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Patents

Submission + - No one expects the Apple inquisition (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
dell623
dell623 writes: "Apple's recent lawsuits against Samsung and HTC are based on patents that are considered trivial and obvious by most people with a working knowledge of software. Apple are not the only company using such patents, but they are doing it blatantly, publicly and dishonestly, and sadly, unlike common patent trolls, they have a unique history of innovation. Such lawsuits can have far reaching consequences. If such patent wars had happened in the last 30-40 years personal computing devices and the internet wouldn't exist as they do today, and similarly, these patent wars threaten to bring about a technological dark age of stagnation or decline, smothering a technological revolution that is still young. We have had an incredible, transformational period of around four decades where powerful computers started off powering expensive military systems and ended up as minuscule devices in our hands that can talk to each other across the world, and we have only begun to explain the possibilities this brings us. These patent wars threaten to brutally strangle a still young revolution that has possibilities we can only begin to imagine."

Comment Imaginary Mass! (Score 1) 412

by The_Dougster (#37520012) Attached to: Faster-Than-Light Particle Results To Be Re-Tested

Wow that's quite a concept. To me that idea smacks of some unknown type of energy which has the potential of being converted into regular mass. However, it would seem to me complex mass would be impossible because as the particle's mass oscillated between the real and complex states its speed would likewise be respectively slower and then faster than c. Heh, imagine the shock waves from something breaking the light barrier a couple billion times per second, and the energy dumped into entropy. I don't think a particle with complex mass would make it very far. More like a one way ride...

Pure imaginary mass (the tachyon) is pretty neat to think about though. What kind of state could mass be in its "potential" form? The old E=mc^2 certainly implies that you can convert energy into mass, but I'm not aware of anybody who has created mass out of pure energy yet.

Comment Re:Has Everyone Already Forgotten About the Netwin (Score 1) 332

by The_Dougster (#37506620) Attached to: Is ARM Ever Coming To the Desktop?

I still have a Netwinder. I spent quite a bit of effort porting the system to Gentoo ARM softfloat, although at the end of the day, it really hasn't aged well. The 275MHz ARMv4l seems a bit pokey now but it can run a bare-bones xorg system with a lightweight window manager. Prior to my porting effort, you had to use hard-float glibc which would trigger an interrupt and the kernel fpu emulator would handle the call. I submitted some patches upstream vs gcc but I have no idea if anybody ever did anything with them, for all I know I have the only softfloat-linux Netwinder in existence.
Government

New FBI Operations Manual Increases Surveillance 189

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
betterunixthanunix writes "The New York Times is reporting that the new FBI operations manual suggests a broad increase in surveillance. Denoted the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the manual officially lowers the bar of acceptability when it comes to engaging in surveillance activities, including allowing agents to perform such surveillance on people who are not suspected terrorists without opening an inquiry or officially recording their actions. The new manual also relaxes rules on administering lie detector tests, searching through a person's trash, and the use of teams to follow targeted individuals. It should be noted that these guidelines still fall within the general limits put in place by the attorney general."
Hardware

'Universal' Memory Aims To Replace Flash/DRAM 125

Posted by Soulskill from the runs-on-vapor dept.
siliconbits writes "A single 'universal' memory technology that combines the speed of DRAM with the non-volatility and density of flash memory was recently invented at North Carolina State University, according to researchers. The new memory technology, which uses a double floating-gate field-effect-transistor, should enable computers to power down memories not currently being accessed, drastically cutting the energy consumed by computers of all types, from mobile and desktop computers to server farms and data centers, the researchers say."
Transportation

How Chrysler's Battery-Less Hybrid Minivan Works 347

Posted by Soulskill from the batteries-are-so-2010 dept.
thecarchik writes "Chrysler announced Wednesday that it would partner with the US Environmental Protection Agency to build and test prototypes of a different kind of hybrid vehicle, one that accumulates energy not in a battery pack but by compressing a gas hydraulically. The system in question, originally developed at the EPA labs, uses engine overrun torque to capture otherwise wasted energy, as do conventional hybrid-electric vehicles. The engine is Chrysler's standard 2.4-liter four-cylinder, the base engine in its minivan line. But rather than turning a generator, that torque powers a pump that uses hydraulic fluid to increase the pressure inside a 14.4-gallon tank of nitrogen gas, known as a high-pressure accumulator."
Wikipedia

