Articles by Slashdot from October 2011

Bocaj writes "I recently spec'd out a large project for our company that included software from Red Hat. It came back from the CIO with everything approved except I have to use CentOS. Why? Because "i...

RedEaredSlider writes "Fish in the Hudson River and the harbor in New Bedford, Mass., have evolved resistance to PCBs. In the Hudson, a species of tomcod has evolved a way for a very specific protein ...

wiredmikey writes "Microsoft has dismissed a lawsuit against a company it contended a month ago was at the heart of the now-defunct Kelihos bonnet. In September, Microsoft named Dominique Piatti and h...

jfruhlinger writes "Apple's North Carolina data center will, it appears, be turning greener: the company is building a dedicated solar farm to power it. That would be a welcome turnaround for proponen...

destinyland writes "An Ohio Emergency Management Agency staged a mock zombie attack using more than 225 volunteers dressed as zombies at an Ohio college. 'Organizers hoped the theme would attract more...

mikejuk writes "Today we celebrate Dennis Ritchie Day, an idea proposed by Tim O'Reilly. Ritchie, who died earlier this month, made contributions to computing that are so deeply woven into the fabric ...

Hasan M. Elahi writes in the NY Times about his run-in with the FBI several months after September 11th, 2001. They'd received an erroneous report that he had explosives and had fled the country, so t...

1sockchuck writes "Is the data center industry on the verge of a revolution in which open source hardware designs transform the process of designing and building these facilities? This week the Open C...

New submitter thyristor pt writes "In light of massive national budget cuts, the Portuguese government will force public schools to move to free/open source software (Google translation of original in...

New submitter gbl08ma writes "The Raspberry Pi project, which aims to create a $25 Linux box, won an award for the category 'Best in Show for Hardware Design' at ARM TechCon, even though they haven't ...

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Purdue say the merging of plasmonics and nanophotonics is promising the emergence of new 'quantum information systems' far more powerful than today's compute...

Hugh Pickens writes "Google is taking its Street View mapping service indoors with plans moving ahead for 360-degree Business Photos, a program that would send Google photographers to various business...

Layzej writes "Two new papers indicate that we are likely already seeing some of the predicted impacts of global warming. The first used Monte Carlo simulations to analyze how many new record events y...

New submitter wesbascas writes "Have you ever wanted to play a new PC game, but weren't sure where your PC falls between the minimum and recommended system requirements? I don't have a whole lot of ti...

BigSes writes "I had been in the amusement repair industry (video gaming, pinball, jukeboxes, etc) for more than a decade, but have recently taken a new career path. I still greatly enjoy tinkering wi...

New submitter NarcoTraficante writes "After one of their members was kidnapped in Veracruz, Mexico by the Zetas drug cartel, Mexican Anonymous members have issued an ultimatum to the Zetas in a recent...

rsk writes "Amazon Web Services' Elastic Load Balancer is a dynamic load-balancer managed by Amazon. Load balancers regularly swapped around with each other which can lead to surprising results; like ...

Ian Lamont writes "Patrick McKenzie has written about the do's and don't's of working as a software engineer, and some solid (and often amusing) advice on how to get ahead. One of the first pieces of ...

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from AndroidPolice.com:"As it turns out, Dolphin HD, one of the top browsers the Android platform has to offer, sends pretty much every web page URL you visit, i...

An anonymous reader writes "Australia's national airline QANTAS, famous for never having had a fatal crash, has been grounded effective immediately by its management. The grounding is in response to i...

crackspackle writes "The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office in suburban Houston, Texas is preparing to launch operations with a newly received Shadowhawk MK-III unmanned aerial vehicle, paid for by gr...

Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that not so long ago, the prospect of a debt-free U.S. was seen as a real possibility with the potential to upset the global financial system. As recently as 2000, the...

DeviceGuru writes "Two startups are about to go chrono y chrono with competing Android gizmos. The I'm Watch exclusively targets smartwatch applications, whereas the WIMM Platform is meant to create '...

slash-sa writes "Two South Africans have given their home country a boost with its Square Kilometre Array (SKA) bid by inventing cellular antenna technology which reduces 'noisy' emissions from cellul...

jldailey618 writes "Nokia just unveiled an OLED smartphone that is controlled by flexing the device with both hands. By bending corners and pushing the sides inward and outward, the user can scroll, z...

First time accepted submitter AtomicAdam writes"I guess all that waiting and hoping was in vain. HP just sent out an email officially claiming to be out of TouchPads. 'Dear Valued Customer: Making sur...

A few weeks ago, in reaction to claims that Blue Coat systems were being used to track internet use in Syria, a company spokesman denied the charges here, saying "To our knowledge, we do not have any ...

First time accepted submitter int2str writes "Autocross is a form of motorsports practiced in the U.S. and around the world where car enthusiasts explore the capabilities of their car in an open parki...

An anonymous reader writes "Not long ago, Mozilla coders announced that they were starting to build PDF.js, a way to display Acrobat documents in the browser using pure web code. No longer will you ha...

eldavojohn writes "Stanford's OpenSim software is a human motion modeling package that is currently making the rounds at museums where 'visitors walk across a pressure-sensitive floor and are presente...

judgecorp writes "RIM has set up a surveillance facility in India to help the authorities monitor users' BlackBerry messages, according to reports. This comes after a long argument in which RIM at fir...

Glyn Moody writes "In an interview, Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and currently CIO at Mozilla, reveals that Microsoft tried to buy Netscape at the end of 1994. They were turned down because...

Trailrunner7 writes "The EFF, through the use of its SSL Observatory, has taken a look at the data from certificate revocation lists for SSL certificates in recent months, and found that there were fo...

OverTheGeicoE writes "TSA's VIPR program may be expanding. According to the Washington Times, 'TSA has always intended to expand beyond the confines of airport terminals. Its agents have been conducti...

An anonymous reader writes "Italian roboticists have built a quadruped robot called HyQ that can walk, trot, jump, and rear. Unlike with another quadruped project, the famous BigDog from Boston Dynami...

An anonymous reader writes "It appears Microsoft's Skype Division is cracking down on reverse-engineering of the Skype client. Skype recently rolled out a new set of APIs for integration into other de...

astroengine writes "Asteroids visited by spacecraft have all turned out to be piles of rubble or chunks broken off of larger bodies, but that's not the case with 21 Lutetia, a 75-mile long, 47-mile wi...

crookedvulture writes "The initial reviews of the first Bulldozer-based FX processors have revealed the chips to be notably slower than their Intel counterparts. Part of the reason is the module-based...

djeps sends in this excerpt from the Physics arXiv Blog:"Japanese scientists have built a cellular automaton from individual molecules that carries out huge numbers of calculations in parallel. ... At...

mvar writes "The Linux Foundation today released technical guidance to PC makers on how to implement secure UEFI without locking Linux or other free software off of new Windows 8 machines. The guidanc...

larry bagina writes "It's no secret that rock stars have riders — provisions on their contractual appearances that require a bowl of brown-free M&Ms or specify the exact brand of bottled wat...

An anonymous reader writes "The days of dealing with very reflective glass panels may soon be behind us. Nippon Electric Glass has used the FPD International 2011 conference in Japan this week to show...

eldavojohn writes "As detailed in the journal Science (abstract), a new compound composed of cobalt, iron and oxygen with other metals presents us with the most efficient way (found so far) of splitti...

New submitter landofcleve writes "When the writing is on the wall, you fight harder — or at least that's what we've seen from Apple in recent months. Now we know why: Samsung has reached a marke...

Coisiche writes "To address the many responses to their original findings, the OPERA team who reported the detection of faster-than-light neutrinos is starting a new and improved version of their expe...

angry tapir writes "In less than a decade, a microprocessor core could be no bigger than a red blood cell, the CTO of ARM has predicted. ARM has already helped develop a prototype, implantable device ...

First time accepted submitter Jherico writes "Andrea Rossi (covered here a few times before) is scheduled to bring his 1MW plant online Oct. 28th. This will likely either be the point where 'unexpecte...

First time accepted submitter shocking writes "The Perth Mint as created a gold coin that is just over one tonne in weight and worth over $50 million AUD. From the article: 'A team of a dozen people h...

InfiniteZero writes "Researchers at the University of Hong Kong observed stars at different evolutionary phases and found that they are able to produce complex organic compounds and eject them into sp...

dotarray writes "An American aquarium supplier obviously has a gamer on the payroll, after naming two new forms of Acanthastrea coral after Activision's shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops. From the artic...

coondoggie writes "The Federal Aviation Administration wants you to go online to help it battle the growing safety problem of people pointing lasers at flying aircraft.The FAA today said it created a ...

Revotron writes "Apple has released the full source to their Apple Lossless Audio Codec under the Apache license. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is a lossless audio codec developed by Apple and...

An anonymous reader writes "The Facebook Immunity System (FIS) processes and checks 25 billion actions every day, or 650,000 actions every second. The social networking giant's cybersecurity system wa...

nixkuroi writes "Redbox, apparently not having noticed the backlash against Netflix, has decided to charge its customers 20% more per day. Though there will be a discounted grace period for the first ...

OzPeter writes "As reported in WA Today, Tony Fadell of iPod fame has been using Nest Labs to design and build a thermostat that learns how you live in your house by following how you manually change ...

First time accepted submitter yourlord writes "Hewlett-Packard Co. has decided to keep its PC division. So says its newly appointed CEO Meg Whitman. Whitman, the former eBay chieftain, categorically r...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Steve Green reports that newspaper copyright infringement lawsuit filer Righthaven of Las Vegas has been hit with an order to pay $119,488 in attorney's fees and costs in i...

First time accepted submitter QuantumMist writes "Researchers from Southern Illinois University have published a paper comparing Perl to Quorum(PDF) (their own statistically informed programming langu...

IDG reports that "The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has voted to overhaul a decades-old system of telephone subsidies in rural areas, with the funding refocused on broadband deployment. The F...

An anonymous reader writes "Frostytech gets to the heart of Zalman's CNPS11X heatsink by cutting a section of heatpipe from the CPU cooler to inspect its inner composite heatpipe wick structure. Now t...

ematic writes with a link to an interesting competition from DARPA: "The ability to reconstruct shredded documents will potentially yield information that may save lives or offer critical information ...

ddfall writes "After a recent update, Avira's anti-virus software reports its own AESCRIPT.DLL file as a trojan or spyware. From the article: 'The dodgy AntiVir virus definition file was quickly pulle...

First time accepted submitter Diggester writes with this snippet from PC World: "Sony took a page out of the playbooks of Microsoft and Apple, announcing it would buy out its smartphone partner, Erics...

Orome1 writes "Two U.S. satellites have been tampered with by hackers — possibly Chinese ones — in 2007 and 2008, claims a soon-to-be released report by the the U.S.-China Economic and Sec...

Hallowe'en is just around the corner. I've spent hours this month poring over masks, fog machines, automated monsters, and sound-activated dancing skeletons (mostly too rich for my blood), and worked ...

An anonymous reader writes "One of the famous stories about Steve Jobs is that he used to drive around in a Mercedez Benz sports car with no license plates, and that he would sometimes park in Handica...

itwbennett writes "Today's criminals aren't stealing money — that's so yesterday, according to professional social engineer Jim Stickley. In an interview with CSO's Joan Goodchild, Stickley expl...

After years of delays in production, technical worries, and technical advances, Zothecula writes with this excerpt that says "The 787 Dreamliner has entered commercial service. The mid-size airliner's...

MBCook writes "After seeing the announcement that Nexus One users won't get ICS, Michael Degusta made a chart to show how current the OS version on Android phones was over time... and the results are ...

mikemuch writes "The standard that eventually became CSS was originally submitted to Tim Berners-Lee et al by Haakon Wium Lie, who continues to have new ideas for the web formatting language. The late...

dutchwhizzman writes "Uturuncu is a Bolivian supervolcano. Research suggests that it has an eruption frequency of roughly 300.000 years and the last eruption was, give or take a few years, 300.000 yea...

angry tapir writes "The intellectual property lawsuit between Oracle and Google over the Android mobile OS won't go to trial until next year, according to a ruling made in the U.S. District Court for ...

coondoggie writes "The US Department of Energy wants researchers and scientists to 'think outside the box' and come up 'highly disruptive Concentrating Solar Power technologies that will meet 6/kWh co...

mayberry42 writes "Did you ever wonder how and why professional economists often seem to get it wrong in terms of predicting consequences or policies accurately (or even at all)? Or how very few even ...

hackingbear writes "In a sign of the Chinese Government's intention to crack down on the black market, there were about 1 million people employed to remove fake goods from Chinese streets, according t...

judgecorp writes "A British man born with one arm has a Nokia phone dock embedded in his prosthetic limb. Apparently, Apple refused to have an iPhone suitably customized for the job. From the article:...

deadeyefred writes "With the last vestiges of Microsoft's U.S. antitrust consent decree expiring earlier this year, the company is again tying its browser tightly to Windows. In pre-release versions o...

bs0d3 writes "The U.S. House has drafted their version of Protect IP today. They have renamed the bill to "the Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation A...

