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Google

Submission + - Google Patents Using iPhones to Kill 'Free Bird'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: At Chicago's Billy Goat Tavern, construction workers found physical threats an effective way to discourage smart-ass Whitney Young High School students from playing annoying jukebox songs over and over again. But with Google's newly-patented technology for the Collaborative Rejection of Media for Physical Establishments, you no longer need to resort to violence to prevent Elton John Songs from being played on jukeboxes in bars. Its invention, boasts Google, 'enables customers of an establishment to collaboratively reject a media file that is currently playing and/or pending to be played within that establishment by entering data into a personal wireless portable computing device on their person, for example a cellular telephone.' But don't get your hopes up too high, kids. Much like Google's dual-tier stock plan, the patent calls for 'customer status levels including a premium status and a standard status,' so a premium customer will be able to veto attempts by lowly standard customers to kill his requests to play MC Hammer's 'Can't Touch This'. The patent comes from a quirky Outland Research IP portfolio acquired by Google; its inventor is Louis B. Rosenberg, a Stanford PhD and professional film maker.
Science

Submission + - Jars of irradiated Russian animals find a new purpose (nature.com)

Submitted by scibri
scibri writes: From the early 1950s to the end of the cold war, nearly 250,000 animals were systematically irradiated in the Russian town of Ozersk. Fearful of a nuclear attack by the United States, the Soviet Union wanted to understand how radiation damages tissues and causes diseases such as cancer. Now, these archives have become important to a new generation of radiobiologists, who want to explore the effects of the extremely low doses of radiation — below 100 millisieverts — that people receive during medical procedures such as computed-tomography diagnostic scans, and by living close to the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan.

Submission + - US Airforce Can 'Accidently' Spy on American Citizens for 90 Days (wired.com)

Submitted by AstroPhilosopher
AstroPhilosopher writes: Researchers at the Federation of American Scientists have discovered documentation that allows the military to keep footage from drones for up to 90 days to determine rather further investigation is warranted. Besides using footage from natural disasters and monitoring of domestic military bases, all that's truly required is for an operator to 'accidently' have the camera running while flying.
Communications

Submission + - Queen's Speech 2012 at-a-glance: Bill-by-bill (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes: "By far the most controversial bill discussed in The Queens speech today has to be the 'Draft Communications Bill' which will allow the police and intelligence agencies to collect data on communications, like texts and emails, flexible to changes in technology, such as the internet. This will apply UK wide.

The Queen's Speech has set out the government's legislative plans for the next year. Here are details of what is in it:"

Submission + - UK Home Secratary Ban US Martial Arts Expert (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
Big Hairy Ian
Big Hairy Ian writes: "An American expert in violent self-defence has been excluded from entering the UK by the Home Office.

Tim Larkin tried to board a plane from his home in Las Vegas on Tuesday, but was given a UK Border Agency letter saying "his presence here was not conducive to the public good". Mr Larkin, who was due to host seminars, told the BBC the move was a "gross over-reaction". The Home Office said he was subject to an exclusion order. A spokeswoman said: "The home secretary will seek to exclude an individual if she considers that his or her presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good." Mr Larkin — who trained as a US Navy Seal — runs a company teaching combat to military and law enforcement clients in the United States.

Some thing's gone wrong here as he's not teaching or even advocating anything that's illegal."

Submission + - Off With His Head! Yahoo's BIG Mistake? (forbes.com)

Submitted by
ALVghgbO
ALVghgbO writes: "Dismissing this as an “inadvertent error” didn’t work very well for Yahoo either. As a result, according to USA today.com, “Yahoo’s board opened an investigation into the circumstances that led to the computer science degree being included in Thompson’s bio. Thompson told employees that he ‘respects the process’ and will provide whatever information the board requests.”"

Submission + - Pacific 'garbage patch' changing insect mating habits (guardian.co.uk) 1

Submitted by nachiketas
nachiketas writes: Marine insects in the Pacific Ocean are changing their reproduction habitats in response to environmental changes from the accumulating amount of rubbish in the north Pacific subtropical gyre, also known as the great Pacific garbage patch, according to a study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego, published on Wednesday in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. "This paper shows a dramatic increase in plastic over a relatively short time period and the effect it's having on a common North Pacific Gyre invertebrate," said graduate student and lead author Miriam Goldstein, in a statement released by Scripps. "We're seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic."
Games

Submission + - BioShock Infinite delayed (but not indefinitely) (playerattack.com)

Submitted by UgLyPuNk
UgLyPuNk writes: When we announced the release date of BioShock Infinite in March, we felt pretty good about the timing. Since then, weve uncovered opportunities to make Infinite into something even more extraordinary. Therefore, to give our talented team the time they need to deliver the best Infinite possible, weve decided to move the games release to February.

