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Google

Submission + - Google Engineer Spied On Teen Users (gawker.com)

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: Former Google employee David Barksdale accessed user accounts to spy on call logs, chat transcripts, contact lists. As a Site Reliability Engineer, Barksdale had access to the company's most sensitive information and even unblocked himself from a teen's buddy list. He met the minors through a Seattle technology group. Angry parents cut off contact with him and complained to Google, who quietly fired him.
Biotech

Submission + - Researchers On The Cusp Of Curing Aging (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by ElectricSteve
ElectricSteve writes: For many scientists who know about such things, the question isn’t whether the first person to live forever has been born, but how old they are. The basis for this belief is that, if a person can survive the next 20 or 30 years, then breakthroughs in biotechnology will easily allow them to extend their lifespan – not to mention their quality of life – to 125 years. From that point, the advances will keep coming to allow the prolonging of life indefinitely. One of the first steps towards such a reality has just been announced by a group of researchers who have discovered the first compound that activates an enzyme called telomerase in the human body.
Graphics

Submission + - NVIDIA Launches GeForce GTS 450 (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "NVIDIA finally launched a new low-cost derivative of their GeForce 400 series graphics processor. As its GTS moniker denotes, NVIDIA's new GeForce GTS 450 is targeted at the mainstream market. That card's reference specifications call for a 783MHz GPU clock and 902MHz GDDR5 memory (3608MHz effective data rate). With those frequencies, stock GeFore GTS 450 cards offer 57.7GB/s of memory bandwidth with a 25.1GigaTexel/s textured fillrate. As is typically the case with mainstream NVIDIA GPU’s, however, board partners will be releasing cards clocked somewhat higher than the reference specifications recommend. Along with a $129 (give or take) price tag, the GeForce GTS 450 is more affordable than any other DX11-class GPU out there right now. Performance-wise, the cards measure up pretty well versus competitive offerings from AMD."
The Military

Submission + - WikiLeaks Releases 92,000 Docs on Afghanistan War (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "A six-year archive of classified military documents to be made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.

The secret documents, to be released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.

The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001."

Comment Re:Nope (Score 1) 376

by LoneHighway (#33016738) Attached to: Amateur Radio In the Backcountry?

So what he needs is a 27MHz Citizen's Band radio? Besides rednecks and freaks, who still uses CB?

Truck drivers. Oh, wait...

(Disclaimer: I am a truck driver, so I'm allowed to make that joke without being modded troll/flamebait.)

Hey! I resemble that remark! (2 million miles and counting.)
Medicine

Submission + - Scientists Find 2,700-year-old marijuana (grabi.co.cc)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China. The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly ``cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.
The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.
Youtube

Submission + - The rising of video manuals. Evil or boon?

Submitted by VincenzoRomano
VincenzoRomano writes: I'm encountering a growing number of cases when you find some kind of (technical) documentation and manuals as online videos.
From listing the features of some new electronic equipment to procedures on how to root it (:-), from programming examples to troubleshooting guides to software.
I personally find this trend quite annoying when not actually evil.
First of all, the perusal of a video needs to follow a defined pace. The one chosen by the person who shot the video, which could not be your very own. Instead you can read text the way you want.
Second, you need to stick to the actual quality of images and speech/sound recorded. Which tends to be very poor as a number of them is shoot with a mobile phone. Text can be shown and printed to the quality you need.
Third, you cannot copy/past any piece of information (like command strings) shown there. You have to carefully read and type. With text this is trivial.
Fourth, you need to stay online with some equipment in order to peruse the document. I know there's a way to "fix" this issue, though, but with text is a trivial task again.
Fifth, If the audio is not in a language/lingo/accent you can understand well, then you are in troubles. With text you can always read more carefully or try some translation.
Sixth, shooting a video is considered somehow easier than writing a text. Which could not be really true if you want to decently document something like CLI or even GUI stuff.

So my question to slashdotters: is my opinion shared among the majority of you or simply I'm getting too old to keep up with new technologies?
Or, in a different form, should we fight this trend or should we all embrace it?

Submission + - Which Android Phone is Less Evil? 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: My cellphone contract expired and I'm ready to splurge on an Android phone. It seems the four best models at this time are: HTC Nexus One, Samsung Galaxy S, Motorola Droid X, and HTC Evo.

Which is the best Android phone to buy to "vote with my wallet" for FOSS, unencumbered hardware ownership, and good telecom behavior?

HTC sold out to Microsoft. And so did Samsung. Motorola to my knowledge has not sold out to MS, but the Droid is on the network that wants to charge ridiculous amounts to do stuff like tethering on a supposed unlimited data plan. (And it's CDMA so I can't use it if I ever get to take vacations again and travel out of the US.)
Patents

Submission + - Bilski v. Kappos decision is out; SFLC reacts. (softwarefreedom.org) 1

Submitted by kfogel
kfogel writes: The Supreme Court of the U.S. has released its decision in Bilski v. Kappos — it's an affirmation, but still a messy decision that doesn't go as far as we'd like in striking down business method patents. The Software Freedom Law Center has a great response up. Says SFLC chairman Eben Moglen: "The confusion and uncertainty behind today's ruling guarantees that the issues involved in Bilski v. Kappos will have to return to the Supreme Court after much money has been wasted and much innovation obstructed."
Patents

Submission + - Supreme's throw out Bilski patent (supremecourt.gov)

Submitted by ciaran_o_riordan
ciaran_o_riordan writes: The US Supreme Court has finally decided the Bilski case! We've known that Bilski's patent would get thrown out; that was clear from the open mockery from the judges during last November's hearing. The big question is, since rejecting a particular patent requries providing a general test and explaining why this patent fails that test, how broad will their test be? Will it try to kill the plague of software patents? and is their test designed well enough to stand up to the army of patent lawyers who'll be making a science (and a career) of minimising and circumventing it? The judges have created a new test, so this will take some reading before any degree of victory can be declared. The important part is pages 5-16 of the PDF, which is the majority opinion. The End Software Patents campaign is already analysing the decision, and collecting other analyses. Some background is available at Late-comers guide: What is Bilski anyway?.
Books

Submission + - Britannica typo proves all bugs are shallow (wordpress.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: A typographical error proves that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". More than four years ago Project Gutenberg introduced a glaring but very funny mistake into the first paragraph of their digital edition of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, adding the word "tush" instead of "tusk" to the poem that opens the chapter "Mowgli's Brothers". Google now finds over 2,500 sites quoting the "tush" version of Kipling's poem, including several universities and even the Encyclopedia Britannica. But the free etext has recently become one of Amazon's best-selling ebooks, which is what led to the discovery of the typo. (Interestingly, Google Books offers another version of the book in which the poem appears correctly.)

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