Hodejo1 writes "Yesterday was a big day for the Pirate Bay when half of the charges against them were dropped leaving only the lesser charges of assisting making copyrighted material available in place. TorrentFreak is following the English twitter feed of the trial in the wee hours of the night, documenting more missteps by the prosecution. 'The Pirate Bay trial is moving forward rapidly and again the day in court has ended early. On the third day the prosecution presented the amended charges. The defendants all called for acquittal while Carl Lundström's lawyer scored points with the already legendary "King Kong" defense.'"

volcanopele writes "NASA and the European Space Agency announced today that they have selected the Europa/Jupiter System Mission as the next large mission to the outer solar system. For the last year, the Europa mission has been in competition with a proposal to send a mission to Saturn's moon Titan, as reported on Slashdot earlier. The Europa Mission includes two orbiters: one developed by NASA to orbit the icy moon Europa and another developed by ESA to orbit the solar system's largest moon, Ganymede. Both orbiters would spend up to 2.5 years in orbit around Jupiter before settling into orbit around their respective targets, studying Jupiter's satellites, rings, and of course the planet itself. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2020 and arrive at Jupiter in 2025 and 2026."

Xandu writes "Be part of a human Beowulf by helping classify millions of galaxies from the SDSS at the Galaxy Zoo. From their about page, "Those involved are directly contributing to scientific research, while getting an opportunity to view the beautiful and varied galaxies that inhabit our universe. Why do we need people to do this, rather than just using a computer? The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer. Galaxies are complicated objects that vary in appearance enormously, and yet in some ways they can be very similar. We could write a computer program to classify these galaxies, and many researchers have, but so far none have really done a good enough job. We have not been able to make computers 'see past' the complexity, to reliably identify the similarities that appear obvious to our eyes and brain. For now, and probably for some time yet, people do the best job of classifying galaxies."

angry tapir writes "A judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Pennsylvania family against Google after the company took and posted images of the outside of their house in its Maps service. The lawsuit, filed in April 2008, drew attention because it sought to challenge Google's right to take street-level photos for its Maps' Street View feature. Judge Amy Reynolds Hay from the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania granted Google's request for dismissing the lawsuit because 'the plaintiffs have failed to state a claim under any count.'"

Slatterz writes "Going just a bit further than your average unboxing, someone has stripped a new 17-inch Apple Macbook Pro to its component parts revealing one or two little surprises. The biggest of which is that the built-in battery is easily accessible, requiring the tinkerer to remove just the 13 Philips screws which hold the bottom cover in place, and the three tri-wing security screws which hold the battery in place."

An anonymous reader writes "Most people who can't or won't hardwire for broadband have an obvious alternative: Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, there can be architectural anomalies between floors or even between rooms that can interfere with Wi-Fi signals, resulting in spotty, or even dead, signals. So what do you do? Well, you can try using a powerline device. Computerworld reviewer Bill O'Brien tests powerline units from Belkin, D-Link, Linksys, Netgear and Zyxel, and compares their performance to that of his wired and wireless setups."

A 14-year-old Wisconsin girl was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after she refused to stop texting during a high school math class. The girl denied having a phone when confronted by a school safety officer, but a female cop found it after frisking her. The Samsung Cricket was recovered "from the buttocks area" of the teenager, according to the police report. The girl was banned from school property for a week, and is scheduled for an April 20 court appearance for a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge. I applaud the adults involved for their discretion and temperance in this heinous case of texting without permission.

An anonymous reader writes "DragonFly BSD 2.2 is now available. The second release to feature the HAMMER (versioning, among other things) filesystem — now considered production-ready — it includes 'major stability improvements across the board, new drivers, much better pkgsrc support and integration.' Apart from the CD ISO, this release has a DVD ISO with 'a fully operational X environment,' as well as a bootable USB disk-key image."

Barence writes "Researchers at MIT have developed a gadget that knows whether you want to use it as a camera or smartphone, just by the way you're holding it. So, if you hold the device, dubbed the Bar of Soap, out in front of you like a camera it will automatically bring up an LCD viewfinder. However, if you then switch to holding it as you would a mobile phone, it will bring up a touchscreen keypad instead. The Bar of Soap utilises a three-axis accelerometer and 72 surface sensors to track the position of the user's fingers and its position."

Titoxd writes "In a blast from the past, NASA reports that Spirit's solar panels have received a much-needed cleaning courtesy of the Red Planet. The report states, 'The cleaning boosts Spirit's daily energy supply by about 30 watt-hours, to about 240 watt-hours from 210 watt-hours. The rover uses about 180 watt-hours per day for basic survival and communications, so this increase roughly doubles the amount of discretionary power for activities such as driving and using instruments.'"

illectro writes "A study on site availability by monitoring service Pingdom shows that in 2008 Twitter greeted users with the 'Fail Whale' for more than 84 hours, almost twice as much as any other site. At the other end of the scale imeem and Xanga managed less than 4 hours of downtime for 99.95% uptime. Myspace, Facebook and Classmates.com were the only other sites studied which managed to stay up more than 99.9% of the time."

An anonymous reader writes "Anne Loucks built a device which, when her cat steps on it, can click the 'I Agree' button of a EULA. Who knows what the lawyers will make of this sort of madness. Can a cat make a legal agreement? Does it need to be of legal age? She lures the cat onto the device, and the cat steps on it of its own free will. Anyway, folks who hate EULAs now have another tool to make the lawyers freak out."

lamaditx writes "The book Collective Intelligence in Action shows you how to apply theory from Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining to your business. The goal is to create systems which make use of data created by groups of people — i.e. social networks — and abstract from these to gain new or additional information. Some of you might think "just another kind of Web 2.0." This is one application you might think of, but the input and output format do not matter that much. You can use these methods anywhere as long as the amount of data is big enough. You will find some examples related to the latest web technologies to explain methods, but the code is rather generic. Also, you won't find a lot disturbing details about HTML, HTTP and the like." Keep reading for the rest of Adrian's review.

CWmike writes "Microsoft has denied that it makes money when users 'downgrade' Windows Vista to XP, as a lawsuit filed last week alleges. The lawsuit, submitted last week, stems from the $59.25 fee that a California woman was charged in mid-2008 when she bought a Lenovo laptop and downgraded from Vista to XP. In fact, it's computer makers, not Microsoft per se, that charge users the additional fees for downgrading a new PC from Vista to XP at the factory. For example, Dell Inc. adds an extra $20 to the price to downgrade a PC. However, Microsoft may profit from the way it structures downgrade rights."

CWmike writes "Attackers are already exploiting a bug in Internet Explorer 7 that Microsoft patched just last week, security researchers warned today. Although the attacks are currently in 'very, very small numbers,' they may be just the forerunner of a larger campaign, said Trend Micro's Jamz Yaneza. 'I see this as a proof-of-concept,' said Yaneza, who noted that the exploit's payload is extremely straightforward and explained that there has been no attempt to mask it by, say, planting a root kit on the victimized PC at the same time. 'I wouldn't be surprised to see this [exploit] show up in one of those Chinese exploit kits,' he added. The new attack code, which Trend Micro dubbed 'XML_Dloadr.a,' arrives in a spam message as a malicious file masquerading as a Microsoft Word document."