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bl968 (190792)

bl968
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bl968 (190792)

  FISA isn't the worst of it[->] 2008-02-25 17:33 bl968

Submitted by bl968 on Monday February 25, @05:33PM
bl968 writes "Clarksville Online has published a article which covers datamining and it's use by both the Federal Government and private industry and the implications for privacy which result from this...

FISA is just the latest salvo in an attempt to install a surveillance society in America. Don't let anger at the Bush administration and Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) over the NSA blind you to a much larger problem. We need a comprehensive national policy on data collection and its use in both the public & private sectors. Privacy rights and the associated laws must be clarified and strengthened, taking into account the complexities of modern technologies. The wall between government and private industry must also be restored.

Theoretically, U.S. laws and policies restrict the government's use of dossiers on individual citizens who are not under criminal investigation. President Carter's Executive order 12036 prohibited domestic surveillance. There are no such laws preventing private companies from doing so, as long as they ensure that specific protected pieces of data (your social security number, for example) aren't lost or stolen or otherwise compromised. And some people in the intelligence community have been trying to get their hands on that commercial data for years...
"
http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/
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 [+] submission, yro, privacy

  Divx video hosting site Stage6 to shutdown 2008-02-25 17:22 bl968

Submitted by bl968 on Monday February 25, @05:22PM
bl968 writes "The online video hosting site run by the creators of the DIVX software is shutting down on February 28. Uploading of new content is already disabled with the existing videos to be removed in the next few days.

So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it's really as simple as that.
"
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 [+] submission, features, media

  Terry Pratchett has Alzheimers[->] 2007-12-12 23:27 Hecatonchires

Submitted by Hecatonchires on Wednesday December 12 2007, @11:27PM
Hecatonchires writes "A blow to discworld fans everywhere. Terry Pratchett has announced he has a rare form of early onset alzheimers."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/ive-got-alzheimers-terry-pratchett/2007/12/13/1197135601731.html
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 [+] submission, books, pratchett, terry, bugrit, milleniumhandandshrimp
Submitted by bl968 on Wednesday December 12 2007, @10:27PM
bl968 writes "Verdicts are in on the two day mock trial of U.S. vs. Bush which was held by Austin Peay State university in Tennessee. In the trial President Bush was found guilty on the charges relating to illegal and unauthorized domestic surveillance and wiretapping of American citizens and violating the Separation of Powers and FISA by ordering a secret Executive Order authorizing such action. Bush was acquitted on the other charges."
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 [+] submission, politics, court

  Toy Shopping? Buy "Made in the U.S.A."[->] 2007-11-25 17:25 bl968

Submitted by bl968 on Sunday November 25 2007, @05:25PM
bl968 writes "Clarksville Online has a helpful article for Slashdot readers who might be looking to buy American made toys for their children titled Toy Shopping? Buy "Made in the U.S.A.". With all the Chinese made toy recalls of the past year, this may a parent's best option this Christmas season.

So you want to buy American as you check off that Christmas toy list? You can, though it may seem as if everything on the shelves was manufactured somewhere else. There are many American toy companies alive and thriving in the USA.
"
http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2007/11/25/toy-shopping-buy-made-in-the-usa/
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 [+] submission, politics, toy

  A First Look At The 45nm Intel Penryn[->] 2007-11-13 16:41 Techwarelabs

Submitted by Techwarelabs on Tuesday November 13 2007, @04:41PM
Techwarelabs writes "TechwareLabs has a first look at the new Intel 45nm Penryn Processor complete with screenshots and a preliminary benchmark. The mobile Penryn chip is faster than a pair of dual Xeon 5150 server cpu's due to several enhancements including Intels new high-k transistor material based on Hafnium. Intel has kept to its release of a new processor every 2 years and feels that the new high-k transistor material will assist it in keeping up with Moore's Law."
http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/processors/penryn-preview
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 [+] submission, hardware, intel

