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Patents

FOSS Community Can Combat Bad Patents 58

Posted by kdawson from the layers-of-barbed-wire dept.
An anonymous reader lets us know about a new initiative designed to help shield the open source software community from threats posed by patent trolls. The initiative, called Linux Defenders (the website is slated to go live tomorrow, Dec. 9), is sponsored by a consortium of technology companies including IBM. "The most novel feature of the new program... will be its call to independent open source software developers all over the world to start submitting their new software inventions to Linux Defenders... so that the group's attorneys and engineers can, for no charge, help shape, structure, and document the invention in the form of a 'defensive publication.' Linux Defenders will then also see to it that the publication, duly attributing authorship of the invention to the developer who submitted it, is filed on the IP.com Web site, a database used by the US Patent and Trademark Office and other patent examiners throughout the world when they are trying to determine whether a proposed patent is truly novel..."

Comment online gaming better or worse than "hanging out" (Score 1) 189

by zarkzervo (#25843817) Attached to: Study Recommends Online Gaming, Social Networking For Kids
Many of the replies here goes along the lines of: "Time spent gaming is time lost doing sports, helping elders, reading books, socially interacting face to face."

So these kids "hanging out" in the malls; better or worse than joining a raid online? What about the 3 meatbags spread out on the floor in front of the TV watching Nth season of American Idol. Is that so very healthy?

Yes, sports is healthy. Yes, talking face to face is healthy, but using your brains during gaming is also healthy. Nothing is healthy to spend too much time on. Nothing!

Kids today socially interact face-to-face all day at school. If you want to worry, worry about all the elder people that don't understand online communities (games, social websites...) and haven't spoken to anyone for the last 6 days.

Comment Re:Telling you what you want to hear (Score 1) 189

by zarkzervo (#25843739) Attached to: Study Recommends Online Gaming, Social Networking For Kids
I certainly see that kids should learn social online interaction under "controlled forms". My partner has a son of 11 and we teach him how to behave online by playing online games with him.

Some of his friends are among the anoying kids you meet online that begs for gold just because you are older and have more money. Their parents are ignorant to how they behave online. If they started going out in real life begging for money from strangers, you can bet they would care.

We are now currently socially interacting through slashdot. Is this really so bad? Should we just log off and go out and interact in the "real world" just because online is so different?

Comment Re:Meta data? (Score 1) 260

by zarkzervo (#25814359) Attached to: Digital Photos Give Away a Camera's Make and Model

> Of course someone who is stripping the exif data will never resize the image and run > some sharpening over the image just to cover their traces, right?

Some will, some won't. Criminals are notoriously careless and stupid.

If you are careless and stupid, how did you remove the EXIF-data? It's difficult enough to find a good EXIF-editor alerady. And if you actually go through all the labour of removing the EXIF-data, you probably would also go through the steps of altering the image. Unless, of course, you are a photo freak and really, really have to use the raw format to capture all the details of your crime.

> Yep, this one was taken by a Canon Powershot A510 of which only 5.7 million were sold. > We also know that this particular model was either sold in North America, Japan, Europe, > Africa, Australia, South East Asia and South America. That should narrow it down.

Yes. Of the 18 initial suspects only two own that camera. Concentrate your investigation on them.

Here, I must agree.

Sci-Fi

New Star Trek Trailer 591

Posted by CmdrTaco from the please-jj-don't-hurt-em dept.
roelbj writes "The full trailer to the next Star Trek movie is now available at the movie's official web site. The upcoming J.J. Abrams-helmed installment represents a changing of the guard, a reboot of the franchise, and a return to the original-series crew. It should prove interesting to see how Abrams' writing staff (Cloverfield, Lost, Alias) tackles the Star Trek universe and all the continuity and baggage that comes with it."

Comment Asta La Vista AltaVista (Score 2, Informative) 209

by Lothar (#24899087) Attached to: Google Turns 10

After my geek friend told me of google in autumn of 1998 I quickly abandoned AltaVista for Google. For a few weeks I would do dual searches with both to compare results and to check how Google was stacking up and it quickly became apparent that they were much much better and they had a nicer cleaner search interface. When I did my CS project I remember occasionally using both google and yahoo because they did put different search items near the top 10-20. Occationally Yahoo would throw up something Google hadn't found. But Google always overall had much better hits.
The Courts

RIAA Conceals Overturned Case 211

Posted by Zonk from the shoe-is-on-the-other-foot dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "When a Judge agreed with the RIAA's claim that 'making available' was actionable under the Copyright Act, in Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA was quick to bring this 'authority' to the attention of the judges in Elektra v. Barker and Warner v. Cassin. Those judges were considering the same issue. When the that decision was overturned successfully, however, they were not so quick to inform those same judges of this new development. When the defendants' lawyers found out — a week after the RIAA's lawyers learned of it — they had to notify the judges themselves . At this moment we can only speculate as to what legal authorities they cited to the judge in Duluth, Minnesota, to get him to instruct the jurors that just 'making available' was good enough."
Science

Replacing Copper With Pencil Graphite 122

Posted by kdawson from the carbon-all-the-way-down dept.
Late-Eight writes "A key discovery at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute could help advance the role of graphene as a possible heir to copper and silicon in nanoelectronics. Researchers believe graphene's extremely efficient conductive properties can be exploited for use in nanoelectronics. Graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, eluded scientists for years but was finally made in the laboratory in 2004 with the help of everyday, store-bought transparent tape. The current research, which shows a way to control the conductivity of graphene, is an important first step towards mass producing metallic graphene that could one day replace copper as the primary interconnect material on nearly all computer chips." Researchers are now hot to pursue graphene for this purpose over the previous favorite candidate, buckytubes (which are just rolled-up graphene). Farther down the road, semiconducting graphene might take over from silicon at the heart of logic chips.
Censorship

Uri Geller Accused of Bending Copyright Law 273

Posted by kdawson from the more-pliable-than-spoons dept.
JagsLive writes in with a Fox News report about Uri Geller's apparently playing fast and loose with copyright law in order to silence his detractors. "'All it takes is a single e-mail to completely censor someone on the Internet,' said Jason Schultz, a lawyer for the online civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing Geller over an unflattering clip posted on YouTube for which he claimed a copyright ownership."
Programming

Submission + - Who still uses Smalltalk?

Submitted by
itsmeront
itsmeront writes: "There has been a lot of talk about the future of Smalltalk. There are number of Object Oriented Languages that are candidates for replacing Smalltalk. Why has Smalltalk lasted so long? Why do business software suppliers still choose Smalltalk? Who are the people that still bet on the future of Smalltalk and how do they manage to succeed. http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2007/02/27/mindi ng-your-business-with-smalltalk-part-1-of-4/"
AMD

Submission + - New AMD Chipset Brings HDMI and ATI Graphics

Submitted by
Vigile
Vigile writes: "Today AMD announced the new AMD 690 series of chipsets that feature integrated graphics based around the aging ATI Radeon X700 core architecture. It is the first AMD branded chipset in nearly 4 years and features some interesting features; one of which is the inclusion of integrated HDMI support. This should make for an interesting HTPC design though as PC Perspective reports, without support for decode acceleration of HD-DVD and Blu-ray, that HDMI is mostly just fluff. They also report that though the gaming performance is better than what NVIDIA's current 6150 chipset offers, it still doesn't impress as they'd hoped it would."

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