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Time To Abolish Software Patents? 259

Posted by Soulskill
from the reply-hazy-try-again dept.
gnujoshua writes "Has the time come to abolish software patents? Fortune columnist Roger Parloff reports on a new campaign called End Software Patents, which he views as 'attempting to ride a wave of corporate and judicial disenchantment with aspects of the current patent system.' Ryan Paul of Ars Technica writes that the purpose of the campaign is to 'educate the public and encourage grass-roots patent reform activism in order to promote effective legislative solutions to the software patent problem.' The campaign site is informative and targets many types of readers, and it includes a scholarship contest with a top prize of $10,000.00. We've recently discussed the potential legal re-examination of software patents."
Power

Salt water fuel?->

Submitted by HeyPunk
HeyPunk writes "Florida man stumbles upon method for turning salt water into fuel? FTA: "On our way to try to do desalinization, we came up with something that burns, and it looks in this case that salt water perhaps could be used as a fuel to replace the carbon footsteps that we've been using all these years, i.e., fossil fuels," Kanzius said."
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Privacy

Warrant Now Required For Email Searches By Feds

Submitted by nnkx00
nnkx00 writes "Courtesy of the EFF: "The government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers, according to a landmark ruling Monday in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their telephone calls...the government has routinely used the federal Stored Communications Act (SCA) to secretly obtain stored email from email service providers without a warrant." Full Ruling here."
Space

Black hole information loss paradox cracked->

Submitted by
Anuborn Satirak
Anuborn Satirak writes "Physicist may have finally cracked the black hole information loss paradox that has befuddled physicists for the past 40 years, according to an article accepted for publication by Physical Review D, which concludes that that an outside observer can never lose objects down a black hole.

The question is: "what happens once something collapses into a black hole?"

If all information about the collapsing matter is lost, it defies the laws of quantum physics. Yet, in current thinking, once the matter goes over the event horizon and forms a black hole, all information about it is lost."
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Unix

24-hour test drive of PC-BSD

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a concise introduction to PC-BSD, a FreeBSD derivative that emphasizes ease of use and aims to convert Windows users. The review describes the installation process, articulates the advantages of PC-BSD,and reveal some of the challenges that the reviewer faced along the way. From the article. "In the end, I would suggest this distribution to new users provided they had someone to call in case of a driver malfunction during installation. I would also recommend PC-BSD to seasoned Unix users that have never tried using FreeBSD before and would prefer a shallower learning curve before getting down to business.""
Spam

Spammers spamming using our addresses

Submitted by
Vesty
Vesty writes "I recently enabled a catchall on our domain while our company transitioned to a new website. I didn't want emails going astray etc while things changed over... Recently I've noticed that on the catchall I get a LOT of 'delivery failure' and similar emails, that are all being returned to the same non active alias. After a bit of digging I discovered that about half a dozen different companies spam has been being sent using an alias at our domain as their from address. I've been slowly attempting to call each of the companies, most are extremely shady, occasionally I get a real person that supposedly knows nothing about it. It seems to me that each of these companies has farmed out there 'advertising' to the same third party that is using our address as their from address. I'm sure this has happened to other people, what can we do to stop it? With the amount of spam these fools send I'm worried that any email from our domain will automatically be treated as spam... Anyone have any suggestions? Are they breaking any laws?"
PC Games (Games)

Game Engines that Changed the Industry->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Game Almighty as posted a retrospective piece looking at some of the most important game engines in the history of gaming. Included is discussion about SCUMM, Source, Renderware, and other engines that have left a mark on the industry. Here's an excerpt from the SCUMM section: "Created by Ron Gilbert in 1987 while at Lucasarts (then Lucasfilm Games), the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion was a hybrid game engine and programming language for adventure games. SCUMM allowed the creative minds at Lucasarts to design puzzles, locations, items, and branching dialogue sequences without having to directly modify the game's source code. Their endeavors turned out to be some of the most memorable adventure games of all time, including Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, the Monkey Island series, and Full Throttle.""
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That feeling just came over me. -- Albert DeSalvo, the "Boston Strangler"