CWmike writes "Oracle is being sued by the US government for allegedly overcharging it by millions of dollars, according to documents on file in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The US General Services Administration's Schedules are supposed to provide discounts that are as good as or better than that given to the vendor's most favored customers, the complaint states. However, Oracle employee Paul Frascella, who joins the government's action, learned that Oracle was finding ways around the GSA restrictions in order to give commercial customers even deeper discounts, according to the complaints. In one alleged practice Oracle was said to be 'selling to a reseller at a deep discount ... and having the reseller sell the product to the end user at a price below the written maximum allowable discounts,' the complaint states. Overall, Oracle's actions cost US taxpayers 'tens of millions of dollars,' it adds."

ros256 writes "I help out a relatively small (100 employees) medical device company that does not have a dedicated IT department. Instead the network admin reports to a manager in the Clinical department. Although this seems unusual to me, the organization isn't really structured at this point to have IT staff report to a department more relevant to the work they do. I've been giving thought as to where within the organization would make more sense. So, I pose this question to the Slashdot community: Where does IT fall within the organizations you work with?"

eldavojohn writes "The proposed rules shielding journalists harbored in Iceland are now official. It appears that sites like Wikileaks and Cryptome could have a friendlier home base. For those familiar with the Icelandic tongue, the voting results and legalese. Some of the details can be found at www.immi.is."

gyrogeerloose writes "In yet another of what's become an almost predictable cycle of events, Apple today reversed its rejection of the 'Ulysses Seen' web comic, admitting, 'We made a mistake.' The comic is now available in the App Store — just in time for Bloomsday, June 16. The comic's author, Robert Berry, is pleased, and adds that Apple 'never acted as a censor, never told us what we could or could not say. ... We didn't believe these were good guidelines for art, but respected their rights to sell content that met their guidelines at their own store. Apple is not a museum or a library for new content then, so much as they are a grocer.'"

diddy81 writes "A book about the open source ETL tool Kettle (Pentaho Data Integration) is finally available. Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration: Beginner's Guide by María Carina Roldán is for everybody who is new to Kettle. In a nutshell, this book will give you all the information that you need to get started with Kettle quickly and efficiently, even if you have never used it before.The books offers loads of illustrations and easy-to-follow examples. The code can be downloaded from the publisher website and Kettle is available for free from the SourceForge website. In sum, the book is the best way to get to know the power of the open source ETL tool Kettle, which is part of the Pentaho BI suite. Read on for the rest of diddy81's review.

blackbearnh writes "As more non-traditional programmers start playing around with embedded platforms like the Arduino, the limitations and complications of interrupt-driven event handling can become an annoying barrier to entry. Now a group of academics have ported the parallel-processing language Occam to the Arduino. In an interview on O'Reilly Answers, Matt Jadud of Allegheny College describes how Occam helps artists using the Arduino in their installations, and how the advent of low-cost computing platforms is changing the educational experience for proto-makers in school. 'Basically, an artist or a tinkerer or a hacker has a goal. They don't really care about learning Occam. They don't care about how this language is different from C. They just want to make a cat door that keeps their cat out when the cat comes back with a mouse. Or they want to make some kind of installation piece. Trying to focus as much on the user and the possible goals they might have is what's motivating our work right now.'"

Lord Ender writes "Poor phone reception may soon be a selling point in San Francisco. A city ordinance was just approved which requires those selling phones to indicate the 'specific absorption rate' (SAR) caused by the radio transmitters in the phones. Cell phone industry groups opposed the law. The FCC already requires phones sold in the US to have SAR levels below 1.6 W/kg, though adverse health effects from such levels of radio exposure have never been conclusively demonstrated."

eldavojohn writes "In 2006, anti-spam crusader Spamhaus was sued for 'defamation, tortious interference with prospective economic advantage and interference with existing contracts' after blocking 'promotional e-mails' from e360. What with the case being in Illinois and Spamhaus being a British outfit, Spamhaus didn't bloody care. So, e360 was awarded $11.7 million in damages, which was later thrown out in an appeals court with a request for the lower court to come up with actual damage estimates instead of the ridiculous $11.7 million. (e360 had originally stated $135M, then $122M, and then $30M as sums of damages.) As a result, the actual damages were estimated to be just $27,002. While this is a massive reduction in the fine and a little bit more realistic, I think it is important to note that Spamhaus is a service that people proactively utilize. They don't force you to use their anti-spam identification system — it's totally opt-in. And now they're being fined what a foreign judge found to be 'one month of additional work on behalf of the customers' to a company they allegedly incorrectly identified as spam. Sad and scary precedent."

kkleiner writes "One of the exciting ideas being tossed around recently at the X Prize Foundation is the creation of an Artificial Intelligence physician that you could access from your smartphone. Want to know if that rash on your leg is poison ivy or smallpox? Take a photo of it with your phone and ask the AI. The possibilities are enormous, especially for the billion plus people around the world who live more than a few hours' walk or drive from the nearest doctor." This is one of four X Prizes in planning for the future. The other three are for an AI automobile driver, organ generation through stem cell use, and a deep sea submersible capable of exploring the sea floor.

Jamie noticed that YouTube has announced a built-in video editor that lets you actually edit video online. The editor lets you manipulate video you've uploaded to your own account.

megahurt writes "Location-based services are becoming more common, and the features they add to mobile devices can be useful and even fun. But the downside is that everyone who reads the posting will know the user isn't home. On top of that, some services, such as Foursquare, can be linked to Twitter feeds. Peter Eckersley, senior staff technologist, says there are many situations in which the location data that is kept could be misused. Many of the providers of services say in their privacy policies they will give up the data in cases where it is subpoenaed. That isn't always from law enforcement; sometimes the data can be used in civil lawsuits such as divorce cases."

An anonymous reader writes "More than 420,000 scam e-mails are sent every hour in the UK, according to a report by CPP, which estimates that Brits were targeted by 3.7 billion phishing e-mails in the last 12 months alone. A quarter of us admit to falling victim to e-fraudsters, with the average victim losing over GBP285. Fake banking e-mails are the most common method used by criminals, with 55% of those targeted receiving seemingly legitimate e-correspondence from high street banks."

An anonymous reader lets us know about the initial release of data from the Kepler spacecraft, launched in the spring of 2009, which has been hunting extrasolar planets. The instrument has found 752 candidates to examine in its first 43 days of operation. This is exciting news, because even if only half of the possibilities pan out as exoplanets (as the Kepler team expects) the results would still almost double the count of known planets. And some of the new ones could be Earth-sized, or not too much larger. Controversy has erupted however because NASA has decided to allow the Kepler team to withhold 400 of the best candidates for its own examination, releasing about 350 others to the worldwide community. The reasons for this are complicated and the New York Times does a good job of digging into the issue of proprietary vs. public data. Nature.com first reported two months ago on the decision to hold back some of the data.