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The Courts

Submission + - Man jailed for trolling (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Xest
Xest writes: A man in the UK has been jailed for just over 4 months for trolling, and has also been given an order banning him from using social networking sites for 5 years. The trolling in question involved insulting a person who committed suicide by jumping in front a train by posting offensive remarks on a page dedicated to her memory, and creating a YouTube parody of Thomas the Tank with the deceased girls face in place of Thomas'.

Is it about time trolling to this extent saw this kind of punishment, or is this punishment simply too harsh for someone who perhaps didn't realise how seriously his actions would be taken by the authorities?
Google

Wolfram Alpha vs. Google — Results Vary 255

Posted by timothy from the and-so-might-your-mileage dept.
wjousts writes "Technology Review has an article comparing various search results from Wolfram Alpha and Google. Results vary. For example, searching 'Microsoft Apple' in Alpha returns data comparing both companies stock prices, whereas Google top results are news stories mentioning both companies. However, when searching for '10 pounds kilograms,' Alpha rather unhelpfully assumes you want to multiply 10 pounds by 1 kilogram, whereas Google directs you to sites for metric conversions. Change the query to '10 pounds in kilograms' and both give you the result you'd expect (i.e. 4.536 kg)."
Security

Submission + - DNS flaw: it hits more than just the web (theinquirer.net)

Submitted by gringer
gringer writes: Dan Kaminsky presented at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, and said that the DNS vulnerability he discovered is much more dangerous than most have appreciated. Besides hijacking web browsers, hackers might attack email services and spam filters, FTP, Rsync, BitTorrent, Telnet, SSH, as well as SSL services. Ultimately it's not a question of which systems can be attacked by exploiting the flaw, but rather which ones cannot. Then again, it could just be hype. For more information, see Kaminsky's power point presentation.
Security

Submission + - Physicist calculates trajectory of tiger at SF zoo (arxivblog.com) 1

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "Is it really possible for a 350 pound tiger to leap a 12.5 foot barrier from 33 feet away? A physicist at Northeastern University has done the math, a straightforward problem in ballistics, and the answer turns out to be yes (abstract on the physics arXiv). But I guess we already knew that following the death of Carlos Souza at the hands of Tatiana, a Siberian Tiger he had allegedly been taunting at San Francisco zoo at the end of last year."
Transportation

Submission + - General Motors: Driverless cars ready by 2018

Submitted by
Gregor Stipicic
Gregor Stipicic writes: " Cars that drive themselves — even parking at their destination — could be ready for sale within a decade, General Motors Corp. executives say. "This is not science fiction," Larry Burns, GM's vice president for research and development, said in a recent interview. GM plans to use an inexpensive computer chip and an antenna to link vehicles equipped with driverless technologies. The first use likely would be on highways; people would have the option to choose a driverless mode while they still would control the vehicle on local streets, Burns said. He said the company plans to test driverless car technology by 2015 and have cars on the road around 2018. "
Media

Submission + - Creative Commons license flaws found (bloosqr.com)

Submitted by
bloosqr
bloosqr writes: "Dan Heller claims to have found a series of problems with the creative commons license, particularly within the realm of photography in a series of three articles. In the first article he states there is a problem with people relicensing copyrighted work under the CC license and having subsequent users of that copyrighted work sued by the original owner. In the 2nd article he fleshes out these ideas and states that there is an increased risk of being sued if you use a CC license. Finally, in the 3rd article, he states that people can "game the CC license" for profit, by suing people who use your CC'd work which you have subsequently revoked from the CC license. This series of blogs has generated a fair amount of discussion on several photography forums, would it be possible for the slashdot community to clarify matters?"
Toys

Submission + - Microfluidic Chips made with Shrinky Dinks

Submitted by
SoyChemist
SoyChemist writes: "When she started her job as a new professor at UC Merced, Michelle Khine was stuck without a clean room or semiconductor fabrication equipment, so she went MacGyver and started making Lab-on-a-Chip devices in her kitchen with Shrinky Dinks, a laser printer, and a toaster oven. She would print a negative image of the channels onto the polystyrene sheets and then make them smaller with heat. The miniaturized pattern served as a perfect mould for forming rounded, narrow channels in PDMS — a clear, synthetic rubber."
Government

