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Woman Trademarks Name and Threatens Sites Using It 273

Posted by samzenpus from the keep-my-name-out-of-your-mouth dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Be careful mentioning Dr. Ann De Wees Allen. She's made it clear that she's trademarked her name and using it is 'illegal... without prior written permission.' She even lists out the names of offenders and shows you the cease-and-desist letter she sends them. And, especially don't copy any of the text on her website, because she's using a bit of javascript that will warn you 'Copyright Protect!' if you right click on a link."
Power

Scale Models Can "Compute" Casimir Forces 136

Posted by kdawson from the by-analogy dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Place two conducting parallel plates a few nanometres apart and the well-known but difficult-to-measure Casimir force will push them together. The force depends crucially on the shape of the plates but nobody is exactly sure how. That's because calculations with anything other than flat plates are fiendishly difficult and measurements are even harder. Now a group at MIT has come up with an ingenious new way to investigate Casimir forces. What the team has noticed is a mathematical analogy between the Casimir force acting on microscopic bodies in a vacuum and the electromagnetic behavior of macroscopic bodies floating in a conducting fluid. Their idea is to build a centimeter-scale metal model of the system they want to investigate, place it in salt water, and bombard it with microwaves and see what happens. The team says the experiment does not measure the force on the scale model but instead a quantity that is mathematically related to the force. So the experiment is not a simulator but actually an analog computer that calculates the force (abstract). What's exciting is that the method should for the first time give researchers a way of testing nano-machines designed to exploit the Casimir force."
Censorship

The Best Way Through the Great Firewall of China 118

Posted by CmdrTaco from the route-around-oppression dept.
eldavojohn writes "The MIT Technology Review brings news of a new report from Harvard assessing circumvention software. The best tools they tested (and they actually did test them in cybercafes in China) were Ultrareach, Psiphon, and Tor, while Dynaweb and Anonymizer also scored well — of course, the huge downside is the long loading times. The report also includes responses from developers of the tools."
Businesses

Belkin's Amazon Rep Paying For Fake Online Reviews 369

Posted by Soulskill from the fake-them-yourself-like-everybody-else dept.
remove office writes "I recently discovered that Belkin's lead online sales rep, Michael Bayard, has been secretly paying internet users to review his company's products favorably on Amazon.com and other websites like Newegg, whether or not they've ever used the devices. Bayard instructed the people he was paying to 'Write as if you own the product and are using it... Mark any other negative reviews as "not helpful" once you post yours.' Ironically, he was using Amazon's own Mechanical Turk service to hire his fraudsters. Did he honestly think he wouldn't get caught? Are Slashdotters aware of other examples of other such blatant astroturfing on behalf of a large tech company like Belkin?"
Government

Indian GPS Cartographers Charged As Terrorists 269

Posted by timothy from the well-lookie-here dept.
chrb writes "Following on from the discussion about Apple disabling GPS in Egyptian iPhones, we have a new case of the conflict between the traditional secrecy of government, and the widening availability of cheap, accurate GPS devices around the world. On 5th December, two software engineers employed by Biond Software in India were arrested for mapping highways using vehicle based GPS devices. Further evidence against the pair emerged when it was found that a laptop they had been using in the car contained some photos of the local airforce base. The company claims they had been commissioned by Nokia Navigator to create maps of local roads and terrain. Following an investigation by the Anti Terrorist Squad of Gujarat the cartographers have now been charged with violating the Official Secrets Act and will remain in custody."
Wine

Wine Goes 64-Bit With Wine64 385

Posted by timothy from the leathery-but-not-presumptuous dept.
G3ckoG33k writes "Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a popular way to run Windows programs on Linux, and it has an impressive compatibility list. After 15 years of development it reached version 1.0 a few months ago. Now, Wine developer Maarten Lankhorst has succeeded in running 'Hello World' in 64-bit, natively! The 64-bit variety is unexpectedly named Wine64."
Space

Submission + - Cosmic 'Bullets' Traced to Galactic Black Holes 1

Submitted by dork
dork writes: The Pierre Auger Observatory announced that active galactic nuclei are the most likely candidates for the source of the highest-energy cosmic rays that hit Earth. Using the Southern Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, the largest cosmic-ray observatory in the world, spanning over more than 3000 square kilometers, they found that the sources of the highest-energy particles are not distributed uniformly across the sky, linking the origins of these "cosmic bullets" to the locations of nearby galaxies, hosting active nuclei in their centers. These galaxies are thought to be powered by supermassive monster black holes that are devouring large amounts of matter. The exact mechanism of how particles get accelerated to energies 100 million times higher than achievable by the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth is still a mystery. A fraction of recorded events is also available through a public online event display.

Comment Presentation from Indian Institute of Technology (Score 0) 245

by osschar (#18900847) Attached to: India To Offer Free Broadband by 2009
I've been at a computing-related conference in India about a year ago and one of the invited local speakers was talking about reality of broad-band delivery in India. Apparently the main issues are the average income which requires about 10-times lower prices for services (same for mobile phones) and problems with power-distribution, especially in rural areas. Here's a link to his slides: http://indico.cern.ch/materialDisplay.py?contribId =430&sessionId=0&materialId=slides&confId=048
Censorship

Submission + - Fair use in scientific blogging?

Submitted by
GrumpySimon
GrumpySimon writes: "Recently, a well-read science blog, Retrospectacle posted an article on a scientific paper. This blog post reproduced a chart and a table from the original article and everything was fully attributed. When the publishers, the mega-science publishing house Wiley found out, they subsequently threatened legal action unless the chart and table were removed. Understandably, this whole mess has stirred up quite a storm of protest, with many people seeing this as falling under fair use, and calling for a boycott of Wiley & Wiley's journals."
Announcements

Submission + - EU approves new, stricter anti-piracy directive

Submitted by
A Pirate
A Pirate writes: "The European Parliament has voted for the new report submitted by Italian parliament member Nicola Zingaretti that criminalize even attempts to infringe on copyrights. Even if the new directive excludes end-users from the law it still criminalize sites like YouTube and practically all P2P services, even the developers of these services. The exceptions beside the end-users' personal use, includes studies and research. While the European Parliament apparently describes the new directive as a an attempt to harmonize the copyright laws of the European Countries others have been describing it as a lobby directive."

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