Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - French Branch of Scientology Is Convicted of Fraud (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by lugannerd
lugannerd writes: The French branch of the Church of Scientology was convicted of fraud and fined nearly $900,000 on Tuesday by a Paris court. But the judges did not ban the church entirely, as the prosecution had demanded, saying that a change in the law prevented such an action for fraud. The church said it would appeal.

The verdict was among the most important in several years to involve the controversial group, which is registered as a religion in the United States but has no similar legal protection in France. It is considered a sect here, and says it has some 45,000 adherents, out of some 12 million worldwide. It was the first time here that the church itself had been tried and convicted, as opposed to individual members.

Submission + - Freetype patents expired? 1

Submitted by yaakovs
yaakovs writes: According to Freetype's patent information page (http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html), the last US patent was granted 17 years ago today, meaning that is has just expired. Can we finally enable hinting without legal repercussions?
Security

Submission + - Cisco to acquire ScanSafe (scansafe.com)

Submitted by theyulman
theyulman writes: ScanSafe as published a message on their home page that Cisco acquire all of it's activity.
Apparently Cisco offered $183 Million in cash for the transaction.
Security

Submission + - Serious Cyber Attacks on the Horizon (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A report prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, used the recent cyber attacks that targeted the US and South Korea as a catalyst to raise a series of very important questions: Which nations possess the cyber capabilities to launch attacks against the US? What are the odds of that happening? How soon will those capabilities be available for purchase to the highest bidder on the black market? The report estimates that at this time China, Russia, Israel, the UK and France (along with the US) are the only nations capable of launching an advanced cyber attack. It also predicts that in as few as three years, this capabilities will probably start to become available on the black market.
Science

Submission + - Particles are back at LHC (web.cern.ch)

Submitted by Tsalg
Tsalg writes: The Large Hadron Collider has switched on the beams again with protons and ions, resuming after a 1-year break. No collisions occured yet, but the ion beam was detected in one of LHC's detector. The first high-energy collisions are still set for after mid-December.
Security

Submission + - 6 disabled antivirus in few minutes (lepoint.fr)

Submitted by frecky
frecky writes: A minute and fifty-six seconds. This is the time it took for two security experts to disable Mc Afee, general widely used antivirusy. Norton, heavyweight in the sector, has not done much better: it took four minutes. G-Data antivirus considered reliable because of its dual analysis engine, has survived five minutes. AVG, NOD32 and Kaspersky
arn't better, with fifteen to forty minutes of heroic resistance. The competition was held under the iAWACS Congress, organized by the Graduate School of Computer Science Auto Electronic (École supérieure d'informatique électronique automatique) (ESIEA), in Laval (France).
The Military

Submission + - DD-214 Now Available Online

Submitted by pdragon04
pdragon04 writes: When leaving the US Armed Forces, it was always stressed how important it was to never loose your copy of your DD-214 as it was your only record of having served. Getting a new copy if you lost it was a long and arduous process and significantly delayed obtaining veterans benefits. An email today from my college's financial aid office stated:

"It's official, DD-214's are NOW Online. The National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) has provided the following website for veterans to gain access to their DD-214's online: http://vetrecs.archives.gov/

This may be particularly helpful when a veteran needs a copy of his DD-214 for employment purposes. NPRC is working to make it easier for veterans with computers and Internet access to obtain copies of documents from their military files. Military veterans and the next of kin of deceased former military members may now use a new on-line military personnel records system to request documents. Other individuals with a need for documents must still complete the Standard Form 180, which can be downloaded from the on-line web site. Because the requester will be asked to supply all information essential for NPRC to process the request, delays that normally occur when NPRC has to ask veterans for additional information will be minimized. The new web-based application was designed to provide better service on these requests by eliminating the records centers mailroom and processing time."

Comment Is this just a misunderstanding? (Score 1) 567

by h0oam1 (#29797593) Attached to: 1/3 of People Can't Tell 48Kbps Audio From 160Kbps
I often see people confuse sample rate with bit rate when discussing digital music. 48KHz is a very common sampling rate, and a 48KHz sampled bit of audio could then be streamed at any bit rate you want. In my experience, a 48Kbps stream sounds very noticeable worse than a 160Kbps stream, regardless of codec, etc. Can someone confirm that SkySongs shows up as 48Kbps when it is streamed to winamp, or some other mp3 player? I can't, as I am in the US.
Music

Submission + - The Revolution of Greed and the Music Industry (theflashbulb.net)

Submitted by JoeZeppy
JoeZeppy writes: An independent musician details how ITunes, BestBuy and the record labels beat him out of %85 of the price of every album, and what he's doing to combat it.

