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+ - Supreme Court Rules For Monsanto In Patent Case ->

Submitted by Pigskin-Referee
Pigskin-Referee writes "WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has sustained Monsanto Co.'s claim that an Indiana farmer violated the company's patents on soybean seeds that are resistant to its weed-killer.

The justices, in a unanimous vote Monday, rejected the farmer's argument that cheap soybeans he bought from a grain elevator are not covered by the Monsanto patents, even though most of them also were genetically modified to resist the company's Roundup herbicide.

Justice Elena Kagan says a farmer who buys patented seeds must have the patent holder's permission. More than 90 percent of American soybean farms use Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" seeds, which first came on the market in 1996."
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+ - Psychiatrists Cast Doubt on Biomedical Model of Mental Illness-> 2

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes "British Psychological Society's division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a 'paradigm shift' in how the issues of mental health are understood. According to their claim, there is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful. The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry's predominantly biomedical model of mental distress – the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. The DCP said its decision to speak out 'reflects fundamental concerns about the development, personal impact and core assumptions of the (diagnosis) systems', used by psychiatry.

The provocative statement by the DCP has been timed to come out shortly before the release of DSM-5, the fifth edition of the American Psychiatry Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The manual has been attacked for expanding the range of mental health issues that are classified as disorders."
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Comment: Re:Or (Score 1) 248

by Tim C (#43157661) Attached to: Testing an Ad-Free Microtransaction Utopia
You wouldn't, and that's the problem I have with most of the "go back to the good old days!" posts. That only works if the cost of hosting the site is cheap enough to fall in to a person's "hobby-level expenditure". Anything even remotely popular is going to cost orders of magnitude more than that; that requires either direct payment, corporate ownership, or corporate sponsorship - the most common form of which is advertising.
NASA

+ - NASA wants new space net to sustain big data dumps; moon and Mars trips->

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes "What kind of network can support future commercial and government space trips around Earth and support bigger distances to the moon and Mars? NASA is in the process of exploring exactly what technology will be needed beyond 2022 in particular to support future space communication and navigation. The agency recently issued a Request for Information (RFI) to begin planning for such a new architecture."
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Games

+ - Following 800 poor reviews, Amazon stops selling download copies of SimCity-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "In what must be a big blow for EA and Maxis, Amazon has stopped selling download copies of the just released SimCity. The game has at time of writing received 833 reviews on Amazon, and has an average rating of just one star. That’s because 740 of those are one star reviews. Only 20 people gave it 5 stars. There’s few better ways to gauge how a game has been received, and this is pretty damning as to how EA has handled the launch."
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Japan

+ - Japan Is Going to Restart Its Nuclear Power Plants, But Don't Freak Out About It->

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes "Areva, the French nuclear fuel company, helps supply Japan with a lot of its juice. And Areva's chief executive says that Japan is going to restart up to six reactors by the end of the year. Eventually, it's going to power up at least two thirds of them. Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe has been a little cagey, but he recently told the press that yes, despite the upcoming March 11th anniversary of the Fukushima crisis, the nuke plants are coming back online.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports that "half a dozen reactors may restart by the end of this year in addition to the two that resumed operations in 2012." Luc Oursel, the Areva CEO, said at a press conference that “I think two-thirds of reactors will restart” within several years. This is probably a good thing:

First, consider Japan's alternative: loads of coal, oil, and gas power. Japan has been importing fossil fuels to make up for the lost supply; burning all of the above pumps out climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, Japan is entertaining plans to build 12.5 gigawatts worth of coal-fired power. That would be a disaster in climate terms. Eventually, solar and wind could feasibly pick up the slack, but it takes years to build out that kind of infrastructure."
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+ - A White House Petition for fairness with ISP deceptive pricing practices->

Submitted by yayoubetcha
yayoubetcha writes "Another White House petition... This one, I signed. It is a proposal for a simple and prominent table of an ISPs pricing on their website. Too often the prices are designed to get a subscriber signed up for a low price for a few months then it expires and they are paying a high rate. The proposal is for a food-like "Nutritional Information" "label" for an ISPs pricing that clearly shows regular rates, special pricing, and bandwidth limits.

My mother uses email and surfs the web occasionally, and of course updates to her Windows OS. That's about it. She was paying $60 a month for 20Gbps service for two years before I called Century Link to get it reduce to 7Gbps and $40/month — still too much for her needs, but she is saving a little."
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+ - How to deal with service providers that make it purposely hard to leave?

Submitted by DrHappyAngry
DrHappyAngry writes "After calling Tmobile to look at getting out of my contract for unnacceptable service throughout Downtown Seattle, I found that they require a snail mail letter or fax. They also require a copy of ID or utility bill showing my address, which would not even show the locations that are problematic, such as my office. The service quality is at the point where most buildings in the core of a major city are not even able to be serviced by their network. How do you deal with a provider that is out to make it as impossible to leave as they can? Asides from posting this to /. how else can they be publicly shamed? I was very upset when they told me this, and in fact told them "This isn't 1980, nobody uses that anymore, and this is for the sole purpose of making it more difficult to terminate the contract.""
Windows

+ - Ask Slashdot: How best to set up a parent's PC? 2

Submitted by CodingHero
CodingHero writes "My mother uses a recent enough PC running Windows XP and has a broadband connection, but her primary method of interacting with the online world remains the AOL software. She also likes to download and use various seasonal wallpapers, screensavers, etc. Usually all this works fine and I don't get family tech support calls, but occasionally something big goes wrong. Since she lives 400 miles away, that means I get to provide phone tech support. While I can usually get something fixed through simple instructions, sometimes it's just too complicated to properly diagnose and explain over the phone (e.g., a trojan infection that anti-virus won't get rid of on its own). I'd like to set up the system so that her account is not an Administrator and that I can easily (and securely) remotely connect to fix problems, install stuff she really wants to use (after proper vetting of course), and so on. Moving to Linux or a Mac is not an option. Upgrading the system to Windows 7 and breaking the AOL habit, while seemingly the best course of action, is going to mean a lot of my time up front to explain how to do things all over again, time that I don't have a lot of right now. Has anyone else had a similar experience? If so, what did you find was the best way to re-educate a parent and/or set up a method to securely remotely manage a system, or at least lock it down to better protect it?"

Comment: Lots of goodies! (Score 2) 102

by Vegan Pagan (#42480235) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: What would you like to see at CES?
I'd like to see 3D printers all over the place: homes and offices for starters. Show some killer apps for them so they fly off the shelves. Convince all the convenience stores to replace their cobweb-gathering photo equipment with some sexy new 3D printers that are bigger and better than what people can get at home so customers can order top-quality printed objects in store.

The ever-improving capabilities of remote-controlled helicopters and planes are always interesting. Is a programmable, unmanned submarine now possible?

OLED TVs and monitors should sell based on speed and contrast. If Peter Jackson and James Cameron get their way and make high frame rate movies the norm, TVs will sell more and more based on their ability to show native HFR material well.

Comment: Re:Yeah! (Score 1) 121

by trogdor8667 (#42383739) Attached to: Google Chrome 25 Will Disable Silent Extension Installation

All my extensions were disabled by the dev channel when that update came through. It gave me a messagebox when it ran the update letting me know it disabled them, and it doesn't give you a way to re-enable them. You do have to dig through the menu to re-enable them. This is after a previous version already made it so to distribute them internally you had to save the crx file, open the extensions page, and drag it on there.

I understand the point is security, but they're making legit purposes harder to deal with.

Gloffing is a state of mine.

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