Whisperwolf - Slashdot User

Google Awarded Broad Patent For Location-Based Advertising 54

Posted by kdawson on Monday March 01, 2010 @11:51PM from the you-are-here-and-we-own-you dept.

Mashable has a report of a patent that just issued (6-1/2 years after filing) — apparently Google now has a lock on location-based advertising. It's not clear that the search company intends to assert the patent against any other companies (such as emerging rival Apple), but it's useful as leverage. Here is the patent. Update: 03/02 14:34 GMT by S : Reader butlerm noted that the incorrect patent was linked. It now points to the correct URL.

The LHC Is Back Online 123

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 28, 2010 @10:10PM from the exercising-the-formula-one-around-town dept.

medea and several other readers noted that the LHC came back online early this morning. Here is the tweet from CERN announcing the milestone. As we discussed a few weeks ago, CERN plans to run the LHC at half power or less through 2011.

Air Canada Ordered To Provide Nut-Free Zone 643

Posted by samzenpus on Friday January 08, 2010 @07:09PM from the no-nuts dept.

JamJam writes "Air Canada has been told to create a special 'buffer zone' on flights for people who are allergic to nuts. The Canadian Transportation Agency has ruled that passengers who have nut allergies should be considered disabled and accommodated by the airline. Air Canada has a month to come up with an appropriate section of seats where passengers with nut allergies would be seated. The ruling involved a complaint from Sophia Huyer, who has a severe nut allergy and travels frequently. Ms. Huyer once spent 40 minutes in the washroom during a flight while snacks were being served."

Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @07:07PM from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."

Comment Re:It's part of the Microsoft business model, IMO. (Score 2, Informative) 448

by Whisperwolf on Sunday October 18, 2009 @05:47PM (#29787283) Attached to: Firefox Disables Microsoft<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.NET Addon

There is a problem with that, because Microsoft have recently changed their licensing policy for XP (amongst others). Now unless you have the ORIGINAL disk supplied with the machine, or can create a keyed disk from the rescue partition of a machine (which becomes impossible if it's so riddled with malware that Windows won't run) you can't reactivate Windows. If you use a different Windows disk, even if your machine has a valid certificate of authenticity sticker on the side, it will fail to pass "genuine product authentication" - and Microsoft are now refusing to re-authenticate because they say they've changed the rules to say if you don't have the original disk supplied with the machine, you MUST buy a new license.

Comment Microsoft's licensing policy is to screw users (Score 2, Interesting) 260

by Whisperwolf on Monday October 05, 2009 @04:40PM (#29649461) Attached to: Ballmer: Don't Expect Simpler Licensing Soon

They have no intention of making it more simple. Case in point: I often see computers come in for repair that need a reinstallation. Where this is the case, we go ahead and reinstall from a disk we hold here providing there is a valid certificate of authenticity on the case or the customer can provide one. Recently, Microsoft stopped allowing the validation of that. The disk we were installing from would still accept the certificate of authenticity number on the side of the case, but then failed to activate. Microsoft's explanation for this is that you can no longer reinstall windows from ANY disk except the one originally supplied with the machine (convenient for Microsoft if, like many computers these days, it didn't actually come with physical disks but instead allowed the user to create "rescue disks" if they could figure out how) and that if you no longer have or never were provided with the original disk that came with the machine, then you have to buy a completely new license from scratch. This is a complete rip-off. If someone has a genuinely installed Windows, then they have bought the license to use one copy on one machine at any one time. This means they should be allowed to reload that one copy from any source should they suffer a machine crash, and should not be tied exclusively to the actual physical disk that may or may not have been supplied with the machine. The real reason MS licensing is so complicated is so that MS can move the goalposts whenever they see an opportunity to make money. The reason it's so complicated is to hide every new initiative to rip off their customers.

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