MrSeb writes "Mozilla is now distributing a version of Firefox that uses Bing as the default search provider instead of Google. Rest assured that this is a joint project, though: the creatively-named ...

Michael J. Ross writes "If you need a theme for a web site based on Drupal 7, then you have a few options for obtaining one. You could go with an existing theme, but the current crop of prebuilt theme...

An anonymous reader writes "Samsung has developed a solar-powered internet school for Africa. Although its more of a CSR initiative to show how 'responsible' they are, the idea is really good. Hopeful...

alphadogg writes "Chinese authorities have started to detain Internet users for allegedly spreading online rumors, in its latest measure to control the country's social media sites. China's State Inte...

theodp writes "On Tuesday, Amazon received a patent on 'Customizing Gift Instrument Experiences for Recipients', which allows a gift card giver to not only recommend items via the gift card but also t...

judgecorp writes "RIM has delayed the 2.0 release of its tablet's Playbook OS until 2012, and admitted it won't have the BlackBerry email app. PlayBook users will only be able to do BlackBerry email o...

Just in time for Halloween, the New York state Division of Criminal Justice Services launched a Facebook application to help families know which houses contain sexual offenders. “Knowledge is po...

itwbennett writes "Eric Bloom, an IT leadership coach and former CIO, has answered that eternal question 'does working on old software hurt your professional marketability' with a somewhat surprising ...

An anonymous reader writes "America's new CIO Steven VanRoekel wants to revamp the federal government and make it as agile as a startup. But first he has to get rid of bugs like the Department of Agri...

Zibodiz writes "The Sensors and Devices group at Microsoft Research has developed a new system called HoloDesk that allows users to pick up, move and even shoot virtual 3D objects.It's about the size ...

Trailrunner7 writes "All of the hype about Duqu being the next Stuxnet obscured many of the real facts about the new malware. It turns out that Duqu not only is essentially a customizable attack frame...

a_hanso writes "The Google funded Enhanced Geothermal Systems research at the Southern Methodist University has produced a coast-to-coast geothermal potential map of the United States. Having invested...

rhettb writes with an article about a fancy mapping sensor. Quoting Mongobay: "High above the Amazon rainforest in Peru, a team of scientists is conducting an ambitious experiment: a biological survey...

mikejuk writes with an excerpt from an I Programmer article: "Nokia has just launched the Lumia 800, its first Windows 7 phone, and it is basically a modified N9. CEO Stephen Elop said: 'It's a new da...

First time accepted submitter eyeoftheidol writes "A judge in the UK has ordered the ISP BT to block access to filesharing site Newzbin2 within 14 days. From the article: 'Wednesday's court order also...

bs0d3 writes "Netflix's video subscription service lost 800,000 customers in the third quarter, the single biggest loss in it's history. Shares plunged by more than 25 percent in Monday's extended tra...

gbrumfiel writes "A new study posted for open peer-review suggests that the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi released far more radiation than the Japanese government initially estimated. The stud...

angry tapir writes "An upcoming version [PDF] of U.S. legislation designed to combat copyright infringement on the Web may include provisions that hold online services such as Twitter, Facebook and Yo...

generalhavok writes "The United States Patent & Trademark Office has approved Apple's patent on the slide to unlock gesture used on iOS devices. Interestingly, this patent was earlier dismissed in...

arkenian writes "The BBC reports that the Royal Society is putting all of its old papers online and has a fascinating sample of articles from the first several years. You can reach all the old journal...

Trailrunner7 writes "A group of researchers has released a tool that they say implements a denial-of-service attack against SSL servers by triggering a huge number of SSL renegotiations, eventually co...

judgecorp writes "When Mitsubishi announced in September it had been hacked in August it was criticized for keeping quiet for a month. Now it appears that the attackers got nuclear power plant and mil...

hype7 writes "With yesterday's release of the Steve Jobs biography, a raft of interesting information has come to light — including Jobs' favorite books. There's one book there listed as 'profou...

itwbennett writes "IBM will start the new year with a new CEO. Virginia (Ginni) Rometty, who built up IBM Global Services, will be the company's first female CEO." Read more of this story at S...

Julie188 writes "Windows XP – the XP stood for 'Experience' — was released October 25, 2001. With Windows XP, Microsoft hoped to have one codebase that would span everything from consumers...

An anonymous reader writes "Canadian and British scientists have found that how rich your family was when you were a kid — as judged by wealth, housing conditions and occupation of parents &mdas...

New submitter ThatsMyNick writes "The two largest credit-card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., are pushing into a new business: using what they know about people's credit-card purchases for ta...

MrSeb writes "Today's groundbreaking entry into the Uncanny Valley is a pair of mechanical, robot legs that are propelled entirely by their own weight: they can walk with a human-like gait without mot...

Bob the Super Hamste writes "The BBC is reporting that the mystery of a supernova seen almost 2000 years ago has been solved. The supernova RCW 86 was observed in 185AD by Chinese astronomers and was ...

Rambo Tribble writes "As reported in TPM, the Federal Trade Commission has reached an agreement (PDF) with Google that will include the agency monitoring the company's privacy practices for the next 2...

NicknamesAreStupid writes "The NYTimes reports on a book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew P. McAfee (MIT director-level staffers), Race Against the Machine, which suggests that the true threat to jobs ...

SpuriousLogic sends this excerpt from an AP report:"The last of the nation's most powerful nuclear bombs — a weapon hundreds of times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — is being...

necro81 writes "An advisory committee to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will soon issue new recommendations that pre-adolescent boys be vaccinated against Human Papilloma Virus (H...

The Bad Astronomer writes "A few months ago I was sent a really weird video showing a cloud snapping around suddenly, far faster than wind could explain. I asked a meteorologist about it, who told me ...

Lauren Weinstein writes "Google is handling SSL search queries on https://www.google.com/ in a manner significantly different than the standard, expected SSL end-to-end behavior — specifically r...

mikejuk writes "Bruce Wilcox won the First Prize of $4000 and the Bronze Annual Medal in the 21st Loebner Prize Competition held in the UK at the University of Exeter on October 19, 2011 with his new ...

Last week, you asked questions of "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf; read on below for Cerf's thoughts on the present and future of IPv6, standards and nomenclature, the origin of his beard, and more...

eldavojohn writes "The 18th century Copiale Cipher has finally been decoded after a few minor breakthroughs were made by linguists versed in machine translation analyzing the document. From the articl...

First time accepted submitter krinderlin writes "My home network consists of a Linksys WRT54GL for WAN access and a WRT54G version 8 for a wireless bridge for my Blu-Ray and old XBox 360*. Due to a re...

DMandPenfold writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld UK "Jaguar has recalled nearly 18,000 X-type cars after it discovered a major software fault, which meant drivers might not be able to turn off...

First time accepted submitter PattonPending writes "Mark your calendars! On November 9th national communications will be disrupted for around 3 minutes during the first nationwide test of the emergenc...

astroengine writes "On Monday, at around 2 p.m. ET, a coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into the Earth's magnetosphere. For a short time (between 3:06 p.m and 3:11 p.m. ET), energetic solar wind par...

The first of a few submitters, szo sent in an earlyreport that John McCarthy passedearly yesterday. Paul Graham(among others) confirmed: the newswas true. And so, shortly after a fellowfounder of coun...

Hugh Pickens writes "Interstate 15 in southern Utah has been reopened and officials say 25 million bees that closed the road have been accounted for after a flatbed truck heading for California carryi...

First time accepted submitter Tim99 writes "This morning I got an email from The Register informing me that they have sent 3,521 of their readers the names and e-mail addresses of 46,000 other readers...

bdking writes "Netflix says it will begin offering streaming video services to customers in the United Kingdom and Ireland early next year. (No DVDs by mail, though. That's so 'Oughts.') The company l...

Kyusaku Natsume writes "In a potentially damning report, the Japanese government panel probing the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown has learned that the nuclear power plant Tokai No.2 avoided station blacko...

First time accepted submitter PcItalian writes with an excerpt from an interesting editorial on XDA Developers: "The open access provision requires Verizon to 'not deny, limit, or restrict the ability...

An anonymous reader writes "Google's new language landed with a loud thud, causing lots of interesting debates about the best place to stick semicolons... An article [in InfoQ] ... looks at some of th...

conner_bw writes "I'm an OS X user looking to switch to a Linux laptop. I like the Unix/BSD aspect of OS X. Simple things like when I close the lid the laptop goes to sleep, the sound card works out o...

New submitter geekgirl09 sends in a story from Wired about the U.S. Army's efforts to develop methods for digitally manufacturing dreams to soothe combat vets who suffer from PTSD. From the article:"F...

SkinnyGuy writes with news of an invention out of Stanford that improves upon previous work: a transparent, stretchable, skin-like sensor that could have applications for prosthetic limbs and robotics...

New submitter roat35 tips news that researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have used Dropcam — a relatively small, glass-walled device containing an HD camera — to make v...

New submitter arcite writes "It's official: planet Earth is now home to over seven billion ugly-bags-of-mostly-water (otherwise known as humans). We're adding ten thousand new humans every hour, or on...

Bob the Super Hamste writes "The BBC is reporting that there is strong support among the public in the U.S., U.K., and Canada for research into geo-engineering with approximately 72% respondents suppo...

jfruhlinger writes "Gamers who have grown bored with the current generation of game hardware will have to sit tight a bit longer. Word on the street has it that the next PlayStation won't be ready unt...

Hugh Pickens writes "Most workplaces build a system to evaluate worker performance, provide feedback that yields information employees can use to improve, and then hold employees accountable for resul...

An anonymous reader writes "As the launch of the $25 PC gets ever closer (sometime next month), members of the Raspberry Pi team have found time to start blogging about the history of the project. Ebe...

alphadogg writes "Of the 470,000 Wi-Fi connections made on a recent day at Abilene Christian University, fully 94% used the 2.4GHz band, representing an extreme example of how today's surging number o...

Astronomer, author, columnist, and successful populizer of science Phil Plait, perhaps best known as The Bad Astronomer, is a regular sight on Slashdot for his unusual ability to find lucid explanatio...

Following up on recent news of a NASA satellite falling from the sky and a German satellite that did the same, new submitter blais writes "NPR has an interesting interview about space junk falling bac...

diegocg writes "Linux 3.1 has been released. The changes include support for the OpenRISC opensource CPU; performance improvements to the writeback throttling; some speedups in the slab allocator; a n...

rubycodez writes "Researchers at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute in Zurich have identified a 'Capitalist Network' [PDF] of well-connected companies that control most of the global economy. They...

Orome1 writes "ACROS Security notified Google about a peculiar behavior of the Chrome browser that can be exploited for execution of remote code outside Chrome sandbox under specific conditions. It is...

lee1 writes "Wikileaks has had to cease publishing classified files due to what the organization calls a 'blockade by US-based finance companies' that, according to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange ha...

Bob the Super Hamste writes "The St. Paul Pioneer Press is reporting on an analysis by lawyer Justin Kwong in the William Mitchell Law Review about virtual property and ownership. Justin Kwong asserts...

On the heels of declaring his intent to axe a few department from the federal government, Ron Paul has revealed more plans should he becomes President. The_THOMAS writes "Ron Paul wants to end Federal...

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has inked a deal with Compal Electronics, which pumps out gadgets that run Android and Chrome OS, for an undisclosed sum."Microsoft has an explanatory weblog post...

Hugh Pickens writes "Reuters reports that Chinese solar companies could soon find themselves bereft of some of their biggest foreign markets as Western manufacturers intensify a solar trade war and se...

