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Submission + - Copyright blackmailers rebuked by court (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Sockatume
Sockatume writes: The first eight ACS:Law cases have reached the courts, and have already fallen on their face. The law firm hit the headlines when it demanded money from tens of thousands of Britons for illegal file sharing, threatening legal action. It seems its bark was worse than its legal bite, as default judgements have been refused in six of the cases for such egregious errors as attempting to make a claim when one is not even the copyright holder. Two of the cases were found in default as the defendants had failed to respond, but not on the merits of ACS:Law's case.
Education

Submission + - Was Studying CS/Math Your 'Sliding Doors' Moment?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In the movie Sliding Doors, a woman's love life and career both hinge, unknown to her, on whether or not she catches a train. Reflecting on her less-than-silver-spoon upbringing in a timely CSEDWeek post, Dr. AnnMaria De Mars recalls that the decision to study math and computer programming was her 'Sliding Doors' moment. 'What I wonder about,' writes De Mars, 'is what would have happened to me if I had sucked at math. I didn't start out with looks, money, connections or even good behavior. By the time I was an engineer, I still didn't have the sense not to be a smart ass to upper management. What I did have going for me was that I was good at math and learned to program a computer very well. There were not enough people that could say that, so I was tolerated and helped until I learned to dress myself and shut the hell up on occasion. If I had studied poetry instead of math and computer programming, I don't know where I'd be but I don't think it would be here.'

Submission + - Amazon selling Wikileaks Cable documents as a book (amazon.co.uk) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Perhaps they didn't filter this book before approving it but a book with the leaks from cablegate is available as a Kindle ebook for download. Many amazon users have written 'reviews' condemning amazon and vowing never to use amazon again. How long before this one is pulled?

Submission + - Intellectual Ventures Files Three Patent Lawsuits (informationweek.com)

Submitted by DustyShadow
DustyShadow writes: After a decade of stockpiling thousands of patents and using them to force huge payments privately from alleged infringers, Intellectual Ventures went public this week and filed infringement cases against nine large high technology companies. Complaints in the software security industry were filed against Check Point Software Technologies, McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro. In the DRAM and flash memory segment, the companies targeted are Elpida Memory and Hynix Semiconductor. FPGA industry companies named in the complaints are Altera, Lattice Semiconductor, and Microsemi. Intellectual Ventures indicated that the complaint against Microsemi may be based on that firm's acquisition of Actel its FPGA business.
Apple

Submission + - The Computer History Museum's amazing new exhibit (technologizer.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum is finally opening its full-blown permanent exhibit on January 13th. It features a spectacular array of stuff: 2,000 years of computing apparatus, from abacuses to a working replica of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 to Herman Hollerith's 1890 punch-card machine to major mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers, and beyond. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak gave reporters a sneak-peek guided tour today--I was lucky enough to tag along, and have posted some highlights.
Facebook

Submission + - Make Facebook Angry, And They’ll Censor You (makeahistory.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Just make sure not to do something that might make Facebook angry. Otherwise it might nuke every link to your site, choking off this river of traffic that you’ve worked so hard to build. That’s the message Facebook sent today with its censorship of links to Lamebook, a humor site that posts lewd conversations spotted on the social network. Facebook has confirmed that it is automatically blocking all links to Lamebook and that it has also removed the company’s ‘Fan’ page. Not because the content was offensive, mind you, but because Facebook doesn’t like Lamebook.
Google

Submission + - "My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement" (nytimes.com) 3

Submitted by otter42
otter42 writes: It's a bit of a moral dilema to post this to slashdot, giving the bastard what he wants, but even if DecorMyEyes is right and it's true that all bad publicity is good publicity in Google land, the story still needs to come out. The NYTimes has an 8-page exposé on how an online business is thriving because of giant amounts of negative reviews. It seems that if you directly google the company you have no problem discerning the true nature; but if you instead only google the brand names it sells, the company is at the top of the rankings. Turns out that all the negative advertisement he generates from reputable sites gives him countless links that inflate his pagerank.

Submission + - USCG Sues Copyright Defense Lawyer (escapistmagazine.com)

Submitted by ESRB
ESRB writes: The US Copyright Group has sued Graham Syfert, an attorney that created a packet of self-representation paperwork for individuals sued for P2P sharing of certain movies and moved to have sanctions placed against the defense attorney. Syfert sells these packets for $20, and the USCG claims the 19 individuals that have used it have costed them over $5000.

Comment Easy to understand (Score 2, Interesting) 66

by elbow_spur (#34344266) Attached to: 60 Years of Hamming Codes
Hamming codes are practical things, while Shannon's analyses of codes were more abstract (though still hugely useful and important)
Consider the checksum bit. It helps to catch errors but there are 2 problems. First, if there is a double error (more likely if the checksum is on a longer string), then the error isn't caught Second, even if we know there is an error, we can't recover, but have to resend.
The easiest error-correcting code is to replace every bit with a triple copy of itself. So
101 becomes 111000111
This way, we can recover from any single error, but the scheme is very inefficient.
Hamming's simplest code takes a 4 bit message and adds 3 very special parity bits (think partial checksums) arranged in a clever way so that any one bit error can be isolated and corrected.
That's the basic idea. The details are many places, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming(7,4)
Television

Submission + - South Korean Cartoonists Cry Foul Over Simpsons

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: When asked to animate a dark commentary about labor practices in Asia's cartoon industry — the edgy title sequence for the The Simpsons' episode 'MoneyBART' — staff from the South Korean production company Akom raised a rare protest. Even after being toned down, the sequence created by British graffiti artist Banksy depicted a dungeon-like complex where droning Asian animators worked in sweatshops, rats scurried around with human bones, kittens were spliced up into Bart Simpson dolls, and a gaunt unicorn punched holes into DVDs. The satire, Akom founder and president Nelson Shin argued, gave the impression that Asian artists slave away in subpar sweatshops when they actually animate much of The Simpsons every week in high-tech workshops in downtown Seoul. Still, South Korean animators make one-third the salaries of their American counterparts, and Shin declined to comment on the full extent of the work his company has outsourced to SEK, a state-run animation studio of North Korea. Some argue that the Banksy sequence's gray and forlorn atmosphere more accurately depicts the sweatshop-like conditions in North Korea.

Comment Re:Great news! (Score 5, Informative) 414

by elbow_spur (#33518934) Attached to: Scientists Cut Greenland Ice Loss Estimate By Half
> We all know that the ice is still melting (but slower than we thought).
This year we are going to see a new record low for arctic sea ice --- surpassing even the dramatic 2007 decline.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.arctic.png
What's really startling is that this year, both the NE and the NW passages are completely open. This animation tells the story
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/animate.arctic.color.0.html
Typically, shipping through the NE passage relies on Russian icebreakers. Judging by the satellite photos, at this point the icebreakers aren't needed
Source: cryosphere today http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

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