Submission + - British Village Requests Removal from GPS Maps (nytimes.com) 6

Submitted by
longacre
longacre writes: "The tiny village of Barrow Gurney, England has asked GPS map publisher Tele Atlas to remove them from the company's maps. The reason: truck drivers using GPS navigation devices are being directed to drive through the town despite the roads being too narrow for sidewalks, and causing numerous accidents. At the root of the problem lies the fact that the navigation maps used by trucks are the same as those used by passenger cars, which don't contain data on road width or no truck zones. Tele Atlas says they will release truck-appropriate databases at some point, but until then they advise local governments to make use of a technology dating back to the Romans: road signs."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - BBC rules that Wi-Fi radiation findings were wrong 1

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: A Panorama programme claiming that Wi-Fi creates three times as much radiation as mobile phone masts was "misleading", an official BBC complaints ruling has found. The team involved in the research came under fire from the school where the "investigations" were held for scaremongering, but now the BBC has come out with an official ruling.

"The programme included only one contributor (Professor Repacholi) who disagreed with Sir William, compared with three scientists and a number of other speakers (one of whom was introduced as a former cancer specialist) who seconded his concerns," the ruling said. "This gave a misleading impression of the state of scientific opinion on the issue." Stewart claimed in the programme to have found evidence that low-level radiation from devices such as mobile phones and Wi-Fi could damage health, and called for a review. The claims prompted a council body in north London to call for Wi-Fi use to be suspended in schools until an investigation had been carried out.
Patents

Submission + - OLPC lawsuit-bringer has past fraud conviction? (boston.com)

Submitted by d0ida
d0ida writes: The Boston Globe posted an article online about LANCOR's lawsuit over the keyboard design: see http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/12/01/one_laptop_per_child_orders_surge/ "Negroponte said the lawsuit is without merit, because OLPC uses a keyboard programming technique developed in 1996, long before the Nigerian patent was filed. The founder of Lagos Analysis Corp., Ade Oyegbola, was convicted of bank fraud in Boston in 1990 and served a year in prison. Oyegbola insists his Nigerian patent is legitimate and said he plans to file a copyright-infringement lawsuit against OLPC in an American court."
Programming

Submission + - Amazon EC2 Open to All

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon just announced that the beta program for their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service is now open to all developers. They also seem to have added new instance types. It appears that you can now get the equivalent of an 8-core machine. Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?
User Journal

Journal Journal: Critic of Software Patents wins Nobel Prize in Economics 235

Journal by doom
You don't need slashdot to hear about this story: Three Share Nobel in Economics for Work on Social Mechanisms (New York Times, login required), but you might have missed this detail: "One recent subject of Professor Maskin's wide-ranging research has been on the value of software patents. He determined that software was a market where innovations tended to be sequent
Space

Submission + - "All Quiet Alert" issued for the sun

Submitted by
radioweather
radioweather writes: "The phrase sounds like an oxymoron, and maybe it is, but the sun is extremely quiet right now, so much in fact that the Solar Influences Data Center in Belgium has issued an unusual "All quiet alert" on October 5th.

Since then, the sunspot number has remained at zero. Because solar cycle 24 has not yet started. There are signs that the sun's activity is slowing. The solar wind has been decreasing in speed, and this is yet another indicator of a slowing in the suns magnetic dynamo. There is talk of an extended solar minimum occurring.

There are a number of theories and a couple of dozen predictions about the intensity solar cycle 24 which has yet to start. One paper by Penn & Livingstonin 2006 concludes: "If [trends] continue to decrease at the current rate then the number of sunspots in the next solar cycle (cycle 24) would be reduced by roughly half, and there would be very few sunspots visible on the disk during cycle 25."

We'll know more in about six months what the sun decides to do for cycle 24."
Censorship

Journal Journal: Police shoot student with stun gun for asking a question 4

Journal by scoot80
A university student was held down and shot with a Taser stun gun by police in the middle of a question-and-answer session with former presidential candidate Democrat John Kerry, later to be charged with resisting arrest and disturbing the peace. All he did was ask a question. Was he out of line, or were the police out of line? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqAVvlyVbag

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I've never been canoeing before, but I imagine there must be just a few simple heuristics you have to remember... Yes, don't fall out, and don't hit rocks.

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