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The Courts

Legal Troubles Continue To Mount For Diebold 115

Posted by Soulskill from the voted-off-the-island-with-no-recount dept.
dstates writes "The State of Maryland has filed a $8.5M claim against Premier Election Systems (previously known as Diebold), joining Ohio in seeking damages from the company. The claim alleges that election officials were forced to spend millions of dollars to address multiple security flaws in the machines. Previously, Diebold paid millions to settle a California lawsuit over security issues in their machines. The dispute comes as Maryland and Virginia prepare to scrap the touch screen electronic voting systems they bought after the 2000 presidential election. California, Florida, New Mexico, and Iowa have already switched to optical scanners, and voters in Pennsylvania are suing to prevent the use of paperless electronic voting systems in their state. Meanwhile, Artifex Software is suing Diebold for violations of the GPL covering the Ghostscript software technology used in the proprietary voting machines."
Privacy

What MSN, Google, Yahoo and AOL Know About You 169

Posted by CmdrTaco from the know-me-better-than-i-know-myself dept.
hotgist writes "America's top four Internet companies, Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft's MSN, promise they will protect the personal information of people who use their online services to search, shop and socialize. But a close read of their privacy policies reveals as much exposure as protection. The massive amounts of data these companies collect, which can include records of the searches you make, the health problems you research and the investments you monitor, can be requested by government investigators and subpoenaed by your legal adversaries. But this same information is generally not available to you."
Bug

Submission + - New Way to Patch Defective Hardware

Submitted by brunascle
brunascle writes: Researchers have devised a new way to patch hardware. By treating a computer chip more like software than hardware, Josep Torrellas, a computer science professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, believes we will be able to fix defective hardware by a applying a patch, similar to the way defective software is handled. His system, dubbed Phoenix, consists of a standard semiconductor device called a field programmable gate array (FPGA). Although generally slower than their application-specific integrated circuit counterparts, FPGAs have the advantage of being able to be modified post-production. Defects found on a Phoenix-enabled chip could be resolved by downloading a patch and applying it to the hardware. Torrellas believes this would give chips a shorter time to market, saying "If they know that they could fix the problems later on, they could beat the competition to market."
Novell

openSUSE Hobbled By Microsoft Patents 266

Posted by CowboyNeal from the or-at-least-disfigured dept.
kripkenstein writes "openSUSE 10.2 no longer enables ClearType (which would improve the appearance of fonts). The reason given on the openSUSE mailing list for not enabling it is, 'this feature is covered by several Microsoft patents and should not be activated in any default build of the library.' As reported on and discussed, this matter may be connected to the Microsoft-Novell deal. If so, Novell should have received a license for the Microsoft patents, assuming the deal covered all relevant patents. Does the license therefore extend only to SUSE, but not openSUSE?"
Power

Submission + - Nanostructured Li-ion batteries for electric cars

Submitted by schliz
schliz writes: Researchers at the Delft University of Technology are developing nanostructured batteries that are expected to deliver more usage between charges, and shorter charge/discharge times, to mobile consumers within the next five years. The batteries will improve electric and hybrid vehicles, researchers say.
Google

Submission + - Google Pushes Open Source OCR

Submitted by
SocialWorm
SocialWorm writes: "Google has just announced work on OCRopus, which it says it hopes will "advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies." OCRopus will be available under the Apache 2.0 License. Obviously, there may be search and image search implications from OCRopus."
The Internet

Utah Bans Keyword Advertising 271

Posted by CowboyNeal from the end-of-the-line dept.
Eric Goldman writes "Last month, Utah passed a law banning keyword advertising. Rep. Dan Eastman, the Utah legislator who sponsored the law, believes competitive keyword advertising is the equivalent of corporate identity theft, causing searchers to be (in his words) 'carjacked' and 'shanghaied' by advertisers. He also takes a swipe at the EFF, dismissing its critique of the law as 'criticism from the fringes.'"
Space

Sunspots Reach 1000-Year Peak 695

Posted by CowboyNeal from the radio-signals-cringing dept.
rlp writes "Researchers at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich are reporting that solar sunspot activity is at a 1000-year peak. Records of sunspots have been kept since 1610. The period between 1645 and 1715 (known as the Maunder Minimum) was a period of very few sunspots. Researchers extended the record by measuring isotopes of beryllium (created by cosmic rays) in Greenland ice cores. Based on both observations and ice core records, we are now at a sunspot peak exceeding solar activity for any time in the past thousand years."

Celebrating the HP-35 Calculator With a New Model 203

Posted by CowboyNeal from the high-tech-slide-rules dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Hewlett-Packard last week announced a contest whereby HP-35 fans create and submit videos of their favorite calculator memories. HP will choose the best videos and you can win a 50-inch, high-def plasma TV. But everyone wins, because HP this summer will debut a special new calculator model. The details aren't announced, however, it's likely to be a 35th anniversary edition of some sort."

Comment Inergen (Score 2, Interesting) 392

by greyspacealien (#18407691) Attached to: Data Centers Breathe Easier With Less Oxygen
Inergen is an inert gas fire suppression system that does exactly the same thing with a much smaller environmental footprint. The gas is generated with similar equipment, and then stored in bottles (similar to Halon et. al.) and then when a fire is detected, the room is flooded with said gas. The installed system is also much less expensive than the equipment.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inergen

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