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Yesterday's News

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Science: Huge Lenses To Observe Dark Energy

Posted by timothy on Friday July 04, @12:50AM
from the that's-what-my-huge-lenses-do-too dept.
Space
Iddo Genuth writes "UK astronomers, as a part of the Dark Energy Survey collaboration, have reached a milestone in the construction of one of the largest ever cameras to detect dark energy by completing the shipment of the glass required for the five special lenses. Each step in the process of completing this sophisticated camera brings scientists closer to detecting the invisible matter that cosmologists estimate makes up around 75% of our universe."

News: EBay Abandons Plans For PayPal Monopoly

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @10:24PM
from the single-source-is-always-risky dept.
The Almighty Buck
An anonymous reader writes "eBay's has lost its fight to ban all payment methods except PayPal. When Paypal originally announced the scheme it was to be global, but they began with a dry run in Australia to test the reaction of government and consumer authorities. In the public slanging match that followed between eBay and the regulatory ACCC, eBay spammed users claiming it was fighting for 'safety benefits for consumers.' Fortunately the consumers won. Conceded eBay vice president Simon Smith, 'While we disagree with the ACCC's draft notice, we have decided to withdraw the notification to stop any further confusion and disruption among the eBay community.' Nevertheless eBay insists PayPal is now always offered as a payment option. Have big corporations finally learned that they can go to far? More chillingly, if eBay had launched the scheme in America would they have got away with it?"

Science: Einstein's Theory Passes Strict New Test

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @08:59PM
from the ha-ha-england-ha-ha dept.
Space
FiReaNGeL writes with an excerpt from a story at e! Science News: "Taking advantage of a unique cosmic configuration, astronomers have measured an effect predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity in the extremely strong gravity of a pair of superdense neutron stars. Essentially, the famed physicist's 93-year-old theory passed yet another test. Scientists at McGill University used the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to do a four-year study of a double-star system unlike any other known in the Universe. The system is a pair of neutron stars, both of which are seen as pulsars that emit lighthouse-like beams of radio waves."

Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Disinfect Your Laptop?

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @07:53PM
from the use-a-nice-strong-antivirus dept.
Medicine
akutz writes "I've had the flu since Tuesday afternoon. My wife picked me up from work with a temperature of 103.6 and it finally broke at 98.7 around 3am this morning. Yay. The problem is that I used my laptop during my periods of feverish deliriousness, contaminating my shiny 15" MacBook Pro with the icky influenza virus. I am asking my fellow Slashdotters if they have ever sought out a good way of disinfecting their lucky laptops after an illness. Do you use soap? A light acid bath? Just get the family dog to lick it until it looks clean?"

Technology: An App to Boil Down Online User Reviews

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @06:52PM
from the please-phrase-your-review-as-free-verse dept.
The Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Is this a glimpse at the future of the Semantic Web? A new startup named Pluribo has developed a technology that can auto-summarize user reviews on the internet. It is a Firefox extension that can take a webpage filled with reviews and condense it down into a couple of sentences. Currently, it just works with Amazon electronics, but the potential seems incredible. Ars Technica took an in-depth look."

Mobile: 12,000 Laptops Lost Weekly At Airports

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @06:02PM
from the dignity-lost-even-more-often dept.
Portables
kthejoker writes "Apparently companies are even worse about losing our data than we suspected. From the article:'According to a study of 106 major U.S. airports and 800 business travelers published by the Ponemon Institute and Dell Computer, about 12,000 laptops are lost in airports each week. Only 30 percent of travelers ever recover the lost devices. Nearly half of the travelers say their laptops contain customer data or confidential business information.' Kinda scary ..."

Games: Poker Program Battles Humans In Vegas

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @05:08PM
from the leds-blink-when-they're-bluffing dept.
Software
Bridger writes "Poker software called Polaris will play a rematch against human players during the 2008 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Developed by an artificial intelligence group at the University of Alberta in Canada, Polaris will be pitted against several professionals at the Rio Hotel between June 3rd and 6th. 'It's possible, given enough computing power, for computers to play "perfectly," where over a long enough match, the program cannot lose money," said associate professor Michael Bowling.'"

News: AOL Users Will Need to Pay $2 a Month For Phone Support

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @04:22PM
from the dear-mom-and-pop-send-money dept.
America Online
destinyland writes "8.7 million AOL subscribers face a new 20% fee increase next month — unless they agree to never call AOL's technical support lines. They'll have to use AOL chat for support or the online help "portal" unless their issue is a failed connection — and they're being enrolled in the program by default unless they opt out. Ominously, AOL used the exact same wording as when they quietly changed their terms of service to allow them to sell subscribers' home phone numbers to telemarketers. 'Your continued subscription to the AOL service constitutes your acceptance of this change.'"

Interviews: Lt. Col. John Bircher Answers Your Questions

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @03:35PM
from the questions-that-dan-savage-won't-touch dept.
Security
A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Lt. Col. John Bircher, head of an organization with a difficult-to-navigate name: the U.S. Army Computer Network Operations (CNO)-Electronic Warfare (EW) Proponent's Futures Branch. Lt. Col. Bircher has answered from his perspective, at length, not just the usual 10 questions, but several more besides. Read on for his take on cyberwar, jurisdiction, ethics, and more.

