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The Courts

Submission + - RIAA ordered to divulge expenses-per-download

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: The Court has ordered UMG Recordings, Warner Bros. Records, Interscope Records, Motown, and SONY BMG to disclose their expenses-per-download to the defendant's lawyers, in UMG v. Lindor, a case pending in Brooklyn. The Court held that the expense figures are relevant to the issue of whether the RIAA's attempt to recover damages of $750 or more per 99-cent song file, is an unconstitutional violation of due process.
Transportation

Submission + - America Takes Another Look at Maglev Trains (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by
longacre
longacre writes: "With highways and airports steadily grinding to a crawl and fuel prices skyrocketing, city planners are taking a new look at high-speed rail solutions such as maglev to alleviate the nation's transportation bottlenecks. At costs of up to $100 million per track mile, the 300 mph, virtually silent, frictionless trains are a hard sell. In places like Los Angeles, however, where the next 30 years will add 6 million people to the population of an area whose transportation infrastructure is already overwhelmed, new capacity is desperately needed. Includes video of a General Atomics maglev prototype in action."
The Internet

Submission + - Flawed Online Dating Bill Being Pushed in NJ (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
Billosaur
Billosaur writes: "According to a report on ars technica, a committee of the New Jersey Assembly is trying to push an on-line dating bill even though it contains significant flaws. The Internet Dating Safety Act would require dating web sites that interact with customers in New Jersey to indicate whether they do criminal background checks and if people who fail such checks are still allowed to register with the site. In addition, the warnings would be displayed in all emails and all sign-up web pages where the site interacts with a New Jersey customer, in a bold, 12-point font. For sites the do background checks, they would be required to inform NJ users of that fact, in the same type of font. And for sites that might allow convicted criminals to sign up, there would be a strict admonition that background checks are not infallible and that the data they use might be incomplete. While perhaps there is merit in the attempt to make online dating safer, you have to wonder what the NJ Assembly actually hopes to accomplish."
The Courts

Submission + - Vonage Lose Appeal; Verizon Owed $120 Million (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by
Billosaur
Billosaur writes: "Things do not look good for Vonage. Yesterday, they lost their request for reconsideration of their settlement with Verizon. This means Vonage owes Verizon $120 million to end the patent lawsuit filed against them. The costs associated with defending the case have cut into Vonage's bottom line, and despite attempts to cut costs by laying off 10% of their workforce, they may be unable to make a payment against their debt come December. According to the settlement, Vonage will pay $117.5 million to Verizon and another $2.5 million dollars to charity. Vonage's shares have dropped 87% since their IPO, now hovering around $1.50 per share."
Privacy

Submission + - Facebook App Exposes User Information (valleywag.com)

Submitted by
Billosaur
Billosaur writes: "According to a report on Valleywag.com, the Facebook application Compare People contains a vulnerability that allows user information to be seen by search engines. What type of information? Age, gender, city, ZIP code, favorite music, favorite movies, favorite TV shows, favorite books, "about me," activities, interests, and political views are all searchable. Further, the company that built the app, Chainn, has no information available on their web site, save an email address."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - 5 Not-So-Awesome Sci-Fi Inventions (cracked.com)

Submitted by
Billosaur
Billosaur writes: "Science fiction often makes the future seem like a wonderful place, with all sorts of cool gadgets and technologies that we can only dream of. However, the folks at Cracked.com took a hard look at what your average sci-fi enthusiast would consider some of the best inventions the genre has to offer and determined the 5 that would actually suck. They are:
  1. Matter Replicators
  2. Teleporters
  3. Holodecks
  4. Jet Packs
  5. Flying Cars


It's not so much the technologies themselves, but the reasons why they would suck that are at once funny and very cogent."
Encryption

Submission + - NIST Opens Competition for a New Hash Algorithm (nist.gov)

Submitted by
Invisible Pink Unicorn
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "The National Institute of Standards and Technology has opened a public competition for the development of a new cryptographic hash algorithm, which will be called Secure Hash Algorithm-3 (SHA-3), and will augment the current algorithms specified in the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180-2. This is in response to serious attacks reported in recent years against cryptographic hash algorithms, including SHA-1, and because SHA-1 and the SHA-2 family share a similar design. Submissions are being accepted through October 2008, and the competition timeline indicates that a winner will be announced in 2012."
The Internet

Submission + - Babelfish sparks international diplomatic row

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: An email sent to the Dutch foreign ministry by a group of Israeli journalists has sparked a diplomatic row, thanks to an unreliable translation by Babelfish. The journalists wrote a set of questions before a planned fact-finding trip to The Netherlands, running them through the online translation tool to turn them into Dutch. The beginning of the email read: 'Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian.'
Education

Submission + - Transition from Academia to Industry 2

Submitted by Pseudonymous
Pseudonymous writes: I am an assistant professor in a computer science department wanting to go into industry (not out of choice but necessity). Over the past pretenure years, I have worked on pretty theoretical problems, involving algorithms and complexity so I think I am unprepared or unskilled to join the software industry. I have of course taught the basic courses in C and Java (which unfortunately does not mean that I know enough to jump into a huge software project). So how do I go from a theoretician to someone that industry might value ? What skills should I aim to develop before I put myself out there ?
Data Storage

Submission + - Hard drive prices drop from PC, flash drive demand (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: "The average price of notebook hard drives tumbled to $53 in the third quarter of 2007, from $86 in the same period during the previous year, according to a survey by a market research firm. The price drop can be accredited to competition among six vendors, enormous demand for PCs and consumer electronics as well as evolving flash memory drives. "Lower-capacity notebook drives showed smaller price drops, while newer high-capacity drives saw massive price drops.""

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