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Privacy

Submission + - Are the Pirates in the Vanguard of a New Politics? (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by
E5Rebel
E5Rebel writes: "The Swedish Pirate Party has secured a seat in the European Parliament. Its vote, 7.1% of the Swedish,suggests that there is something deeper going on here than a few bored voters choosing a joke party. The Pirate Party has just three basic policy areas. It wants to "fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected." Whether it is software, pharmaceuticals or just the right to live your life as you please, this is a breakthrough."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Is Buying Their Way Into Spanish Schools (opensourcereleasefeed.com)

Submitted by
volume4
volume4 writes: "HispaLinux is up in arms about the Spanish Goverment's announcement that Microsoft will be powering computers in their education system instead of Open Source and Linux after a, seemingly successful, paid for experiment run in schools in Aragon. Paul Brown, editor-in-chief, speaks his mind about the situation and why he believes there is more to the deal then meets the eye."
Idle

Submission + - Company Produces THC Tomatoes (thecrit.com) 2

Submitted by Corpuscavernosa
Corpuscavernosa writes: Scientists at Montsaint Genie Tech Inc. announced today that they have successfully transferred the gene segment that produces the psychotropic chemical THC in cannabis plants to many other common garden plants, including tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, carrots, and more.

But is it legal? "Actually, yes," says Vale. "Our research qualifies as GMO 'intellectual property', as does the process itself. Since tomatoes and other plants are not illegal, a person would be well within the law to grow them and use them as they please."
Music

Submission + - How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall?

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "Practice, practice, practice. Then audition on YouTube. When then 10-year-old Hannah Tarley asked to get her ears pierced, her mom told the aspiring violinist she could if she performed at Carnegie Hall. Seven years later, using a computer placed atop several volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 17-year-old Hannah filmed herself in her bedroom playing Brahms' Symphony No. 4 to audition by video for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. On April 15, Hannah will make her debut with others who made the cut at New York City's Carnegie Hall in a concert conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony."
Data Storage

Submission + - Auditing paper trail without the paper

Submitted by
chthonicdaemon
chthonicdaemon writes: "I am a engineering lecturer at a university, and to maintain our accreditation we are audited by a local engineering council. One of the things they require is a detailed audit trail or paper trail for our exam process. So far, this has involved a set of paper forms that are signed at various points along the process. When your external examiner lives far away, it is often impossible to get the physical form to them in time. Unfortunately, a scanned signature is not really very secure, and printing and scanning forms repeatedly is time-consuming and degrades document quality. PDF forms with electronic signatures seem like a good solution, but all the form-filling software I can find for Windows costs money, not to mention that some of the external examiners are still paper-bound and that the council requires hard-copy evidence of the audit trail. Our IT department is very difficult about allowing computers in the DMZ, and we don't have the manpower to maintain a custom web-solution (my first instinct), so the process will probably based around e-mail.

How do you approach process auditing and paper trail generation? Are there any solutions out there that can be handled using just basic tools like e-mail and doesn't involve training users about public key encryption or getting them to buy Acrobat Professional or CutePDF form filler?"
Medicine

Submission + - Inhaled Chocolate: Crazy idea or boon to dieters? (boston.com) 1

Submitted by Chienne Folle
Chienne Folle writes: Harvard professor David Edwards usually works on inhaled medicines, but his latest invention is a way to inhale something that, while regarded by many as a medicine, is technically a food: chocolate. That's right — a Harvard professor wants you to inhale chocolate. The chocolate pieces are too large to get into the lungs but too small to have much in the way of calories, so for those who want the taste without the substance, Dr. Edwards has an inhaler for you.

Read more at the Boston Globe: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/04/10/for_those_who_live_and_breathe_chocolate_a_puff/
Media (Apple)

Submission + - Apple To Hit 1 Billionth App Store Downloads (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "If there is any doubt as to the popularity of iPhone Apps, then the fact that Apple is about to mark the one-billionth iPhone app download should put any potential skepticism to rest. Apple estimates that over 929-million apps have been downloaded since the App Store first launched less than a year ago, on July 10, 2008. This means that from the beginning of the App Store's launch until now, an average of about 3.39-million apps per day have been downloaded; but as app downloads have been steadily increasing over time, the actual number of apps being downloaded now is at an even far-greater pace than that--which is estimated at over 5.1 million app downloads per day. Regardless of your perspective of the App store, the numbers don't lie and they're pretty amazing actually."
The Media

Submission + - VISA's anti-cash commercial

Submitted by
David Savoie
David Savoie writes: "Sunday, December 3, 2006 Just another cog in the wheel? A new VISA television commercial depicts cafeteria patrons moving smoothly through the check-out process, like parts of smoothly operating machine. Smooth, that is, until one "trouble maker" uses cash instead of his credit card. Then the whole "machine" comes to a standstill. The other "cogs" are presumably irritated until the offending cash user is checked-out, the patrons resume using credit cards, and the world is "good" again. Aside from the implications of using perceived social peer pressure to make non-credit card users feel ostracized, what do you think of VISA's proposition that credit cards take less time in the check-out line than cash? Is that accurate in your experience. I use credit cards for convenience, but I don't think they speed up the check-out process at a bricks and mortar retail establishment, do you?"
Space

Submission + - Organic Matter Found on Meteorites in Canada

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "From what sounds like the opening of an X-Files episode, Canadian scientists have reportedly found organic matter on a meteorite older than the sun. In Tagish Lake in Canada, scientists believe that organic globules found inside a meteorite are organic material older than the sun. From the article,
"We mean that the material in the meteorite has been processed the least since it was formed. The material we see today is arguably the most representative of the material that first went into making up the solar system." The meteorite likely formed in the outer reaches of the asteroid belt, but the organic material it contains probably had a far more distant origin. The globules could have originated in the Kuiper Belt group of icy planetary remnants orbiting beyond Neptune. Or they could have been created even farther afield. The globules appear to be similar to the kinds of icy grains found in molecular clouds — the vast, low-density regions where stars collapse and form and new solar systems are born.
The article seems to imply that life could potentially survive in these meteorites and maybe even travel through space — supporting the theory that life arrived on earth and evolved from that point on."

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