Barence writes "A Google Street View car has been chased out of a British village by angry residents. The car was taking photographs of Broughton in Buckinghamshire for Google's when it was spotted by a local resident who warned the car not to enter the village then roused his neighbors, who surrounded the vehicle until the driver performed a U-turn and left. 'This is an affluent area,' protester Paul Jacobs said. 'We've already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it's an invitation for more criminals to strike. I was determined to make a stand, so I called the police.'"

Riding with Robots writes "NASA reports that the Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds. According to the Canadian team running a weather experiment, a laser instrument designed to study how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars has detected snow from clouds about 4 kilometers above the landing site. Data shows the snow vaporizing before reaching the surface, but one of the mission scientists said, 'We'll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground.' Spacecraft soil experiments have also provided evidence of past interaction between minerals and liquid water."

Jawdy writes "I am currently leading a small game development project with artists and developers scattered all over the country. Getting together is somewhat difficult, but we try to do this every couple of months. We often share all kinds of documents with each other, and even do so while using IM clients (GTalk and MSN), but this winds up being a tedious process of: send document; read and edit; send back; rinse and repeat. What I wanted to ask fellow slashdotters is, if anyone knows of any FOSS software that can handle IM (or even voice chat), Whiteboard and document sharing — where we can all see the document, pass around 'editing rights' and edit live. Even several small apps that handle the individual components would help out!"

Hugh Pickens writes "Professor Avishai Wool has unveiled a program to watch for malware on servers with a modification to the Linux kernel. 'We modified the kernel in the system's operating system so that it monitors and tracks the behavior of the programs installed on it,' says Wool. Essentially, Wool says, his software team has built a model that predicts how software running on a server should work (pdf). If the kernel senses abnormal activity, it stops the program from working before malicious actions occur. 'When we see a deviation, we know for sure there's something bad going on,' Wool explains. Wool cites problems with costly anti-virus protection. 'Our methods are much more efficient and don't chew up the computer's resources.'"

ashitaka writes "KDDI has announced that they will be launching a 1Gbps Internet service to single-family home and condo users in October. The service is supposedly synchronous, with 1Gbps in both directions, although the article implies that speeds will vary with location. Cost will be 5,985 yen/month (about US$56.50) for the basic Internet and IP phone service. This is intended to compete with NTT, who currently control over 70% of the Japanese FTTH market."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Senate has passed the PRO-IP Act. While they stripped out the provision to have the DoJ act as copyright cops, it still contains increased penalties for infringement, civil forfeiture provisions, and creates an 'IP czar' to coordinate enforcement. Even though the civil forfeiture provisions are ostensibly intended for use against commercial piracy outfits, history indicates that they will probably get used against individuals at some point. Worse, because they left out the only part of the bill that Bush threatened to veto, it is expected to pass. It is going back to the House where they're expected to pass it on Saturday, after which the President will probably sign it. So, if you want to contact your representative, hurry." An anonymous reader notes that DefectiveByDesign.Org is mobilizing to fight this legislation. The Senate vote was unanimous. We've been following the progress of this bill for quite some time.

An anonymous reader writes "Speaking at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie explained that he sees the industry evolving into 'spatial computing,' and he envisions a 3-D virtual world populated by virtual presences, using a combination of client and cloud services. 'In a few months, the compay plans to test a new virtual reception assistant in some of its campus buildings. The assistant, which takes the form of an avatar, helps schedule shuttle reservations to get people to various locations across the 10-million-square-foot Redmond, Wash., campus. The system includes array microphones and natural language processing by which the avatar listens to the subjects and then interacts with them in real time. The system has been programmed to differentiate people by their clothing. Someone in a suit, for instance, would more likely be a visitor and not a potential shuttle rider.'"

AdamWill writes "The Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring Alpha 2, marking the first public pre-release of the upcoming Mandriva Linux 2009. This alpha introduces several significant changes, most obviously the inclusion of KDE 4 — 4.1 beta 2, specifically — as the default version of KDE, and the latest development version of GNOME, 2.23.4. The kernel has also been updated to release 2.6.26rc7. Another feature of interest to many users will be the addition of orphan package tracking (and optional automatic removal) to the urpmi package manager. Of course, many applications have been updated (although the default version of Mozilla Firefox is still currently 2.0.x), and most of the distribution has been rebuilt with a new GCC version, 4.3. Mandriva warns that this is a true alpha, likely to contain many bugs related to the new version of KDE. Please install it only in a test environment, and especially do not use it as an upgrade from any earlier Mandriva Linux release."

esocid writes "Researchers at HP Labs have solved a decades-old mystery by proving the existence of a fourth basic element in integrated circuits that could make it possible to develop computers that turn on and off like an electric light. The memristor — short for memory resistor — could make it possible to develop far more energy-efficient computing systems with memories that retain information even after the power is off, so there's no wait for the system to boot up after turning the computer on. It may even be possible to create systems with some of the pattern-matching abilities of the human brain. Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, initially theorized about and named the element in an academic paper published 37 years ago. Chua argued that the memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor, and that it had properties that could not be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements."

NorseWolf writes "Since its foundation, the United Nations system has been collecting statistical information from member states on a variety of topics. The information thus collected constitutes a considerable information asset of the organization. However, these statistical data are often stored in proprietary databases, each with unique dissemination and access policies. As a result, users are often unaware of the full array of statistical information that the UN system has in its data libraries. The current arrangement also means that users are required to move from one database to another to access different types of information. UNdata addresses this problem by datapooling major UN databases and those of several other international organizations into one single Internet environment. The innovative design allows a user to access a large number of UN databases either by browsing the data series or through a keyword search."

Blue Light Special writes "With HD DVD on life support, Toshiba is reportedly preparing to bow to the inevitable and allow HD DVD to expire quietly. 'While denying that a decision on the fate of HD DVD has been made, a Toshiba marketing exec left the door wide open. "Given the market developments in the past month, Toshiba will continue to study the market impact and the value proposition for consumers, particularly in light of our recent price reductions on all HD DVD players," Jodi Sally, VP of marketing for Toshiba America Consumer Products, said.'" A few folks have also noted that Wal-mart is joining the Blu-ray train, further lowering the stock of HD DVD.

Albanach writes "The European Union Commissioner for the Internal Market has today proposed extending the copyright term for musical recordings to 95 years. He also wishes to investigate options for new levies on blank discs, data storage and music and video players to compensate artists and copyright holders for 'legal copying when listeners burn an extra version of an album to play one at home and one in the car ... People are living longer and 50 years of copyright protection no longer give lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties, he said.'"

paulraps writes "Suddenly the founders of the Pirate Bay are not so hearty. The four men behind the popular file-sharing site were indicted in Sweden on Thursday on charges of being accessories to breaking copyright law. And this is more than just a shot across the bows. The prosecutor reckons that they can be hooked for 'promoting other people's copyright breaches' but there will be no walking the plank: instead, they face fines of up to $200,000 and the confiscation of all their hardware. 'The Swedish prosecutor listed dozens of works that had been downloaded through The Pirate Bay site, including The Beatles' Let It Be, Robbie Williams' Intensive Care and the movie Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire. Plaintiffs in the case include Warner, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI.'"

coondoggie writes to mention that the National Science Board is concerned about certain indicators in the science and engineering fields for the United States. "For example, US schools continue to lag behind internationally in science and math education. On the other hand, the US is the largest, single, R&D-performing nation in the world pumping some $340 billion into future-related technologies. The US also leads the world in patent development."