm sure there are more subtle considerations involved in a zero-minute commute. What are other Slashdot readers' experiences and recommendations for working from home?"
AI

Submission + - Computer Competes in Crossword Tournament (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Can a computer program, Matt Ginsberg's Dr.Fill, beat the best human crossword puzzle solvers? Not yet according to the results of last weekend's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in which the computer was foiled by the ingenuity of the human puzzle setters.
But was it a stitch up?
Before the contest, last year's winner Dan Feyer (who went on to win again last weekend) said he expected that the contest would include "a puzzle or two that involved innovative twists or patterns to trip up Dr. Fill."
So were puzzles chosen deliberately to put the computer program at a disadvantage?
Tournament organizer Will Shortz shook his head and smiled when that question was put to him.
Perhaps the lesson is not to let the humans know you are coming..
Chrome

Submission + - Chrome beats IE for first time ever (statcounter.com) 2

Submitted by Kjella
Kjella writes: Sunday 18th of March should go down in browser history. For the first in many years IE is no longer then #1 web browser, with Chrome narrowly beating IE with 32.71% to 32.50% while Firefox on third with 24.81%. As the figures are substantially higher for Chrome and lower for IE on weekends it's only for a day but it's another big milestone. While IE still is in a clear lead in North America and Oceania, it is tied with Firefox in Europe while Chrome now leads in Asia and South America and Firefox leads in Africa.
Graphics

Submission + - Sunside Games To Release Their Radiance Engine As "Free Open-Source Software" (indiegamemag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IGM Reports that Sunside Games will be releasing their mobile game engine as free-open source: "When we questioned them about this impressive engine, they announced this news exclusively to us: 'Radiance will be released as free open-source software in the near future after Crow ships. It won’t be GPL or anything copy-left, it will be under a BSD or MIT style license. People will be able to use it however they’d like. Sunside will continue to invest in the technology for its future titles and anyone that wants will be able to take advantage of our technology without charge for any project commercial or otherwise.' "

Comment Re:Uh, no (Score 1) 897

by chuckfirment (#39344329) Attached to: How To Crash the US Justice System: Demand a Trial

"Legalization leads to less abuse by youths, and less abuse overall, lower rates of addiction, and less overall harm."

Actually, the United States Prohibition against alcohol DID reduce alcohol consumption. Greatly. In fact, after the Prohibition was repealed in 1933, it took another thirty years before alcohol consumption reached pre-Prohibition levels.

Source.

Comment Re:How is this a waste? (Score 1) 408

by chuckfirment (#39343887) Attached to: Google 'Wasting' $16 Billion On Projects Headed Nowhere

Driverless cars have been around for over thirty years - it's not a new concept. The DARPA Grand Challenge is a challenge event where people (typically students) create driverless vehicles and have them navigate a course. The winner receives a very large prize.

In 2007, the driverless car prize was $2,000,000 for first place, $1,000,000 for second, and a 'measly' five hundred thousand dollars for third place.
Cloud

Submission + - Microsoft: RDP Vulnerability Should be Patched Immediately (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Microsoft is urging organizations to apply the sole critical update in this month’s Patch Tuesday release as soon as possible. The critical bulletin – one of six security bulletins issued as part of today’s release – addresses two vulnerabilities in the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

Those IT admins who use RDP to manage their machines over the internet, which is essentially the default in cloud-based installations such as Amazon’s AWS, need to patch as quickly as possible, said Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek.

Besides the RDP bugs, this month’s Patch Tuesday addressed five other vulnerabilities: two denial-of-service bugs and an escalation of privileges issue in Microsoft Windows; a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Expression Design; and an escalation of privileges issue in Microsoft Visual Studio. All those issues are rated ‘important’ with the exception of one of the Windows’ denial-of-service bugs, which is rated ‘moderate.’

Submission + - Smartphones More Accurate, Faster, Cheaper for Disease Surveillance

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Smartphones are showing promise in disease surveillance in the developing world. The Kenya Ministry of Health, along with researchers in Kenya for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that smartphone use was cheaper than traditional paper survey methods to gather disease information, after the initial set-up cost. Survey data collected with smartphones also in this study had fewer errors and were more quickly available for analyses than data collected on paper, according to a study presented today at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta.

