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Television

+ - NBC's Syfy delaying online episodes 30 days-> 1

Submitted by commodore64_love
commodore64_love writes "The Comcast/NBC-owned Syfy cable channel has decided to delay Online airing of new episodes. Most of its shows (including Haven, Ghost Hunters, Sanctuary) will not be legally available online for 30 days, in an attempt to get more people watching the show live on their Cable or Dish TV subscriptions. The response from Syfy VP Craig Engler: "How soon we post video is dependent on various agreements with producers, distributors, etc. We post as much as we can as soon as we can."

The explanation given by Hulu on their Stargate Universe page: "The first 3 episodes of the new season will be available the day after their original airdates. Subsequent episodes will become available 30 days after their original airdates.""
Link to Original Source
The Courts

+ - New York Judge rules 6-year-old can be sued-> 4

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes "A girl can be sued over accusations she ran over an elderly woman with her training bicycle when she was 4 years old, a New York Supreme Court justice has ruled.

The ruling by King's County Supreme Court Justice Paul Wooten stems from an incident in April 2009 when Juliet Breitman and Jacob Kohn, both aged four, struck an 87-year-old pedestrian, Claire Menagh, with their training bikes.

Menagh underwent surgery for a fractured hip and died three months later.

In a ruling made public late Thursday, the judge dismissed arguments by Breitman's lawyer that the case should be dismissed because of her young age. He ruled that she is old enough to be sued and the case can proceed.

"For infants above the age of 4, there is no bright-line rule," Wooten wrote, adding that the girl had been three months shy of turning 5.

Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69S4ZE20101029"
Link to Original Source
Science

+ - Aussie scientists find coconut-carrying octopus->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot. "I was gobsmacked," said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. "I mean, I've seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I've never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh.""
Link to Original Source
Power

+ - Micro-Wind Turbines for use in the city

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes "Engineers at the University of Hong Kong and a private renewable energy company have developed a new micro wind turbine that can generate electricity even if wind speeds are as low as two meters per second. Lucien Gambarota , the main inventor of the technology, says this is its advantage over conventional small wind turbines, which only work about 40 percent of the time because of low wind speed. "We never stop this machine and they never stop because there is always one meter per second wind — 365 days, 24 hours a day, they keep working," said Gambarota. "They deliver different levels of energy because the wind changes but these turbines they keep moving, they keep spinning." More: http://www.energyhack.com/"
The Internet

Why the Semantic Web Will Fail 179

Posted by kdawson
from the coopetition dept.
Jack Action writes "A researcher at Canada's National Research Council has a provocative post on his personal blog predicting that the Semantic Web will fail. The researcher notes the rising problems with Web 2.0 — MySpace blocking outside widgets, Yahoo ending Flickr identities, rumors Google will turn off its search API — and predicts these will also cripple Web 3.0." From the post: "The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating. There is no way they: (1) would agree on web standards (hah!) (2) would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say) (3) would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)."
United States

+ - The U.S. military mulls user-driven content

Submitted by
PetManimal
PetManimal writes "Computerworld reports that the U.S. military is being urged to embrace user-driven Internet tools to communicate with each other and outside organizations, such as non-profits and businesses. Some potential apps: Shareable whiteboards, instant messaging, and image-sharing. In certain cases, military users are going out and creating these applications on their own, but such efforts sometimes are resisted by top brass:
For example, a group of military officers launched CompanyCommand.com in the early days of the current Iraq war. At the site, they shared tips and warnings about locations in Iraq, and the site rapidly grew to have thousands of members, Ben-Ari said. The U.S. military threatened to shut the site down because it was on the open Internet, but it eventually moved the site in-house and restricted access via passwords.
"
Software

+ - Wikipedia Used for Artificial Intelligence

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "It may be no surprise but Wikipedia is now being used in the field of artificial intelligence. The applications for this may be endless. For instance, the front of spam fighting is a tough one and it looks as though researchers are now turning towards an ontology or taxonomy based solution to fight spammers. The concept is also on the forefront of artificial intelligence and progress towards an application passing the Turing Test and creating semantically aware applications. The article comments on uses of Wikipedia in this manner:
"... spam filters block all messages containing the word 'vitamin,' but fail to block messages containing the word 'B12.' If the program never saw 'B12' before, it's just a word without any meaning. But you would know it's a vitamin," Markovitch said. "With our methodology, however, the computer will use its Wikipedia-based knowledge base to infer that 'B12' is strongly associated with the concept of vitamins, and will correctly identify the message as spam," he added.
"
Businesses

+ - eBay's Innovation Machine?

