Comment: These aren't the drones you're looking for (Score 1) 133
These are the drones looking for you
Universities agree to email monitoring for copyright agency-> 1
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fish waffle
fish waffle writes "The universities of Western Ontario and Toronto have signed a deal with Access Copyright that allows for surveillance of faculty correspondence, defines e-mailing hyperlinks as equivalent to photocopying a document, and imposes an annual $27.50 fee for every full-time equivalent student to pay for it all.
Access Copyright is a licensing agency historically used by most universities in Canada to give them blanket permission to reproduce copyrighted works, largely to address photocopying concerns that may extend beyond basic fair-use. Since the expiration of this agreement, and with recognition that many academic uses do not require copyright permissions or payments or are already covered under vendor-specific agreements, Canadian academic institutions have been united in opposing continuation of the agreement with the agency. Access Copyright has countered with a proposal for increased fees, and expansion of the definition of copyright to include linking and the need for online surveillance. In a strange breaking of ranks, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto have capitulated and signed agreements that basically accede to the licensing agency's demands.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers bulletin provides detailed background on the issue."
Link to Original Source
Access Copyright is a licensing agency historically used by most universities in Canada to give them blanket permission to reproduce copyrighted works, largely to address photocopying concerns that may extend beyond basic fair-use. Since the expiration of this agreement, and with recognition that many academic uses do not require copyright permissions or payments or are already covered under vendor-specific agreements, Canadian academic institutions have been united in opposing continuation of the agreement with the agency. Access Copyright has countered with a proposal for increased fees, and expansion of the definition of copyright to include linking and the need for online surveillance. In a strange breaking of ranks, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto have capitulated and signed agreements that basically accede to the licensing agency's demands.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers bulletin provides detailed background on the issue."
Link to Original Source
Commercial Drones Taking To the Skies->
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Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "A new federal law, signed by the president on Tuesday, compels the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors — from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones. But while businesses, and drone manufacturers especially, are celebrating the opening of the skies to these unmanned aerial vehicles, the law raises new worries about how much detail the drones will capture about lives down below — and what will be done with that information. Safety concerns like midair collisions and property damage on the ground are also an issue."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Heartland Institute documents have evidence of forgery->
Submitted
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MSTCrow5429
MSTCrow5429 writes "Slashdot ran a story earlier this week claiming damaging documents had been leaked from the Heartland Institute. Review of the documents has indicated a likely hoax, due to unlikely phrasing of disputed issues and metadata revealing such oddities as being created outside of the Institute's timezone and lacking authors as in all other Heartland documents."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Comment: Re:Perspective, People (Score 3, Informative) 213
Well they don't keep committing suicide. As fas as I know you can only do it once.
The potential suicides were at the Microsoft part of the plant - and I'm not even sure they jumped
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/11/foxconn_mass_suicide/
John Nash's NSA Correspondance->
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Corporate T00l
Corporate T00l writes "Aaron's "Adventures in Computation" blog has an interesting piece where he writes:
"
Link to Original Source
What this is, is a recently declassified correspondence between John Nash and the NSA from January 1955. In it, John Nash makes the distinction between polynomial time and exponential time, conjectures that there are problems that -cannot- be solved faster than in exponential time, and uses this conjecture as the basis on which the security of a cryptosystem (of his own design) relies. He also anticipates that proving complexity lower bounds is a difficult mathematical problem. These letters predate even Godel's letter to Von Neumann, which goes into much less detail about complexity, and yet has also been taken to anticipate complexity theory and the P vs. NP problem.
Link to Original Source
Declassified NSA correspondence with Nash show thoughts on modern crypto->
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mashengo
mashengo writes "The National Cryptologic Museum is showing recently declassified correspondence between the NSA and John Nash, circa 1955 in a new exhibit, showing Nash developing his own ideas on an encryption-decryption machine."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Comment: It's from Google... (Score 0) 289
Now they really can track your location!
Microsoft's Killer Tablet Opportunity->
Submitted
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snydeq
snydeq writes "Advice Line's Bob Lewis sees ripe opportunity for Microsoft in the tablet market: Forget about outdoing Apple's iPad and give us the features that finally improve the way we work. 'The game isn't beating Apple at its own game. The magic buzzword is to "differentiate" and show what your technology will do that Apple won't even care about, let alone beat you at. One possible answer: Help individual employees be more effective at their jobs,' Lewis writes, outlining four business features to target, not the least of which would be to provide UI variance, enabling serious tablet users to expose the OS complexity necessary to do real work."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Ask Slashdot: Tech manufacturers with better labor practices?
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srs5694
srs5694 writes "In light of the recent flood of stories about abysmal labor practices at Foxconn and other Chinese factories that produce most of the tech products we consume, the question arises: Who makes motherboards, plug-in cards, cell phones, and other devices WITHOUT relying on labor practices that are just one rung above slave labor? If I want to buy a new tech gadget, from whom can I buy it without ethical qualms?"