qcomp - Slashdot User

Submission + - IBM says software patents drive OSS development (zoobab.com) 2

Submitted by

zoobab

on Monday August 17, 2009 @02:36PM

zoobab writes: "In its Amicus Brief to the US Supreme Court on the Bilski case, IBM is arguing that "patent protection has promoted the free sharing of source code [...] which has fueled the explosive growth of open source software development." IBM also argue that the machine-or-tranformation test allow software to be patented, and that "software patent protection provides significant economic, technological, and societal benefits". IBM also "finds alarming decisions in the wake of Bilski concluding that software is excluded from patentable subject matter" making references to the BPAI decisions on Ex Parte Altman. IBM also says thet are "committed to ensuring that such technology [software] is and remains patentable"."

Submission + - Best Open Source Projects of All Time (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Monday August 17, 2009 @01:15PM

snydeq writes: "InfoWorld highlights the 36 most useful and important free open source software projects in history, as well as a ranking of the Top 10 most indispensable open source projects of all time, in its 'Open Source Hall of Fame': 'The 36 inaugural members of our hallowed hall include familiar names and famous successes, as well as others that often slip under the radar or are taken too much for granted. From Linux and GNU to Asterisk and Apache, all are mature and well-established projects that have served as the foundations of software development projects, business networks, datacenters, and the public Internet for years. They are the proven and trustworthy longtime favorites that have propelled the open source movement into the spotlight.'"

Firefox Faster In Wine Than Native 493

Posted by timothy on Friday February 13, 2009 @08:33AM from the that-sounds-hard-to-swallow dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Tuxradar did some benchmarks comparing Firefox's Windows and Linux JavaScript performance. 'We did some simple JavaScript benchmarks of Firefox 3.0 using Windows and Linux to see how it performed across the platforms — and the results are pretty bleak for Linux.' Later on, they tried Wine. 'The end result: Firefox from Mozilla or from Fedora has almost nil speed difference, and Firefox running on Wine is faster than native Firefox.'"

Pirate Bay Operators Stand Trial On Monday 664

Posted by timothy on Friday February 13, 2009 @02:17AM from the stay-warm-date-a-swede dept.

Anonymous Pirate writes "Operators of The Pirate Bay stand trial on Monday in Stockholm. The four defendants from the popular file-sharing web site are charged with being accessories to breaking copyright law and may face fines or up to two years in prison if found guilty. The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. The Swedish public service television announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation."

The Real Risks of Obama's BlackBerry 273

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 12, 2009 @04:37PM from the for-certain-values-of-real dept.

An anonymous reader writes "When the mainstream media first announced Barack Obama's 'victory' in keeping his BlackBerry, the focus was on the security of the device, and keeping the US president's e-mail communications private from spies and hackers. The news coverage and analysis by armchair security experts thus far has failed to focus on the real threat: attacks against President Obama's location privacy, and the potential physical security risks that come with someone knowing the president's real-time physical location. In this article, a CNET blogger digs into the real risks associated with the President carrying around a tracking device at all times."

Court Rules Autism Not Caused By Childhood Vaccine 1056

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 12, 2009 @03:00PM from the thanks-court dept.

wiredog writes "From The Washington Post comes word that three special masters have decided that MMR vaccines do not cause autism. 'Special master George Hastings said the parents ... had "been misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment." ... "the evidence advanced by the petitioners has fallen far short of demonstrating ... a link."'

Iowa Seeks To Remove Electoral College 1088

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday February 12, 2009 @10:27AM from the not-cancelling-their-caucus-i-bet dept.

Zebano writes "Since changing the US constitution is too much work, the Iowa senate is considering a bill that would send all 7 of Iowa's electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in a presidential election. This would only go into affect after enough states totaling 270 electoral votes (enough to elect a president) adopted similar resolutions."

A Quantitative Study of How Memes Spread 219

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday February 12, 2009 @09:47AM from the please-no-more-25-things dept.

rememberclifford writes "A survey of about 3,000 people who were tagged in a '25 Random Things About Me' note on Facebook found that memes spread through social networks in a remarkably similar way as diseases do. A biologist who looked at the data says that '"25 Things" authors can be seen as "contagious" under what's known as a "susceptible-infected-recovered" model for the spread of disease,' with a propagation factor of 0.27 in this case. But like an infection, the whole thing died out as quickly as it exploded once the number of 'victims' — people who were willing to write 25 things about themselves — was depleted." The '25 Things' meme was at least as annoying as a light flu.

Comment fire the parents... (Score 1) 26

by qcomp on Tuesday December 16, 2008 @06:22PM (#26138477) Attached to: Teacher Laid Off For Telling the Truth About Santa

too bad that one cannot fire the parents that tell weird stories to their kids (which is fine) and wantto sell these fabricated and highly unbelievable stories to be accepted as truth (which is a crime against the intelligence of their kids).

Comment Re:28 Qubits ought to be enough for everybody (Score 1) 191

by qcomp on Sunday July 27, 2008 @08:08PM (#24362393) Attached to: Opening Quantum Computing To the Public

Not even for factoring, actually. Factoring is known to be sub-exponential.
yes, you're right. I should have said "outperforms super-polynomially" (I guess it is poly(n) for a QC vs n^log(n) classically, n beinig the input size in bits)

Submission + - Dark Matter Of The Universe Has A Long Lifetime (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by

Tjeerd

on Wednesday October 03, 2007 @04:56AM

Tjeerd writes: ""New research from the Niels Bohr Institute presents new information that adds another piece of knowledge to the jigsaw puzzle of the dark mystery of the universe — dark matter. Signe Riemer-Sørensen has analysed the one of the two clusters of galaxies that are in the process of colliding. The analyses show that it is a very heavy cluster with many galaxies, and measurement of the gravitation show that there is a very big amount of dark matter, up to 85 per cent of the collective mass. However, no x-ray of any consequence was measured.""

Submission + - SPAM: Weird science: Harvard's annual Ig Nobels

Submitted by alphadogg on Tuesday October 02, 2007 @06:56PM

alphadogg writes: Skip the Grammys. The Oscars are boring. It's time to talk about the only award in the history of the Earth that has been presented both to ducks that practice homosexual necrophilia and Dan Quayle.That's right, it's time for the Ig Nobel Prizes, which are ... ahem ... "loosely" affiliated with Harvard University. It's not quite the anti-Nobel, since you're bound to learn about some real, if weird, science Thursday if you attend this year's ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theater, or if you watch the live Webcast. [spam URL stripped]

Submission + - Finally, water burns (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

benesch

on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @08:31AM

benesch writes: "Associated Press reports that a cancer researcher stumbled upon a way of burning water: "John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn.""

Submission + - Help Find Steve Fossett (avweb.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08, 2007 @02:56PM

An anonymous reader writes: DigitalGlobe, one of Google's imaging partners, as acquired new high-resolution satellite imagery of the area where adventurer Steve Fossett disappeared on Monday. Using the Amazon Mechanical Turk, the public can now, go through this imagery and quickly flag any images which might contain Fossett's plane. Images which are flagged will receive further review by Search and Rescue experts.

Submission + - BBC forced to back down over iPlayer

Submitted by The Flying Yorkshireman on Saturday September 08, 2007 @01:51PM

The Flying Yorkshireman writes: The petition signed by many Slashdot readers to prevent the BBC launching a content player for Windows only has succeeded! The Prime Minister's Office has responded to that petition and you can view it here.

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