Submission + - US, EU, Japan Complain to WTO Over China's Rare Earth Ban (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: China's rare earth monopoly has resulted in a shortage as China blocks their export and the rest of the world resumes their operations. Now in a first ever joint filing from three members of the WTO Japan, the EU and the US are not sitting idly by as China repeatedly ignores the WTO's orders to export rare earths and raw materials at a fair price to other countries. China claims that the embargoes are in place to protect its environment while Obama denounces China as being unfair and not playing by the rules of the WTO. In 2009, the WTO released a report that explained how actions like China's hurts trade partners.

Submission + - Why Do We Love Sad Music?

Submitted by
smickdougle
smickdougle writes: "The jury is surely out regarding why we enjoy sad music. It’s clearly a complicated issue. On the one hand, sad music can give us the same kind of pleasure we derive from other enjoyable music, happy, tender or otherwise. In that sense, we are paradoxically both sad and happy when we listen to sad music. Many aspects of music excite and pleasure us, from the basic rhythm itself to the tension and resolution of melody and harmony. Valorie Salimpoor and a team of researchers published a great article last year in the journal Nature that showed the connection of music to the release of the all-powerful pleasure chemical dopamine in the brain. They argued that, 'intense emotional responses to music involve ancient reward circuitry.'"
Government

Submission + - Hackers Discover Government Employees Watch Porn (theatlanticwire.com)

Submitted by
TheNextCorner
TheNextCorner writes: "A group of hackers calling themselves Th3 Consortium and claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous and LulzSec broke into yet DigitalPlaground.com, the third porn site it's hacked in as many weeks, stealing 72,000 passwords and 40,000 credit card numbers.

But the porn network does not seem to be the real target of the attack: the hackers seem most interested in embarrassing government employees who used their official email addresses (for some reason?) to register for a porn site.

There was no shortage of .mil and .gov emails in their user list."
Space

Submission + - Nomad planets: Stepping stones to interstellar space? (aljazeera.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ian O'Neill, founder of Astroengine and Space Science Producer at Discovery News, suggests in an opinion piece at Al Jazeera English that brown dwarves and nomad planets (planets not orbiting any star) could be a much needed stepping stone on our way to foreign stars.
    Quoting the article: "In February, a fascinating paper was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society detailing calculations on how many "nomad planets" the Milky Way must contain after estimating our galaxy's mass from how much gravity it exerts on surrounding space. Scientists from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) had uncovered something surprising — there are likely many more planets in the Milky Way than stars. In fact, this may not sound surprising at all; NASA's Kepler space telescope has uncovered many multi-planetary systems not too dislike our Solar System — logic dictates that if most stars have planets orbiting them, many will have multiple planets orbiting them. But Louis Strigari and his Kavli team calculated that there must be 100,000 planets for every star in the Milky Way. That's a lot of planets!

But how can this be? Every star can't have tens of thousands of planets ranging from Pluto-sized to Jupiter-sized. This planetary "excess" actually suggests the existence of planets that were born without a star — nomad planets. [...] s discussed in a previous Al Jazeera English article, we need all the help we can get if we are to venture to another star, so these ultracool brown dwarfs could become much-needed "stepping stones" for future starships to refuel on their light-years of journey time. There may be the possibility that these sub-stellar objects may even become more desirable targets for interstellar travellers. After all, there may be dozens of these invisible objects between here and Proxima just waiting to be uncovered by the sophisticated infrared telescopes of the future; they'd certainly make for more accessible scientific curiosities."
Government

Submission + - White House CIO describes "worst day" ever (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: In the first 40 days of President Barack Obama’s administration, the White House email system was down 23% of time, according to the White House CIO Brook Colangelo, the person who also delivered the “first presidential Blackberry.” The White House IT systems inherited by the new administration were in bad shape. Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives, including the one Colangelo delivered to Rahm Emanuel, Obama's then chief of staff and now Mayor of Chicago. There were no redundant email servers.

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