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Submission + - Amazon Purchases .buy Domain for $4.6 Million

Submitted by onproton
onproton writes: Amazon outbid Google at the ICANN auction this week for the top-level domain .buy, to which it now has exclusive rights, paying around 4.6 million for the privilege. Google was also reportedly outbid for the .tech domain, which went for around $6.7 million. No word yet on Amazon's plans for the new domain suffix, but it's probably safe to say amazonsucks.buy will be added to Amazon's collection of reserved anti-Amazon URLs.

Submission + - KDE Releases Frameworks 5 (kde.org)

Submitted by KDE Community
KDE Community writes: The KDE Community is proud to announce KDE Frameworks 5.0. Frameworks 5 is the next generation of KDE libraries, modularized and optimized for easy integration in Qt applications. The Frameworks offer a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. There are over 50 different Frameworks as part of this release providing solutions including hardware integration, file format support, additional widgets, plotting functions, spell checking and more. Many of the Frameworks are cross platform and have minimal or no extra dependencies making them easy to build and add to any Qt application.

Submission + - Tractor Beam Created Using Water Waves

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: The idea that light waves can push a physical object is far from new. But a much more recent idea is that a laser beam can also pull objects like a tractor beam. Now a team of Australian physicists has used a similar idea to create a tractor beam with water waves that pulls floating objects rather than pushes them. Their technique is to use an elongated block vibrating on the surface of water to create a train of regular plane waves. When the amplitude of these waves is small, they gradually push the surface of the water along, creating a flow that pushes floating objects with it. However, when the amplitude increases, the waves become non-linear and begin to interact with each other in a complex way. This sets up a flow of water on the surface in the opposite direction to the movement of the waves. The result is that floating objects--ping pong balls in the experiment--are pulled towards the vibrating block, like a tractor beam.
Education

Submission + - Young Students Hiding Academic Talent to Avoid Bullying

Submitted by
jones_supa
jones_supa writes: "The recent anti-bullying survey conducted by ABA brings up some interesting findings. According to it, more than 90% of the 1,000 11-16 year-olds surveyed said they had been bullied or seen someone bullied for being too intelligent or talented. Almost half of children and young people (49.5%) have played down a talent for fear of being bullied, rising to 53% among girls. One in 10 (12%) said they had played down their ability in science and almost one in five girls (18.8%) and more than one in 10 boys (11.4%) are deliberately underachieving in maths – to evade bullying. Worryingly, this means our children and young people are shying away from academic achievement for fear of victimisation."
Piracy

Submission + - NetFlix caught stealing DivX subtiles (google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NetFlix release it's service in Finland and was caught stealing movie subtitles from local DivX community site.

How were they caught? NetFlix forgot to remove endorsement to the pirate site from the subtitles ;)
Medicine

Submission + - 'Magic Carpet' Could Help Prevent Falls Among the Elderly

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Falls are a major cause of injury and death among over 70s and account for more than 50% of hospital admissions for accidental injury, so being able to identify changes in people's walking patterns and gait in the natural environment, such as in a corridor in a nursing home, could help identity mobility problems early on. Now BBC reports that researchers have shown off a "magic carpet" that can detect falls and may even predict mobility problems. Beneath the carpet is a mesh of optical fibers that detect and plot movement as pressure bends them, changing the light detected at the carpet's edges. These deflected light patterns help electronics "learn" walking patterns and detect if they are deteriorating. With over 19,700 deathes in the elderly in the US in 2008 from unintentional fall injuries and 2.2 million nonfatal fall injuries among older adults treated in emergency departments, spotting subtle changes in a person’s walking habits may help identify changes that might go unnoticed by family members or care-givers. “The carpet can gather a wide range of information about a person’s condition; from biomechanical to chemical sensing of body fluids, enabling holistic sensing to provide an environment that detects and responds to changes in patient condition,” says Patricia Scully from The University of Manchester’s Photon Science Institute. “The carpet can be retrofitted at low cost, to allow living space to adapt as the occupiers’ needs evolve – particularly relevant with an aging population and for those with long term disabilities – and incorporated non-intrusively into any living space or furniture surface such as a mattress or wall that a patient interacts with.""

Submission + - TextMate 2 released as open source (macromates.com)

Submitted by DaBombDotCom
DaBombDotCom writes: Allan Odgaard, the author of the popular text editor for Mac OS X, TextMate has posted on his blog:

"Today I am happy to announce that you can find the source for TextMate 2 on GitHub.

I’ve always wanted to allow end-users to tinker with their environment, my ability to do this is what got me excited about programming in the first place, and it is why I created the bundles concept, but there are limits to how much a bundle can do, and with the still growing user base, I think the best move forward is to open source the program.

The choice of license is GPL 3. This is partly to avoid a closed source fork and partly because the hacker in me wants all software to be free (as in speech), so in a time where our platform vendor is taking steps to limit our freedom, this is my small attempt of countering such trend."
Internet Explorer

Submission + - Is IE usage share collapsing? 1

Submitted by
je ne sais quoi
je ne sais quoi writes: "Net Applications normally releases its statistics for browser and operating system usage share on the first of every month. This month however, the data has not shown up, only a cryptic message has appeared that states they are reviewing the data for inexplicable statistical variations and that it will be available soon. Larry Dignan at ZDNet has a blog post that might explain what is happening: Statcounter has released some data that shows a precipitous drop in IE browser use in North America. At the end of May, StatCounter shows IE usage share at around 64%, at the beginning of June it is now about 56%, an astounding 8% drop in one month.

While interesting, it should be remembered the difficulties in estimating things like browser usage share, and this could very well be a change in how browsers report themselves, or other statistical anomaly, so it should probably be healthy to remain skeptical until this is confirmed by other organizations. Have any slashdotters seen drops in IE usage share for web-sites they administer?"
Transportation

Submission + - SAHIMO Hydrogen Vehicle Gets 568km per Liter (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
Mike
Mike writes: "Students from Turkey's Sakarya University have unveiled a remarkable attempt at creating Europe's most fuel efficient vehicle. Dubbed the Sahimo, their pint-sized hydrogen car is cable of eeking out an incredible 568 Kilometers on 1 Liter of Fuel (about 353 miles on a quarter gallon). An aerodynamic carbon fiber construction keeps the vehicle's weight down to less than 110 kilograms, and the designers hope to push the SAHIMO's performance even further to a full 1,000 kilometers/per 1 liter of fuel before participating in the Global Green Challenge in October."
Google

Google Apps Leave Beta 116

Posted by Soulskill from the why-so-soon dept.
Today Google announced that they're removing the "beta" label from Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk. They said, "We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase." Quoting the NYTimes: "'Obviously we haven't had a consistent set of policies or definitions around beta,' said Matt Glotzbach, a director of product management at Google. Mr. Glotzbach said that different teams at Google had different criteria for what beta meant, and that Google felt a need to standardize those. ... Practically speaking, the change will mean precious little to Gmail's millions of users. But it could help Google's efforts to get the paid version of its package of applications, which includes Gmail, Calendar, Docs and other products, adopted inside big companies."

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