"A decade ago, while being an amateur musician and daytime computer technician, a tech-savvy friend of mine called me raving about MP3s. He even sent me some files on my painfully slow dialup connection. The technology impressed me, but I didn't worry about it either. I thought to myself:

"Surely nobody is going to spend 40 hours downloading an album at a horrible audio quality."

Of course I didn't speculate how advanced the internet would become 10 years later. Those who did either fought it or became millionaires.

Now before you start getting excited about being part of a music revolution, I'm going to share my rendition of it, which isn't going to be inspirational in the least bit. The point of all it all is, well, that nearly everyone involved is unethical and greedy. From the largest corporation all the way down to the consumer."
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - Lawmaker Upset by iPhone Termination Fee (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by
Inquisitor911
Inquisitor911 writes: "The Apple iPhone has enjoyed favorable reviews since its recent debut, but it came in for some rare criticism on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
The phones, which cost between $500 and $600 _ are usable only on AT&T Inc.'s wireless network and will remain that way until 2012.
Even though the phones become expensive paperweights if customers quit AT&T's wireless plan, the company will still charge a $175 early termination fee, said Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., chairman of a House subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet.
Markey described the phone as a "Hotel California service. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave _ you're stuck with your iPhone and you can't take it anywhere."
The issue arose at a hearing on whether Congress should grant the cell phone industry's wish and pre-empt states from regulating wireless phone companies. State public utility commissions have no authority over pricing on wireless plans, but do have the authority to regulate the terms and conditions of wireless service agreements.
The wireless industry opposes what Verizon Wireless general counsel Steven Zipperstein called "patchwork, utility-style regulation" as "unnecessary and harmful."
Verizon wants a national framework for wireless oversight that would take authority away from state utility commissions while still allowing state attorneys general to protect against unfair and deceptive industry practices.
Tony Clark, a North Dakota public utility commissioner and chairman of the telecommunications committee of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, said the states should be allowed to maintain their enforcement authority.
"The bottom line is that state regulators are seeking a middle ground that relies on each level of government doing what it does best: the federal government setting standards that apply to all and the states enforcing those rules and tailoring them to specific emerging issues," he said.
Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and commentator on technology issues, described the cell phone industry as "spectrum-based oligopoly" where customers have given up their property rights.
"Imagine buying a television that stopped working if you decided to switch to satellite," Wu said. "Or a toaster that died if you switched from Potomac Power to ConEd."
The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering rules that will dictate how a valuable swath of spectrum to be auctioned in the next six months will be used. Among the proposals is a requirement that one block of airwaves being auctioned be accessible to all wireless devices _ which would include the iPhone."
Linux Business

Submission + - Linux creator calls GPLv3 authors 'hypocrites' (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
AlexGr
AlexGr writes: "We hear conflicting tales regarding Linus Torvalds acceptance of GPLv3. For example, this one by Paul McDougall (InformationWeek): Linux creator Linus Torvalds said the authors of a new software license expected to be used by thousands of open source programmers are a bunch of hypocrites and likened them to religious fanatics — the latest sign of a growing schism in the open source community between business-minded developers like Torvalds and free software purists. In an online post, Torvalds slammed executives at the Free Software Foundation, likening their mind-set to that of "religious fanatics and totalitarian states." Harsh! http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/ 2007/07/linux_creator_c.html"
Software

Submission + - Why should government spatial data be free?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Digital geographic data is used to the point of being essential by most governments in Canada for mapping and geographic analysis. Decision makers use government geographic information to help decide where to create a new park, which hillside is to be logged, or where a pipeline or highway should go. This information represents a valuable public asset, just like roads, schools, hospitals, or ferries. Since the 1980's the general trend has been towards cost recovery of government information. At first glance, this policy appears to be a good way of sharing the costs of a government service among those who benefit from it, like a toll booth on a bridge or a user fee on an ambulance. However, there are significant problems with this approach.

http://space.frot.org/docs/why-free.html

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close