houston_pt - Slashdot User

Submission + - Brazil voids Merck AIDS drug patent

Submitted by

JoeBackward

on Saturday May 05, 2007 @07:37AM

JoeBackward writes: "Merck has this useful anti-AIDS drug Elfavirenz, and Brazil has lots of poor people with AIDS. So, after trying really hard to get Merck to cooperate on pricing, the Brazilian government has decided to take a "compulsory license" to the patent, and get the drug from a factory in India. This "compulsory license" is basically a way to take the patent by eminent domain. Check out this story from the Reuters news agency."

Submission + - TSA Loses Hard Drive With Personnel Info

Submitted by WrongSizeGlass on Saturday May 05, 2007 @07:19AM

WrongSizeGlass writes: a portable hard drive containing personnel data for former and current employees, went missing from a controlled area at the TSA."
From the article:
"The Transportation Security Administration has lost a computer hard drive containing Social Security numbers, bank data and payroll information for about 100,000 employees."

Should we be expect better internal security from a security agency or should everyone just stop putting personnel data on removable media?

Submission + - Supreme Court to Hear 'Bong Hits 4 Jesus' Monday

Submitted by

theodp

on Sunday March 18, 2007 @05:52AM

theodp writes: "In 2002, 18-year-old Joseph Frederick held up a 14-foot banner saying 'Bong Hits 4 Jesus' as the Olympic torch passed by his Juneau high school, sparking a feud with the principal that heads to the Supreme Court on Monday. Legal experts say Morse v. Frederick could be the most significant case on student free speech since the days of Vietnam War protests."

Submission + - Microsoft pays companies to use LiveSearch

Submitted by

tsa

on Sunday March 18, 2007 @05:48AM

tsa writes: "On John Battelle's Searchblog there is a piece about how Microsoft pays companies to not only have them use MS's Live Search engine, but also get information about the amount of users and PC's in the company. Companies get paid a fee per PC. The height of the fee depends on the usage of the MS LiveSearch engine. The use of IE7 is mandatory for this, because MS wants the companies to use a plugin for this browser to be able to keep track of the user's searching habits. If you ask me, this is bribery."

Submission + - Controversial New Idea: Nerves Transmit Sound, Not

Submitted by worldsound73 on Sunday March 18, 2007 @05:10AM

worldsound73 writes: Interesting article about how some researchers are attempting to show that nerves transmit sound as opposed to electricity. A quote from the article, "The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that no such heat is produced." The article continues to show why this view is controversial and that this research has a long road ahead to gain support.

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/070312_ner ves_work.html

Submission + - Market Share vs Installed Base: iPod, Zune, Mac

Submitted by redrum on Sunday March 18, 2007 @03:24AM

redrum writes: Analysts and reporters like to talk about market share statistics, but the conclusions they draw are often misleading, RDM reports. Market Share Myth 2007: iPod vs Zune and Mac vs PC takes a look at how numbers are used to paint grossly inaccurate portrayals of the market share of the Zune among iPods, and alternatively the Mac among PCs. A follow up article, Market Share vs Installed Base: iPod vs Zune, Mac vs PC demonstrates how the conventional wisdom of market share reporting can be turned upside down by simply comparing what vendors actually sell. An eye opening, in depth look at the real numbers behind PCs, music players, and console games.

Journal Journal: Googlebot and Document.Write 180

Journal by gbulmash on Sunday March 11, 2007 @05:32PM

With JavaScript/AJAX being used to place dynamic content in pages, I was wondering how Google indexed web page content that was placed in a page using the JavaScript "document.write" method.

Submission + - YouTube Banned Again: Time to RethinkWeb 2.0

Submitted by

vikrantsharma1

on Sunday March 11, 2007 @04:59PM

vikrantsharma1 writes: "After Brazil & Turkey, YouTube seems to have got a similar treatment in Thailand. Beginning past Friday till Saturday evening, YouTube users in Thailand got redirected to website of MICT, the government agency responsible for Internet censorship. The site was later restored. The ban in Brazil and Turkey was lifted only when YouTube removed the videos which lead to the controversy. The kind of reaction YouTube has faced from government and judges looks bizarre.

This series of bans on YouTube and subsequent judgements raises certain concerns in mind about user generated content and the future of web 2.0 companies. The freedom for users and user-generated content around which the entire Web 2.0 concept revolves goes for a toss when sharing and viewing is banned by force. Users should be deciding what should be shared & seen and what not; however, the democracy of Internet takes a backseat when interest of government or authorities comes forward. Like in case of Thailand, Mashable reports that, the ban could be related to clips from a CNN interview featuring Thailand's ex-Prime Minister Thaksin who was ousted by the Thai military. It seems that the current regime is not happy about the media exposure Thaskin is getting.

This does not imply that there should not be any censorship on the content but solutions need to be explored to involve users in filtering objectionable content. Although, the voting system used by Digg and other sites is a similar soulution but that does not seem to be enough. Suggestions are welcome...!

If we look from a Web 2.0 company's perspective, these kind of situations are really discouraging for startups and headache for established ones. When a giant like YouTube could not stand their ground, in a situation which should not have lead to a ban in the first place, what will happen to a smaller companies. Startups, generally, don't feel comfortable entering areas with lot of legal hassles. If these kind of bans keep coming in, not many startups
will dream of getting into video sharing arena.