News: Freeze On U.S. Solar Plant Applications Lifted

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @02:44PM
from the it-would-have-melted-eventually dept.
Power
necro81 writes "Barely a month ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a freeze on applications for solar power plants on federally managed land, pending a two-year comprehensive environmental review. After much hue and cry from the public, industry, and other parts of government, BLM has today announced that it will lift the freeze, but continue to study the possible environmental effects. To date, no solar project has yet been approved on BLM land."

Technology: Dial-Up Users "Don't Want Broadband"

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @01:58PM
from the get-spied-on-at-lower-speeds dept.
The Internet
Barence writes "The majority of dial-up Internet users say they don't want to upgrade their connection to broadband, according to a new study in the US. The Pew Internet & American Life research found that 62% of dial-up users had no interest in upgrading to a high-speed connection." (CNN is carrying the AP's story on the study, too.)

News: G8 Summit Aims To Kill International Piracy

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 03, @01:13PM
from the this-can-only-end-well dept.
Media
arcticstoat writes "Next week, the G8 summit will discuss proposals for new international piracy laws, which include border controls and cooperation from ISPs to identify pirates. The laws will also prevent ISPs from being liable for copyright infringement. If the G8 summit were to agree on these measures and enforce them through international cooperation, could they really cut down piracy, or would they be impractical to enforce?"

Technology: Is Today's Web Still 'the Web'?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 03, @12:00PM
from the worth-thinking-about dept.
The Internet
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister raises questions regarding the transforming nature of the Web now that Tim Berners-Lee's early vision has been supplanted by today's much more complex model. AJAX, Google Web Toolkit, Flash and Silverlight all have McAllister asking, 'Is [the Web] still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? Is it still the Web if the content can't be indexed and searched? Is it still the Web if you can only view the application on certain clients or devices? Is it still the Web if you can't view source?' Such questions bely a much bigger question for Web developers, McAllister writes. If today's RIAs no longer resemble the 'Web,' then should we be shoehorning these apps into the Web's infrastructure, or is the problem that the client platforms simply aren't evolving fast enough to meet our needs?" If the point of 'The Web' is to allow direct links between any 2 points, is today's web something entirely different?

IT: AVG Fakes User Agent, Floods the Internet

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 03, @11:18AM
from the way-to-go-guys dept.
Security
Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding websites with meaningless traffic (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now). Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots.

Science: Wood Density May Explain Stradivarius Secret

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 03, @10:37AM
from the don't-sit-on-it dept.
Music
Whorhay writes "A Dutch doctor and a violin maker from Arkansas have compared five classical and eight modern violins in a computed tomography (CT) scanner. Apparently the 300-year-old violins are made of wood with a more consistent density than the modern violins. They aren't saying for sure that this is what gives the Stradivarius violins their unique sound, but it's the first scientific explanation I've heard for it that seems to have merit." Unfortunately science has yet to explain how how all three chords I know ROCK on my SG.

Technology: Firefox Breaks 8 Million, Gets Into Guinness

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 03, @10:00AM
from the right-next-to-the-worlds-fattest-motercycle-twins dept.
Mozilla
Punkster812 writes "Mozilla has gotten the results back from the Guinness World Records and the official number that will be set as the record is 8,002,530 downloads. The day started out a little rough for them, with server troubles during the initial launch, but once they got everything going, they were able to transfer 62,419,734 MB in 24 hours. You can get more information, including a breakdown of how many downloads each country did from around the world, by visiting spreadfirefox.com. Congratulations, Mozilla, on the new record."

Developers: Best Color Scheme For Coding, Easiest On the Eyes?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 03, @09:19AM
from the that-looks-good-on-you dept.
Programming
Marzubus writes "I tend to do a lot of code editing in vim and sometimes get the 'burning eyes' or headaches. I have been trying to find a background / foreground combination for my terminal sessions which is easiest on the eyes but cannot seem to find any real data on this subject. Does anyone know of a study / data on this topic?"

Technology: YouTube Must Give All User Histories To Viacom

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 03, @08:39AM
from the stay-classy-viacom dept.
The Internet
psyopper writes "Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as 'speculative' and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four terabyte hard drives." Update: 07/03 18:05 GMT by T : Brian Aker, now of MySQL but long ago Slashdot's "database thug," writes a journal entry on how companies could intelligently treat such potentially sensitive user data.

IT: The Microsoft Office Rental Program

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 03, @07:57AM
from the four-easy-payments dept.
Microsoft
LWATCDR writes "Yes, it looks like Microsoft is going to a rental program for Office. From the article, 'The software bundle, which also includes Microsoft's Live OneCare computer security software, will be sold at nearly 700 Circuit City stores for $70 per year.' Well I for one will be happy to stick with OpenOffice for now. From Microsoft's point of view it means a constant flow of money. For the customer it means you only have to pay a little each year instead of a lot every few years. I don't think this will save the average user any money and I wonder about problems with 'activation.' So will this fly, or will it give a big push to OpenOffice?
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