Slashdot

An anonymous reader writes "The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc. In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in article 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three — the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal — the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they 'result in a physical transformation of an article' or are 'tied to a particular machine.'"

Several readers sent in word that the FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, is calling for sanctions and enforcement actions against Comcast for resetting BitTorrent traffic. "Mr. Martin will circulate an order recommending enforcement action against the company on Friday among his fellow commissioners, who will vote on the measure at an open meeting on Aug. 1... Martin, a Republican, will likely get support from the two Democrats on the commission, who are both proponents of the network neutrality concept. Those three votes would be enough for a majority on the five-member commission."

psyopper writes "Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as 'speculative' and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four terabyte hard drives." Update: 07/03 18:05 GMT by T : Brian Aker, now of MySQL but long ago Slashdot's "database thug," writes a journal entry on how companies could intelligently treat such potentially sensitive user data.

An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA must be celebrating. According to the BitTorrent news site Slyck.com, the Department of Justice is proclaiming their first P2P criminal copyright conviction, against an Elite Torrents administrator. The press release notes, 'The jury was presented with evidence that Dove was an administrator of a small group of Elite Torrents members known as "Uploaders," who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group. At sentencing, which is scheduled for Sept. 9, 2008, Dove faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.'"

That's an overly simplified view. Are you saying that in public it should be legal to be able to take pictures of anybody from any angle/viewpoint? (eg: upskirt)
Can I take my parabolic microphone and start recording people's conversations 100 meters away and then post the conversations on the Internet?
Why can't people walk around with no clothes on in public if they aren't doing anything weird or being "sexual" (whatever that means)?
If there are no expectations of privacy, then what's the problem? (sarcasm)

I would modify your "no expectations of privacy in public" to "reduced expectations of privacy in public"

If the student is a truant then WHO CARES.

Give him a shovel and have him work for a living.

Forcing an extended artifical childhood on people is highly unnatural and
only leads to an obvious conflict between authority and instinct. If people
don't want to go to school then don't force them. Schools should be places
were those interested can get ahead, not some sort of prison. Treating schools
as prisons and daycare just undermines their alleged goal.

If you can't keep the truant interested than the school has failed to be relevant.

Tridus writes "The PC version of Mass Effect is going to require Internet access to play (despite being a single-player game), as its DRM system requires that it phone home every 10 days. Sadly, Spore will use the same system. This will do nothing to stop piracy of course, but it will do a heck of a good job of stopping EA's new arch-enemy: people playing their single player games offline." Is this better or worse than requiring a CD in the drive to play? Update: 05/07 17:17 GMT by T : According to a message from Technical Producer Derek French (may require a scroll-down) on the Bioware forums, there is indeed an internet connection required, but only for activation, not for all future play. Update: 05/08 04:10 GMT by T : Mea culpa. As reader David Houk points out, the 10-day window is in fact correct as initially described, so don't count on playing this on any machine without at least some Internet connectivity.

Hugh Pickens writes "Nick Bostrom has an interesting interpretation on why the failure of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for the past half-century is good news and why the discovery of life on Mars could foretell our doom. Bostrom postulates a 'Great Filter,' which can be thought of as a probability barrier and consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems."

MIT's Technology Review is reporting that a new input device, designed for soldiers, may soon be making an appearance. The "RallyPoint," a glove designed to allow soldiers to easily interact with wearable systems via sensors, could allow soldiers a feature-rich input device without having to put down their weapon. "Some U.S. soldiers in Iraq are already equipped with wearable computer systems. But the lack of efficient input devices restricts their use to safer environments, such as the interior of a Humvee or a base station, where the soldier can set down his weapon and use the keyboard or mouse tethered to his body. Now RallyPoint, a startup based in Cambridge, MA, has developed a sensor-embedded glove that allows the soldier to easily view and navigate digital maps, activate radio communications, and send commands without having to take his hand off his weapon."

An anonymous reader writes "The Seattle Times has an article "Border Patrol "spot checks" on ferries provoke outrage in San Juan Islands" [I]n February, when federal agents started corralling everyone off domestic ferries into a fenced-off area in Anacortes and questioning them about their citizenship. It now happens once, maybe twice a week; no one has any way to know if they will be stopped.

The article goes on further, As for residents who refuse to cooperate or answer questions, Giuliano [the Border Patrol's deputy chief patrol agent for the Blaine border sector] said, agents will still run their license-plate numbers and search databases, detaining them until it can be determined whether they are here legally.

Anybody remember the movie, "Born in East L.A.?""
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004364797_ferrypatrol22m.html?syndication=rss

Pioneer Woman writes "Microsoft announced plans to introduce a Web-based service for driving directions that incorporates complex software models to help users avoid traffic jams. The system is intended to reflect the complex traffic interactions that occur as traffic backs up on freeways and spills over onto city streets and will be freely available as part of the company's Live.com site for 72 cities in the US. Microsoft researchers designed algorithms that modeled traffic behavior by collecting trip data from Microsoft employees who volunteered to carry GPS units in their cars. In the end they were able to build a model for predicting traffic based on four years of data, effectively creating individual 'personalities' for over 800,000 road segments in the Seattle region. In all the system tracks about 60 million road segments in the US."

bibekpaudel brings news that researchers from Cornell University have developed a very small silicon microresonator that vibrates at the highest frequency ever recorded for such a device: 4.51 GHz. Typical quartz-crystal oscillators, commonly used in electronics as clock signals, are about a millimeter wide and operate in the KHz - MHz range. The newly developed microresonator measures 8.5 micrometers long and 40 micrometers wide, making it ideal for use in smaller circuits and microprocessing. Quoting: "One of the advantages of silicon microresonators is that they can be integrated directly into microchips using conventional manufacturing techniques, making them cheaper to produce and easier to fabricate small. Also, multiple resonators of different frequencies could be put on the same chip, says Ville Kaajakari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Louisiana Tech University. In a cell phone, for example, high-frequency resonators could filter out interference from other sources of radio signals."

hairyfeet writes "Argeniss founder Cesar Cerrudo has found serious design weaknesses that could allow a skilled hacker to take complete control of the Windows Server 2008. These weaknesses could allow a hacker to have complete control over the system and also affects Windows XP,Server 2003,and Windows Vista. To Quote Mr. Cerrudo "[We found] from design issues that were not identified by Microsoft engineers during the Security Development Lifecycle, and allows accounts commonly used by Windows services — NETWORK SERVICE and LOCAL SERVICE — to bypass new Windows services protection mechanisms and elevate privileges". He further stated that on Windows XP and server 2003 it is especially severe as "any Windows service, even when running under a low privileged account, can potentially break through the security protections and fully compromise the operating system.""

C-NET.co.uk has a lighthearted look at ten of the best obsolete ports. The biggest surprise is that C-NET claims Firewire is obsolete, which will come as a surprise to the millions of people worldwide who are still using it, especially in light of the story that Firewire is due to get a massive speed boost! The same could be said for their claims about SCSI, although from a consumer point of view I guess that's fairer.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/0,39029477,49295857,00.htm

michaelmarshall writes "Companies are developing hardware and software which they claim can detect brainwaves and use them in video games. If all goes to plan, the first of a new generation of games with mind control as a central feature will hit the high street this year."
http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg19726471.600-next-generation-of-video-games-will-be-mental.html