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Comment Re:Fraud? (Score 3, Interesting) 87

by davecb (#43150243) Attached to: Canadian File Sharing Plaintiff Admits To Copyright Trolling

In addition, their actions have been found to be a fraud upon the courts in some cases.

Applying to the courts for an order to identify people on the grounds you will sue them, and then extorting payments instead, makes the initial application fraudulent.

In the U.S. and the U.K., this has led to legal or law-society actions against the fraudulent plaintiffs. In Canada, as we just passed a law to limit such suits, it may lead to stronger measures.

--dave
The Internet

Submission + - The Pirate Bay's Move To North Korea Was A Hoax (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by
casac8
casac8 writes: "The Pirate Bay torrent site announced Sunday that it had been booted from Norway and was moving its traffic to North Korea, where it had been granted virtual asylum.

Too bad it was all just an elaborate hoax, according to a report that emerged Tuesday."
Privacy

Submission + - Anonymous publishes personal information of Wall Street CEO's (examiner.com)

Submitted by
Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: "

Declaring “the guilty must pay,” Anonymous has released 4.6 gigabytes of data detailing the personal information of Wall Street CEOs and other high level Wall Street executives.

Links to the data began appearing via Twitter on March 2. AnonymousIRC, a popular Twitter account associated with the international hacktivist collective known as Anonymous, tweeted the following:4.6GB .xml files on CEOs and Directors [Compressed to 520mb zip] http://bit.ly/15VxSkA #Anonymous #OWS #OpWallStreet #BofA #Bloomberg

Between Too Big To Fail banksters and online vigilantes, we are not going to have any law in this country."
Medicine

Submission + - Programming Immune Cells To Treat Disease (acs.org)

Submitted by
MTorrice
MTorrice writes: "Some biologists would like to train patients’ own immune systems to treat diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders. They envision isolating a person’s immune cells and then programming the cells to destroy tumors or to stop other parts of the immune system from attacking healthy tissue. Now a team of German researchers reports a method that traps immune cells in microscopic water droplets and exposes the cells to chemical signals that could teach them the difference between friend and foe. The droplets mimic the cellular environments in which immune cells typically trade information about what to attack."
Businesses

Submission + - How 'Indie' Capitalism Will Replace Our Stagnant Economic System (wired.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "We’re beginning to see evidence of what I call Indie Capitalism. My use of the word “indie” is deliberate. “Indie” reflects an economy that is independent of the prevailing orthodoxies of economic theory and big business. It shares many of the distributive and social structures of the independent music scene, which shuns big promoters and labels. And as happens with many bands, so many of today’s successful creative endeavors began as local phenomena before branching out to new locations and networks.

Indie Capitalism is bolstered by a single, simple fact: New companies (those less than five years old) have been responsible for all the net new jobs in the United States for the past three decades. We celebrate the entrepreneur (including those within corporations who behave like entrepreneurs) because we value the entrepreneur’s creativity. It is that creativity that we need to make central to our economy and to our economic thinking."
Programming

Submission + - JavaScript Assembly Language (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: The idea of using JavaScript as a modern day assembly language for browser code is being taken very seriously by Mozilla. Asm.js is a specification for a high performance JavaScript assembly language and OdinMonkey is an engine that runs it really fast. It is a detailed specification for a subset of JavaScript. Notice that while this means that this isn't a new language there are new features which would be ignored by a standard JavaScript engine. For example, the language only has strictly-typed integers, floats, arithmetic, function calls, and heap accesses. This is achieved using annotations in the form of comments and a restricted set of operations which only work with the data type — for example logical operators convert numeric values to int32.

The fact that asm.js is a subset of JavaScript means that you can take an asm.js program and run it in a standard unmodified browser or JavaScript engine. However, to get any real value from using it you need it to be run using an optimizing JavaScript engine. This is the second half of the project. Mozilla is working on OdinMonkey, a JavaScript engine that recognizes when it has been fed an asm.js program and can apply automatic optimizations.
At the moment asm.js runs no worse than half the speed of native code. So who needs NaCL or PNaCL — JavaScript might be all we need.

Comment Re:First Amendment (Score 3, Interesting) 219

by davecb (#43069707) Attached to: Copyright Trolls Sue Bloggers, Defense Lawyers

In the era in which the Constitution was written, this wasn't a common practice. A good federal SLAPP law might classify then actions as an abuse of power, or a fraud upon the court, depending on whether one was a lawyer or a plaintiff, in order to make the punishment fit the crime.

Anyone want to start a White House petition for criminal sanctions against anyone who defrauds a court?

--dave (I can't, I'd have to start a 24 Sussex Drive petition) c-b

Submission + - Copyright trolls sue bloggers, defence lawyers (fightcopyrighttrolls.com)

Submitted by
davecb
davecb writes: "Prenda Law has commenced three defamation, libel and conspiracy suits against the same people: defence lawyers, defendants and all the blogger and commentators at "Die Troll Die" and "Fight Copyright Trolls". The suits, in different state courts, each attempt to identify anyone who has criticized Prenda, fine them $200,000 each for stating their opinions, and prohibit them from ever criticizing Prenda again."
Science

Submission + - Physicists Discover a Way Around Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Science Daily Headlines reports that researchers have applied a recently developed technique to directly measure the polarization states of light overcoming some important challenges of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle and demonstrating that it is possible to measure key related variables, known as "conjugate" variables, of a quantum particle or state directly. Such direct measurements of the wavefunction had long seemed impossible because of a key tenet of the uncertainty principle — the idea that certain properties of a quantum system could be known only poorly if certain other related properties were known with precision. "The reason it wasn't thought possible to measure two conjugate variables directly was because measuring one would destroy the wavefunction before the other one could be measured," says co-author Jonathan Leach. The direct measurement technique employs a "trick" to measure the first property in such a way that the system is not disturbed significantly and information about the second property can still be obtained. This careful measurement relies on the "weak measurement" of the first property followed by a "strong measurement" of the second property. First described 25 years ago, weak measurement requires that the coupling between the system and what is used to measure it be, as its name suggests, "weak," which means that the system is barely disturbed in the measurement process. The downside of this type of measurement is that a single measurement only provides a small amount of information, and to get an accurate readout, the process has to be repeated multiple times and the average taken. Researchers passed polarized light through two crystals of differing thicknesses: the first, a very thin crystal that "weakly" measures the horizontal and vertical polarization state; the second, a much thicker crystal that "strongly" measures the diagonal and anti-diagonal polarization state. As the first measurement was performed weakly, the system is not significantly disturbed, and therefore, information gained from the second measurement was still valid. This process is repeated several times to build up accurate statistics. Putting all of this together gives a full, direct characterization of the polarization states of the light."

Submission + - Swiss vote against exorbitant salaries of managers (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
hinterwaeldler
hinterwaeldler writes: "In 2012, the CEO of swiss pharma company Novartis earned 45 million. Even during the financial crisis the top management of swiss banks helped themselves to salaries and compensations worth tens of millions while laying-off thousands of employees. The problem was identified as managers being essentially able to set each others salaries with little control of the share holders. This led to a huge public outcry against the self-serving by "Rip-Off" managers and the launching of the "Abzocker Initiative" by concerned citizens around Thomas Minder. The initiative aims to strengthen the control of share holders over managers salaries and will outright outlaw practices such as golden parachutes or bonus payments for fusions. The initiative was accepted this sunday by swiss voters with a majority of 68%."

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