david mitchell - Slashdot User

Solar Impulse Airplane To Launch First Sun-Powered Flight Across America 89

Posted by samzenpus on Friday March 29, 2013 @08:08AM from the guided-by-the-light dept.

First time accepted submitter markboyer writes "The Solar Impulse just landed at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California to announce a journey that will take it from San Francisco to New York without using a single drop of fuel. The 'Across America' tour will kick off this May when founders Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg take off from San Francisco. From there the plane will visit four cities across the states before landing in New York."

DOJ Often Used Cell Tower Impersonating Devices Without Explicit Warrants 146

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Thursday March 28, 2013 @05:11PM from the bending-the-rules dept.

Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants. "When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:"

Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Thursday March 28, 2013 @03:50PM from the now-and-forever dept.

sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.

Comment Re:Completely misleading headline (Score 1) 285

by david mitchell on Thursday April 19, 2012 @11:04AM (#39734067) Attached to: Florian Mueller Outs Himself As Oracle Employee

Always fun to see an AC commenting "for the record."

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Don't ask.

Mobile Medical Lab — the $10 Phone Microscope 54

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @03:30PM from the repurposing dept.

kkleiner writes "Aydogan Ozcan of UCLA has developed a microscope attachment for a cell phone – turning the device into a sort of mobile medical lab. It's both lightweight (~38g or 1.5 oz) and cheap (parts cost around $10). The cellphone microscope can analyze blood and saliva samples for microparticles, red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and water borne parasites. Ozcan and his team have recently won three prestigious awards for the device: a Grand Challenges award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (worth $100,000), the National Geographic Emerging Explorer award (worth $10,000), and the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation ($400,000). With these funds, Ozcan plans on starting case studies in Africa to see how the microscope can help revolutionize global medicine."

Comment Re:How science is viewed by the Normals (Score 1) 191

by david mitchell on Tuesday June 01, 2010 @02:27PM (#32421622) Attached to: Chameleon-Like Behavior of Neutrino Confirmed

Best off-topic post in the thread so far, thanks! And may I point out that many of the hypersensitive alienated Normals are armed?

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Comment Re:How much does it cost??!! (Score 1) 507

by david mitchell on Sunday July 06, 2008 @03:06AM (#24073069) Attached to: VW Concept Microcar Gets 235 MPG

"Want to make a killer difference in our gas consumption, engineer a way to make the current 500 million cars already on the roads today get 3 more mpg, because I figure 1/3rd of the cars on the road are in the sub 20mpg range."

Lower the highway speed limit to 55 mph and city/town speed limits to 35 mph. Eight solar panels on your roof can provide 30 miles daily range in an electric car with no emissions at all. No engineering needed, and it can be done tomorrow.

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Perhaps what we need to get on with it is a bit of widely-shared sacrifice.

Submission + - New planets for old stars

Submitted by

Smivs

on Thursday January 10, 2008 @07:11PM

Smivs writes: "Evidence is emerging that some old stars may develop a second set of planets long after this would normally be expected. A BBC article explains how Astronomers believe the stars once had orbiting companions, but that these were engulfed when the stars expanded. This caused matter to be ejected from the stars, forming a disc of dust and gas from which planets could form anew.
The two stars described in the latest study — known as BP Piscium and Tycho 4144 329 2 respectively — possess many signatures characteristic of stellar youngsters. However strong evidence exists that these stars are, in fact, very old."

Dvorak On Microsoft/Novell Deal 218

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 08, 2006 @12:55PM from the they-all-wear-party-hats dept.

zaxios writes, "John C. Dvorak has weighed in on the recent Novell-Microsoft pact. Among his insights: 'Microsoft has been leery of doing too much with Linux because of all the weirdness with the licenses and the possibility that one false move would make a Microsoft product public domain at worst, or subject to the GPL at best.' But now, 'the idea is to create some sort of code that is jammed into Linux and whose sole purpose is to let some proprietary code run under Linux without actually "touching" Linux in any way that would subject the proprietary code to the GPL.' According to Dvorak, it's only a matter of time before Linux is 'cracked' by Microsoft, meaning Microsoft figures out a way to run proprietary code on it."

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