Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Power

The Great Ethanol Scam 894

Posted by kdawson from the don't-even-think-about-switch-grass dept.
theodp writes "Over at BusinessWeek, Ed Wallace is creating quite a stir, reporting that not only is ethanol proving to be a dud as a fuel substitute, but there is increasing evidence that it is destroying engines in large numbers. Before lobbyists convince the government to increase the allowable amount of ethanol in fuel to 15%, Wallace suggests it's time to look at ethanol's effect on smog, fuel efficiency, global warming emissions, and food prices. Wallace concedes there will be some winners if the government moves the ethanol mandate to 15% — auto mechanics, for whom he says it will be the dawn of a new golden age."
Linux Business

The Problem With Estimating Linux Desktop Market Share 409

Posted by timothy from the something-about-lying-and-statistics dept.
jammag writes "It's long been one of those exceptionally hard-to-quantify numbers: exactly what percentage of the desktop PC market is held by Linux? Doubters suggest it hovers around a negligible one percent, while partisans suggest it's in excess of 10 percent. Bruce Byfield explores the various sources of estimates, dismissers' and fan boys' alike, and guesstimates it might realistically be 5-6%. Still, he admits, 'the objectivity of numbers is often just a myth.'"
KDE

Submission + - Social Desktop Starts to Arrive in KDE (kde.org)

Submitted by
FrankKarlitschek
FrankKarlitschek writes: "At last year's KDE Conference Akademy the vision of the Social Desktop was born and first presented to a larger audience. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the Free Software community is its worldwide community of contributors and users who belief in free software and who work hard to bring the software and solutions to the mainstream. A core idea of the Social Desktop is connecting to your peers in the community, making sharing and exchanging knowledge easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. One of the ideas was to place a widget on the desktop where users can find other KDE users in the same city or region, making it possible to connect to these people, to contact them and to collaborate. If a user is starting KDE for the first time he has questions. At the moment a lot of the support for KDE users is provided through forums and mailinglists. Users have to start up a browser and search for answers for their questions or problems. The community is relatively loosely connected, it is spread all over the web, and it is often hard to verify the usefulness and accuracy of the information found somewhere out on the web. Although is works relatively well for experienced users, beginners often get lost. Access to a lot of user-generated information offers a great way to provide online community support. This user-generated content comes from openDesktop.org right now and there is work going on integrating the KDE Forum as knowledge Base as well, so people can help each other via the web, and application developers transparently integrate this knowledge into applications and the desktop. The basic implementation of the Social Desktop will be release with KDE 4.3 this summer. But the idea, API specs and backends are cross platform. So we hope that other Free Desktops join and can work together on the Social Desktop vision. More information, screenshots and a demo video here: http://dot.kde.org/2009/05/01/social-desktop-starts-arrive"
Government

The Woman Who Established Fair Use 226

Posted by kdawson from the one-of-a-kind dept.
The Narrative Fallacy writes "The Washington Post has an interesting profile on Barbara A. Ringer, who joined the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress in 1949 and spent 21 years drafting the legislation and lobbying Congress before the Copyright Act of 1976 was finally passed. Ringer wrote most of the bill herself. 'Barbara had personal and political skills that could meld together the contentious factions that threatened to tear apart every compromise in the 20 year road to passage of the 1976 Act,' wrote copyright lawyer William Patry. The act codified the fair use defense to copyright infringement. For the first time, scholars and reviewers could quote briefly from copyrighted works without having to pay fees. With the 1976 act that Ringer conceived, an author owned the copyright for his or her lifetime plus 50 years. Previously under the old 1909 law, an author owned the copyright for 28 years from the date of publication and unless the copyright was renewed, the work entered the public domain, and the author lost any right to royalties. Ringer received the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honor for a federal worker. Ringer remained active in copyright law for years, attending international conferences and filing briefs with the Supreme Court before her death earlier this year at age 83. 'Her contributions were monumental,' said Marybeth Peters, the Library of Congress's current register of copyrights. 'She blazed trails. She was a heroine.'"
Government

Submission + - The Woman who Established Fair Use

Submitted by
The Narrative Fallacy
The Narrative Fallacy writes: "The Washington Post has an interesting profile on Barbara A. Ringer who joined the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress in 1949 and spent 21 years drafting the legislation and lobbying Congress before the Copyright Act of 1976 was finally passed. Ringer wrote most of the bill herself. "Barbara had personal and political skills that could meld together the contentious factions that threatened to tear apart every compromise in the 20 year road to passage of the 1976 Act," wrote copyright lawyer William Paltry. The act codified the fair use defense to copyright infringement for the first time in section 107 of the 1976 Act whereby scholars and reviewers could quote briefly from copyrighted works without having to pay fees. With the 1976 act which Ringer conceived, an author owned the copyright for his or her lifetime plus 50 years. Previously under the old 1909 law, an author owned the copyright for 28 years from the date of publication and unless the copyright was renewed, the work entered the public domain, and the author lost any right to royalties. Ringer received the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honor for a federal worker. Ringer remained active in copyright law for years, attending international conferences and filing briefs with the Supreme Court before her death earlier this year at age 83. "Her contributions were monumental," said Marybeth Peters, the Library of Congress's current register of copyrights. "She blazed trails. She was a heroine.""
Debian