  Politics: All Fifty States May Face Voting Machine Lawsuit 2007-11-13 15:51

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday November 13 2007, @03:51PM
from the counters-fans-of-fuzzy-math dept.
according to an announcement made by activist Bernie Ellis at the premier of David Earnhardt's film "Uncounted [The Movie]" all fifty states could be receiving subpoenas in the National Clean Election lawsuit. The documentary film, like the lawsuit, takes a look at the issue of voting machine failure and the need for a solid paper trail. "The lawsuit is aimed at prohibiting the use of all types of vote counting machines, and requiring hand-counting of all primary and general election ballots in full view of the public. The lawsuit has raised significant constitutional questions challenging the generally accepted practices of state election officials of relying on "black box" voting machines to record and count the votes at each polling station, and allow tallying of votes by election officials outside the view of the general public."
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 [+] story, politics, court, usa, abouttime, publicitystunt

  The Rules of the Swarm 2007-11-13 05:25 Hugh Pickens

Submitted by pickens on Tuesday November 13 2007, @05:25AM
Researchers are starting to discover the simple rules that allow swarms of thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism. To get a sense of swarms, Dr. Iain Couzin, a mathematical biologist at the Collective Animal Behaviour Laboratory at Princeton University, builds computer models of virtual swarms with thousands of individual agents that he can program to follow a few simple rules. Among the findings are that swarm behavior has patterns common to many different species, that just as liquid water can suddenly begin to boil, swarm behavior can also change abruptly in character, and that just a few leaders can guide a swarm effectively by creating a bias in the swarm's movement that steers it in a particular direction. The rules of the swarm may also apply to the cells inside our bodies and researchers are working with cancer biologists to discover the rules by which cancer cells work together to build tumors or migrate through tissues. Even brain cells may follow the same rules for collective behavior seen in locusts or fish. "How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you're seeing?" Dr. Couzin says. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm.
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 [+] , science, biotech, innerswarm
Submitted by mu22le on Tuesday November 13 2007, @05:18AM
mu22le writes "An international team of researchers at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, the "Belle collaboration"*1, recently announced the discovery of an exotic new sub-atomic particle with non-zero electric charge. This particle, which the researchers have named the Z(4430)*2, does not fit into the usual scheme of "mesons", combinations of a quark*3and an antiquark that are held together by the force of the strong interaction.

The Z(4430) particle was found in the decay products of B-mesons (mesons containing a "bottom" quark) that are produced in large numbers at the KEKB "B-factory", an electron-positron collider at the KEK laboratory. While investigating various decays of the B meson in a data sample containing about 660 million pairs of B and anti-B mesons, the Belle team observed 120 B mesons that decay into a Z(4430) and a K-meson. The Z(4430) then instantly decays into a "Psi-prime" (Psi-prime) particle and a pi-meson (see Figure-1). The Belle team found that this particle has the same electric charge as the electron and a mass about 4.7 times that of the proton.

In the past few years, a number of peculiar new particles, including the so-called X(3872), Y(4260), X(3940), Y(3940), have been found by the Belle and also by the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). These new particles lie in the mass region from 4 to 4.5 times the proton mass, and decay into "J/psi" or "Psi-prime" particles and pi-mesons. Here J/psi and Psi-prime particles are examples of so-called "charmonium" mesons, bound states of a charm quark and its anti-particle (an anti-charm quark). Since the masses and the decay properties of these new particles do not match theoretical expectations for quark-antiquark combinations, theorists around the world have proposed other potential explanations, which include the possibility that some are made up of four quarks (for example, a combination of a charm quark, an anti-charm quark, an up quark and an anti-up quark). However, since all of these new particles are electrically neutral, it was not experimentally possible to rule out alternative explanations of the new states as excited charmonium mesons.

On the other hand, the newly discovered Z(4430) state has non-zero electric charge, a characteristic that clearly distinguishes this particle from normal quark-antiquark mesons; it, therefore, must have a charm quark, an anti-charm quark and at least two more quarks (for example, an up quark and an anti-down quark). Thus, the Z(4430) does not fit into the framework of known mesons. As a result it has attracted a considerable amount of attention from the world's physics community (Figures 2 and 3).

Single quarks cannot be isolated. Instead, quarks are confined in composite particles such as mesons. This is a characteristic feature of the strong force, described by a mathematical theory called "Quantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD)". The discoveries of sub-atomic particles at the KEK B-factory provide an experimental foundation for better understanding of the phenomena of quark confinement as well as the formation of matter in QCD.