Submission + - Project to ship cheetahs from Africa to India 'totally misconceived' (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by nachiketas
nachiketas writes: An ambitious project to ship cheetahs from Africa to reintroduce them to India has been halted by the country's Supreme Court after an expert said the idea was "totally misconceived". India's environment minister himself had championed the £35m plan, which involved transferring African cheetahs from Namibia to a wildlife sanctuary in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. But this week, a court adviser, PV Narsimha, pointed out while cheetahs may have once been a common sight in India, the African and Asian varieties of the big cat were entirely different in both characteristics and genetics.
Network

Submission + - Smartphones set to become the fastest spreading technology in human history (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "According to some numbers compiled by Michael Degusta, smartphones might just be the fastest-spreading technology in human history. The only technologies that come close is the adoption of television between 1950 and 1953, and the recent emergence (and rapid growth) of the tablet market. While his numbers are entirely US-centric, they are representative of other Western world countries. What about the rest of the world, though? Well, mobile phones (and now smartphones) are kind of unique in this regard. Historically, the adoption of advanced technologies is usually closely linked to a country’s GDP — but mobile phones have completely bucked that trend. In 2001, there was just one billion mobile phone subscribers — most of them in developed countries. Today there are six billion subscribers, and 73% of those (4.4 billion!) are in developing countries that account for just 20% of the world’s total GDP. In short, in just 10 years, mobile phones have almost reached saturation point in countries where people earn just a few dollars per day (and we have cheap ARM CPUs to thank for that!) Smartphones, with their larger screens and processors, are obviously more expensive than feature phones at the moment, but it’s only a matter of time until they’re cheap enough for worldwide adoption. In the first quarter of 2012, worldwide, 36% of all mobile phone shipments were smartphones, compared to 25% the year before."
Privacy

Submission + - CarrierIQ Hires Former Verizon Counsel as Chief Privacy Officer (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Carrier IQ, a startup heavily bruised last fall by harsh criticism of its handset diagnostic software, today announced it's hired a high-profile lawyer as its Chief Privacy Officer.

Magnolia Mansourkia Mobley, a CIPP and former Verizon executive, will be tasked with quickly broadening the company's focus on consumer privacy. She also was named the company's General Counsel.

The company became the flashpoint in a heated controversy after initial reports its analytics software, embedded in some 150 mobile phones, was capable of gathering a great deal of personal data without the customer's consent.

Submission + - Responsive Web Design – The Next Gen Flexible Web Design! (thinkedynamic.com)

Submitted by
narendra199
narendra199 writes: "Responsive Web Design is a concept that blends CSS, CSS3 and JavaScript to create fluid site designs that can expand, contract, rearrange or remove content based upon the user’s screen size. Responsive web design responds to the user’s behavior and environment. Instead of developing different sites for devices with different screen sizes and capabilities, one site reacts flexibly to display optimally on everything. It can range from a 27-inch desktop monitor to a three and a half-inch iPhone display."

Submission + - Paul Ryan Defends Cutting Food Stamps For The Poor (thinkprogress.org)

Submitted by
POUXEN
POUXEN writes: "We want to have people go from welfare back to work. That’s why we conjoined in our budget the job training programs, consolidate the 47 different job training programs spread across 9 different agencies to scholarships to go to people so they can get new training, so under the bill we’re moving right now through Congress, food stamps will have increased something like 260 percent over the last decade instead of 270 percent."
Science

Submission + - Mini mammoth once roamed Crete (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Scientists can now add a 'dwarf mammoth' to the list of biological oxymorons that includes the jumbo shrimp and pygmy whale. Studies of fossils discovered last year on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea reveal that an extinct species once thought to be a diminutive elephant was actually the smallest mammoth known to have existed — which, as an adult, stood no taller than a modern newborn elephant (abstract). The species is the most extreme example of insular dwarfism yet found in mammoths.

Submission + - LazyTruth hunts down urban myths in your inbox (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: LazyTruth is an inbox widget that works by searching through your received messages, looking for specific phrases associated with some of the most common viral emails that make bogus claims. When it finds one, it composes an email rebuttal, which includes links to sources that refute the content of the offending message. Those sources include fact-checking and/or urban myth websites such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org.

Submission + - New W3C Proposal could end the CSS Prefix Madness (webmonkey.com)

Submitted by Pieroxy
Pieroxy writes: The W3C is proposing a set of new rules for CSS prefixing by Browser vendors. This would greatly mitigate the problem caused today where vendor specific prefixing is seeing its way through production sites. The problem is so bad that some vendors are now tempted to support other browsers prefixing. The article also has a link to an email from Mozilla’s Henri Sivonen that does a nice job of addressing many potential issues and shortcomings of this new proposal.
IOS

Submission + - Retro: Turn your iPad into an Etch a Sketch (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It was bound to happen: Someone created an Etch a Sketch for the iPad. Looks to work exactly like the original, but the software will be open source so you can hack at will!

Who knows, with a new Etch a Sketch 2.0, perhaps Romney will get his fair "shake" ;-).
Android

Submission + - Sombreros for the (Android) World (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I have been using the Addi and Addiplot Android applications for a while now. Together, they are like a scaled back version of Octave + gnuplot. Well, looks like the developer wants to port the full capabilities and has just sarted a campaign to do so http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/6438588/sombreros-for-the-android-world . Seems lofty, but possible. Mobile devices have gotten pretty powerful, so this could be quite useful.
Education

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Getting a head start on Mechanical Engineering (asme.org)

Submitted by
TremorAcePV
TremorAcePV writes: "I am about to enter my 3rd year of college life, and my decided major is Mechanical Engineering. What would Slashdot suggest I study over the summer to prepare for my "major oriented" education considering that I never experienced nor understood a trigonometry class beyond the concepts of right triangles, Sine, Cosine, & Tangent, and radians. I ask because I realize how far behind I am in my major's required learning."

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