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Patent Troll now armed with thousands of Nortel patents->

Submitted by dgharmon
dgharmon writes "You may recall last summer that Apple, Microsoft, EMC, RIM, Ericsson and Sony all teamed up to buy Nortel's patents for $4.5 billion. They beat out a team of Google and Intel who bid a bit less. While there was some antitrust scrutiny over the deal, it was dropped and the purchase went through. Apparently, the new owners picked off a bunch of patents to transfer to themselves... and then all (minus EMC, who, one hopes, was horrified by the plans) decided to support a massive new patent troll armed with the remaining 4,000 patents. The company is called Rockstar Consortium, and it's run by the folks who used to run Nortel's patent licensing program anyway — but now employs people whose job it is to just find other companies to threaten:"
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Shouryya Ray solves 300-year-old mathematical riddle posed by Isaac Newton->

Submitted by
johnsnails
johnsnails writes "A GERMAN 16-year-old has become the first person to solve a mathematical problem posed by Sir Isaac Newton more than 300 years ago.
Shouryya Ray worked out how to calculate exactly the path of a projectile under gravity and subject to air resistance, The (London) Sunday Times reported.
The Indian-born teen said he solved the problem that had stumped mathematicians for centuries while working on a school project.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/german-teen-shouryya-ray-solves-300-year-old-mathematical-riddle-posed-by-sir-isaac-newton/story-e6frfro0-1226368490157#ixzz1w3LI5N1w"
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Games

Dungeons and dragons playtest released->

Submitted by thuf1rhawat
thuf1rhawat writes "for a certain type of geek, nothing is more important than dungeons and dragons, with the announcement last year of the new edition and the announcement that an open playtest will occur. finally it's available ( subject to usual nda's etc)"
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Businesses

Teacher Earns $700K Selling Lesson Plans Online-> 1

Submitted by stevegee58
stevegee58 writes "Teaching isn't known to be the highest-paying profession. However at least one teacher made $700K selling her lesson plans through teacherspayteachers.com.

Through this new e-commerce site some 700,000 subscribers can buy and sell lesson plans, typically for $5 — $10 though some are free. Teachers Pay Teachers makes money by taking a commission on each sale.

If sites like this take off it begs the question if it's truly good for education, or merely for lining the pockets of a few teachers willing to sell."
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Education

Barter-Based School Catching on Globally->

Submitted by
sethopia
sethopia writes "In 2010, three people had the crazy idea to start a school where the teachers teach whatever they want and the students pay for classes with whatever teachers need—cutlery, art, advice—but never with money. Trade Schools have been popping up around the world and are now active in 15 cities and 10 countries, with almost no prodding from its founders. Caroline Woolard, one of the founders, discusses the challenges and opportunities of adapting their idea to an international audience and making the Trade School software—based on Python and Django—great."
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Google

Google Now Searches JavaScript ->

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes "Google has been improving the way that its Googlebot searches dynamic web pages for some time — but it seems to be causing some added interest just at the moment. In the past Google has encouraged developers to avoid using JavaScript to deliver content or links to content because of the difficulty of indexing dynamic content. Over time, however, the Googlebot has incorporated ways of searching content that is provided via JavaScript.
Now it seems that it has got so good at the task Google is asking us to allow the Googlebot to scan the JavaScript used by our sites.
Working with JavaScript means that the Googlebot has to actually download and run the scripts and this is more complicated than you might think. This has led to speculation of whether or not it might be possible to include JavaScript on a site that could use the Google cloud to compute something. For example, imagine that you set up a JavaScript program to compute the n-digits of Pi, or a BitCoin miner, and had the result formed into a custom URL — which the Googlebot would then try to access as part of its crawl. By looking at, say, the query part of the URL in the log you might be able to get back a useful result."
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BitTorrent Traffic Falls In The U.S.->

Submitted by CAKAS
CAKAS writes "After legal actions taken by several industry outfits, BitTorrent traffic has fallen in the United States to the all time low of 12.7 percent of internet traffic. However, this trend seems to be unique to the U.S. — In other parts of the world, like Europe and Asia, BitTorrent traffic continues to rise. "According to Sandvine, the absence of legal alternatives is one of the reasons for these high P2P traffic shares". In the U.S. legal content delivery has flourished and provided customers easy access to content. This seems to suggest that due to these alternatives, people are less willing to pirate and pay the publishers for entertainment."
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