i_frame - Slashdot User

Submission + - SAP Sued By Oracle for Corporate Espionage

Submitted by christoofar on Thursday March 22, 2007 @08:25PM

christoofar writes: The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a story about SAP America of stealing customer information by "theft on a grand scale" and then offering cut rate services to Oracle's customers. Story also here and here. The fireworks are just about to begin and I'm sure we'll hear from Larry Ellison soon about this.

Another Step Towards the Driverless Car 224

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday March 22, 2007 @08:21PM from the optical-sensors-said-the-light-was-yellow dept.

jtogel writes "At Essex, we have for some time been working on automatically learning how to race cars in simulation. It turns out that a combination of evolutionary algorithms and neural networks can learn how to beat all humans in racing games, and also come up with some quite interesting, novel behaviours, which might one day make their way into commercial racing games. While this is simulation, the race is now on for the real thing — we are setting up a competition for AI developers, where the goal is to win a race between model cars on real tracks. As the cars will be around half a meter long, the cost of participating will be a fraction of that for the famous DARPA Grand Challenge, whereas the challenges will be similar in terms of computer vision and AI."

Submission + - Researchers spin out smaller electronics than ever

Submitted by schliz on Thursday March 22, 2007 @08:20PM

schliz writes: Scientists have found a more efficient way to harness the spin of an electron to store and process information. The new technology, dubbed 'spintronics', has potentials in the development of nanoscale devices that are much more energy efficient than current charge-based electronic devices. Researchers expect the new technology to be incorporated in computing circuitry within the next decade. Computerworld reports.

Submission + - Google prototype needs Boise programmers?

Submitted by

destinyland

on Thursday March 22, 2007 @08:08PM

destinyland writes: "Programmer Aaron Stanton got Google's attention by flying from Boise to Mountain View without an appointment to pitch his big idea. But now he's building a prototype for a return visit in July. He's looking for programmers with PHP, Perl, Python, Ajax, MySQL (and maybe C or Java) — but what's more interesting is how he's built his enterprise. From a spontaneous worldwide network of supporters. (My theory? He wants to build a content-analyzing algorithm that works on Google's web page databases.)"

Submission + - Astronomers Explode Virtual Supernova

Submitted by

DynaSoar

on Thursday March 22, 2007 @08:07PM

DynaSoar writes: "Scientists at the University of Chicago's Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes have created a simulation of a white dwarf exploding into a type 1a supernova http://space.com/scienceastronomy/070322_stellar_e xplosion.html. Using 700 processors and 58,000 hours, they produced a three second movie showing the initial burst that is thought to be the source of much of the iron in the universe. Understanding these supernova is also important to testing current cosmological theories regarding dark matter and dark energy, as their brightness is used as a measurement of distance, and discrepancies found in the brightness of very distant supernovae consistently seem to indicate a change in the speed of expansion of the universe over time."

Submission + - Real-time P2P monitoring

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 22, 2007 @03:59AM

An anonymous reader writes: Apparently someone is running global BitTorrent P2P network monitoring. There is impressive view on http://www.p2p-monitor.com/?rt — currently representing downloads of Borat movie across all Internet. Each peer is geolocated, and information about download progress and client used is included.

Submission + - FBI in Cohoots with Verizon, AT&T, MCI

Submitted by

mrbluze

on Wednesday March 21, 2007 @10:24PM

mrbluze writes: "In the ongoing FBI probe, Wired News confirms that the FBI did enter into contracts with telephone companies to "harvest" telephone records.

"The contract essentially pays for the man hours or the personnel cost for the people who have to do the work," said FBI Assistant Director John Miller in an interview with Wired News last night. "We want dedicated people who handle our requests or do nothing else."

I have read elsewhere that security organizations have deals with operating system and other software manufacturers to provide back-doors to PC's. How widespread is all of this privacy invasion in reality?"

Submission + - A Meeting with Jim Stone, DMCA Enforcer

Submitted by

EverStoned

on Wednesday March 21, 2007 @09:09PM

EverStoned writes: "After receiving some copyright violation warnings from various notifying agencies, forwarded to me by Boston University, my school account was shut down. To get it back, I had to have a talk with Jim Stone, self-proclaimed "DMCA Enforcer." I think I might have been the first person to ever disagree with him.
It was interesting to me to see what he, a cop and a lawyer, thought of various copyright issues. He seems completely oblivious to the importance of the issue in relation to free human society, and cares only about it from a financial aspect. He claims that there are people like him in every school, so have any slashdotters in other universities ever dealt with these so called "DMCA Enforcers"?"

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