An anonymous reader writes with this report from Hackaday, which recently covered an attempt at the UK altitude record for an amateur balloon launch. Says the story: "Things don't always go as planned...

First time accepted submitter IDarkISwordI writes "A new abstract headed to SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 provides a method for rapid execution of computer graphics, synthesized into photographs with accurate li...

itwbennett writes "In a notice posted Thursday on the customer support section of its website, Sprint said it would impose monthly data caps on plans for all tablets, laptops, netbooks, USB and PC Car...

ozmanjusri writes "New smartphones may be lightweight, compact objects, but their OSs are anything but. Ice Cream Sandwich will need workstations with no less than 16 GB RAM to build the source code, ...

An anonymous reader writes with a report that an employee of Hyperion Entertainment has disclosed (but not officially announced) that there is a new portable computer with the Amiga name on it in the ...

alphadogg writes with this excerpt from the Boston Globe: "On a whim two years ago, performance artist Jonathan Doyle paraded around the bustling peak of New Hampshire's Mount Monadnock in a $40 Bigfo...

harrymcc writes "It's been exactly ten years since Steve Jobs stood on a stage at Apple and explained to a surprisingly small group of journalists that his company was going to make a music player and...

theodp writes "Over at the Google Web Search Community, posters are questioning why Google feels free to IFrame others' web pages, yet blocks attempts to IFrame pages on its own sites. 'Google has so ...

PolygamousRanchKid writes with an article exploring the question posed in the headline, which says that "One answer may lie in biology. Scientific studies have shown that people generally find women's...

First time accepted submitter CtownNighrider writes "I'm in my senior year of high school currently in a selective program for future engineers. I have always been a good student and feel like I can g...

Motor writes "As has long been expected — we are now beginning to see governments pushing for the use of so-called 'trusted computing' — chips installed in all computers that effectively r...

Mike_EE_U_of_I writes with "Continuing coverage of the World Solar Challenge in Australia. Now up are interviews with the second place team (Nuon from the Netherlands) and third place University of Mi...

Hugh Pickens writes "Matt Richtel writes that many employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard send their children to the Waldorf School in Los Altos where the sch...

EccentricAnomaly writes "The New York Times has a story about a leaked NASA study that showed it would cost $80 BIllion less and get astronauts to an asteroid sooner if NASA used fuel depots instead o...

Shareable writes "Makerbot just launched Project Shellter, which will leverage the Makerbot community's network of 5,000 3D printers to make shells for hermit crabs — which face a species-threat...

Joren writes "Bad Lip Reading is an independent producer known for anonymously parodying music and political videos by redubbing them with his humorous attempts at lip-reading, such as Everybody Poops...

An anonymous reader writes "The Jumentum open source project has announced a single-chip programming system based on the NXP LPC1768 (the same as in the mbed) that can generate PAL/NTSC video and use ...

savuporo writes "By crossing airships with airplanes, Solar Ship is planning to build a craft that can carry heavy loads long distances with a tiny carbon footprint. Filled with helium, they soak up r...

An anonymous reader points out a fun robot project from Japan, writing: "The robot pedals with its feet at variable speed. The steering is done by the robot hands as with a normal bike, and remote con...

Of all the upgrades that distinguish the new iPhone 4S from its predecessors, probably the feature that's gotten the most attention is the voice-based personal assistant app called Siri, which allows ...

First time accepted submitter howzit writes "German paleontologists have discovered what they believe is the best-preserved dinosaur skeleton ever found.The flesh-eating member of the theropod subgrou...

First time accepted submitter Alt-kun writes "Like Amazon last month, Kobo is now making the jump to an Android-based tablet e-reader. Priced at $200 and available on October 28th, the Kobo Vox is set...

First time accepted submitter koper writes "The new programming language Opa makes web programming easier by providing a one-tier one-language-for-everything approach. Now it goes one step further by ...

suraj.sun writes "ZDNet's Ed Bott warns small businesses that if you sign up with Microsoft's Office 365, make sure you read the fine print carefully as an obscure clause in the terms of service limit...

adharma writes "According to Robert Cringely, in 1995 he was granted an hour long interview with Steve Jobs at NeXT headquarters for Triumph of the Nerds and promptly lost. Two weeks ago, a 'PAL-VHS, ...

BBC News reports that a German satellite is soon to fall from sky. According to the article: "The Roentgen Satellite (Rosat) is due to come back to Earth at some stage over the weekend - possibly Sund...

First time accepted submitter lsllll writes "I got drawn (without my intention) into three 20 minute sessions, talking to high school students about computer science and programming, and am wondering ...

First time accepted submitter trombonehero writes "Prominent Computer Science researchers from Google, Microsoft and UC Berkeley are starting to sign the 'Research Without Walls' pledge, promising to ...

chrb writes "According to Security News Daily, Anonymous has taken down more than 40 darknet-based child porn websites over the last week. Details of some of the hacks have been released via pastebin ...

Hugh Pickens writes "DARPA reports that more than $300 billion worth of satellites are in the geosynchronous orbit, many retired due to failure of one component even if 90% of the satellite works just...

waderoush writes "Virtually overnight, Siri, the personal assistant technology in Apple's new iPhone 4S, has brought state-of-the-art AI to the consumer mainstream. Well, it turns out there's more whe...

gzipped_tar writes "Researchers from Ruhr University Bochum demonstrated the insecurity of XML encryption standard at ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Chicago this week. 'Ever...

Nate the greatest writes "It looks like Amazon won't be adopting Epub after all. [Thursday] Amazon released some technical details on the new Kindle ebook format, which they are calling Kindle 8. Ther...

Trailrunner7 writes "There is a new worm circulating right now that is compromising servers running older versions of the JBoss Application Server and then adding them to a botnet. The worm also attem...

dcblogs writes "Complaints about the performance of USAjobs.gov, the government's central website for job applicants, are piling up after the U.S. took control this month of the site from Monster.com....

An anonymous reader writes "I'm an American who is living in Tokyo. Stories have started popping up about 'radiation hot spots' in Tokyo and surrounding prefectures so I have begun to worry. I live on...

New submitter SpzToid writes "Nasdaq's Directors Desk is a program sold to both listed and private companies, whose board members use it to share documents and communicate with executives. Apparently ...

SKYMTL writes "With Thailand experiencing its worst flooding in generations, component manufacturers have been especially hard hit. The trickle down effect is having a huge impact upon hard drive manu...

Valve Software is working on a second helping of downloadable content for Portal 2, and they've revealed that it will include an in-game map editor. It's planned for early next year, and it will allow...

New submitter blastoff9 sends this excerpt from Space.com:"The annual October meteor shower will peak before sunrise on Saturday (Oct. 22) as the Earth passes through a stream of leftover dust from th...

bs0d3 writes "Right now the police and FBI are able to use GPS tracking devices, stingrays, and other tracking technologies without a warrant. They can read your personal emails without a warrant, the...

jfruhlinger writes "TDL4, a rootkit that helps build a powerful botnet, is pegged by security vendor ESET as one of the most sophisticated pieces of malware in the world. But its creators aren't resti...

Blizzcon 2011 kicked off today, and the biggest announcement from the opening ceremonies was the development of a new expansion for World of Warcraft. Titled Mists of Pandaria, the expansion will focu...

mayberry42 writes with news that President Obama has announced an end to the U.S. military engagement in Iraq. All U.S. soldiers will leave Iraq by the end of the year."Mr. Obama said that as of Jan. ...

New submitter lordofthechia writes "Last month the White House created an online petition system through which constituents can directly voice any grievances and concerns to the US government. Any pet...

itwbennett writes "Researchers have figured out a way to link online Skype users to their activity on peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent. The team was able to sift out the nodes through which Skype...

theodp writes "With PR successes like the Fisker Karma, does the Department of Energy need to worry about PR failures like Solyndra? ABC News and others are reporting that electric car company Fisker,...

judgecorp writes "A Danish study of more than 350,000 people found no correlation between using a mobile phone and getting cancer. The results backs up previous work, but researchers say more work is ...

ptorrone writes "Imagine waking up and seeing your design for a circuit being used in a product by someone who never contacted you to ask if it was okay. You will not get any payment for their usage o...

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees Microsoft's Project Roslyn potentially reinventing how we view compilers and compiled languages. 'Roslyn is a complete reengineering of Microsoft'...

T Murphy writes "Although in the draft stages, a treaty being pushed by the United Nations Environment Programme has a blanket ban on mercury. While the ban would stop the use of mercury in paints or ...

An anonymous reader writes "A mainstream media outlet has published an article called 'The Case for Piracy. The writer shows how copyright has been hijacked by corporations and that publishers are the...

chrb writes "The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project — an independent study of Earth's historical temperature record partly funded by climate skeptics, including the Koch brothers —...

hype7 writes "It's clear Steve Jobs didn't pull any punches from the interviews for his forthcoming biography. In the latest release from the book, hosted over at AP, 'Isaacson wrote that Jobs was liv...

Hugh Pickens writes "Eli Lake reports that the U.S.'s 16 intelligence agencies are using a program called SureView that makes it easier to spy on the spies and catch whistleblowers early in the act. S...

itwbennett writes "Good news today for those of you who have been waiting for news about whether Google would be opening up the ICS source and for those of you who thought it was gone for good. Androi...

adeelarshad82 writes "You often hear in the software industry that performance optimization is one of the last steps in the software development process. That bodes well for Windows 8, considering at ...

judgecorp writes "A Parliamentary Committee in the UK has suggested that sites should be protected against libel claims against contributors — as long as those contributors are identified. Anony...

AZA43 writes "As if its latest BlackBerry service outage--the worst in company history--and the mass exodus of BlackBerry users to iOS and Android weren't bad enough, RIM is now facing a potential tra...

Nethead writes "At TAM 2011, presented by The James Randi Foundation (JREF), a panel with Pamela Gay, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and moderated by Phil Plait, discussed our fut...

An anonymous reader writes "For as long as I've been playing around with computers I've had a home test lab. I found it to be a great learning tool. However, I haven't invested much money into it late...

An anonymous reader writes "Political and territorial disputes have been leaking to scientific venues like Nature, Science and Climatic Change. Many recent scientific papers submitted to these journal...

destinyland writes "A California librarian is urging librarians to complain to Amazon over issues with privacy and advertising in Amazon's new Kindle ebook lending program for libraries. 'In our greed...

First time accepted submitter para_droid writes "Version 1.3 of the popular open source notification system for Mac OS X, Growl has surprised its users by going closed-source and only available for pu...

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the derided-on-slashdot paywall for the NY Times hasn't brought down the paper so far. The Times now reports 300,000 digital subscribers (to e-reader versions...

bs0d3 writes "After months of Google+ being unsuccessful at taking the edge over Facebook, Google announces a new plan. Google executive Vic Gundotra announced yesterday that they will be 'adding...

lekernel writes "The Milkymist project (also mentioned earlier this year) have started shipping their so-called 'video synthesizer,' a device used by concert and other event organizers to create live ...

First time accepted submitter fyngyrz writes "Lousiana has passed a law that says people may no longer use cash for second hand transactions. The idea being to make all transactions traceable, thus fo...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "George Anders writes that companies like Facebook are finding that old-fashioned hiring channels aren't paying off fast enough and are publishing gnarly programming challen...

esocid writes "In 2008, BBC's 'Top Gear' aired an episode featuring the Tesla Roadster. One of the show's car reviewers, Jeremy Clarkson, gave a less-than-flattering analysis of the vehicle, sparking ...

Lucas123 writes "OCZ today released a new line of 2.5-in solid state drives that have up to 1TB of capacity. The new Octane SSD line is based on Indilix's new Everest flash controller, which allows it...

OverTheGeicoE writes "TSA is expanding its presence to the American road system. As part of its Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) program, TSA agents are now working at 5 weigh station...

itwbennett writes "Responding to a U.S. request to explain China's policies regarding blocking U.S. websites, China's foreign ministry said the country's Internet policies have been open and clear. 'T...

MrSeb writes "Moments ago, Google announced that Reader, as soon as next week, will be moving closer to Google+. Many of its social features (friending, following, sharing) are being buried in fa...

edesio writes "Many satellites and spacecraft require accurate timing signals to ensure the proper operation of scientific instruments. In the case of GPS satellites, accurate timing is essential, oth...

