Csiko - Slashdot User

Submission + - Adobe demands 7000 years a day from humankind (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by oyenamit on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @10:21AM

oyenamit writes: When was the last time you actually read and understood the EULA before installing a software? Never? You are not in a club of one. Unless you are a legal eagle, it would be almost impossible to fully understand what you are agreeing to.

Consider this: The Adobe Flash installer has a EULA that is 3500 words long. Adobe claims that the software is downloaded eight million times a day. If each person takes 10 minutes to read (and understand!) the entire text, they would consume over 1,522 years in just one day. If we put that into man-hours: an 8hr day, 240 working days in a year, that becomes 6944 years in a day. Turn that into a 50-year working life and that's 138 lifetimes a day!

This article at The Register deconstructs the text that we all blindly agree to by clicking the "I have read and understood the..." checkbox.

Submission + - Iran bags another US drone (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

AmiMoJo

on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @04:34AM

AmiMoJo writes: "The Iranian military says it has captured an unmanned US drone aircraft in its airspace over Gulf waters. The Revolutionary Guards said they had brought down a ScanEagle — one of the smaller, less sophisticated drones employed by the Americans. The US said it was looking into the reports."

Submission + - The Science of Roadkill

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @12:51AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Sarah Harris writes that roadkill may not be glamorous, but wildlife ecologist Danielle Garneau says dead critters carry lots of valuable information providing an opportunity to learn about wildlife and pinpoint migratory patterns, invasive species, and predatory patterns. "We're looking at a fine scale at patterns of animal movement — maybe we can pick up migratory patterns, maybe we can see a phenology change," says Garneau. "And also, in the long term, if many of these animals are threatened or they're in a decline, the hope would be that we could share this information with people who could make changes." Garneau turns students out into the world to find dead animals, document them and collect the data using a smartphone app RoadkillGarneau and she has already received data from across New York, as well as Vermont, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Florida and Colorado. Participants take photos of the road kill, and the app uploads them through EpiCollect, which pinpoints the find on the map. Participants can then update the data to include any descriptors of the animal such as its species; sex; how long the dead animal had been there; if and when it was removed; the weather conditions; and any predators around it. "People talk a lot about technology cutting us off from nature," says Garneau. "But I found that with the road kill project, it’s the opposite. You really engage with the world around you — even if it is a smelly skunk decaying on the side of the road.""

Submission + - Apple "invents" wireless charging. Get ready for another patent war! (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by GabriellaKat on Monday December 03, 2012 @12:32PM

GabriellaKat writes: Via The Register
Apple is trying to patent wireless charging, claiming its magnetic resonance tech is new and that it can do it better than anyone else. This would be cool if its assertions were true.

Apple's application, numbered 20120303980, makes much of its ability to charge a device over the air at a distance of up to a metre, rather than requiring close proximity. The Alliance For Wireless Power, which also touts long-range juicing, will no doubt be comparing Apple's designs to its own blueprints.

Submission + - Wal-Mart Jumps in the Stream (latimes.com)

Submitted by Endoflow2010 on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @05:21PM

Endoflow2010 writes: Today Wal-Mart has added streaming video to their website. What better a time than now to compete with Netflix? Now that Netflix have raised their prices.

On Wal-Mart's website, the movies will be available the same day the DVDs go on sale in stores. Rental prices range from 99 cents to 599 cents. Digital purchases are priced from $4.99 to $24.99.

Walmart.com general manager Steve Nave said the retailer is following its customers as they increasingly embrace digital movie rentals and purchases.

"We know customers are starting to shift their behavior, in terms of how they consume their media," Nave said, adding, "As as customers make that change, we don't want to lose that customer as they shift to digital."

Wal-Mart, long the nation's leading seller of DVDs, signaled its intent to double down on digital movie distribution in February 2010, when it spent a reported $100 million to acquire Vudu, a Silicon Valley start-up that was gradually being added to home entertainment devices.

Submission + - The Rise of Git (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @01:56PM

snydeq writes: "InfoWorld takes a look at the rise of Git, the use of which has increased sixfold in the past three years. Buoyed in large part by interest among the Ruby community and younger developers, Git has been gaining share for open source development largely because of its distributed architecture, analysts note. And the version control system stands to gain further traction on Subversion in the years ahead, as Eclipse is making Git its preferred version control system, a move inspired by developers and members."

