cyclonite - Slashdot User

Craigslist Forced To Reveal a Seller's Identity 314

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 25, 2008 @12:19PM from the limits-to-anonymity dept.

mi writes "The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts has won a judgment compelling Craigslist to reveal the identity of 'Daniel,' who tried to sell two tickets to the Oscar ceremony recently. The plaintiff's argument against such sales is scary and can be taken very far very quickly: 'If you don't know who's inside the theater, it's very difficult to provide security.' Craigslist's handling of the case may be even scarier, however — instead of fighting tooth-and-nail for the user's privacy, as we expect Google, Yahoo, and AOL, and even credit-card issuers to do, Craigslist simply did not show up in court and lost by default."

"Last Lecture" CMU Professor Randy Pausch Dies 208

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 25, 2008 @11:28AM from the imagineering-on-the-other-side dept.

Many readers are sending in word that Randy Pausch has died at 47. The charismatic young college professor celebrated life despite a death sentence from pancreatic cancer in a remarkable speech widely known as the "Last Lecture." The video went viral and has been downloaded by over 10 million people.

Scientists Find Trigger For Northern Lights 97

Posted by timothy on Friday July 25, 2008 @03:22AM from the when-aliens-are-tickled dept.

daftna writes "The New York Times (registration required) is reporting that NASA researchers 'have identified the trigger for the colorful electrical storms in the polar regions ... Scientists knew two events that occur in the tail of the magnetic field during substorms, but did not know which event acted as the trigger for the auroras.'"

Spelunkers Explore Crystalline Cave In New Mexico 99

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 24, 2008 @10:35PM from the caves-rock dept.

onehitwonder writes "New Mexico cavers have set foot — for the first time ever — on a 'river' of tiny, white calcite crystals covering a four-mile stretch of the floor of the Fort Stanton Cave in New Mexico. The privileged few spelunkers who have explored the 'Snowy River' formation say they've seen nothing like it. Not only is Snowy River exquisite, it is also home to some three dozen species of microbes previously unknown to man."

Robocars As the Best Way Geeks Can Save the Planet 394

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 24, 2008 @06:28PM from the at-least-the-parts-we-can-drive-on dept.

Brad Templeton writes "I (whom you may know as EFF Chairman, founder of early dot-com Clari.Net and rec.humor.funny) have just released a new series of futurist essays on the amazing future of robot cars, coming to us thanks to the DARPA Grand Challenges. The computer driver is just the beginning — the essays detail how robocars can enable the cheap electric car, save millions of lives and trillions of dollars, and are the most compelling thing computer geeks can work on to save the planet. Because robocars can refuel, park and deliver themselves, and not simply be chauffeurs, they end up changing not just cars but cities, industries, energy, and — by removing dependence on foreign oil — even wars. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords." (More below.)

Critiquing Claims of an Open Source Jobs Boom 134

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 24, 2008 @04:46PM from the join-us-now-and-free-the-software dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder examines what appears to be an open source job market boom, as evidenced by a recent O'Reilly Report. According to the study, 5 to 15 percent of all IT openings call for open source software skills, and with overall IT job cuts expected for 2009, 'the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software,' Snyder writes. But are enterprises truly shifting to open source, or are they simply seeking to augment the work of staff already steeped in proprietary software? The study's methodology leaves too much room for interpretation, Savio Rodrigues retorts. 'That's why the 5% to 15% really doesn't sit well with me,' Rodrigues writes. 'I suspect that larger companies are looking for developers with a mix of experience with proprietary and open source products, tools and frameworks,' as opposed to those who would work with open source for 90 percent of the work day."

Online Colleges Could Spy On Students – By Law 307

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 24, 2008 @02:15PM from the pay-for-your-papers-please dept.

skeazer writes "Tucked away in a 1,200-page bill now in Congress is a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras in their students' homes. It sounds Orwellian, but the paragraph — part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act — is all but assured of becoming law by the fall. No one in Congress objects to it."

Speculation On a Second Internet Economy Collapse 307

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday July 23, 2008 @08:06AM from the put-down-that-pin dept.

David Barrett writes "If you sell three billion ads a month and can't break even, what do you do? Drop prices by 40% and switch business models, apparently. Is this an isolated incident, or does it contribute to the growing pile of evidence that ad inventory is overpriced industry-wide, with Google being the worst offender due to its policy of requiring minimum bids on keywords that would otherwise go for cheap? Check out this analysis on my blog and make up your own mind."

Scientists Solve Riddle of Toxic Algae Blooms 237

Posted by timothy on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @12:10PM from the bet-that-lake's-no-longer-pristine dept.