It looks like the military has finally figured out a way to combine American's love of french fries with their love of blowing stuff up . The Air Force says all of its 40-plus aircraft models will be ...

jfruhlinger writes "On the day Android Ice Cream Sandwich was released, Steve Ballmer livened up the Web 2.0 conference by lobbing potshots at Google's mobile OS, calling it the choice of 'cheap' phon...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "T. N. Tobias writes that over the summer, over 60,000 people voted at NPR to select the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books of all time. The result? A list of 100 boo...

thodelu writes "Scientists have taken another step towards biological computing, with the creation of logic gates from gut bacteria and DNA. While something similar has been done before, the team says...

astroengine writes "We know that the planets in our solar system were born from a dusty disk surrounding the sun billions of years ago; wouldn't it be amazing if we could see another star system going...

An anonymous reader writes "In the New York Times, Kenneth Chang writes about the 100-year starship conference, where 'an eclectic mix of engineers, scientists, science fiction fans, students and drea...

Alain Williams writes "An actress has sued Amazon.com for more than $1m (£639,000) after her age was posted on its Internet Movie Database. She says revealing her age on the site will lose her a...

UnknownSoldier writes "Wired reports that researchers at Tel Aviv University have discovered you can 'lock' a magnetic field into place with a superconductor. They have a very cool demonstration of a ...

AmyVernon writes "Until Intel's next-gen, high-end Sandy Bridge-E processor is released sometime this quarter, Intel's second generation Core family of processors and the Z68 Express chipset are Intel...

holy_calamity writes "Developers want to know when their apps will be able to connect to Siri, the virtual assistant built into the new iPhone 4S. Technology Review reports that providing APIs for Sir...

itwbennett writes "Researchers from Kaspersky Lab have discovered that the R2D2 surveillance Trojan, which is used by German law enforcement to intercept Internet phone calls, is capable of monitoring...

An anonymous reader writes with an except from an article on Geek.com about the Galaxy Nexus: "Samsung has been on the receiving end of many an Apple lawsuit in recent months, and in some cases a ban ...

kkleiner writes "The current official human record for the Rubik's cube 3×3 puzzle is just 5.66 seconds. Now a robot called CubeStormer II did it in just 5.35 seconds. CubeStormer II is controlle...

omega6, joining the legions of accepted submitters, writes "The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that posting links is not the same as posting the actual content, but more similar to a footnote. 'The top...

Zothecula writes with an excerpt from a Gizmag article: "Amateur astronomers wanting to observe celestial bodies soon won't be limited to just their own personal telescopes, or visits to the local pub...

alphadogg writes (quoting Networkworld): "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer feels intensely fortunate that his company's $44 billion bid for Yahoo back in 2008 never materialized. 'Sometimes you're lucky,' ...

souravzzz writes with an update on the state of Bitcoin. Quoting the Ars Technica article: "Bitcoin, the world's first peer-to-peer digital currency, fell below $3 on Monday. That represents a 90 perc...

Hitting the front page for the first time, ttong writes "The highly anticipated Android 4.0 (codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich) has been released and finally brings the features of 3.x Honeycomb to smaller...

An anonymous reader writes "According to a report in Reuters, scientists are celebrating the end of a clinical trial which found a malaria vaccine reduces infection risk by half in children. From the ...

The Opposable Thumbs blog covers a 48-hour-long "game jam" at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Twenty teams of game developers — 16 indie and four professional — compe...

An anonymous reader writes "IEEE reports that Google's autonomous cars have logged more than 190,000 miles driving in all kinds of traffic, and the company is also testing a fleet of self-driving golf...

judgecorp writes "Two Galileo satellites that will signify the start of the European Union's answer to the American Global Positioning System will be launched into orbit on Thursday aboard a Russian S...

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at MIT's Lincoln Lab have developed new radar technology that provides real-time video of what's going on behind solid walls. 'The researchers’ device is ...

Sony's upcoming portable gaming console has now gotten a firm launch date. After arriving in Japan on December 17, the PlayStation Vita will come to North America and Europe on February 22. "The two v...

LibRT writes with this excerpt from the BBC:"Europe's highest court has ruled that stem cells from human embryos cannot be patented, in a case that could have major implications for medicine. ... The ...

An anonymous reader writes "The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a recommendation to parents that kids under the age of two should be limited in their time watching television and using compu...

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Georgia Tech demonstrate that a mobile phone located near a keyboard can use its accelerometers to recover text typed by a target. 'The technique works throu...

sciencehabit writes "Here's what we know about the evolution of flight: By about 150 million years ago, the forests were filled with flying — or perhaps just gliding — dinosaurs like Archa...

snoop.daub writes "A while back, we discussed UCSD professor Tom Murphy's post about the limits on growth in energy use and economies. Partly in reaction to Slashdot's response (and my own writeup!), ...

theodp writes "GeekWire reports that Microsoft is seeking a patent on the concept of applying the persona of a celebrity to Internet searches, allowing people to see search results shaped by the perso...

New submitter HommeDeJava writes "Research In Motion unveiled a new operating system for its tablet and smartphones at the company's BlackBerry developer conference in San Francisco. Called BlackBerry...

shaitand writes about Google disagreeing with the desire of Chrome users to put tabs under (rather than above) the location bar: "This issue has had overwhelming feedback from users with no notable di...

nonprofiteer writes "Google plans to encrypt search for signed-in users, so that websites will no longer get to see the search terms that led a user to their site, though they will get aggregated repo...

An anonymous reader writes "On Oct. 14, 2011 Symantec was alerted to a malware sample from some recovered computers that demonstrated code similar to Stuxnet. This code however appears to serve a diff...

First time accepted submitter misterbarnacles writes "The Microtouch is a mobile media device that aims to become an open-source alternative to the iPod Touch."Deeper investigation reveals that the Mi...

Stirling Newberry writes "The New York Times reports on the continued expansion of the sea route along the Russian side of the Arctic Ocean. It was only in 2009 that outside ships were allowed to ply ...

Landing an accepted submission, notanymore writes "The PA Supreme Court now has a Twitter account to post rulings and opinions. How could this be a bad thing? It's progression toward making public inf...

Hugh Pickens writes "Alan Mutter writes that the California Public Employees Retirement System, the nation's largest pension fund, has become the latest investor to say it would vote against the re-el...

Taco Cowboy writes "Someone from US is claiming that the universe was born spinning and continues to do so around a preferred axis"The full paper has more details. The researchers measured the spin of...

Musical group, Marconi Union, and Lyz Cooper, the UK's leading therapeutic sound practitioner have released what they claim is the world's most relaxing music. They contend that the calming effects of...

snydeq writes "Flooding near Bangkok has taken about 25 percent of the world's hard disk manufacturing capacity offline, InfoWorld reports. 'Disk manufacturing sites in Thailand — notably includ...

frisket writes "My current phone contract is about to run out, and I'm due a phone upgrade. My HTC Hero has been fine except for the notorious lack of Android proxy support for wireless connections, s...

nonprofiteer writes "In December, a federal judge ruled that the 4th amendment applies to email and that the feds cannot go after it without a warrant. (We have Smilin' Bob to thank for that.) Though ...

Bob the Super Hamste writes "Fortune magazine is reporting that the company Zebra Imaging is producing a 3D hologram table that will project a 360 degree 3D image that doesn't require glasses. Funding...

sfcrazy points to news, posted in the current blog post about Linux mint statistics, that the Linux Mint "team has thus decided that in the next version of Linux Mint 12, they will continue to support...

As co-designer of TCP/IP (along with Robert E. Kahn), and former chairman of ICANN, it is no exaggeration to say that Vint Cerf is certainly one of the fathers of the internet, and is often referred t...

An anonymous reader writes "As noted previously, Max Schrems of Europe Versus Facebook has filed numerous complaints about Facebook's data collection practices. One complaint that has failed to draw m...

Barence writes "PC Pro has published a comprehensive guide to installing Android on a HP TouchPad using CyanogenMod's alpha Android release. The mod, which is based on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) instea...

Medevilae writes with a recent report from PopSci's dedicated 'space monkey' news feed that "When Iran indefinitely suspended its plans to launch a monkey into space earlier this month, it was actuall...

An anonymous reader writes "In a breakthrough that could aid spies, keepers of medical records, and parents who want to prevent their kids from 'sexting,' a team of Virginia Tech researchers has creat...

First time accepted submitter r5r5 writes "In possibly a ground-breaking rule, European Court of Justice ruled against exclusive rights to broadcast sporting events within a single member state. The m...

bs0d3 writes "Last year, piratebay co-founder Peter Sunde gathered coders to begin a decentralized dns system. This is a direct result of the increasing control which the US government has over ICANN....

Phil Plait ("The Bad Astronomer") writes with a skeptical take on the recent report that a comet may have narrowly missed earth. According to the linked post from Plait, "When a comet breaks up, it sp...

Hugh Pickens writes "Studies comparing identical twins with non-identical twins have helped to establish the heritability of many aspects of behavior. Recent work suggests that about one third of the ...

Just over a year ago, Square Enix released Final Fantasy XIV. It was not well received, and to atone for their mistake, the company removed the game's subscription fee, replaced a bunch of the develop...

tekgoblin writes "In a joint effort between Microsoft and the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute, a new interface has been born. The new interface is usable on any surface, including...

Lucas123 writes "An extremely profitable relationship between Dell and EMC has come to an end after 10 years. Over the past five years, as Dell has continued to sell more of its own storage products &...

New submitter GumphMaster writes "In the latest edition of the Apple vs. Samsung patent fight, the ABC is reporting that Samsung has filed in Australian and Japanese courts seeking an injunction to ha...

Kvorg writes "After a year of rapid development, newly released version 2.0 of Mojolicious, the new generation real-time Perl web framework written by Sebastian Riedel and many others, offers a versat...

An anonymous reader writes "Road traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi and Dubai plummeted last week — and the local police have a theory as to why: drivers' BlackBerrys weren't working. Police in the ...

nk497 writes "British ISPs have been told by the government to offer their customers parental control systems to block content like gambling sites and pornography, but the McAfee system used by BT and...

An anonymous reader writes "The DeLorean Motor Company just announced plans to launch an all-electric version of its gull-winged Back to the Future car in 2013. While it doesn't run on fusion power (y...

Orome1 writes "Imperva released a report (PDF) analyzing the content and activities of an online hacker forum with nearly 220,000 registered members, although many are dormant. The forum is used by ha...

itwbennett writes "Rumors of original, professionally-produced content channels coming to YouTube are heating up. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported on it, invoking pro skateboarder ...

eldavojohn writes "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick has a rather nebulous title and the subtitle doesn't really help one understand what this book hopes to be about. The e...

Esther Schindler writes "'Over the past century a lot of science fiction has been published, showcasing a lot of wild ideas, and if you sit enough authors at enough typewriters or word processors, som...

Trailrunner7 writes "The new version of NoScript, the popular browser add-on that blocks JavaScript and other embedded objects from running on Web pages, is out in alpha form. It can now run on Androi...

Hugh Pickens writes "David Streitfeld reports that Amazon is aggressively wooing top authors, gnawing away at the services publishers, critics and agents used to provide. 'Everyone's afraid of Amazon,...

Coisiche writes "The BBC covers a team of scientists who are working on a new way to power medical implants: an internal biofuel cell. From the article: 'Their gadget, called a biofuel cell, uses gluc...

Zothecula writes "Although Virgin Galactic is generally known as a space tourism company, it sees research experiments as a future mission segment and significant business opportunity. To this end, th...

You asked William Shatner questions, and Shatner replied. It's not the first time he's answered questions for Slashdot (that was in 2002), but Shatner's given a bit more insight this time into what ma...

networkBoy writes "ICANN has taken stewardship of the time zone database after its original operators were sued for copyright infringement by an astrology software company, saying they will 'deal with...

itwbennett writes "On the sidelines of the CTIA trade show in San Diego last week, Verizon showed off one of its test vehicles, a Chevy Tahoe equipped with a variety of phones and mobile data devices....

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Katharine Gammon writes that last week, the Kismot Indian restaurant in Edinburgh, Scotland, held a competition to eat the extra-hot Kismot Killer curry and several ambulan...

wiredmikey writes "Following a series of outages last week that affected BlackBerry users around the word over a three day period, RIM has come forward with its plans to "make good" on the incidents t...