Submitted by Anonymous
Anonymous writes "CIOInsight.com has published a case study on eBay and its efforts to expand beyond online auctions. Writer Ed Cone says the company may struggle to meet investor demands unless it does so, despite double-digit growth rates and profits of $1.08 billion. "They are in a tough spot, because they're approaching maturity with the core auction business," says Sucharita Mulpuru, a senior retail analyst with Forrester Research Inc.

To make it happen, eBay is retooling its technology platform to "help its large sellers become more efficient and grow its fixed-price marketplaces, and turbocharge its international business, which has not developed as planned; in late 2006, eBay shut down its Chinese affiliate and entered a minority partnership with a Beijing company." The key is service-oriented architecture and a growing community of third-party developers."
Programming

+ - Lazy Programming and Evaluation

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Lazy programming is a general concept of delaying the processing of a function or request until the results are needed. This concept has numerous applications, from the obvious to the obscure. Thinking in terms of lazy programming can help you rid your code of unneeded computation and restructure programs to be more problem-oriented."
Programming

+ - Where are the C++ frameworks?

Submitted by wandazulu
wandazulu writes "Objective C has Cocoa, C# has .NET, Java has its packages, and every scripting language has an extensive library of functionality for handling things like XML, HTTP, encryption, regular expressions, etc. So why is there no likewise unified library of functionality for C++? At this point I can pretty much count on having a standard template library for any C++ compiler I use on any platform, but that provides basic functionality, like containers and strings. Why is it that I have to write my own socket-based routines for getting a web page, or hashing a string, etc.? So why is there no unified framework for C++? Is it because it's not "owned" by a particular organization or person? Has anyone even attempted to create a library to rival Java's or Ruby's or Perl's or Python's...."

File Sharing Ruled Legal In Spain 136

Posted by Zonk
from the for-about-five-minutes dept.
stupid_is writes "As a follow-up to a previous discussion a judge in Spain has ruled that under Spanish law a person who downloads music for personal use can not be punished or branded a criminal. This seems to be a teeny bit clearer than the first article, which points out that downloading is a civil, and not criminal, offense for individuals. The Spanish recording industry federation Promusicae is predictably a bit peeved, and says it will appeal against the decision." From the article: "The state prosecutor's office and two music distribution associations had sought a two year sentence against the man, who downloaded songs and then allegedly offered them on a CD through email and chat rooms. However, there was no direct proof he made money from selling the CDs. Justice Minister Juan Fernando Lopéz Aguilar says Spain is drafting a new law to abolish the existing right to private copies of material. Due to different regulatory regimes in Europe, the proceedings against file sharers differ greatly in each country. However, most European judges tend to take a harder stance on file sharing. Twenty two people in Finland were fined €427,000 last week for illegally sharing movies, music, games and software, while courts in Sweden also fined two men who had downloaded movies and music for personal use."

Comment: Credit Card Security Impact (Score 1) 96

by kjz (#16026320) Attached to: AT&T Crack Part of a Phishing Operation
I can't help but wonder whether the payment card industry will adjust their security standards in the face of this kind of threat. Currently, the security standards stipulate that a credit card number has been sufficiently protected/destroyed if only the last four digits of the account number are kept. In the face of this kind of attack, would that be enough? All of a sudden, what information is left is being used to obtain whatever was missing.

I can see security requirements being adjusted in a couple of ways: First, require complete obliteration of the credit card account number when it is no longer needed. Don't even keep the last four digits. Second, require that various pieces of information be kept in separate logical or physical databases. If card numbers are stored separate from addresses and other personal information, it's one more barrier for an attacker to overcome.

Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them. -- Booth Tarkington

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