×
IBM

IBM Snags Patent On Half-Day Off of Work Notifications 163

Posted by samzenpus from the looks-like-you've-been-missing-a-lot-of-work-lately dept.
theodp writes "The USPTO appears to have lowered the bar on obviousness, awarding a patent to IBM Tuesday for its System for Portion of a Day Out of Office Notification. 'Out of office features in existing applications such as Lotus Notes, IBM Workplace, and Microsoft Outlook all implement a way to take a number of days off from one day to many days,' acknowledges purported patent reformer Big Blue. 'Yet, none of these applications contain the feature of letting a person take a half-day or in more general terms, x days and x hours off.' Eureka! And yes, the invention is every bit as obvious as you can imagine."
The Military

Almost 1 In 3 US Warplanes Is a Drone 328

Posted by samzenpus from the skynet-approved dept.
parallel_prankster writes "A recent Congressional Research Service report, titled U.S. Unmanned Aerial Systems, looks at the more-prominent role being played by drones. In 2005, drones made up just 5 percent of the military's aircraft. Today one in three American military aircraft is a drone. The upsides of drones are that they are cheaper and safer — the military spent 92% of the aircraft procurement money on manned aircraft. The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War."
Books

Are Programmers Ruining the Design of eBooks? 470

Posted by samzenpus from the homer-car dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Toronto Review of Books claims that the majority of digital books are awful because major publishers are handing over the design work to programmers, not artists and editors. This results in the 'typographical horrors' typical of so many eBooks, and hundreds of 'lackluster' iPad adaptations. 'Programmers are suddenly being given free reign to design books,' the article laments. 'Most publishers don't care about the iPad or eBooks very much... which may be an aesthetic rejection based on the publisher's historical reverence for the printed page.' Don't we deserve better eBooks?"
Google

Google Giving Google TV Another Shot 199

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the this-dream-sponsored-by-google dept.
MrSeb writes with a piece on Google's renewed push for Google TV adoption. From the article: "In spite of a mediocre launch caused by an overpriced device and low consumer adoption, Mountain View is attempting to breathe life into Google TV in the way of a major marketing push at CES 2012. By announcing partnerships with companies like Marvell and LG, and an effort to cut costs by switching to ARM architecture, Google is hoping to finally achieve the mass adoption it has been hoping for with the service. Is this a case of too little, too late?"
Digital

Glimpse of Stephen Hawking's Computer 146

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the long-live-dectalk dept.
kenekaplan writes "Intel application engineer Travis Bonifield has been working closely with Hawking to communicate with the world for a decade. He's traveled from the United States to England every few years to hand-deliver Hawking a customized PC. Bonifield talks about the technology that powers the customized system." Hawking's latest machine is a Thinkpad x220. Lately he's been trouble speaking due to weakened cheek muscles (down to one word per minute). New Scientist has a brief interview with Hawking's outgoing technician on the challenges he faced. It turns out Hawking is still using a DECtalk (despite some reports suggesting otherwise).
The Courts

Newspaper Articles Not Copyrightable In Slovakia 86

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the us-to-issue-trade-sanctions dept.
Yenya writes "In Slovakia, newspaper articles can be freely aggregated and archived, and are not worth copyright protection. The district court in Bratislava, Slovakia, stated in the case between news publishing house Ecopress and a news monitoring company Storin, that while the news articles manifests traces of creativity, it is not enough to be considered worth protecting the authors rights (English translation)."
Science

Cambridge Scientists Create Huge Quantum Particles 52

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the quantum-mechanics-never-looked-so-good dept.
judgecorp writes "Researchers at Cambridge University have produced a quantum fluid thousands of times larger than previously, leading to the possibility of polaritons produced at lower power and at a broader temperature range. This could lead to quantum circuits, as well as applications such as more sensitive gyroscopes." The paper was published in Nature Physics on January 8th, but a pre-press version is available through arXiv.
Piracy

Pirate Party Leader: Copyright Laws Ridiculous 543

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the we're-not-listening dept.
smitty777 writes "Rick Falkvinge, better known as the leader for Sweden's Pirate Party, recommends doing away with copyright laws since no one is following them anyway. FTA: '...he uses examples from the buttonmakers guild in 1600s France to justify eliminating the five major parts of copyright law today. The first two are cover duplication and public performance, and piracy today has ruined those. The next two cover rights of the creator to get credit and prevent other performances, satires, remixes, etc they don't like. Falkvinge says giving credit is important, but not worthy of a law. Finally, "neighboring rights" are used by the music industry to block duplication, which Falkvinge rejects.'"
Businesses

Michael Dell Dismisses Tablet Threat To the PC Market 352

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the newton-shall-rise-again dept.
alphadogg writes with an excerpt from a Network World article: "The PC is not likely to be challenged by the tablet or the smartphone, and many users of the Internet on these devices will turn to the PC for a better experience, Michael Dell said in Bangalore on Monday. If you were going off to college and could only have one device, you would choose the PC over a smartphone or a tablet, said Dell, whose company also sells smartphones. 'If you could have two devices, then you would probably choose the phone before the tablet,' the Dell CEO added."
United States

FBI's Troubled Sentinel Project Delayed Again 96

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the project-delays-cost-american-lives dept.
gManZboy writes "The FBI's Sentinel project, a digital case-management system meant to replace outdated, paper-based processes, has been delayed again. The FBI's CIO and CTO bet big on using agile development to hasten the project's completion. But now performance issues have arisen in testing and deployment has been pushed out to May. It's the latest in a series of delays to build a replacement for the FBI's 17-year-old Automated Case Support system. In 2006, the FBI awarded Lockheed Martin a $305 million contract to lead development of Sentinel, but it took back control of the project in September 2010 amid delays and cost overruns. At the time, the FBI said it would finish Sentinel within 12 months, using agile development strategies."
China

Inside the Great Firewall of China's Tor Blocking 160

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the onions-against-the-revolution dept.
Trailrunner7 writes with an article at Threat Post about China's ability to block Tor. From the article: "The much-discussed Great Firewall of China is meant to prevent Chinese citizens from getting to Web sites and content that the country's government doesn't approve of, and it's been endowed with some near-mythical powers by observers over the years. But it's somewhat rare to get a look at the way that the system actually works in practice. Researchers at Team Cymru got just that recently when they were asked by the folks at the Tor Project to help investigate why a user in China was having his connections to a bridge relay outside of China terminated so quickly. Not only is China able to identify Tor sessions, it can do so in near real-time and then probe the Tor bridge relay and terminate the session within a couple of minutes."
Republicans

Ask Slashdot: Which Candidates For Geek Issues? 792

Posted by Soulskill from the cthulu-write-in dept.
Okian Warrior writes "An oft-repeated sentiment on Slashdot is that we should change the situation by voting in better officials. An opinion that appears in nearly every political thread is: 'we're to blame because we elected these people.' On the eve of the first primary (in New Hampshire), I have to wonder: how can we tell the candidates apart? Ron Paul is an obvious exception, and I am not discounting him, but otherwise it seems that no candidate has made a stand on any issue. Consider the candidates (all of them, of any party) as a set. What issue can I use to divide them into two groups, such that one group is 'for' something and the other is 'against'?"

Slashdot Top Deals