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from the Victoria Times Colonist: "After a remarkable 37-year experiment, University of Alberta scientist David Schindler and his colleagues have finally nailed down the chemical triggers for a problem that plagues thousands of freshwater and coastal ecosystems around the world." Punchline: "Phosphorus."

Global Warming Stopped By Adding Lime To Sea 899

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday July 21, 2008 @12:00PM from the but-then-nobody-can-have-a-good-gin-and-tonic dept.

Antiglobalism writes "Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, reports Cath O'Driscoll in SCI's Chemistry & Industry magazine published today."

China Races To Clean Up Olympic Air 362

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday July 21, 2008 @11:13AM from the hope-the-opening-ceremonies-are-confusing dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "With the Olympics due to start in less than three weeks, Beijing is cranking up antipollution measures by yanking cars off the roads, expanding mass transit and staggering work hours in a bid to meet its pledge of a 'green' Olympics. Beijing has gone on a spending spree, relocating factories, seeding clouds, retiring old vehicles, planting millions of trees and halting building construction amid concerns that athletes and visitors could suffer breathing problems. For the next two months, owners of 3.3 million private cars can drive only on alternate days in China's capital, based on whether the last digit of their license plates is even or odd. Environmental and sports performance experts have cast doubt on the effectiveness of the measures taken so far. 'Arguably these are all short-term measures, just designed to control air quality for the time when the Olympics are on,' says Dr Andy Jones. Dr Angus Hunter warned that athletes are at risk for low performance if the air quality cannot be brought down to acceptable levels. 'Average times could be lower and the chances of records being broken become less. It's a bit like trying to exercise in a room when the gym is full of smokers.'"

To Stet Or Not To Stet, That Is the Question 264

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 19, 2008 @09:10PM from the why-the-monkeys-poke-and-prod dept.

theodp writes "The NY Times' Virginia Heffernan confesses to being stumped by how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs. For example, Heffernan notes she could quote kavya on Yahoo Answers word for word ('How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?'), but worries that doing so makes kavya look like an idiot rather that the sweetly earnest 7-year-old that he or she might be. Is it better to paraphrase or revise the question into 'How is a baby formed?' For now, Heffernan is going to let things stand (stet) and treat message boards like novels, preserving idiosyncrasies of language as far as possible and taking them as intentional — a 'wuz' on the Internet remains 'wuz' in the paper."

USAF Counter-Terror Funds Buy "Comfort Capsules" 429

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday July 19, 2008 @01:19PM from the let's-buy-toys dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post reports, 'The Air Force's top leadership sought for three years to spend counterterrorism funds on "comfort capsules" to be installed on military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world ... Air Force documents spell out how each of the capsules is to be "aesthetically pleasing and furnished to reflect the rank of the senior leaders using the capsule," with beds, a couch, a table, a 37-inch flat-screen monitor with stereo speakers, and a full-length mirror.' Congress told the USAF twice that they could not spend the money on this frivolous project, but they did it anyway."

The Inside Story On the San Francisco Network Hijacking 471

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 18, 2008 @09:55PM from the connection-reset-by-lack-of-peers dept.

snydeq writes "A source with direct knowledge of San Francisco's IT infrastructure has tipped off Paul Venezia to the real story behind Terry Childs' lockout of San Francisco's network, providing a detailed account of the city's FiberWAN, interdepartmental politics, and Terry Childs himself. Childs pleaded not guilty to charges of tampering yesterday and is being held on $5 million bail. According to the source, Childs' purview was limited to the city's FiberWAN — a network he himself built and, believing no one competent enough to touch the network but himself, guarded religiously, sharing details with no one, including routing configuration and log-in information. Childs was so concerned about the network's security that he refused even to write router and switch configurations to flash. But what may prove difficult for the prosecution in its case against Childs is that his restricted access to the network was widely known and accepted among managers and the city's other network engineers. Venezia, who has been suspicious of the official story from the start, suspects that the Childs case may be that 'of an overprotective admin who believed he was protecting the network — and by extension, the city — from other administrators whom he considered inferior, and perhaps even dangerous.' Further evidence is that fact that the network, from what Venezia understands, has been running smoothly since Childs' arrest."

Comment Maybe we should look at how the Europe does this (Score 2, Informative) 239

by cyclonite on Friday December 01, 2006 @08:01AM (#17063676) Attached to: Supreme Court To Rule On "Obvious" Patents

You've just described how the European Patent Office works. In fact, there is even an additional period where, after the examing board finds your patent to be valid, your competitors can file an opposition brief and show up to provide counter-evidence to a board with a scientific/engineering background in the general area. I've done it, and it was night and day compared to dealing with the US examiners I've had to deal with.

We have modified the patent system in the recent past, we finally did away with "first to invent", and went to "first to file" like the Europeans, so maybe there is hope.

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