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Comment: Re:This should not be patentable. (Score 3, Interesting) 87

by GiantRobotMonster (#42382941) Attached to: Microsoft Patents Virtual Handshakes, Hugs

If we all ignore them, wont they go away?

Anybody know an easy way to get Slashdot to filter out *all* patent related stories? They are always ridiculous, even when they're accurate!

I had enough of this crap when I wasn't allowed to make a protocol I was implementing work as efficiently as it could, because Motorola had a patent on the concept of "Pardon? Could you repeat yourself please?" in this particular context. Utterly freaking ridiculous.

The current patent system does not encourage innovation -- it encourages taking out patents.

Hint -- follow the money.

NASA

+ - Source of Pioneer space probe deceleration anomaly found.->

Submitted by deathcow
deathcow writes "After forty years, a fresh perspective on old Pioneer data leads to new conclusions as to why the Pioneer probes are decelerating. Many theories to the slowing probes have persisted over the years — was it gravity? some type of unforeseen radiation? dark matter?

Thanks to the data backup preservation efforts of a NASA Ames Research engineer, mountains of old telemetry data were still available for studying this curious anomaly."
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Science

+ - Drunk Maggots Make Good Students->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "Some fruit fly larvae need a little extra buzz with their lessons. In a new study, reported last week in Current Biology, researchers fed the larvae of fruit flies alcohol-spiked food and then tested their ability to learn to avoid an unpleasant stimulus. After consuming an amount of alcohol that would be mildly intoxicating to humans (equivalent to a 0.05 to 0.08 blood alcohol concentration) the larvae were less apt at avoiding an attractive odor that had been paired with an unpleasant heat shock than their sober counterparts—indicating that alcohol initially impaired learning. However, after a 6-day drinking binge, those same larvae adapted and were able to learn just as well as the non-alcoholics—and even performed worse when the alcohol was taken away. Once they were allowed to drink again, their performance returned to normal. Researchers say that the findings, the first evidence that invertebrate learning and memory can become dependent on alcohol, also demonstrate that alcohol directly affects cells of the nervous system."
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Science

+ - Why Old People Get Scammed->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "Despite long experience with the ways of the world, older people are especially vulnerable to fraud. According to the Federal Trade Commission, up to 80% of scam victims are over 65. One explanation may lie in a brain region that serves as a built-in crook detector. Called the anterior insula, this structure—which fires up in response to the face of an unsavory character—is less active in older people, possibly making them less cagey than younger folks, a new study finds."
Link to Original Source

+ - Global Warming Really Just a Statistical Fluke?->

Submitted by J Story
J Story writes "Matt Asher, a statistics wonk, in a blog posting (The surprisingly weak case for global warming) claims that: "Based solely on year-over-year changes in surface temperatures, the net increase since 1881 is fully explainable as a non-independent random walk with no trend."

For the programmer/statistics junkie, R code is provided."
Link to Original Source

+ - Auto-threading compiler could restore Moore's Law gains->

Submitted by Nemo the Magnificent
Nemo the Magnificent writes "Develop in the Cloud has news about what might be a breakthrough out of Microsoft Research. A team there wrote a paper (PDF), now accepted for publication at OOPSLA, that describes how to teach a compiler to auto-thread a program that was written single-threaded in a conventional language like C#. This is the holy grail to take advantage of multiple cores — to get Moore's Law improvements back on track, after they essentially ran aground in the last decade. (Functional programming, the other great white hope, just isn't happening.) About 2004 was when Intel et al. ran into a wall and started packing multiple cores into chips instead of cranking the clock speed. The Microsoft team modified a C# compiler to use the new technique, and claim a "large project at Microsoft" have written "several million lines of code" testing out the resulting "safe parallelism.""
Link to Original Source

+ - Electroluminescent plastic bulbs to replace CCFLs?->

Submitted by hattig
hattig writes "US researchers say they have developed a new type of lighting that could replace fluorescent bulbs. The new light source is called field-induced polymer electroluminescent (Fipel) technology. It is made from three layers of white-emitting polymer that contain a small volume of nanomaterials that glow when electric current is passed through them. The developer is promising cheap, hard-to-break, mercury-free, highly efficient bulbs from 2013."
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Media

+ - RED shocks with Odemax 4K distribution platform and REDRAY home player->

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes "Serial disruptor RED is at it again. While the announcement of a REDRAY player capable of outputting 4K (4096 x 2160 pixels) moving images had been expected for some time, the accompanying infrastructure that’s being put in place comes as a major shock. RED, in partnership with new venture Odemax, is setting up an alternative to the highly regulated and protected film distribution networks of the big studios – and anybody can join. If they can pull it off it could be nothing less than a revolution.

Odemax is run by Jon Farhat, an experienced Hollywood visual effects supervisor and long-time RED collaborator. The full details of the service, and some big name early adopters, will be announced at the upcoming Sundance Film Festival in January, but the basic idea is this; Odemax has set up a cloud-based content video delivery network plus a sophisticated web site (not yet online) for obtaining, uploading, promoting, discussing and controlling content. In the U.S. it has leased bandwidth on a nationwide fiber network. So far, so iTunes/YouTube/Vimeo etc.

