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Businesses

Skype's Legal Situation Clears 49

Posted by Soulskill from the everybody-goes-home-happy dept.
chill writes "Skype's co-founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, have agreed to transfer ownership of the remaining Skype technology that eBay didn't own, paving the way for eBay to complete its sale of a majority stake in Skype to an investor consortium. In exchange, Friis and Zennstrom will join the investor consortium and obtain a 14 percent stake in Skype. The other consortium partners, led by Silver Lake, will own a 56 percent stake in Skype, and eBay will hold on to 30 percent, eBay said Friday."
The Courts

Norwegian Court Rules ISP Doesn't Have To Block The Pirate Bay 154

Posted by Soulskill from the arrr-me-hearties dept.
C4st13v4n14 writes "In a sudden outbreak of uncommon sense yesterday, a Norwegian District Court handed down the decision that Telenor, Norway's largest ISP, will not have to block access to The Pirate Bay. Telenor was sued earlier this year by the IFPI after being threatened and not backing down. 'The court ruled that Telenor is not contributing to any infringements of copyright law when its subscribers use The Pirate Bay, and therefore there is no legal basis for forcing the ISP to block access to the site. ... In making its decision, the court also had to examine the repercussions if it ruled that Telenor and other ISPs had to block access to certain websites.'"
Input Devices

Sony Demos Natal-Like Control System 63

Posted by Soulskill from the wink-to-fire-the-cannon dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It's not just Microsoft investigating full body, markerless motion capture. Sony has enlisted the help of Swiss firm Atracsys to develop similar technology. Sony has openly discussed the technology with New Scientist, and has realistic expectations for the new system — it can capture broad body gestures but not individual fingers. That's just one trade-off needed in order to develop a real-time system that anyone can use, according to a markerless motion-capture expert." It's still in the early stages of development, but the accompanying video shows the use of face-recognition software as well. The demo game has players moving their heads left or right to position their character, and then smiling to "catch" an object.

Submission + - CERN looks to graphics processors, many-core (itpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: Sverre Jarp, the CTO of CERN's openlab, thinks the future is many-core — and thinks graphics processors could have a place in physics experiments. Ahead of the LHC experiment kicking off again, he said: "Right now we’re so happy with the multicore strategy that we jump on every incremental improvement because it's so important to us, so we expect to be equally enthused with the Westmere."

He added: "So we expect that we will go down the road of many-core parallelism, so maybe 16 core, 32 core, who knows. Maybe in certain cases, that means a certain risk of less reliability, now this still shouldn't be red pixels in a blue sky, but it might mean the mean-time between failures not being thousands of hours but maybe being a bit shorter."

Submission + - Sony demos Natal-like control system (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It's not just Microsoft investigating full body, markerless motion capture. Sony has enlisted the help of Swiss firm Atracsys to develop similar technology. Sony has openly discussed the technology with New Scientist, and has realistic expectations for the new system — it can capture broad body gestures but not individual fingers. That's just one trade-off needed in order to develop a real-time system that anyone can use, according to a markerless motion capture expert.

Submission + - Top Ten Geek Recipes - What do nerds cook?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CNET has just posted the Top Ten Geek Recipes, which details the favourite foods of famous geeks, and how to cook it at home. Apparently Mary Shelly loved crumble, Wozniak enoys spaghetti from a Telegraph Hill cafe, and Bill Gates is a regular at Dick's Drive-In on 45th Street, Seattle. The list explains how to make 10 dishes, including "Steve Jobs Ice Cream", "Gates Burgers" and "Hopper Picosecond Steak". From the article "It's easy to forget that every geek has a food-port in the middle of their facial interface zone. But when they weren't redefining the fabric of modern society, many of the world's most famous nerds took time out to snarf a burger. Not so in the case of Steve Jobs, of course — he's far more likely to be nibbling on a couscous flan."

Submission + - WW2 codebreakers tell how they cracked Nazi codes (silicon.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: World war 2 codebreakers reunited at Bletchely Park and told their stories here of how the work they did cracked Nazi war codes. The Colossus codebreaking machine was the first ever computer and was the size of a room. They broke codes of the German Enigma machine.

Submission + - Major Nidal Malik Hasan Kills 12 At Fort Hood Army (blogspot.com)

Submitted by ipirat
ipirat writes: An Army psychiatrist opened fire with two handguns at the Fort Hood Army post on Thursday, killing 12 and wounding 31 others, Army officials said, adding the suspect was shot several times but survived.
Censorship

Submission + - South African Blogger Arested (google.com)

Submitted by nicc777
nicc777 writes: A South African blogger of the blog South Africa Sucks was arrested by the ANC government. The original article is in Afrikaans and translated using the Google translation service. Updates can also be read on the blog. Question is: to what length will governments go to stop bad press? Another question: is the new ANC government really that different from the old SA government (apart from Apartheid, of course)?

Submission + - Google releases JavaScript Library (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Art3x
Art3x writes: Google has released an open-source, modular JavaScript library called the Closure Library," which it developed in house for its own web applications like Gmail and Google Docs. "Web developers can pull just what they need from a wide set of reusable UI widgets and controls, as well as lower-level utilities for the DOM, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and much, much more."

Submission + - How to build a cyborg astrobiologist

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Researchers have built an artificial intelligence-based wearable computer with digital eyes that could help future robots or astronauts "see' and discover signs of life in the desert-like conditions found on Mars or the Moon. Specifically, the researchers said they have developed and tested a what's known as an novelty-detection algorithm for robotic exploration of geological and astrobiological fields, researchers stated in a white paper on the system. The novelty-detection algorithm can detect, for example, small features such as lichens as novel aspects of the image sequence in semi-arid desert environments.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/47127
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - Roomba Pac-Man (elstonj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The vacuum, long an instrument for chasing cats, has now been turned against its own. What better use for automatic home appliances than to have them chase each other in classic video game style? Videos and a detailed explanation about how three individuals turned their Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) management software into the backbone for Roomba Pac-Man are available on their site. Also available is the source code for the project, and a lengthy explanation of the capabilities of the UAS management software.

Submission + - French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has (boingboing.net)

Submitted by tugfoigel
tugfoigel writes: The man widely considered to be the father of modern anthropological study has passed away at 100 years of age.

"Among the more striking conclusions of his work was the idea that there is no fundamental difference between the belief systems and myths of so-called 'primitive' races and those of modern western societies."

Submission + - Legal Status for Climate change Belief (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by xirusmom
xirusmom writes: In the UK, climate change belief was given same legal status as religion.
The London Telegraph reports that an executive has won the right to sue his employer, on the basis that he was unfairly dismissed for his green views. A judge ruled that environmentalism had the same weight in law as religious and philosophical beliefs.

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