First time accepted submitter afree87 writes "A re-analysis of historical observations at a Mexican observatory suggests Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago. On Au...

judgecorp writes "Google Translate for Android, the mobile version of Google's machine translation software, now translates speech back and forth between 14 languages, the company claims. Earlier this...

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have developed a nanomaterial that can 'steer' electrical currents. The discovery could lead to the invention of devices that can reconfigure their internal wir...

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have developed a nanomaterial that can 'steer' electrical currents. The discovery could lead to the invention of devices that can reconfigure their internal wir...

First time accepted submitter Macgrrl writes "It was reported today in The Age newspaper that scientists believe they will have a drug within the next 5-10 years that will extend the average human lif...

angry tapir writes "A judge at the district court in the Hague has rejected claims that Samsung had made against Apple regarding four patents. Samsung wanted Apple to pay for licensing the patents in ...

An anonymous reader writes "A Japanese programmer that goes by the handle JA0HXV announced that he has computed Pi to 10 trillion digits. This breaks the previous world record of 5 trillion digits. Co...

First time accepted submitter flash2011 writes "Recently Verizon changed its home internet TOS to by default share your location with advertisers. Now Verizon Wireless has also changed its privacy pol...

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook is being sued in multiple states for tracking its users even after they logged out of the service. All the lawsuits allege the company violated federal wiretap law...

CSHARP123 writes "Ballmer opened up the company's coffers to Nokia and Samsung for a holiday blitz of Mango marketing. Hold onto your hats though, it's no carte blanche access to Redmond's Gringotts. ...

theodp writes "On October 20th, Microsoft will open its 14th store in Seattle's popular University Village shopping center, where it will go head-to-head against an existing Apple Store. To help build...

First time accepted submitter coolstoryhansel writes "You might have heard the Australian Attorney-General published a consultation paper considering the implementation of a streamlined process of get...

MojoKid writes "NVIDIA just announced their next generation of 3D Vision technology that claims to deliver greater realism and immersion for 3D games, movies and photos. 3D Vision 2 is very similar to...

First time accepted submitter otaku244 writes "I spent a day in Vancouver this week while working in Seattle. While I enjoyed the area, some Vancouver citizen decided to enjoy my Macbook Pro. Unfortun...

First time accepted submitter onezeta writes "California Gov. Jerry Brown, in an announcement via a Twitter post, has declared it 'Steve Jobs Day." The Apple co-founder's life as a technology trailbla...

wiredmikey writes "An interesting read on the state of privacy and how technology, along with government and social media have changed the idea, and reality of privacy forever. The article takes the r...

First time accepted submitter mcswell writes "Daniël Noordermeer and Denis Duboule, two researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the University of Geneva claim to hav...

Hugh Pickens writes "Tens of thousands of people around the world took to the streets Saturday to reiterate their anger at the global financial system, corporate greed and government cutbacks, with ra...

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times is running a story on people hacking the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle. 'Using Mr. Giddings’s home-brewed E.V. fuel-level display, Leaf drivers get ...

New submitter mercurywoodrose writes "To commemorate a decade-long electronics upgrade, the Very Large Array in New Mexico is up for renaming. Submissions may be made at the National Radio Astronomy O...

chrb writes "The DNA of W115 — an anonymous woman who lived to the age of 115 years and left her body to science — has been sequenced. Despite her old age, W115 showed no signs of dementia...

mikejuk writes "2012 is the one hundredth anniversary of Alan Turing's birth, with many celebration events being planned around the world. This week Warner Bros outbid other companies for the script o...

jjp9999 writes "Video game developer and novelist Tim Rogers exposes the underbelly of free-to-play games that use real-world currency. They're not trying to entertain you — they're trying to ge...

The Bad Astronomer writes "A new paper, recently posted on the arXiv physics preprint server, claims to have explained the faster-than-light neutrino experiment from last month. The author claims the ...

SustainableJeroen writes "On Sunday morning at 08:30 local time — that's less than an hour away — the World Solar Challenge will start in Darwin, Australia. The first solar racing car and ...

EccentricAnomaly writes "A story over at Science News quotes Alan Stern (former head of NASA Science missions) as saying: 'The three strongest candidates [for extraterrestrial life] are all in the out...

lee1 writes "After the police broke in to a Gizmodo editor's home and collected emails from computers found there as part of the investigation of the stolen 2010 iPhone prototype, the San Mateo Distri...

relyte writes "In the spirit of the recent poll — where many people recommended ergonomic upgrades — what's the best way to get a comfortable, ergonomic, efficient work environment? I'm ju...

An anonymous reader sends word of new research into automating computational experiments. A team of scientists developed a piece of software, dubbed Eureqa, to help solve complex, computationally-inte...

suraj.sun sends this quote from an article at Ars:"Congress is trying to wrap its collective head around Amazon's new Silk Web browser. At a privacy hearing yesterday, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) expressed...

Barence writes "Is Apple turning its back on professional users to focus on consumers? That's the argument in this article, which claims Apple is alienating the creative professionals who have support...

florescent_beige writes "Researchers from Cornell and UBC report that analysis of speech patterns using Wmatrix, along with something called the Dictionary of Affect in Language (see a demo here), sho...

afabbro writes with news that Google is working to follow up its cloud music service with an MP3 store capable of competing with Amazon and Apple. The NY Times reports that "According to numerous musi...

phil reed writes "Creative Cow Magazine reports that manufacturers of movie cameras have quietly discontinued production of film cameras. There are still some markets — not in the U.S. — w...

Nate the greatest writes "It's been just over a month since the T1 launched and only a couple weeks since it shipped — and it has already been hacked. A video has surfaced that shows the T1 runn...

daria42 writes "Remember how the mass piracy lawsuits common in the U.S. are now coming to Australia? Of course you do. Well, now Australia's Government has come out backing the legal process which ma...

itwbennett writes "News from the LibreOffice Conference in Paris is trickling out. Blogger Brian Proffitt has a roundup of the conference announcements thus far. Notably included are plans for a brows...

PolygamousRanchKid writes "Kansas City's Catholic bishop was charged Friday with not telling police about child pornography found on a priest's computer, making him the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic o...

99luftballon writes "The OccupySF team have been running an ad-hoc computer network on the streets of San Francisco without a steady power source, no Wi-Fi and even the occasional police raid. It turn...

dstates writes "What happens when Apple ships 100,000 iPhone 4S in a day? Answer, 100,000 users all try to activate their new phones. AT&T's activation servers are struggling under the load. Appar...

Richard.Tao writes "Scientists have recovered the RNA of the virus that caused the plague by digging through an English mass grave, and compiling [from several partial examples] the genetics of the vi...

Lucas123 writes "NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has placed its data, from photos of Mars to top secret government information, in 10 different public or private clouds. JPL's 5,000 workers have acce...

mask.of.sanity writes "A security consultant who quietly tipped off an Australian superannuation fund about a web vulnerability that potentially put millions of customers at risk has been slapped with...

Several readers sent in a story that's sure to be embarrassing for Samsung. The company has been involved in a drawn-out patent dispute with Apple over similarities between the Galaxy Tab and the iPad...

An anonymous reader writes "I work as an IT administrator at a school. We have just upgraded our entire webcam inventory (about 45 webcams, model Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX) and have all the ol...

gregg writes "According to this article, a new game called NetworKing, developed at NASA's Ames Research Center, 'lets players build fast and efficient communication networks by first setting up comma...

Trailrunner7 writes "The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued new guidance to help public companies determine when they may need to disclose an attack — or even a potential attack &mdas...

MrSeb writes "Jonas Pfeil, a student from the Technical University of Berlin, has created a rugged, grapefruit-sized ball that has 36 fixed-focus, 2-megapixel digital camera sensors built in. The user...

MrCrassic writes "It looks like the glory days of Google Buzz have finally come to an end. Google has formally announced the termination of this service to concentrate their efforts on Google+. F...

Nemesisghost writes "According to emails obtained via a Freedom of Information request, the U.S. Copyright Czar played an important role in brokering the deals between ISPs and copyright holders to pu...

Mightee sends in this excerpt from TorrentFreak:"The Stockholm District Court sentence against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was finalized today after he failed to appear at the Court of Appea...

astroengine writes "Hesperia Planum: once a Martian plain — a regular, no-surprises, run-of-the-mill plain. But now, thanks to researchers who used high-resolution imagery from the armada of sat...

hypnosec writes "A team of researchers has managed to boost storage density on traditional magnetic platters as high as 3.3 terabits per square inch using a technique that relies on NaCl — table...

jfruhlinger writes "OpenOffice.org, now separate both from corporate sponsor Oracle and the Document Foundation's LibreOffice, is in trouble, with its team putting out a dramatic press release detaili...

theodp writes "Bloomberg reports that the IRS is auditing how Google shifted profits offshore to avoid taxes. According to Bloomberg, Google cuts its tax bill by about $1 billion a year using a techni...

An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. government has cited national security as a reason not to let Chinese company Huawei build an LTE public safety network. They're worried about Huawei's close ties ...

itwbennett writes "Computer scientists at a German university have built a set of brakes controlled using a small motor for a braking mechanism and a wireless signaling device to tell it when to brake...

suraj.sun sends word that Microsoft's acquisition of Skype for $8.5 billion has officially completed. Quoting:"Skype CEO Tony Bates will be named president of the new Skype Division of Microsoft, and ...

holy_calamity writes "AT&T is adopting technology that gives a person with an Android device two user profiles, enabling company email and other data to reside in an encrypted partition separate f...

DesScorp writes "Science News reports on a story which blames a centuries long cooling of Europe on the discovery of the new world. Scientists contend that the native depopulation and deforestation ha...

Fluffeh writes "Australian shopping centers will monitor customers' mobile phones to track how often they visit, which stores they like and how long they stay. One unnamed Queensland shopping center i...

wiredmikey writes "Air Force officials have revealed more details about a malware infection that impacted systems used to manage a fleet of drones at the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada as reported la...

judgecorp writes "Virgin Media's broadband services in parts of Scotland have been taken down by rats biting through the fibre optic cables. It's unusual to have an operator attribute an outage to suc...

schliz writes "IBM's research director John E Kelly III has delivered an academic lecture in Australia, outlining its 'cognitive computing' aims and efforts as the 70-year 'programmable computing' era...

An anonymous reader writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is already camped out in front of an Apple store for the new iPhone 4S. From the article: 'Woz and his trusty Segway showed up at his local A...

An anonymous reader writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is already camped out in front of an Apple Store for the new iPhone 4GS. From the article: 'Woz and his trusty Segway showed up at his local ...

First time accepted submitter mphall21 writes "New York University scientists have developed artificial structures that can self-replicate, a process that has the potential to yield new types of mater...

itwbennett writes "Facing budget problems, University of California officials and state analysts say that expanding online courses could help them 'innovate out of the current crisis.' But the lecture...

hype7 writes "The Harvard Business Review is running an article on Siri, the speech recognition technology inside the new iPhone. They make the case that Siri's use of artificial intelligence and spee...

Reader HnT writes with an update on the German government's malware, recently dissected by the CCC: "The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reports details on cases where the government malware...

yesakmac joins the teeming hordes of successful Slashdot submitters, with this excerpt from PC World that says the frenzied effort to port Android to HP's discontinued TouchPad has actually succeeded:...

GeorgeK writes "To update Wednesday's Slashdot article, VeriSign, the .com/net domain name registry, has withdrawn their controversial proposal which would have allowed them to suspend domains without...

An anonymous reader writes "An AMD engineer has inadvertently revealed that their Windows Embedded graphics driver is ported from the open-source Linux driver. AMD China last year began porting the op...

An anonymous reader writes "After making 22 complaints regarding Facebook's various practices, the Austrian group Europe versus Facebook stumbled upon an important tidbit: Facebook says it is not requ...

Riskable writes "Dan McDougall (full disclosure: That's me) just publicly released the source code to Gate One, which is an HTML5-powered terminal emulator and SSH client. It is unique in that it does...

First time accepted submitter ServerCobra writes "Last week, Mark Pilgrim 'pulled down his popular 'Dive Into...' sites. I remirrored a couple of them, because they are far too helpful and important t...

coondoggie writes "Cerf says he profoundly feels the advent of cameras everywhere and the ability to post video and photos online can be hugely disconcerting. He recounts how he stepped once off a hel...