The genius bit is that the content is encoded using a new, very high quality delivery codec called (shockingly) .RED, that is suitable for 4K movies at up to 60 frames per second – in stereo (3D) if required. The content can be optionally encrypted. Anybody can encode their 4K material using the free Redcine X Pro software with a US$20 Redray encode plug in."
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Hardware

+ - "self-healing" NAND flash memory that can survive over 100 million cycles->

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes "Taiwan-based Macronix has found a solution for a weakness in flash memory fadeout. A limitation of flash memory is simply that eventually it cannot be used; the more cells in the memory chips are erased, the less useful to store data. The write-erase cycles degrade insulation; eventually the cell fails. "Flash wears out after being programmed and erased about 10,000 times," said the IEEE Spectrum. Engineers at Macronix have a solution that moves flash memory over to a new life. They propose a "self-healing" NAND flash memory solution that can survive over 100 million cycles."
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Privacy

+ - Julian Assange: "Online Totalitarianism is Near, Entire Nations are Intercepted"-> 2

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes "Russia Today's correspondents have visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Assange has been holed up for nearly 6 months now. In the 12 minute long interview with RT, Assange has many interesting things to say about privacy, and government data interception in particular. A small excerpt: >> Russia Today — 'So you’ve written this book ‘Cypherpunks. Freedom and the Future of the Internet’ based on one of the programs that you’ve made for RT. In it, you say that the internet can enslave us. I don’t really get that, because the internet it’s a thing, it’s a soulless thing. Who are the actual enslavers behind it?' >> Julian Assange — 'The people who control the interception of the internet and, to some degree also, physically control the big data warehouses and the international fiber-optic lines. We all think of the internet as some kind of Platonic Realm where we can throw out ideas and communications and web pages and books and they exist somewhere out there. Actually, they exist on web servers in New York or Nairobi or Beijing, and information comes to us through satellite connections or through fiber-optic cables. So whoever physically controls this controls the realm of our ideas and communications. And whoever is able to sit on those communications channels, can intercept entire nations, and that’s the new game in town, as far as state spying is concerned – intercepting entire nations, not individuals. The US National Security Agency has been doing this for some 20-30 years. But it has now spread to mid-size nations, even Gaddafi’s Libya was employing the EAGLE system, which is produced by French company AMESYS, pushed there in 2009, advertised in its international documentation as a nationwide interception system. So what’s happened over the last 10 years is the ever-decreasing cost of intercepting each individual now to the degree where it is cheaper to intercept every individual rather that it is to pick particular people to spy upon.'"
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Earth

+ - Scientists Develop Sixty Day Bread 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "BBC reports that scientists have developed a technique that can make bread stay mould-free for 60 days that could also be used with a wide range of foods including fresh turkey and many fruits and vegetables. At its laboratory on the campus of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Don Stull of Microzap showed off the long, metallic microwave device that resembles an industrial production line. Originally designed to kill bacteria such as MRSA and salmonella, the researchers discovered it could kill the mould spores in bread in around 10 seconds. "We treated a slice of bread in the device, we then checked the mould that was in that bread over time against a control," says Stull. "And at 60 days it had the same mould content as it had when it came out of the oven." Food waste is a massive problem in most developed countries. In the US, figures released this year suggest that the average American family throws away 40% of the food they purchase — which adds up to $165 Billion annually. There is some concern that consumers might not take to bread that lasts for so long and Stull acknowledges it might be difficult to convince some people of the benefits. "We'll have to get some consumer acceptance of that. Most people do it by feel and if you still have that quality feel they probably will accept it.""

+ - Swedish stock exchange hit by programming snafu->

Submitted by whizzter
whizzter writes "I was reading the national news today and an image in a stock exchange related article struck my eye. An order had been placed for 4 294 967 290 futures (0xfffffffa or -6 if treated as an 32bit signed integer) each valued at approximately 15 000 usd giving a neat total of almost 65000 trillion usd. The order apperantly started to affect valuations and was later annulled, however it is said to have caused residual effects in the system and trading was halted for several hours."
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Mars

+ - Elon Musk outlines SpaceX's Mars settlement plans->

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes "Space.com (http://www.space.com/18596-mars-colony-spacex-elon-musk.html) has the news of Alon Musk's November 16 talk at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. Musk outlined SpaceX's plans to establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by staring with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people."
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Piracy

+ - New Hunt Begins Today for Online Pirates

Submitted by
markfeffer
markfeffer writes "David Strom says that today AT&T, Time Warner and other broadband providers will start enforcing their “Six-Strikes” approach to stopping illegal downloads of movies, TV shows and other content. The Center for Copyright Information, an operation they’ve funded, will send suspected individuals multiple emails pointing out any illegal activity, getting them to acknowledge their misdeeds, and finally imposing increasing punishments like throttling connection speeds or blocking particular websites (though not outright disconnection or legal action). Strom writes that the next step will be to start using VPNs to block your real IP address when you want to download illegal content. It might be better if the movie studios learned from the peer music piracy debacle of the late 1990s, and made it easier for folks to find and download legal content. But that would require careful thought by people other than lawyers to build better systems, like Pirate Bay’s."

+ - Using nanoparticles to boil water for less £->

Submitted by
vswee
vswee writes "Generating steam, typically requires vast amounts of energy to heat and eventually boil water or another fluid. Now researchers at Rice University have found a shortcut. Using light-absorbing nanoparticles suspended in water, the group was able to turn the water molecules surrounding the nanoparticles into steam while scarcely raising the temperature of the remaining water. The trick could dramatically reduce the cost of many steam-reliant processes."
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For some reason, this fortune reminds everyone of Marvin Zelkowitz.

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