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Submission + - Where is your taskbar?

Submitted by nickrjsmith
nickrjsmith writes: I want to ask slashdotters a question. Where is your task bar? Mine is along the right hand side, top to bottom. I do this as it provides me with more vertical space for browsing docs, webpages etc. After all, it's rare I need axtra space left / right on a wide screen. Where is your placed? Could this be a poll?
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Submission + - Warrantless wiretapping cases at the 9th Circuit (eff.org)

Submitted by sunbird
sunbird writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued several critical cases yesterday before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Both Hepting v. AT&T and Jewel v. National Security Agency raise important questions regarding whether the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program (pdf summary of evidence) disclosed by whistleblower Mark Klein and implemented by AT&T and other telecoms, violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The full text of the Klein declaration and redacted exhibits are publicly available (pdf). This issue has been previously discussed here (1 2 3 4). The Klein evidence establishes that AT&T cut into the fiber optic cables in San Francisco to route a complete copy of internet and phone traffic to the "SG3" secure room operated by the NSA. The trial court dismissed the Hepting lawsuit (pdf order) based on the 2008 Congressional grant of immunity to telecoms. Similarly, the trial court in Jewel dismissed (pdf order) the lawsuit against the government agencies and officials based on the state secrets privilege. Both cases were argued together before the same panel of judges. The audio of the oral argument will be available after 12noon PT today.

Submission + - Man Faces 75 Year Sentence For Recording Police (youtube.com) 3

Submitted by esocid
esocid writes: 42-year-old Michael Allison of Illinois could spend the rest of his life in prison for recording police in public. He faces five counts of eavesdropping, a class one felony. The Illinois Assistant Attorney General has joined the case and told the judge that citizens do not have the constitutional right to record police.
Idle

Submission + - US Authorities GPS tagging duped Indian Students (indiatimes.com)

Submitted by tanveer1979
tanveer1979 writes: Indian students duped by the dodgy Tri-Valley university in California have been fitted with GPS radio collars by the immigration authorities.

Scores of Indian students were caught in a scam where the university violated immigration norms and illegally got the students F1 visa and immigration status. To keep a track on the movements of the students, the authorities put GPS radio tags. This is spiraling into a major diplomatic row between India and USA, with the former calling the practice inhuman and unwanted.
Science

Possible Room Temperature Superconductor Achieved 264

Posted by kdawson from the beware-of-puppeteer-breeding-experiments dept.
TechkNighT_1337 sends news that surfaced on the Next Big Future blog, concerning research out of the University of Bengal, in India. The report is of a possible superconducting effect at ambient room temperatures. Here is the paper on the ArXiv. (Note that this research has not been peer-reviewed or published yet.) "We report the observation of an exceptionally large room-temperature electrical conductivity in silver and aluminum layers deposited on a lead zirconate titanate (PZT) substrate. The surface resistance of the silver-coated samples also shows a sharp change near 313 K. The results are strongly suggestive of a superconductive interfacial layer, and have been interpreted in the framework of Bose-Einstein condensation of bipolarons as the suggested mechanism for high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates. ... The fact that the results described above have been obtained from very simply-fabricated systems, without the use of any sophisticated set-up and any special attention being given to crystal purity, atomic perfection, lattice matching, etc. suggests that the physical process is a universal one, involving only an interface between a metal and an insulator with a large low-frequency dielectric constant. We note in passing that PZT and the cuprates have similar (perovskite or perovskite-based) crystal structures. This resemblance may provide an added insight into the basic mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity."

Submission + - Sprint Delays Android Update; Customers Revolt. (sprint.com)

Submitted by
vonWoland
vonWoland writes: "Instead of receiving the long waited-for update to their HTC Hero and Samsung Moment tomorrow, Sprint customers were told to shut up and wait in the company's forums today.
Irate Moment and Hero users did the only thing they could: found a Facebook group in protest.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=115085721860964
Also:
http://www.androidcentral.com/21-update-sprint-hero-not-coming-friday-after-all"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft patents portable applications (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by Julie188
Julie188 writes: On Tuesday, Microsoft was awarded a U.S. patent for "portable applications." The description of this innovative technology? Running an executable file from a flash device. Does this, or does this not, sound an awful lot like running an application from a thumb drive instead of loading it onto your computer? A Microsoft spokesperson offers this clarification: "The patent relates to portable applications that can be executed from a portable memory device (such as a USB flash drive) without impacting the configuration of the computer. The patent is not directed solely to running an application from a flash drive but to running an application from the flash drive without altering the configuration of the computer."
The Courts

Downloading Copyrighted Material Legal In Spain 323

Posted by kdawson from the presumed-innocent dept.
Sqwuzzy notes a judge's ruling in Spain that makes that country one of the most lenient in the world as respects sharing copyrighted material over P2P networks. "The entertainment industries in Spain must be progressively tearing their hair out in recent months as they experience setback after setback. ... After Spain virtually ruled out imposing a '3-strikes' regime for illicit file-sharers, the entertainment industries said they would target 200 BitTorrent sites instead. Now a judge has decided that sharing between users for no profit via P2P doesn't breach copyright laws and sites should be presumed innocent until proved otherwise." This ruling occurred in a pre-trial hearing; the case will still go to trial.

Computers Key To Air France Crash 911

Posted by kdawson from the who-or-what-do-you-trust dept.
Michael_Curator writes "It's no secret that commercial airplanes are heavily computerized, but as the mystery of Air France Flight 447 unfolds, we need to come to grips with the fact that in many cases, airline pilots' hands are tied when it comes to responding effectively to an emergency situation. Boeing planes allow pilots to take over from computers during emergency situations, Airbus planes do not. It's not a design flaw — it's a philosophical divide. It's essentially a question of what do you trust most: a human being's ingenuity or a computer's infinitely faster access and reaction to information. It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems. As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer."

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