Ubuntu 9.04 Is As Slick As Win7, Mac OS X 871

Posted by kdawson from the continuous-improvement dept.
An anonymous reader writes in with an opinion piece from ZDNet Australia. "Here's what the official press release won't tell you about Ubuntu 9.04, which formally hit the streets yesterday: its designers have polished the hell out of its user interface since the last release in October. Just like Microsoft has taken the blowtorch to Vista to produce the lightning-quick Windows 7, which so far runs well even on older hardware, Ubuntu has picked up its own game."
Communications

Obama To Get Secure BlackBerry 8830 191

Posted by timothy from the what-about-back-worn-radio-controller-devices dept.
CWmike writes "President Barack Obama is set to receive a high-security BlackBerry 8830 soon, The Washington Times reported today. The device is said to be in the final stages of development at the National Security Agency, which will check that its encryption software meets federal standards. It might not be ready for months. It was reported that Obama will be able to send text and e-mail messages and make phone calls on the device, but only to those with the secure software loaded on their own devices. The list includes First Lady Michelle Obama and top aides. The security software is made by Genesis Key, whose CEO, Steven Garrett, is quoted as saying: 'We're going to put his BlackBerry back in his hand.' The Sectera Edge was pegged in January by analysts as the top device choice because of its reputation for secure data communications when used by other federal workers. And there are many reasons why Obama might have been told 'no' on his BlackBerry. But Obama may wish he had chosen a Sectera if BlackBerry has more outage problems like its latest last week, which meant no mobile e-mail for hours across the US."
Movies

Wolverine Film Leaked a Month Before Release 464

Posted by CmdrTaco from the second-the-director-yelled-sniiikt dept.
hansamurai writes "The FBI are investigating the leak of an almost finished copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine a month before the film's cinema release. The movie was reported to have been downloaded several hundred thousand times and has since been 'removed.' Viewers have called the movie incomplete, missing some special effects and music. Fox and the MPAA are still upset, though, but say the copy is forensically marked and can be traced to the leak. The film is due out May 1st in the United States, and the leaked copy is marked March 2nd."
Transportation

Submission + - Wind-Powered Car Breaks World Speed Record 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Richard Jenkins reached 126.1mph in his Greenbird car on the dry plains of Ivanpah Lake in Nevada setting a new world land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle. "It's great, it's one of those things that you spend so long trying to do and when it actually happens, it's almost too easy," says Jenkins. The Greenbird is a carbon fiber composite vehicle that uses wind (and nothing else) for power. The designers describe it as a "very high performance sailboat" but one that uses a solid wing, rather than a sail, to generate movement. Due to the shape of the craft, especially at such high speeds, the wings also provide lift; a useful trait for an aircraft, but very hazardous for a car. To compensate for this, the designers have added small wings to "stick" the car to the ground, in the same way Formula 1 cars do. "Greenbird weighs 600kg when it's standing still," says Jenkins. "But at speed, the effect of the wings make her weigh just over a ton." Jenkins has also built a wind powered craft that travels on ice, rather than land. "Now that we've broken the record, I'm going back on to the ice craft. There's still some debate as to whether travelling on ice or land will be faster.""
Supercomputing

Microchip Mimics a Brain With 200,000 Neurons 521

Posted by Soulskill from the will-soon-run-for-congress dept.
Al writes "European researchers have taken a step towards replicating the functioning of the brain in silicon, creating new custom chip with the equivalent of 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections. The aim of the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States (FACETS) project is to better understand how to construct massively parallel computer systems modeled on a biological brain. Unlike IBM's Blue Brain project, which involves modeling a brain in software, this approach makes it much easier to create a truly parallel computing system. The set-up also features a distributed algorithm that introduces an element of plasticity, allowing the circuit to learn and adapt. The researchers plan to connect thousands of chips to create a circuit with a billion neurons and 10^13 synapses (about a tenth of the complexity of the human brain)."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Kernel hackers on ext3/4 afte 2.6.29 release

Submitted by microbee
microbee writes: Following the Linux kernel 2.6.29 release, several famous kernel hackers have raised complaints upon what seems to be a long-time performance problem related to ext3. Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, Andrew Morton, Andi Keen, Theodore Tso, and of course Linus Torvalds have all participated. It may shed some light on the status of Linux filesystems. For example, Linus Torvalds commented on the corruption caused by writeback mode, calling it "idiotic".

Comment Re:Tablet Cart, plz (Score 1) 411

by evilgourmet (#26628833) Attached to: Best IT Solution For a Brand-New School?
Build the Social Networking into the classroom; turn the LMS ( Learning Management System ) into a social networking classroom. Make it part of the curriculum, we are working toward this goal right now for the community college I am working at. I don't think this is the end all solution to getting the students involved, but as technology changes we have to roll and adapt to what they are familiar with, incorporating these technologies into the learning process.

Slashdot Top Deals

Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz

Close