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Submission + - Wikileaks took advice from media outlets (google.com) 1

Submitted by formfeed
formfeed writes: According to the AP (through Google News), Wikileaks isn't just sitting on the recent material so they can release it bit by bit to the press, as many people implied. On the contrary, it's quite the other way around: "only after considering advice from five news organizations with which it chose to share all of the material" are they releasing it themselves. These Newspapers "have been advising WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to those documents"

AP questions whether Wikileaks will follow these redactions, but nevertheless seems quite impressed by this "extraordinary collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets and the WikiLeaks organization"
Censorship

Submission + - PayPal stops WikiLeaks payments (thepaypalblog.com)

Submitted by mpawlo
mpawlo writes: It seems like Wikileaks is finally starting to learn that corporations do not provide free speech or services as such. This week Wikileaks has not been able to use Amazon's cloud service, then its domain name hosting got into trouble, then some of its other hosting disappeared and now Paypal "permanently restricts" Wikileaks account. This due to EULA violations, namely "payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity". The Web and the Internet is fantastic to facilitate free speech, but in practice there is no real safeguards for it, when the sh*t hits the fan for real. You may be a supporter or a non-supporter to Wikileaks, but that is in my opinion the real story here.
Google

Google Loses Street View Suit, Forced To Pay $1 225

Posted by timothy from the token-victory dept.
Translation Error writes "Two and a half years ago, the Borings sued Google for invading their privacy by driving onto their private driveway and taking pictures of their house to display on Google Street View. Now, the case has finally come to a close with the judge ruling in favor of the Borings and awarding them the princely sum of $1. While the judge found the Borings to be in the right, she awarded them only nominal damages, as the fact that they had already made images of their home available on a real estate site and didn't bother to seal the lawsuit to minimize publicity indicated the Borings neither valued their privacy nor had it been affected in any great way by Google's actions."
Google

Submission + - Google buries searches for 'bad' businesses (techtree.com)

Submitted by digitaldc
digitaldc writes: Do you wish that all those unhelpful websites that show up in your Google search results would disappear and only those which offer a good user experience stay? Well, Google is here to help. It has tweaked the search ranking algorithm of its search engine. Thus, today onwards, websites giving poor a user experience would not be showing up in the searched results and will get buried eventually.

This was the result of a news story run by The New York Times about Clarabelle Rodriguez's horrible experience with one of the online vendor. Even though Google search engine is smart enough, several individuals try to understand how the search engine's ranking systems work. While many try to make the best of it, select few try to find loopholes and exploit it. As per NY Times' story, Vitaly Borker, a seller at DecorMyEyes.com, purposely shouted and ill-treated several customers as he saw that online complaints of the same put his site rankings higher.

So, does this mean that banks involved in the housing mortgage crisis are getting buried as well?
Science

Submission + - Pollutant Changes Sexual Preference (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Scientists have long known that mercury in the environment can harm wildlife. A new study shows it can also change their sexual preference. Researchers collected 120 white ibis chicks from the wild and raised them in captivity for 3 years. They fed some of the birds a diet laced with mercury, a common pollutant from coal-burning power plants. 55% of male birds in the group exposed to the highest level of mercury formed mating pairs with other males. Though the mechanism is unknown, the study suggests that mercury may threaten the survival of ibises and other species, as no laws exist to protect them from exposure.

Submission + - What primers would you recommend for SQL? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I just moved into a new role that I need to use SQL. My background is being a bench chemist, so DBA is not my forte. I'm familiar with M$ Access, but I'm no programmerr. I've only had university training in fortran and pascal, so I'm pretty much in larval stage with databases. What texts would you recommend that helped you?

Submission + - Cinnamon replaces toxic chemicals in nanoparticle (ecoseed.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at the University of Missouri used cinnamon to replace almost all toxic chemicals needed for making gold nanoparticles used in electronics and healthcare products.

Nanoparticle production requires the use of extremely dangerous and toxic chemicals. While the nanotechnology industry is expected to produce large quantities of useful nanoparticles in the near future, the entire production process could be detrimental to the environment.

Submission + - Ted Dabney, reveals more about Atari Early Days (retrogamingroundup.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nolan Bushnell partner and Atari Co-Founder, Ted Dabney reveals more about the early days of the console and arcade industry. It is interesting to note that much of the story of the creation of Atari and the first commercial arcade game, Computer Space, as told over the years by Nolan Bushnell, is untrue. Ted does his best to set the record straight in this lengthy 2-hour interview.