An anonymous reader writes "When MIT's Media Lab originally came up with E-Ink back in 1997, we doubt they expected the technology to be this widely popular. Today, we see E-Ink's applications take a ...

judgecorp writes "Dutch ISP A2B has filed police complaints against anti-spam project Spamhaus, calling its CEO 'nuts' and accusing him of blackmail. Spamhaus added all A2B's addresses to a spam black...

drmartin66 makes it to the front page with this question: "Last weekend I installed a new spam filter server for a client, and enabled connection rejection if the sending server did not have a Reverse...

bs0d3 writes "In a written letter which can be found here, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden questions President Obama's authorityto sign ACTA without Congressional approval. 'It may be possible for the U.S. to ...

Zothecula writes "It appears that there's a number of customers willing to pay a lot to be in possession of a lifelike replica of their face or even their whole head ... or at least, REAL-f hopes so. ...

Cue the Ubuntu release parties — Ubuntu 11.10 has arrived. Ars Technica has a very positive summary of the changes in 11.10; Joe Brockmeier's piece of a few weeks back explains the return to Xen...

Frankie70 writes that after more than three years, Microsoft has "finally learned to stop worrying and love Hadoop." Frankie70 excerpts from the linked Wired article: "Any aversion to Hadoop disappear...

An anonymous reader writes "Apple's iCloud service has been a little overlooked in the bumfight for the iPhone 4S. When it was first announced some predicted it would wipe out companies like Box.net, ...

CoveredTrax writes "Everyone knows oil and water don't mix. It's a simple concept, sure, but the hydrophobic interactions between fats and water are crucial to the mechanics of microbiology. The weird...

cylonlover writes "Last July, in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the X PRIZE Foundation launched the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE. As with previous X PRIZE competitions, thi...

Dynamoo writes "Ever wondered how criminals can spirit away the products they buy with stolen credit cards? The answer is that they use surprisingly sophisticated but very shady reshipping centers to ...

WankerWeasel writes "The sad news of the death of another tech great has come. Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, has passed aw...

jimboh2k writes "Apple has succeeded in blocking the sale of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in Australia until a final hearing can be heard in the case down under. The judgment on Thursday could eff...

Speaking at a panel during the WTIA TechNW conference, Valve CEO Gabe Newell had some interesting things to say about his expectations for the console business. Quoting:"The living room is the domain ...

MrSeb writes "It seems, as a culture, we have a deep-seated interest in robots and automatons, and if we can love an animal or other non-humanoid creature, what's to stop us from falling in love with ...

gpronger writes "Researcher John Hutchinson (Royal Veterinary College in London) and Peter Makovicky (Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago) built digital models of a T-rex and then added flesh usi...

judgecorp writes "A major NATO exercise off the coast of Scotland has been ordered to stop using GPS jamming technology after complaints that to do so would endanger the lives of fishermen and disrupt...

An anonymous reader writes "An Austrian group called Europe versus Facebook has so far made 22 complaints regarding the social network's practices. In the process, the organization has stumbled upon a...

kkleiner writes "Two developers from Shapeways and i.materialise have designed a 3D printer for your ten year old . The prototype, named Origo, would allow children to easily design objects in 3Dtin a...

astroengine writes "The ESA's Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program has scored its first hit. Although SSA astronomers have detected asteroids before, this is the first time that a near-Earth obje...

First time accepted submitter quantumplacet writes "Longtime Googler Steve Yegge posted an insightful rant on his Google+ page about how Google is failing to make platforms of it's products. He a...

Harperdog writes "This is a nice piece by Dawn Stover on how science has had little to do with the choice, and blockage of Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository. This article doesn't go where y...

An anonymous reader writes "There is an interesting story over at the SANS Internet Storm Center that shows details on about 50 organizations that have had new machine names added to their DNS zone in...

cramco writes "Moments ago, a U.K. software company announced at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle that it would send a lucky contestant to space. The sponsors, ...

tekgoblin writes "Apple has released the iOS 5 update. To update to iOS 5 just open iTunes with your iDevice connected to your computer and press update. I recommend doing a manual backup of your iDev...

bs0d3 writes "U.S. Intelligence has hired social scientists to mine the vast resources of the Internet — Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails g...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "The US government has brought a lawsuit against astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man on the moon, after discovering that Mitchell had approached a NY auction house tryin...

bdking writes "After signing off on former CEO Leo Apotheker's proposal to spin off or sell HP's personal computer unit, the company's braintrust is reassessing the wisdom of dumping a division that c...

GeorgeK writes "VeriSign, the monopoly registry operator for .com/.net domain names, has submitted a proposal to ICANN (PDF) describing an 'Anti-Abuse' policy. If allowed to proceed with such a policy...

iONiUM writes "With increasing pressure on RIM to catch up to the new phones, and the upcoming release of the iPhone 4S, could this three day outage of BlackBerry's service be a nail in the coffin? Fr...

think_nix writes "Brian Hogan, who found an iPhone 4 prototype last year which was sold to Gizmodo for $5,000, has been sentenced to one year of probation, 40 hours of community service, and a $250 fi...

First time accepted submitter Pat Attack writes "In an ironic twist of fate, Phoenix Jones, a self-styled super hero from Seattle, has landed in jail. Jones happened upon a group of people fighting in...

judgecorp writes "The Liberal Democrat party is attempting to repeal the controversial web-blocking powers allowed by Britain's Digital Economy Act. The move goes against the policy of the coalition g...

alphadogg writes with an excerpt from a Network World article: "Sony suspended 93,000 user accounts on several of its gaming and entertainment networks after unauthorized login attempts on those accou...

I.M.O.G. writes "Today AMD lifted the embargo on their most recent desktop AMD FX architecture, code named Bulldozer, whose CPU frequency record Slashdot recently covered. The fruition of 6 years of A...

nightcats writes "The League Championship Series of baseball are upon us, and numerous sports media pundits, armies of fans at comment boards, and TV people are openly debating the possibility of robo...

EccentricAnomaly writes "Lou Friedman (former head of the Planetary Society) has written a provocative article over at Space Policy Review where he accuses the Obama administration of working on plans...

For some time, players of Blizzard's World of Warcraft have been able to purchase a small number of vanity in-game items for real money, but the items were restricted to the user's own account. Now, B...

symbolset writes "Bloomberg is reporting that Intel, on the cusp of having low-power embedded chips that can do true HD in a flatscreen, has given up on getting its chips embedded in TVs. While many m...

BioWare has announced that Mass Effect 3, planned for March of next year, will be the first game in the series to include co-operative multiplayer. In a post on their forums, they provided details abo...

walterbyrd writes "A company called Smartphone Technologies filed the suit last Friday in Texas Eastern District Court accusing the Kindle Fire tablet of violating four of its patents. Smartphone Tech...

An anonymous reader writes "Security firm RSA has revealed that it believes two groups, working on behalf of a single nation state, hacked into its servers and stole information related to the company...

Barence writes "Opera has proposed a new browsing system that swaps scrolling on websites for flippable pages. The Norwegian browser maker is looking to remove the side scroll bar for documents or art...

Nemesisghost writes "Wired's Danger Room reports that the network admins of the 24th Air Force found out about the virus infecting the drone cockpits at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada by reading the ...

hydrofix writes "Techdirt has been following the story of the DoJ's classified interpretation of the PATRIOT Act. Specifically, it's all about Section 215, the so-called 'business-records provision,' ...

miller60 writes with an except from a Data Center Knowledge article: "AOL has begun operations at a new data center that will be completely unmanned, with all monitoring and management being handled r...

With his first accepted submission, tyler.russell writes with a report that the WineHQ database systems were compromised. Quoting the official announcement: "We are sorry to report that recently our l...

CSHARP123 writes "In a move that's sure to raise some eyebrows, Microsoft today debuted a new web site designed to raise awareness of security issues in web browsers. When you visit the site, called Y...

Hugh Pickens writes "After a 45-year production run, Mazda Motor Corp announced that the latest edition of the Mazda RX-8 will end production in June 2012. The Japanese automaker ... introduced its fi...

Trailrunner7 writes with some good/bad news concerning Android and privacy. Quoting the Threatpost article: "In a landmark move, the Federal Trade Commission has settled charges it brought against the...

An anonymous reader writes "Linux kernel developers have decided to mark the VirtualBox kernel driver as tainted crap for the significant number of problems this open-source driver has caused. The Vir...

coondoggie writes with an excerpt from a Networld World article: "SSL/TLS, the protocol that protects security of e-commerce, has taken a beating lately, with news items ranging from the violation of ...

garymortimer writes with an article in sUAS News. From the article: "A Boeing chief has suggested that the company's mysterious unmanned space-plane, called X-37B, developed for the US Air Force, coul...

MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about the Titan supercomputer. From the article: "Cray, AMD, Nvidia, and the Department of Energy have announced that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's J...

First time accepted submitter sftwrdev97 writes "I have only been doing software development for about 5 years, and worked most of it at one company. I recently switched to a new company and am amazed...

First time accepted submitter drmemnoch writes with a follow-up to a report last week that Internet proxy / filtering / logging devices made by Sunnyvale, CA based Blue Coat Systems have been used by ...

A few days ago, we posted about Derek Deville's mind-blowing high-altitude rocket-launch in the Nevada desert. His 14-foot, GPS-equipped (four GPS units, actually) home-made rocket ("Qu8k") managed to...

First time accepted submitter benro03 writes "Airing photojournalism's dirty secret, Italian photographer Ruben Salvadori demonstrates how conflict photography is often staged by the photographers the...

karthikmns writes with word of an amazing demo presented last week at Adobe's annual MAX convention. You'll have to watch the video, but the enthusiastic crowd reaction seems genuine (or at least just...

First time accepted submitter clickforfreepizza writes with this news on the German 'state trojan' analyzed by the CCC: '[The] Bavarian Interior Minister [confirmed] that state officials had indeed us...

dylan_- writes "The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle — where you pay whatever you want for a collection of games — has just hit the $1 million mark with 1 day and 9 hours left to buy. The game...

First time accepted submitter Sanoj writes "Strange patterns of ichthyosaur bones have been found on an ancient deep-water seabed. One paleontologist has put forward the theory that these could have b...

An anonymous reader writes "In a plan sponsored by the UK government, four major UK ISP's, Virgin, BT, TalkTalk and Sky, are set to implement blocking of porn websites, requiring subscribers to 'opt-i...

Stirling Newberry writes "The New York Times reports that an upcoming paper by Martin E. Hugh-Jones, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, and Stuart Jacobsen – all of whom have long questioned the closing o...

Rexdude writes "A prized drug-sniffing dog at Incheon Airport in South Korea was cloned four years ago, and now the clones have proven to be much more successful at becoming sniffer dogs themselves co...

A few months ago we discussed an uproar in the EVE Online community over CCP Games' implementation of microtransactions within the game. Hilmar Pétursson, the company's CEO, recently posted a len...

Hugh Pickens writes "Renee-Nicole Douceur, the winter manager at the Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole, was sitting at her desk on August 27 when she suffered a stroke. 'I looked at th...

jjp9999 writes "Anyone who remembers Eye of the Beholder should be glad to know a group of developers is trying to bring back the first person dungeon crawl genre while holding true to the classic sty...

New submitter Kyrall writes "A man was questioned by security guards and then police after taking a photo of his own child in a UK shopping center. The center apparently has a 'no photography' policy ...

awtbfb writes "Tim Hemmes, with the help of University of Pittsburgh researchers, successfully controlled a robot arm in three dimensions. He's had quadriplegia for seven years. The feat was accomplis...

kodiaktau writes "In probably the most important decision Gov. Brown of California will make this year, he has vetoed the bill that would require officers to get a search warrant before searching cell...

Julie188 writes "Sam Ramji thinks the days where Microsoft's, (and Apple's, and Oracle's) love-hate relationship with open source are numbered, thanks to the cloud. Whereas some open source advocates ...

bs0d3 writes "The U.S. Department of Justice has forced Gmail and Sonic.net to hand over the personal information of Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer. Sonic says they fought to keep the DoJ out ...

Several readers have sent word that "tens of millions of BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been unable to receive or send emails and messages through their phones, following ...

packetrat writes "Hewlett Packard may not be in danger as a company, but its future in the PC business is in doubt, thanks to former CEO Leo Apotheker's maneuvers to turn HP into IBM. This article at ...

astroengine writes "Ever since the last NASA space shuttle mission touched down in Florida on July 21, there has been a spirited debate in articles and blogs across the Internet over the future of hum...

