Goose42 - Slashdot User

Submission + - EU beats North America in Open Access policy

Submitted by

robotninja

on Monday February 26, 2007 @06:02PM

robotninja writes: "Everyone's favourite professor, Michael Geist, provides a great overview of Open Access in this article, published today in the Toronto Star. In it, he briefly outlines how the Eurpoean Union is leapfrogging both the US and Canada in Open Access policies. From the article:

"the European Commission committed over $100 million toward facilitating greater open access" whereas "Neither the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, nor the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, which together have an annual budget of more than $1 billion, are anywhere near incorporating open access requirements into their funding policies"; and that although "last year the Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced in the U.S. Congress", the bill has yet to become law.

For a movement toward openness that started in large part among North American scholars, are the U.S. and Canada dropping the ball on Open Access?"

Submission + - $25 Mill for solution to removing greenhouse gases

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Monday February 26, 2007 @05:40PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "The Virgin Earth Challenge (of Virgin Airlines fame) is a prize of $25m for whoever can demonstrate to the judges' satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth's climate. http://www.virginearth.com/"

Submission + - Welcome to garage door opener hell

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Monday February 26, 2007 @05:39PM

coondoggie writes: "The Washington Post has an interesting story of military abuse today: abuse of garage door openers. Seems a large number of folks living near the Quantico Marine base in eastern Virginia have found their garage door openers being rendered useless by a wireless signal coming from the base. And they aren't the first, the story says. Garage door openers have been zapped in other towns near military operations for a couple years now experts say. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1184 7"

Submission + - PS3 Firmware Version Check Circumvented

Submitted by

Chouonsoku

on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @06:18PM

Chouonsoku writes: "Before yesterday, PlayStation 3 owners had to be running the latest system firmware in order to access the PlayStation Network. The PlayStation Network allows users to play their games online, download demos, trailers and add-ons for their games. However, with a simple DNS request redirection, the firmware check becomes null and void, allowing users to access the PlayStation Network from any firmware, up-to-date or not."

Recording Your Entire Life 211

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @06:03PM from the as-we-may-think dept.

Scientific American has an article on Gordon Bell's 9-year-long experiment of recording great swaths of his life on digital media. The idea harks back to an article by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, which arguably presaged hypertext and the Web as well. Bell, the father of the VAX computer and now with Microsoft Research, first published a paper on his experiment in CACM in 2001. The goal is to record "all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits." Storage requirements are estimated at a modest 18 GB a year, 1.1 TB over a 60-year span. Not a lot if the article's projection comes to pass — that we will all be walking around with 1 TB of storage in our portable devices by 2015. The article is co-authored by Jim Gemmell, who wrote the software for the MyLifeBits project.

Submission + - Temp. difference observed between Sun's poles

Submitted by ATestR on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @05:10PM

ATestR writes: From the Article (science.nasa.gov), one pole of the sun is cooler than the other. That's the surprising conclusion announced today by scientists who have been analyzing data from the ESA-NASA Ulysses spacecraft.

Measurements of the Northern Solar pole taken by Ulysses in 1994 and 1995 observed a temperature difference of 7 — 8 percent from the recent measurements taken of the Southern pole. Since the average Solar temperature has been measured to be constant during this twelve year period, the scientists invovled with the project are scratching their heads over the difference.

Submission + - Saudi Free Speech Campaign Goes Online

Submitted by

cultrhetor

on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @04:59PM

cultrhetor writes: "Following the arrest of ten Saudi activists involved in circulating a petition in favor of protecting freedom of expression, fellow reform advocates have posted the petition online, according to a BBC news article posted today. According to the article, By placing their petition on the internet, the Saudi activists are taking an enormous risk. From the article:

The petition calls for elections in which both men and women would be allowed to vote.
The signatories want freedom of expression to be protected by law and they want the powers of the interior ministry curtailed.
But the Saudi authorities have made it clear they will not tolerate public calls for political change.
What do you think? Can the Internet be use effectively to change policy in truly authoritarian governments?"

Submission + - Wanna be great surgeon? Start playing video games

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Monday February 19, 2007 @05:56PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Surgeons with video game skill appear to perform better than non-gamers, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "Training curricula that include video games may help thin the technical interface between surgeons and screen-mediated applications, such as laparoscopic surgery," the authors conclude. "Video games may be a practical teaching tool to help train surgeons.""

Submission + - Hollywood training swedish police in Anti-Piracy

Submitted by

Oxygen

on Monday February 19, 2007 @05:54PM

Oxygen writes: "IDG.se reports on it's online newssite that representatives from the MPAA, FBI and the Swedish lobbyorganisation Antipiratbyrån have held seminars for swedish police officers (Swedish only) that are being trained in fighting piracy and copyright violations. From the article: "According to Bertil Ramsell, responsible for the course, the purpose of the visit was to give the invited speakers a chance to explain to the students what their organsation's purpose was. But in a report from the IIPA, the pupose was to educate students in anti-piracy." Educating is one thing, but the acronym MPAA doesn't really spell "objective" or "no hidden agenda" to me."

Submission + - Dell XPS 710 H2C Watercooled Desktop Tested

Submitted by

MojoKid

on Monday February 19, 2007 @05:30PM

MojoKid writes: "Dell's XPS 710 H2C Edition is touted as a top-of-the-line, ultra-performance machine built with performance enthusiasts in mind. Not only does the XPS 710 H2C hold the distinction of being Dell's first volume available, factory overclocked computer, but it also uses Dell's first in-house developed liquid cooling system to keep its quad-core power plant cool. This evaluation at HotHardware has plenty of performance data and goes into great detail on the technologies employed in the XPS 710 H2C Edition. It sure seems like a killer system if you can justify the investment."

Journal Journal: What Basic Skills?

Journal by rpbird on Monday February 19, 2007 @05:08PM

What are the basic skills and knowledge any eighteen-year-old American should have? What do you need to know in order to function, even at a minimal level, as an independent human being in the United States? A first list, in no particular order of importance.

1. Fluent in the English language, both the written and spoken forms. What's the point in being a genius if you can't tell anyone about it, or send them a letter?

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