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Submission + - Bush derails attempts to end illegal wiretapping

Submitted by
P. Rivacy
P. Rivacy writes: "Remember how the Congress tried to outlaw the already illegal NSA wiretaps authorized by the President?

Bush is now using delaying tactics to derail the passage of that bill by not providing documents related to the President's warrantless wiretapping program to the Senate Intelligence Committee that is currently reviewing the proposed legislation."
Businesses

Submission + - Friendster's demise and Socializr launch

Submitted by
prostoalex
prostoalex writes: "Inc. magazine takes a look at Jonathan Abrams, founder of social network Friendster, and online events site Socializr, paying a great deal of attention to the reasons behind Friendster's demise, not the least of which was total chaos in the engineering organization, and inability to come up with scalable solutions: "Rather than address the problem of too many calculations, Sassa opted to make massive investments in hardware and software in 2004. Under Winner's leadership, a team of engineers completely rewrote Friendster's code into a different programming language and spent more than $1 million on a Hitachi storage area network, effectively halting business development for six months. Although Winner claims the rewrite was successful, load times continued to be a problem as late as 2006, according to Chander Sarna, Friendster's current vice president of engineering. "The ex-Friendster people are not going to like me for saying this, but there was a lack of spending discipline," Sarna says. "There were very basic problems that good code writers should have fixed to begin with."""
Science

Forgetting May be Part of the Remembering Process 191

Posted by samzenpus from the what-was-I-talking-about dept.
CFTM writes "The New York Times is running an interesting article about how human memory works and the theorized adaptive nature of forgetfulness". From the article, "Whether drawing a mental blank on a new A.T.M. password, a favorite recipe or an old boyfriend, people have ample opportunity every day to curse their own forgetfulness. But forgetting is also a blessing, and researchers reported on Sunday that the ability to block certain memories reduces the demands on the brain when it is trying to recall something important. The study, appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is the first to record visual images of people's brains as they suppress distracting memories. The more efficiently that study participants were tuning out irrelevant words during a word-memorization test, the sharper the drop in activity in areas of their brains involved in recollection. Accurate remembering became easier, in terms of the energy required."
Software

Submission + - White house seeks overhaul of US patent system

Submitted by
icfantv
icfantv writes: "The NY Times is reporting that the white house is seeking overhaul of the US patent system.

While I'm not so naiive to believe that this is 1) real, and most importantly 2) will ever actually happen I am quite happy to see that software patents will supposedly be the first in the pilot program to subject patents to public scrutiny. In our extremely litigious society this actually sounds like a great idea (and it's not just the alcohol talking here...). In the pilot program, software "patents will be posted on a Web site, and members of the public with software expertise will be allowed to send the patent office technical references related to the patent claims."

Now, whether or not they redirect those comments to /dev/null remains to be seen. So for now, I'm cautiously optimistic."
Music

Submission + - Why DRM Will Never Work (zdnet.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "A Google employee goes on a hilarious rant against DRM comparing it with underwear gnomes & Star Trek while ending with: "Believing in a DRM business model is like joining Star Fleet security, putting on your red shirt, and volunteering to beam down to the new unexplored planet with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Someone will be coming back from that mission, it's just not likely to be the security guard. Always a true engineer, Scotty had the good sense to stay safely on board the ship.""
Movies

Submission + - Shrek 3 & Linux (linuxjournal.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "We know the first Shrek used Linux & that rendering Shrek takes a lot of computers. But recently, Linux has played a larger and larger role for Shrek development. Enter the popular Linux Maya commercial package for 3-D modeling employed by Dreamworks Animation Studios for the latest Shrek release. Over 1,000 Linux developer desktops went into the recent movie's production (and over 3,000 server CPUs!). Be sure to peruse the section entitled "The Linux Pipeline" that describes a lot how the process worked: "Each frame is assigned to a different node of the renderfarm by grid software (using Platform LSF, a commercial Linux package), so that many frames can be output simultaneously. The frames are edited into a movie using Avid software (not on Linux). Early in the process, hand-drawn storyboard images are scanned, and a scratch audio track is edited together creating a rough video representation of the movie. As each sequence is completed, it replaces the rough storyboard footage, building the fully rendered movie scene by scene.""

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