Wikipedia and the History of Gaming 240

Posted by Soulskill from the citation-needed dept.
Wired is running a story about Wikipedia's tremendous contribution to documenting the history of video games, and why it shouldn't necessarily be relied upon. Quoting: "Wikipedia requires reliable, third-party sources for content to stick, and most of the sites that covered MUDs throughout the ’80s were user-generated, heavily specialized or buried deep within forums, user groups and newsletters. Despite their mammoth influence on the current gaming landscape, their insular communities were rarely explored by a nascent games journalist crowd. ... while cataloging gaming history is a vitally important move for this culture or art form, and Wikipedia makes a very valiant contribution, the site can’t be held accountable as the singular destination for gaming archeology. But as it’s often treated as one, due care must be paid to the site to ensure that its recollection doesn’t become clouded or irresponsible, and to ensure its coalition of editors and administrators are not using its stringent rule set to sweep anything as vitally relevant as MUDS under the rug of history."

Comment Adding IPv6 is not difficult (Score 1, Interesting) 406

by The_Dougster (#34623414) Attached to: Military Pressuring Vendors On IPv6
I upgraded my systems to ipv6 even though I just have IPv4 by signing up for a free tunnel broker service. I recommend SixXS if you are serious, or one of the others if you just want to flirt around with IPv6. Basically, you open a tunnel on one of the machines, it starts radvd which activates ipv6 on every machine on your LAN automagically, and thats all you do. Perhaps edit a config file here or there to turn on ipv6 if its lacking for some reason. The radvd machine broadcasts on your net and provides something like DHCP for all your ipv6 enabled machines which usually just pick it up on the fly with no reboot or anything required.
Image

Archaeologists Find 2,400-Year-Old Soup Screenshot-sm 108

Posted by samzenpus from the your-dinner-is-cold dept.
Chinese archaeologists have discovered a sealed bronze pot containing what they believe is a batch of 2,400-year-old bone soup. The pot was dug up near the ancient capital of Xian. Liu Daiyun of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology says, "It's the first discovery of bone soup in Chinese archaeological history. The discovery will play an important role in studying the eating habits and culture of the Warring States Period (475-221BC)." No word on if the archaeologists also found the accompanying ancient crackers.
Math

Medical Researcher Rediscovers Integration 473

Posted by timothy from the it's-all-mathy dept.
parallel_prankster writes "I find this paper very amusing. From the abstract: 'To develop a mathematical model for the determination of total areas under curves from various metabolic studies.' Hint! If you replace phrases like 'curves from metabolic studies' with just 'curves,' then you'll note that Dr. Tai rediscovered the rectangle method of approximating an integral. (Actually, Dr. Tai rediscovered the trapezoidal rule.). Apparently this is called 'Tai's Model.'"
Security

Doorways Sneak To Non-Default Ports of Hacked Servers 63

Posted by timothy from the buncha-jerkfaces dept.
UnmaskParasites writes "To drive traffic to their online stores, software pirates hack reputable legitimate websites injecting hidden spammy links and creating doorway pages. Google's search results are seriously poisoned by such doorways. Negligence of webmasters of compromised sites makes this scheme viable — doorways remain unnoticed for years. Not so long ago, hackers began to re-configure Apache on compromised servers to make them serve doorway pages off of non-default ports, still taking advantage of using established domain names."
Crime

Cybergang Compromises Every ATM In Russian City 74

Posted by timothy from the equal-opportunity dept.
Orome1 writes "A group of fraudsters has been arrested in Yakutsk and Moscow for allegedly compromising all the ATMs in the city of Yakutsk — population: around 210,000 — in the Republic of Yakutia in the Russian Federation. Three of the men formed the actual criminal group, and the fourth — a Moscow-based malware developer — was 'subcontracted' by them and received 100,000 rubles (some $3200) to develop a custom ATM virus with which they would infect the devices."

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