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Sci-Fi

Battlestar Galactica Gets Spinoff Prequel Series 297

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the frak-here-comes-more-fraking dept.
It was recently announced that sci-fi remake series Battlestar Galactica is getting a whole new spinoff prequel series called "Caprica." Signed on for twenty hours worth of finished product, including a two-hour pilot, the new series is to be set 50 years prior to Battlestar Galactica, and will focus on two rival families, the Graystones and the Adamas. "Enmeshed in the burgeoning technology of artificial intelligence and robotics that will eventually lead to the creation of the Cylons, the two houses go toe-to-toe blending action with corporate conspiracy and sexual politics. 'Caprica' will deliver all of the passion, intrigue, political backbiting and family conflict in television's first science fiction family saga."
Communications

The State of UK Broadband — Not So Fast 279

Posted by kdawson from the but-you-have-actual-competition dept.
Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."
Patents

Rewriting a Software Product After Quitting a Job? 604

Posted by kdawson from the clean-room-white-coats dept.
hi_caramba_2008 writes "We are a bunch of good friends at a large software company. The product we work on is under-budgeted and over-hyped by the sales drones. The code quality sucks, and management keeps pulling in different direction. Discussing this among ourselves, we talked about leaving the company and rebuilding the code from scratch over a few months. We are not taking any code with us. We are not taking customer lists (we probably will aim at different customers anyway). The code architecture will also be different — hosted vs. stand-alone, different modules and APIs. But at the feature level, we will imitate this product. Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or whatever? Are workers allowed to imitate the product they were working on? We know we have to deal with the non-compete clause in our employment contracts, but in our state this clause has been very difficult to enforce. We are more concerned with other IP legal aspects."
The Courts

Microsoft Moves To Quash Case, End E-mail Revelations 158

Posted by timothy from the gentlemen-do-not-open-each-other's-email dept.
CWmike writes "Microsoft asked a federal judge yesterday to end the class-action lawsuit that has been the source of a treasure trove of embarrassing insider e-mails covering everything from managers badmouthing Intel to others on who worried how Vista would be compared to Apple's Mac OS X in 2005. In seeking to end the case, Microsoft argues the plaintiffs have not demonstrated that the lowest-priced version of Windows Vista was not the 'real' Vista, or showed that users paid more for PCs prior to the new operating system's launch because of the Vista Capable campaign."
Christmas Cheer

Holiday Art Executed In Google Documents 72

Posted by timothy from the but-they-offered-it-a-blindfold dept.
CyberKnet writes "Some enterprising folks over at Google have collaborated via Google Documents to create holiday art using cells in a spreadsheet as the pixels. A time delay video was taken and is available over at YouTube and the result is pretty spectacular. More info on how they did this is available behind the scenes. They're inviting people to share their own masterpieces or post a video response over on YouTube."
Google

Google Apps Gets a 99.9% Guarantee 155

Posted by kdawson from the outlook-cloudy-try-again dept.
David Gerard passes along a posting on Google's official blog announcing that they have extended the three-nines SLA for the Premier Edition of Google Apps from Gmail alone to also cover the Calendar, Docs, Sites, and Google Talk services. 99.9% uptime translates to 45 minutes a month of downtime, and the blog post puts this in context with Gmail's historical reliability, which has been between three and four times as good over the last year (10-15 min./mo.). It also claims, based on research by an outside group, that Gmail's historical reliability beats that of in-house hosted solutions such as Groupwise and Exchange, on average. Reader Ian Lamont adds an article in The Standard that digs down into the details of the SLA, revealing for instance that outages of less than 10 minutes aren't counted against the monthly 45 minutes.

Comment Re:Texas voter here: This is simply untrue. (Score 2, Informative) 898

by SimplexO (#22650792) Attached to: Clinton Takes Ohio, Texas; McCain Seals The Deal
The goal of the presidential primary process (right or wrong) is to obtain delegates for the national convention in Denver. The delegate results for the primary seem to be Clinton 65 Obama 61. That's a net of 4 for Clinton. Obama looks to win 21 of the 31 state districts (which is how the remaining 67 remaining delegates get allocated). I can't speak as to how the TX caucus processes works from here forward. I know it's complicated and not as straight forward as the 21/31 senate districts number I sited above. But I would guess that Obama is going to net more than 4 delegates from the caucuses, and actually come out of Texas a delegate winner even though he lost the popular vote (see Nevada for details).

Also, don't think that only Texans understand how silly and convoluted the process is. Everyone outside of Texas also thinks "y'all are doing it wrong." However, it's the process that the state democratic party came up with, and that's the way you do it down there. Complaining about the disenfranchisement of voters because of a system that was created before the race began is a bad argument. You should complain about the incompetence of the plan on its own merits. However, it's the system Texas Democrats decided upon and that's the way it goes. (I have similar feelings about Michigan and Florida.) Lets all learn from our mistakes and get it right next time.
It's funny. Laugh.