Comment Educational OS (Score 1) 2

by apdyck (#34358726) Attached to: Giving a Netbook to a 4yr old. What to load on it?
I would suggest installing an OS that is targeted at educational purposes. Edubuntu comes to mind (http://edubuntu.org/). I'm sure that any person growing up in today's world will have plenty of exposure to Windows and the Internet. Installing Edubuntu would provide him with the exposure to alternative operating systems and at the same time will provide learning opportunities for years to come. Once you've installed Edubuntu you will have a multitude of available applications and games. Just my $.02.

Submission + - P2P LItigation Crippled in US Court Ruling

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a stunning defeat for the US Copyright Group, DC District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer is forcing copyright holders to sue only those who the DC court has personal jurisdiction over. The USCG has sued over 4,500 people on behalf of a German producer that created the Far Cry movie in the DC court. But the Judge is having none of that; in her ruling today, Judge Collyer stated that only those who are in the DC court's jurisdiction can be sued — shrinking what could have been a windfall of defendant's cash into perhaps a mere trickle.

Submission + - Science-y heroes for young children?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Unhappy that all his friends have heroes he knows nothing about (they've all chosen hockey players--actually a hockey player, Sidney Crosby), my eight-year-old son asked me if I would find him a "cool hero." When pressed to define "cool," he very earnestly gave me this list of acceptable professions: "Astronauts, explorers, divers, scientists, and pilots." A second and only slightly less worthy tier of occupations includes "inventors, meteorologists, and airplane designers." To be eligible for hero status, an individual must be (1) accomplished in one of these fields, (2) reasonably young (it pains me to report that Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, NASA's youngest astronaut and now just 31, barely makes the cut), and, critically to my naive son's way of thinking, (3) respected by third graders nationwide. Ignoring that last criterion, or not, what heroes would you suggest from the sciences as people whose lives and accomplishments would be compelling to an eight-year-old mind?
United Kingdom

UK Games Retailers Threaten Boycott of Steam Games 443

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-we-like-it-our-way-better dept.
RogueyWon writes "Games industry trade site MCV is reporting that two major UK video games retailers are threatening to ban Steam-enabled PC games from their stores. The as-yet-unnamed retailers are apparently concerned that by selling Steam games, they are pointing their customers towards a competitor and will by trying to bring pressure upon publishers to strip Steam functionality from their games. This could prove an interesting test of where the real power lies at the retail end of PC gaming."
Idle

Submission + - How to become an old white guy and move to Canada (thestar.com) 1

Submitted by formfeed
formfeed writes: The Toronto Star has a story how a young man from Hong Kong disguised himself as an old white guy, so he could get on a flight to Canada, where he asked for Asylum.

Not only did he wear a — really believable — silicone mask, he apparently had also studied his role pretty well. Don' t know how he did it, but since he didn't wear a plaid shirt, his character can' t be based on the Red Green show.
Microsoft

Submission + - $1k bounty for open source Xbox Kinect drivers (adafruit.com) 2

Submitted by
ptorrone
ptorrone writes: "Open source hardware company Adafruit Industries is offering a $1,000 bounty for the first person or group to upload code and examples under an open source license to GitHub for the Xbox Kinect released today. The Kinect sensor outputs video at a frame rate of 30Hz, with the RGB video stream at 32-bit color VGA resolution (640×480 pixels), and the monochrome video stream used for depth sensing at 16-bit QVGA resolution (320×240 pixels with 65,536 levels of sensitivity). The Kinect sensor has a practical ranging limit of 1.2–3.5 metres (3.9–11 ft) distance. The open hardware group would like to see this camera used for education, robotics and fun outside the Xbox."
Science

Submission + - 3-D holographic telepresence created (w/video) (insidescience.org)

Submitted by Flash Modin
Flash Modin writes: Eventually you'll be able to project a holograph of Princess Leia into your own living room, thanks to a device announced today by the journal Nature. The physicists who created the device claim that their holographic 3-D display can refresh color images every two seconds without the need for glasses and say it's the closest thing to a real time holographic projection ever created. The breakthrough was possible because of a material called a photorefractive polymer film, on which a 3-D image can be recorded and erased, and then replaced with a new image. The holograph still exists inside of a flat frame rather than being projected into thin air, but like a sheet of magical glass it allows you to see all sides of an image as the frame is rotated. This sets it apart from seemingly 3-D projections like those used by CNN in its election night coverage, which still only show one perspective. The group plans to make a much improved version that they expect to have marketable applications in the entertainment industry, telemedicine, manufacturing and the military.

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