A couple weeks ago, you asked questions of Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey about what has been dubbed Koomey's Law — the idea that the energy efficiency of computing doubles every 1.5 years. ...

jfruhlinger writes "The long-running security battle has seesawed against RFID cards, as German researchers revealed a way to clone one type of card currently used for a variety of purposes, from tran...

__roo writes "The New York Times reports that the Occupy Wall Street movement has inspired hundreds of Facebook pages, Twitter posts, and Meetup events, and that 'blog posts and photographs from all o...

Lucas123 writes "When it comes to performance, power and size, external I/O interconnect Thunderbolt handily beats SuperSpeed USB, but in the one critical category — ubiquity — it has an a...

First time accepted submitter tech4 writes "Despite users' curiosity around Google+, it seems like most Google+ users just wanted to see the platform before returning to Facebook. 'Google ha...

Hugh Pickens writes "Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, writes that Barack Obama may be struggling in the polls and even losing support among his core boosters, but when it comes...

MrSeb writes "After waiting for more than a month, Google has unveiled its mysterious Dart programming language... and you're going to kick yourself for getting so preemptively excited. Dart is a new ...

Nethead writes "When he was 8 years old, Gabriel See got a score on the math part of the SAT that would be the envy of most high-school seniors. When he was 10, he worked on T-cell receptor research a...

gclef writes "Netflix has apparently decided that spinning off their DVD business into a separate organization was a bad idea after all, and is killing off the 'Qwikster' concept. From the article: 'L...

Garabito writes "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has posted his no-so-fond memories of Steve Jobs on his personal site saying: "As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of th...

SonicSpike writes "The Governor of Tennessee struck a deal with Amazon.com to allow their operations to move to TN in exchange for Amazon.com not having to collect TN sales tax for the next 2 years. H...

theodp writes "Anaheim Union High School District has killed a controversial incentive program that assigned students color-coded ID cards and planners based on state test scores, required those who p...

Slate has reprinted the piece that Ron Rosenbaum wrote for Esquire in 1971, explaining to the world that there was an underground movement of people hacking the phone system. (Rosenbaum is now a colum...

RogerRoast writes "Scientists at the University of Manchester have come one step closer to creating the next generation of computer chips using graphene. By sandwiching two sheets of graphene with ano...

An anonymous reader writes "A north Queensland mining company has discovered one of the world's largest deposits of the rare earth, scandium, used in fuel cells." Read more of this story at Sl...

An anonymous reader writes "There are two types of office workers in the world — those who file their emails in folders, and those who use search. Well, it looks like the searchers are smarter. ...

angry tapir writes with this bit from TechWorld: "Prosecutors call it the biggest identity theft bust in U.S. history. 111 bank tellers, retail workers, waiters and alleged criminals were charged with...

eljefe6a writes "The Million Monkeys project has finished every work of Shakespeare. The last work was The Taming of the Shrew (insert shrewish joke here), which finished on October 6. I give my thoug...

An anonymous reader writes "The UK Ministry of Defence has been left with egg on its face, after a supposedly redacted PDF detailing secrets related to air defence radar systems was published on a par...

The iPad has sold extremely well at a starting price of $500 but "that kind of pricing doesn't work for many tablet vendors," says a story at CNET. And recent price drops reflect this. It's been a rou...

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Examiner.com, citing a report at gagdet.ro, about Samsung's upcoming high-end Nexus Prime, the first phone to be delivered with Ice Cream Sandwich. "T...

Perhaps to one one's surprise, the just-announced iPhone 4S has been been leaping off the shelves ... in advance of it ever hitting shelves at all. In fact, as reported by numerous sources (here's the...

darkjohnson writes "Lately we've been inundated with 100k' balloon flights and amazing video footage from space — the flights usually taking better than an hour to achieve apogee. Derek Deville ...

mikejuk writes "Are you a newbie programmer looking for a job? It seems your best bet is to opt for .NET. According to technical jobs website Dice.com, companies in the U.S. have posted more than 10,0...

First time accepted submitter KowboyKrash writes "OK, a little background: I use Acronis to create custom recovery partitions for my personal computers that include all my software and drivers. I also...

Hugh Pickens writes "The WSJ reports that the discovery of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil pr...

theodp writes "In response to DC Entertainment's agreement to exclusively offer digital versions of certain titles in Amazon Kindle format, Nook maker Barnes & Noble has begun pulling DC Entertain...

An anonymous reader writes "Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing has unearthed an amazing video where the head of WIPO, the UN agency responsible for 'promoting' intellectual property, suggests that Tim B...

jjp9999 writes "The virus that hit Predator and Reaper UAVs could be an internal monitoring system employed by the military. According to security researcher Miles Fidelman, there are vendors that sel...

An anonymous reader writes "While Samsung has been accused of repeatedly borrowing everything from Apple's hardware, to packaging and accessories, it appears that all current iDevices share a port whi...

bs0d3 writes "Recently, many people from Belgium have been joining The Pirate Bay's and Telecomix's IRC channels, asking for help with the Telecomix DNS, saying that it doesn't work to access www.thep...

CNET reports that as of yesterday, a new Chrome extension will "let a person on one computer remotely control another across the network." The new remote-desktop capability is in BETA (Google's all-ca...

Facebook's recent move to scan for malicious URLs sounded like a pretty good idea, but itwbennett writes with word that it's already been bypassed.'Hatter,' a member of hacking think-tank Blackhat Aca...

First time accepted submitter lennier1 writes "The German hacker group CCC (Chaos Computer Club) has analyzed a piece of malware the German government uses in criminal investigations to spy on a suspe...

bizwriter writes "Apple has spared no effort in trying to injure its arch mobile rival through the courts, like blocking Android vendors from important markets through patent and trademark infringemen...

First time accepted submitter Boogaroo writes "The Washington County school district in Florida has placed fingerprint scanners at the entrance to Chipley High School. They've also made a decision to ...

blarkon writes "With ebook prices falling and some readers even unwilling to pay more than 99 cents for an ebook, some authors are starting to consider a move back to the patronage model that was succ...

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that the real news out of this year's JavaOne is Oracle's ambitious plan to revitalize Java on the desktop, the Web, and mobile devices. 'It's...

Reader TheodoreQSwiss breaks onto the page with this question: "The independent school where I serve as Dir. of Technology is in the middle of reworking their employee handbooks and would like to incl...

An anonymous reader writes "Remember Fabrice bellard's [Linux-booting PC emulator in JavaScript] ? This modified version [Note: click on "emulator.html" in that directory to see it in action] allows t...

bheer writes "Microsoft's Windows 8 blog has a good post about the work being done to reduce Windows 8's memory footprint. The OS will use multiple approaches to do this, including combining RAM pages...

hessian writes with this excerpt: "The FBI by mid-January will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in select states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos, bu...

Barence writes "ISPs are wildly exaggerating the cost of increased internet traffic, according to a new report. Fixed and mobile broadband providers have claimed their costs are 'ballooning' because o...

An anonymous reader writes "MTS, one of the three largest mobile carriers in Russia, have been buying up smaller cable TV and Internet providers across the country, and besides the GSM/3G cellphone se...

jfruhlinger writes "Nearly four years ago, Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo, but eventually withdrew the offer in the face of resistance from Yahoo's leadership. This week rumors resurfaced that Microsoft...

mvar writes "Dtrace co-author Adam Leventhal writes on his blog about Dtrace for Linux: 'Yesterday (October 4, 2011) Oracle made the surprising announcement that they would be porting some key Solaris...

An anonymous reader writes "The significant Linux kernel power regression reported back in April, which ended up being attributed to PCI-E Active State Power Management, is still not resolved even as ...

holy_calamity writes "Slashdot noted in September that Google had bought 1023 patents from IBM. Now IP analytics firms IPVision says they're a 'mixed bag' of mostly unrelated patents that won't be muc...

An anonymous reader writes "Cort Stratton, a developer who has worked on graphics code for many first-party PS3 games, wrote an article about the kinds of games that appeal to programmers. He covers c...

Stirling Newberry writes "Nottingham University's Pavlopetri project spent months measuring a city that sank beneath the waves 3,000 years ago, perhaps in a tsunami. The result is a BBC documentary th...

waderoush writes "Opposed-piston engines (with two pistons in the same cylinder) have been around since the 1920s, but have been used mainly in submarines and airplanes. Now, several startups are work...

the_arrow writes "Apparently there are some politicians who 'get it.' At least it seems that way after reading an entry on the blog of Rick Falkvinge (founder of the Swedish Pirate Party). He says the...

An anonymous reader writes "Unreal Engine now runs in Flash and Crytek is considering porting CryEngine to Flash, but perhaps the Source Engine could go a different route. A software developer who wor...

astroengine writes "On Oct. 5, less than two months before it will be launched, Mars Science Laboratory 'Curiosity' was sealed between its heat shield and back shell at Kennedy Space Center's Payload ...

New submitter Golgafrinchan passes along this quote from an article at Wired:"A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America's Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots' every keystroke as the...

oker writes "Google has finally added SQL to its cloud platform offering, Apps Engine. Until now, developers had to use the Datastore service, which provides a vendor lock-in threat and isn't supporte...

MrSeb writes with news out of MIT about another interesting and potentially useful property of graphene. Researchers have known for several years that graphene generates electricity when exposed to su...

Trailrunner7 writes "The number of IP addresses required for large scale botnets to operate effectively can be considerable, and finding large IP blocks to use for them can be difficult. If the botnet...

An anonymous reader writes "It appears scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have made an app to visualize proton collisions at the largest of the four experiments, ATLAS. 'For the first time you ca...

New submitter jmeboi writes "Engadget reports that Sprint has announced a rollover from WiMAX to LTE for its 4G needs. The company is 'converting its 1900MHz holdings and LightSquared's 1600MHz spectr...

suraj.sun tips news that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has begun testing its project to predict future crimes on members of the public. The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) proj...

An anonymous reader writes "As a senior developer for a small IT company based in the UK that is about to release their flagship project, I know that if I were to leave the company now, it would cause...

An anonymous reader writes "FCC chairman Julius Genachowski revealed plans yesterday to overhaul the U.S. phone subsidy program and shift its focus to providing broadband access. He said, 'Broadband h...

New submitter kodiaktau writes "A recently presented paper discusses how large data sets can improve learning algorithms, but points out that researchers still need to account for bias and incompleten...

PolygamousRanchKid sends in this excerpt from a Reuters report:"Sony Corp is in talks to buy out Ericsson's stake in their mobile phone joint venture, a source said, in a bid to catch up with rivals. ...

Spy Hunter writes "Memristors are the basis of a new memory technology being developed by HP and Hynix. At the International Electronics Forum, Stan Williams, senior fellow at HP Labs, said, 'We're pl...

Pigskin-Referee wrote in with a story about the EU's approval of Microsoft acquiring Skype. The article reads: "Microsoft's proposed $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype has earned the approval of the Eu...

angry tapir writes "It is rare for a piece of scientific equipment to hold a place in a nation's heart. But 'The Dish' — the CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope — has in its 50 years come to me...

Geoffrey.landis writes "The 'creative class' was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, but according to Scott Timberg, writing in Salon, that engine is sputtering. While a very f...

tlhIngan writes "Miramax CEO Mike Lang has admitted to what we all suspected. The biggest worry is a distribution monopoly, not piracy. They saw what happened to the music industry with iTunes, and vo...

The Ohio Supreme Court will decide if a builder will have to replace magnetized parts of two couples homes, even though they signed a limited warranty which did not specifically cover replacing positi...

coondoggie writes "In what it says is the largest False Claims Act settlement it has ever collected, the US General Services Administration will get $199.5 million plus interest from Oracle for 'faili...

Orome1 writes "Most users get hacked at high rates even when they do not think they are engaging in risky behavior, with 62% unaware of how their accounts had been compromised, The results of a Commto...

An anonymous reader writes "New York City recently announced a PSA contest, in which it asked schoolkids to create a video about how evil piracy is. Techdirt found the whole marketing campaign questio...

First time accepted submitter jalfreize writes "Indian Mathematician Rohit Gupta (known by the moniker @fadesingh on twitter) has announced an online workshop which he intends to 'conclude by attackin...

