Slashdot

Overwhelming the patent system with trash cause the whole system to fail. Thanks to the $$$ grubbing Jews who try to reap profit from Global Warming to Communism to Subprime Crisis to Terrorism worldwide.

akutz writes "I've had the flu since Tuesday afternoon. My wife picked me up from work with a temperature of 103.6 and it finally broke at 98.7 around 3am this morning. Yay. The problem is that I used my laptop during my periods of feverish deliriousness, contaminating my shiny 15" MacBook Pro with the icky influenza virus. I am asking my fellow Slashdotters if they have ever sought out a good way of disinfecting their lucky laptops after an illness. Do you use soap? A light acid bath? Just get the family dog to lick it until it looks clean?"

TrueCrypt has already changed it's name to TueCrypt to avoid pursuit.

Jono Bacon, Community Manager for Ubuntu, has announced development on the next version of the popular Linux distribution name "Hardy Heron". "Not only will the Ubuntu community continue to do what it does best, produce an easy-to-use, reliable, free software platform, but this release will proudly wear the badge of Long Term Support (LTS) and be supported with security updates for five years on the server and three years on the desktop. We look forward to releasing the Hardy Heron in April 2008."

Hillie writes "Apparently someone has hacked the Wii remote and paired it with their Mac; They've developed a Mac OS X application that essentially allows you to use the Wii remote as a virtual lightsaber. Slashfilm has the scoop. You simply run the application, and then press 1+2 on your Wii remote to connect it to your Mac, and then presto! Swing that baby around. It even vibrates when the virtual saber strikes something (simulated) and the saber can be retracted using the B button. It's only sound, but still it's pretty fun to play around with. The whole Star Wars light saber thing has become a desperate want for all Star Wars fans everywhere since the Wii has been announced. There is also a video of it in action as well."

An anonymous reader writes "A court ruling has given the recording industry the green light to go after individuals who link to material from their websites, blogs or MySpace pages that is protected by copyright.

A full bench of the Federal Court yesterday upheld an earlier ruling that Stephen Cooper, the operator of mp3s4free.net, as well as the internet service provider that hosted the website, were guilty of authorising copyright infringement because they provided a search engine through which a user could illegally download MP3 files.

The website did not directly host any copyright-protected music, but the court held that simply providing links to the material effectively authorised copyright infringement."

AMD has updated its Opteron rollout roadmap with an announcement of a quad-core processor for one-socket servers and workstations, and giving us a release date on the follow-up to its initial quad-core release, as well as its new mobile processor core. "That initial quad-core release will be followed in the first half of 2008 by the launch of Shanghai, its quad-core successor, according to Seyer. Shanghai is a code name for a processor that will feature HyperTransport 3.0, which provides high-speed chip-to-chip and board-to-board communications. Right now, the company's processors are using HyperTransport 1.0. Shanghai, according to an AMD spokesman, also will have shared L3 cache, a third bank of memory on the processor for storing instructions. He said it also will have DDR2 (double data rate) options, which is a memory industry standard. Budapest will be a quad-core Opteron offering for one-socket servers and workstations. It also will offer HyperTransport 3.0. It's scheduled for release in mid-2007, as is Barcelona."

IndioMan writes "One great thing about the Rails approach, is that it uses run-time code generation and custom tags, which insulates you from the complexities of JavaScript. This article walks through a couple of simple Ruby on Rails — Ajax examples and, along the way, shows you what makes the Ruby/Ajax combination so successful."

MrCrassic writes "From the article:

The drug maker Eli Lilly has engaged in a decade-long effort to play down the health risks of Zyprexa, its best-selling medication for schizophrenia, according to hundreds of internal Lilly documents and e-mail messages among top company managers...Lilly's own published data, which it told its sales representatives to play down in conversations with doctors, has shown that 30 percent of patients taking Zyprexa gain 22 pounds or more after a year on the drug, and some patients have reported gaining 100 pounds or more. But Lilly was concerned that Zyprexa's sales would be hurt if the company was more forthright about the fact that the drug might cause unmanageable weight gain or diabetes, according to the documents, which cover the period 1995 to 2004.

"

donzo writes "eWEEK has an article about advances in RFID: "UC/Berkeley researchers have created tiny wireless 'motes' (aka network sensors) that use radio signals to communicate where they are located in physical space. The end goal: an RFID network that could revolutionize the industry with its ability to locate tagged items without the aid of readers... 'What we showed in the university was that you could network together a lot of sensors,' said Kristofer Pister, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC/Berkeley who made a name for himself with his 1997 development of technology called Smart Dust — a self-organizing network of tiny wireless 'motes.'... Intended to be about the size of a grain of sand or a piece of dust — the motes from Dust Networks are currently about the size of a quarter — the motes contain sensors, computing circuits, bi-directional wireless technology, and an antenna and very low-battery power supply that are external to the chip. The motes can detect light, temperature or vibrations."

Paul Cobbaut writes ""Patent trolling activities essentially hold inventors and tech companies hostage and clog up the patent system with injunctions and excessive litigation." This sounds like a Slashdot comment, but it is written by the BSA on their webpage. Who ever thought the BSA would become so insightful ?"

DJLuc1d writes "Penny-Arcade's succesful charity, Child's Play is begining its drive for this year. For those who are unfamiliar with Child's Play, its goal is to help hospitals around the world by providing sick kids with not only video games, but consoles, books, movies, and other entertainment while they are in the hospital."

Anonymous Immigrant writes "Texas recently installed Internet viewable surveillance cameras on the Mexican border as a part of their Border Watch program. They have provided this "to stress the system by providing public access to numerous surveillance cameras. Thank you for helping test this important capability." So I figured Slashdot might be able to help out. Login is required — try borderwatch@gmail.com/X9kn2M4c — and they require Internet Exploder, plus a plug-in from E-Watch.

After all that, you get a screen with thumbnails from nine webcams that you can then click on to get live footage — update rate appears to be a couple of frames/second. They go on to say "If you should notice any suspicious activity while viewing the camera images please notify the State by selecting the "Report Suspicious Activity" button under the camera view."

I watched for a while, but it was about as exciting as watching grass grow. Will this be an effective tool in "securing the border for the people of Texas?""