The discovery of the Z(4430) is described in a paper submitted on October 22 to Physical Review Letters, a leading physics research journal."
http://www.kek.jp/intra-e/press/2007/BellePress11e.html
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 [+] submission, science, announcement
Submitted by bl968 on Tuesday November 13 2007, @04:24AM
Business as usual will not be the norm over the next 48 hours as Secretaries of State in all fifty states will each receive subpoenas in the National Clean Election lawsuit, according to an announcement made Monday night by activist Bernie Ellis at premier of Uncounted at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, TN
http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2007/11/13/fifty-states-face-voting-machine-lawsuits-uncounted-documents-dre-issues/
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 [+] , politics, court

  Microsoft Loses Anti-Trust Appeal in EU[->] 2007-09-17 04:02 sjdaniels

Submitted by sjdaniels on Monday September 17 2007, @04:02AM
sjdaniels writes "(From of BBCNews) The European Court of First Instance has dismissed Microsoft's appeal in its long-running competition dispute with the European Commission. The court upheld the ruling that Microsoft had abused its dominant market position. A probe concluded in 2004 that Microsoft was guilty of freezing out rivals in server software and products such as media players. It was ordered to change its business and fined 497m euros (£343m; $690m)."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6998272.stm
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 [+] submission, it, microsoft, dupe, eu, haha
Journal by shadowless on Monday September 17 2007, @02:56AM
As of yesterday evening, all subdomains of "google.com" are filtered out and user access to them are blocked by some (possibly all) major ISPs in Iran. The couple of ISPs I tried to reach had no comment on the situation, and there's no government office that an end-user can turn to and complain in these cases.
The "filtering" process in Iran is quite opaque and the details are unknown to many. What we know is that a three-member committee decides the "black list" and it's mandatory that the ISPs implement the filtering. The criteria on which basis the filtering occurs is undocumented and widely believed to be subjective to a large extent.
Obviously, this is not the first time such blunders are made, as in various periods over the past few years other high visitor websites (not to mention essential to everyday life) like Yahoo! webmail and the English Wikipedia were blocked. Those sites were unfiltered in a matter of days because of public outcry; let's see how long this one lasts.

UPDATE: It lasted less than 12 hours. The "google.com"'s reachability is restored as of 10:30 AM IRST.
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 [+] journal, slownewsday

  Wikileaks leaks Media Defender phonecall 2007-09-17 02:29 bl968

Submitted by bl968 on Monday September 17 2007, @02:29AM
bl968 writes "Wikileaks has been given a phone call between Media Defender and the New York Attorney's office discussing the recently leaked 700 megs of email and their combined efforts to entrap file sharing users with a fake torrent company, miivi dot com."
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 [+] submission, yro, internet

  Ask Slashdot: Entry-Level Astronomy? 2007-09-11 02:43

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 11 2007, @02:43AM
from the getting-started-for-a-grand dept.
brobak writes "I'm getting ready to move into a new home on a couple of acres of rural property a significant distance from any large source of light pollution. I've always been interested in astronomy in general, and I would like to put my dark skies to use by picking up decent telescope and learning a bit about the skies over my head. The overall budget for this project is going to be around $1,000. I am particularly interested in astrophotography, but I understand that that may carry me outside the scope of the initial budget. I've already signed up for my local astronomy club's next monthly meeting. I have been doing Web research, but I thought that the Slashdot community would be the perfect place to get opinions on entry-level equipment, websites, and books."
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 [+] story, askslashdot, space, science, moneypit, stellarium, astronomy
Journal by WED Fan on Tuesday December 19 2006, @01:51PM

I'm not generally a fan of British politicians, and even less fond of our American hucksters...er...politicians, but, I am a fan of this guy, Lord Monckton of Brenchley.

He recently took two U.S. Snakes-in-the-Grass...oops...Senators, to task for suggesting that Exxon stop funding research into climate change that challenges the media accepted standard lines about climate change.

Three cheers for Brenchley, hip hip hoorah, hip hip hoorah, hip hip hoorah.

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 [+] journal, censorship

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