Texas Creationist Museum Facing Extinction 824

Posted by kdawson from the going-the-way-of-the-dinosaurs dept.
gattaca writes "A small Texas museum that teaches creationism is counting on the auction of a prehistoric mastodon skull to stave off extinction. The founder and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, which rejects evolution and claims that man and dinosaurs coexisted, said it will close unless the Volkswagen-sized skull finds a generous bidder. 'If it sells, well, then we can come another day,' Joe Taylor said. 'This is very important to our continuing.'" Meanwhile, the much larger Creation Museum in Kentucky that we discussed and toured when it opened last year seems to be thriving.
The Internet

'I Was a Hacker for the MPAA' 385

Posted by Zonk from the definition-of-catharsis dept.
Wired has up an article with a man named Robert Anderson, who was recruited by the MPAA in 2005 to inform on people in the BitTorrent community. In a tell-all interview with the site, Anderson explains how the powerful media organization encouraged him to obtain the information they were looking for: "According to Anderson, the MPAA told him: 'We would need somebody like you. We would give you a nice paying job, a house, a car, anything you needed.... if you save Hollywood for us you can become rich and powerful.' In 2005, the MPAA paid Anderson $15,000 for inside information about TorrentSpy -- information at the heart of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought by the MPAA against TorrentSpy of Los Angeles. The material is also the subject of a wiretapping countersuit against the MPAA brought by TorrentSpy's founder, Justin Bunnell, who alleges the information was obtained illegally."
United States

Cyber Crime A Distant #3 Priority for FBI 154

Posted by CowboyNeal from the bigger-fish-to-fry dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A reading of the Justice Department's 2008 budget justification to Congress for the FBI indicates the agency is dedicating about 5.5 percent of its field agents to combating cyber crime, the FBI's stated Number Three priority, The Washington Post reports. Take away the agents dedicated to catching child predators online — a program that accounts for the vast majority of the department's prosecutorial victories — and about 3.6 percent of the FBI's agents are dedicated to cyber crime, the report notes. From the story: 'If the FBI's third most-important priority claims just over 3.5 percent of its active agents, how many agents and FBI resources are dedicated to the remaining Top Ten priorities?'"
Space

3 Ton Meteorite Stolen 273

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-in-frat-boys-basement dept.
morpheus83 writes "Russian news agency Interfax is reporting that thieves have stolen a three-ton meteorite from the yard of the Tunguska Space Event foundation, whose director said it was the part of meteor that caused a massive explosion in Siberia in 1908. The massive three tonne rock was bought to Krasnoyarsk after an 2004 expedition to the site of the so-called Tunguska event- a mysterious mid air explosion over Siberia in 1908 was 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The foundation's director Yury Lavbin claimed to have discovered the wreckage of an alien spacecraft during the expedition."
Communications

Hotmail vs Goodmail 222

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who-controls-your-spambox dept.
Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton wrote in with his latest column. He says "Are we being too hard on Goodmail for their plans to charge senders a quarter-penny per message to bypass companies' spam filters? Hardly anyone has mentioned that Microsoft has been doing the same thing for years, only (surprise!) charging more. Hotmail lets senders pay a $1,400 "fee" to help get through their spam filter; when I wrote to them about my newsletter being blocked as spam, they said they knew it wasn't spam, but they told me several times they would not even talk about unblocking it unless I paid the $1,400. It's odd that so little attention has been paid to Hotmail's program, since it not only mirrors the Goodmail situation, it validates Goodmail's critics who have said that once you start charging to bypass spam filters, the next step is the marginalization of people who won't pay." Read on for more words.
Portables (Apple)

iPhone Release Date Is June 29 515

Posted by kdawson from the lines-form-now dept.
willith writes "Apple has placed three iPhone commercials on their Web site today, and each ends with a tag: 'Coming June 29.' This puts to rest the question of when the thing will hit the streets, but there are still worries about allocation — AppleInsider is reporting that the supplies at Cingular/AT&T stores may be relatively tight." And some fanatic sites are already parsing the ads for such enigmas as the "mystery app."
Google

Submission + - Google to deliver TV Ads

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) is reporting that Google has made a first contract with Astound Broadband to serve custom ads to 25.000 customers. On a related note, the Venturebeat Blog reports a related story of a Google deal with Dish Network, Nr. 2 in US satellite TV. Now your TV ads will be all Pizza home delivery, no more mortgage refinance...
Education

Museum IDs New Species of Dinosaur 79

Posted by Hemos from the dinosuars-rock dept.
Uryugen writes "A new dinosaur species was a plant-eater with yard-long horns over its eyebrows, suggesting an evolutionary middle step between older dinosaurs with even larger horns and the small-horned creatures that followed, experts said. The dinosaur's horns, thick as a human arm, are like those of triceratops — which came 10 million years later. However, this animal belonged to a subfamily that usually had bony nubbins a few inches long above their eyes"

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