I will not be surprised if these kind of activities and judgements, which have set a precedent now, are used as weapons by companies to pull their competitors in court or probably getting banned!!!

Let me know your opinion on this and probable solutions to content moderation if any has come to your mind.

http://vikrantweb.blogspot.com/2007/03/youtube-ban ned-again-time-to-rethink.html"

Submission + - What's new in study of human evolution?

Submitted by je ne sais quoi on Sunday March 11, 2007 @04:42PM

je ne sais quoi writes: MSNBC/Newsweek has an informative article summarizing a lot of the recent advancements in tracing the evolution of modern humans. From the article:

Unlike the earlier wave of Homo erectus into Asia a million years ago, the first modern humans, the ancestors of everyone today, departed Africa about 66,000 years ago... These pilgrims were strikingly few. From the amount of variation in Y chromosomes today, population geneticists infer how many individuals were in this "founder" population. The best estimate: 2,000 men. Assuming an equal number of women, only 4,000 brave souls ventured forth from Africa. We are their descendants.
The article emphasizes that evolution is not necessarily linear, in that a given trait might show up multiple times before being used by a successful species. We've come a long way from the old story of humanoid evolution that goes in a more or less linear chain from Australopithicus to Homo Sapiens.

Submission + - Al Qaeda plot to bring down UK internet

Submitted by Khaed on Sunday March 11, 2007 @02:27PM

Khaed writes: British MI5 have gathered evidecne that Al Qaeda were plotting to bring down the internet in the UK. Not by technical means or DDoS attacks, but by actually blowing up the facilities where servers are located.

Journal Journal: F-22 Navigation Glitch: "It worked fine in the lab" 4

Journal by DingerX on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @09:20AM

IFENs aren't the only computer system you can crash in flight, evidently. The shiny-new F-22 raptor arrived in Okinawa this weekend, the first overseas deployment for the USAF's most advanced and most expensive fighter. The arrival was a week late, due to a

Submission + - YouTube permanently bans Gisburne, changes story

Submitted by

mijkal

on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @08:01AM

mijkal writes: "YouTube has told atheist member Nick Gisburne that he is now permanently banned from the site. This stems from his posting of a video slideshow of quotes from the Quran. Originally YouTube said it was because of 'inappropriate content', but now it has changed its story and is claiming copyright infringement because it has a soundtrack (nevermind that hundreds of lip-synch videos as well as official music videos readily available on YouTube). Had Nick known this was the reason to begin with (YouTube admits it made a mistake), he wouldn't have reposted the video (or encouraged others to do the same). YouTube has decide to evoke the DMCA and its '3 strikes' policy, and is trying to reassure us all that the content has nothing to do with the banning of a certain unnamed account, but rather because of recurring copyright infringement. YouTube is also covering its tracks by changing the reason the videos were removed. All of his videos from all of his accounts have been removed, and anyone who's spent some time on YouTube and seen Nick's videos should clearly see this policy is not routinely executed, so why is Gisburne being unfairly targeted here? Given the context, it seems Gisburne is being treated rather harshly by the YouTube censors. (And just to nip this in the bud, yes, YouTube has the right to censor; and we all have the right to call YouTube on it when we feel its unfair and YouTube can change its policy or we can move on; no one's equating this with government censorship.)"

Submission + - Which Embedded Linux Distribution?

Submitted by Abhikhurana on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @07:03AM

Abhikhurana writes: I work for a company which designs a variety of video surveillance devices (such as MPEG4 video servers). Traditionally, these products have been based on proprietory OSs such as Nucleus and VxWorks. Now we are redesigning a few of our products and I am trying to convince my company to go down the Linux route. Understandably, our management is quite sceptical about that and so I was asked by our CTO to recommend a few RTOSs which have mature Networking stacks and which work well on ARM platform. I know that there are many embedded linux based distributions out there. There are commerical ones such as Montavista, LynuxWorks, free ones such as uclinux, muLinux and some Linux like distros such as Ecos, but which is the most stable and best community supported embedded Linux distribution out there?

Submission + - Astronaut to undertake record breaking spacewalk

Submitted by

MattSparkes

on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @06:53AM

MattSparkes writes: "Two residents of the International Space Station will take a spacewalk tomorrow to try to jam a stuck antenna on a docked cargo ship back into place. The spacewalk will set a US record of over 65 hours spacewalk experience. During the spacewalk, the astronauts will "use a hammer and a chisel to try to pound the antenna into place". Precision engineering at its very best I'm sure you'll agree."

Submission + - Debian Founder visits MicroSoft to Talk Shop

Submitted by wellingj on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @06:40AM

wellingj writes: As reported on ZDNet, Debian founder and chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation, Ian Murdock will be giving a 'Power Lunch' presentation at MicroSoft. On the table for discussion is the origins of Debian and it's community development model. The talk is being put on by Bill Hilf, former director of the Linux Lab at Microsoft. Microsoft Employee Rocky Heckman's blog might bring an cynical insider look of the talk. Stay tuned.

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