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Google

Submission + - YouTube to be sued by English Premier League

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC is reporting that the English Premier Football League, with high profile content worth $5.5bn over the next 3 years, has launched a lawsuit against YouTube and its owner Google claiming unspecified damages. This will be the second major attack on the site since Google's purchase, who are already defending a $1bn suit lodged by Viacom. Are the floodgates now gradually starting to open and how many well funded organisations with extremely powerful legal teams can Google hope to successfully defend against before being forced to settle?
Patents

Submission + - Brazil voids Merck AIDS drug patent

Submitted by
JoeBackward
JoeBackward writes: "Merck has this useful anti-AIDS drug Elfavirenz, and Brazil has lots of poor people with AIDS. So, after trying really hard to get Merck to cooperate on pricing, the Brazilian government has decided to take a "compulsory license" to the patent, and get the drug from a factory in India. This "compulsory license" is basically a way to take the patent by eminent domain. Check out this story from the Reuters news agency."
Security

Submission + - TSA Loses Hard Drive With Personnel Info

Submitted by WrongSizeGlass
WrongSizeGlass writes: a portable hard drive containing personnel data for former and current employees, went missing from a controlled area at the TSA."
From the article:
"The Transportation Security Administration has lost a computer hard drive containing Social Security numbers, bank data and payroll information for about 100,000 employees."

Should we be expect better internal security from a security agency or should everyone just stop putting personnel data on removable media?
Space

Astronomers Again Baffled by Solar Observations 299

Posted by CowboyNeal from the back-to-the-drawing-board dept.
SteakNShake writes "Once again professional astronomers are struggling to understand observations of the sun. ScienceDaily reports that a team from Saint Andrew's University announced that the sun's magnetic fields dominate the behavior of the corona via a mechanism dubbed the 'solar skeleton.' Computer models continue to be built to mimic the observed behavior of the sun in terms of magnetic fields but apparently the ball is still being dropped; no mention in the announcement is made of the electric fields that must be the cause of the observed magnetic fields. Also conspicuously absent from the press releases is the conclusion that the sun's corona is so-dominated by electric and magnetic fields because it is a plasma. In light of past and present research revealing the electrical nature of the universe, this kind of crippling ignorance among professional astrophysicists is astonishing."
Programming

Alternatives To SF.net's CompileFarm? 186

Posted by kdawson from the in-search-of-iron dept.
cronie writes "Not long ago, SourceForge.net announced the shutdown of the Compile Farm — a collection of computers running a wide variety of OSes, available for compiling and testing open source projects. SF.net stated their resources 'are best used at this time in improving other parts' of the service. I consider this sad news for the OSS community, because portability is one of the strengths of OSS, and not many of us have access to such a variety of platforms to compile and test our software on. As a consequence, I expect many projects dropping support for some of the platforms they can't get access to. Are there any sound alternatives with at least some popular OS/hardware combinations? Any plans to create one? (Perhaps Google or IBM might come up with something?)"

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