Submission + - NASA Tentatively Approves Combining SpaceX Flights (spacenews.com)

Submitted by thomst on Monday July 25, 2011 @08:10PM

thomst writes: Space News reports that NASA has given tentative approval for SpaceX to combine the two remaining flights designed to prove the Hawthorne, Calif., company can deliver cargo to the international space station, according to William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, although formal approval for the mission is still pending. If NASA does approve the plan, SpaceX's Dragon capsule would be the first civilian spacecraft actually to dock with the International Space Station. According to NASA spokesman Joshua Buck, the current plan calls for SpaceX to launch a Dragon capsule aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on Nov. 30, which would then rendezvous and dock with the space station on Dec. 7 — a day that would live in spaceflight history.

Submission + - Boot to Gecko – Mozilla's Web-Based OS (digitizor.com)

Submitted by

kai_hiwatari

on Monday July 25, 2011 @06:42PM

kai_hiwatari writes: "Mozilla has launched a new project called “Boot to Gecko”. The aim of this project is to develop a complete operating system for the open web. Unlike Google’s version of a web-based OS – the Chrome OS – Mozilla’s version is not aimed at netbooks. With Boot to Gecko, Mozilla is aiming for smartphones – and Android forms a part of their plan."

Submission + - Sun CEO explicitly endorsed Java's use in Android (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25, 2011 @06:30PM

An anonymous reader writes: ZDNet writes: 'If you believe Oracle’s patent lawsuits against Google for its use of Java in Android, Google has stolen not just patented ideas but directly copied Java code. In short, Google is a red-handed thief and should pay Oracle over a billion in damages. There’s just one little problem with this portrayal of Google as an intellectual property (IP) bandit. When Android first came out, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, then Java’s owner, greeted the news with “heartfelt congratulations.” Whoops.'

Submission + - Wolfram launches Computational Document Format (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by

Barence

on Thursday July 21, 2011 @08:49AM

Barence writes: "Wolfram Research has launched its own document format, which it claims is "as everyday as a document, but as interactive as an app". The Computational Document Format (CDF) allows authors to embed interactive charts, diagrams and graphics into their documents, allowing readers to adjust variables to see how increasing a price affects profits, for example, or display different segments of a brain scan. Wolfram aims to make the format easy enough for non-programmers to use, based on the linguistic commands used in its search engine. "[Currently] anyone who can make an Excel macro should easily be able to make interactivity for CDF," said Conrad Wolfram. "Where I'd like to get is that anyone who can make an Excel chart can make interactivity in CDFs.""

Submission + - Frictionless Superfluid Found in Neutron Star Core (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by intellitech on Thursday February 24, 2011 @09:37AM

intellitech writes: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered the first direct evidence for a superfluid, a bizarre, friction-free state of matter, at the core of a neutron star. Superfluids created in laboratories on Earth exhibit remarkable properties, such as the ability to climb upward and escape airtight containers. The finding has important implications for understanding nuclear interactions in matter at the highest known densities.

Comment overseas differences (Score 1) 2

by Csiko on Tuesday December 21, 2010 @07:02PM (#34635484) Attached to: Hacking Neighbor Guilty on Death Threats and Porn

Quite interesting: in US there are multiple cases where people get sued for using the open WLAN of a neighbour. In Germany, it is more likely, if somehing bad happens, that the owner of the WLAN router gets sued for not securing the WLAN.

Submission + - Self-built gyroscope messenger as Christmas gift (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Csiko on Tuesday December 21, 2010 @06:12PM

Csiko writes: The ingredients in this do-it-yourself christmas project are a gyroscope built of a felt pen, a bunch of old CDs, an embedded microcontroller (MCU), some LEDs and a big portion of nerdism. While the gyroscope spins, the MCU controls the LEDs so that a writing appears in realtime. Nice project, but it definitely needs a nerd girlfried to appreciate that.

Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory At South Pole 78

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 21, 2010 @04:37PM from the steady-obserbbin' dept.

Scryer writes "Construction of the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory was completed on 18 Dec at the South Pole. It's now the world's largest neutrino detector, with 5,160 optical sensors on 86 strings embedded two kilometers below the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. It has been gathering data since construction started, and will be fully operational after the last strings freeze in March 2011."

Oregon To Let Students Use Spell Check on State Exams 235

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 21, 2010 @04:06PM from the is-there-a-proofreader-in-the-house? dept.

Starting in 2011, the Oregon Department of Education will let students spell check their work before submitting state exams. From the article: "The move is supposed to help the assessments focus less on typos and more on their writing skills. 'We are not letting a student's keyboarding skills get in the way of being able to judge their writing ability,' said state Superintendent Susan Castillo. 'As we're using technology to improve what we're doing with assessments as a nation, we believe that spell check will be one of those tools.'"

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