First time accepted submitter osman84 writes "I've been developing web/mobile apps for some time, and have managed to build up some decent experience about usability. However, as I'm growing a team of...

The Bad Astronomer writes "Using new software techniques on Hubble data from 1998, astronomers have teased out direct images of three planets orbiting the Sun-like star HR 8799, 130 light years away. ...

Long-time readers will know that we try not to clutter the front page of Slashdot with much stuff about the site itself; this is a rare exception, but we hope you'll like the reason: we want your opin...

A few weeks ago, UBS employee Kweku Adoboli (universally described as a "rogue trader") ran up a $2 billion loss for his employer; many readers wondered how it is the systems which allow trades to hap...

An anonymous reader writes "Arthur David Olson, the creator and maintainer of the timezone database used in about every unix/linux platform in use on the planet, just sent the message to the timezone ...

gbrumfiel writes "Two weeks ago, researchers claimed particles called neutrinos were travelling faster-than-light and violating the laws of special relativity. But now it looks as though general relat...

zentigger writes "At approximately 06:36 EDT Thursday, October 6, 2011, the Anik F2 satellite experienced an attitude control issue and lost earth lock, affecting C, Ku and Ka services. The satellite ...

First time accepted submitter microphage writes "Mark Pilgrim, author of many 'Dive into ...' books and guides, has — as the saying now goes — 'committed infosuicide,' which happily isn't ...

It comes as no surprise that Margie Phelps of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church has already declared the church's intention to picket Steve Jobs's funeral. What is interesting, is that she did so u...

An anonymous reader writes "Today, Wired.co.uk is running a story, 'Cold fusion rears its head as "E-Cat" research promises to change the world.' It gives an overview of the technology that claims to ...

An anonymous reader writes "There is a piece of software, released under the Modified BSD license, that risks becoming abandonware and, IMHO, is worth being saved. Where can I post an announcement to ...

iONiUM writes with a CNET article outlining the next step in Microsoft's plans for cable television, which he says "seems like yet another step forward in killing traditional cable companies." From th...

First time accepted submitter Parham90 writes "After the Iranian post-election events that led to massive riots and break-outs through the world, the Iranian government started blocking all social web...

angry tapir writes "HP is investigating how several TouchPads reportedly shipped to end users running Android, instead of webOS. Shortly after HP announced it would stop selling TouchPads and began of...

Local ID10T writes with this excerpt from The Blaze: "In a case explicitly decided to set a precedent, the California Appellate court has determined police officers can rifle through your cellphone du...

angry tapir writes "Responding to the rapid adoption of their software, the folks behind the OpenStack cloud software are planning to form a stand-alone nonprofit foundation to steward future developm...

An anonymous reader writes "The European Commission has launched a project to recruit 10,000 volunteers across Europe to measure the performance of their broadband connection over two years. The trial...

bs0d3 writes "Today in France under the new HADOPI law, 60 people have received their third strike and are facing disconnection from the internet. The first 60 may only be the beginning. 650,000 peopl...

twoheadedboy writes "UK service provider BT has launched its Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) product, pledging it will offer downstream speeds of 300Mbps by spring next year. At present, the service can ...

wiredmikey writes "Security researchers have discovered a unique feature circulating in some Android-based malware. The malicious application is using a blog in China to act as a Command and Control (...

SoCalChris writes "Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was found dead in his Cupertino home this morning. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him — even if you didn't enjoy his work, th...

Back in 2009 we ran a story about a Chicago based non-profit company that trained high-functioning autistic people to be software testers. Two years later Aspiritech has grown to offer services in Bel...

Med-trump writes "Scientists at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory have reprogrammed an adult human egg cell to an embryonic state using cloning technology and created a self-reproducing lin...

msmoriarty writes "Oracle had lots of Java announcements at this year's JavaOne. So far the plans include: 'The availability of an early access version of JDK 7 for the Mac OS, plans to "bridge the ga...

Michael J. Ross writes "Most computer and web programming books are written entirely by a single author, while the remaining are written by more authors, typically with each one tackling several chapt...

First time accepted submitter Mindflux0 writes "The European Union is going forward with the proposed Solar Orbiter, a space probe designed to study the sun. The probe will orbit closer to the sun tha...

Lucas123 writes "After six days of spotty service and outages with its online and mobile sites, Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware....

First time accepted submitter Lindan9 writes "After an apparent increase of yeti sightings in the Kemerovo and Altai region of Siberia, a group of scientists from around the world are meeting to exami...

itwbennett writes "At the Ceatec electronics conference in Japan this week, 3M is showing film that turns windows into solar panels. Although the product only generates about 20% of the electricity of...

Hummdis writes "After more than a month of being offline due to a security breach at Kernel.org, they're back! While they were down, they took the time to 're-architect' the site for developers and us...

cylonlover writes "Robots are a perfect tool to give soldiers in the field 'eyes' on a potentially hazardous situation without placing themselves in harm's way. With soldiers often operating in diffic...

First time accepted submitter KingofSpades writes "Samsung has announced that they will try to stop the sale of Apple Inc.'s iPhone 4S in France and Italy. Samsung believes that Apple is 'severely vio...

Many readers have submitted stories about a new $35 tablet computer released today in India. The Aakash (meaning sky) has been handed out to 500 students for an initial trial run, if successful a $60 ...

Andy Smith writes "Fedora 16 beta and OpenSuse 12.1 beta have been released. For most users the major change in each distro is Gnome 3.2. Fedora also adopts the new Linux 3 kernel and the GRUB2 bootlo...

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook is once again setting its datr cookie via the Like button and other social plugins on third-party websites. The datr cookie can be used for tracking users whether ...

Geoffrey.landis writes "In an essay discussing the space program, author Neal Stephenson suggests that the decline of the space program 'might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get...

Reader kackle joins the army of free and accepted Slashdot submitters with this eyebrow-raising story: "I received a form letter from the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority saying that my first-gen...

hcs_$reboot writes "According to a Japanese researcher, the electron count escalation high in the atmosphere could indicate that a major earthquake is going to happen within 30~40 minutes. That phenom...

Orome1 writes "Since Up to 85 % of all virus infections occur as a result of drive-by attacks automated via commercial exploit kits, CSIS has actively collected real time data from them for a period o...

Stirling Newberry writes with word that Dan Shechtman of Israel's Technion has won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals, and provides a short description of why quasicrystal...

itwbennett writes "Mozilla is advising Firefox users to disable McAfee's ScriptScan software, saying that it could cause 'stability or security problems.' ScriptScan, which ships with McAfee's VirusSc...

pafein writes "Hacktivist cluster Telecomix released 54 gigabytes of Syrian censorship log data. The anonymized log data was collected from seven of 15 Bluecoat SG-9000 HTTP proxies used by Syrian gov...

rodrigoandrade writes "I've been invited to participate in the beta testing program for SW:TOR. However, EA's giving out 3-day passes to most testers. A few people are receiving passes for longer peri...

First time accepted submitter aonsquared writes "A couple of months ago I managed to scoop up a cheap (£30) robot arm with a USB interface from Maplin (I'm in the UK). Following a wrist injury w...

iONiUM writes"The BBC reports that 'Ozone loss over the Arctic this year was so severe that for the first time it could be called an "ozone hole" like the Antarctic one, scientists report. About 20km ...

Eraesr writes with news that Epic Games has added Unreal Engine 3 support for Adobe Flash Player. This comes alongside news that Flash Player 11 has been released, an update that added Stage3D, "a set...

mikejuk writes "Bletchley Park has secured a £4.6 million Heritage Lottery Fund Grant for the establishment of a visitor center dedicated to the World War II Codebreakers. This year saw the unve...

New submitter zeroshade writes "Sony has confirmed that going forward, all first-party games will use the PSN Pass to force used game buyers to pay an extra $10 just for the right to play the multipla...

brindafella writes "Thirteen years ago, two teams of astronomers and physicists independently made the same stark discovery: Not only is the universe expanding like a vast inflating balloon, but its e...

An anonymous reader writes "A team of Brigham Young University students recently smashed the world land speed record for electric vehicles by hitting a top speed of 175 miles per hour in their self-bu...

An anonymous reader writes "Proposed legislation under debate in Italy has Wikipedia warning of a shutdown for the Italian version of the site. They say the law would create 'a requirement to all webs...

Julie188 writes "One of the more interesting aspects of Red Hat's acquisition of virtual storage vendor Gluster on Tuesday is how it drags Red Hat into bed with its cloud competitor OpenStack. Red Hat...

superapecommando writes "Simon Phipps, former head of open source at Sun and a backer of LibreOffice, looks at a tempestuous year for the OpenOffice fork. 'Once framed as an impetuous fork, LibreOffic...

DougDot writes "According to a recent SFGate article, 'Social networking giant Facebook is expanding its political footprint, confirming that it has filed the necessary paperwork to open a political a...

New submitter Stirling Newberry writes "You may have heard of The Great Moderation (PDF), which argues that business cycles have become less volatile over time, and the Green Revolution, a set of init...

An anonymous reader writes "A group of four NY state senators have written a paper suggesting that free speech should be looked upon as a government granted privilege rather than a right. They're spec...

crookedvulture writes "AMD's new Llano-powered A-series APUs have had a difficult birth on the desktop. The first chips were saddled with a 100W power rating, making them look rather unattractive next...

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft recently killed the Start Menu and their explanation for it seems fairly straightforward: no one used it. Though this may be a bit of an exaggeration but Microsof...

John Cowan recently gave a talk on the progress of R7RS (slides), the next revision of the Scheme language standard, at LispNYC. After the R6RS debacle, the community stepped back and is now basing th...

An anonymous reader writes "Due to Governor Jerry Brown temporarily repealing the tax law opposed by Amazon, the Amazon Associates Program has been brought back to California."Amazon will still have t...

bs0d3 writes "Today a court ruling in Belgium over-ruled an earlier court ruling and is ordering an ISP to block The Pirate Bay. It's been announced that the type of block to be used by the ISP is a s...

tverbeek writes "Leonard Nimoy announced at the Creation Con in Chicago, celebrating the 45th anniversary of Star Trek, that this would be his last appearance at a Trek convention. He spoke for an hou...

An anonymous reader writes "Government contractor SAIC just can't seem to get a break. Still fresh off of the Citytime scandal they have now had a data breach where backup tapes of 4.9 Million personn...

British Airways is giving their best customers a competitive edge in the event of disaster by offering a course on surviving a plane crash. Beginning next year, members of the airline's Executive Club...

CowboyRobot writes "Yaron Minsky of Jane Street argues that the time has come for statically-typed functional languages like OCaml and Haskell. He cites many reasons and illustrates what he says is th...

Apple is currently announcing various things about a new iPhone; the CNN Live has coverage as it is happening. Watch for updates as more information comes in. For those of you who like to read instead...

jfruhlinger writes "Alibaba is a company that most Americans probably haven't heard of, but it's a hugely important Internet player in China, owning the Yahoo! China site as well as a host of other ma...

mattnyc99 writes "Esquire raises an interesting question on iPhone 5 day: What if Apple stores had cafes? From an analyst cited in the article: 'In line with the Genius Bar concept, I could see them t...

First time accepted submitter crazyvas writes "Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers (except if a waiver is requested). Th...

An anonymous reader writes "Should the U.S. government hold developers more responsible for the quality of their code? One top cyber security analyst says more regulations would be a mistake. 'Any att...

First time accepted submitter Oyjord writes "I am going to China in March, and I was curious what kind of cell phone hardware and plans American travelers use while there. I honestly don't like cell p...

An anonymous reader writes "Leaked screens from Amazon's internal stock monitoring and assignment system (Alaska) has revealed just how popular the Kindle Fire tablet is already. In just 5 days of bei...

First time accepted submitter Gastrobot writes "Stanford University is offering some computer science classes for free. This has been discussed here twice before. The classes begin on Oct. 10th. At th...

An anonymous reader writes "That email you might be getting from Barnes and Noble might not be spam, but rather your only chance to prevent the comprehensive record of your buying history at defunct a...

itwbennett writes "When Stuxnet first appeared in July 2010, the U.S. response was gathered at the ICS-CERT facilities at Idaho National Labs (INL). 'This is the classified building where phones will ...

UnknowingFool writes "On Monday Microsoft updated webpages to announce a price drop for the Zune pass subscription, it removed all references to the Zune hardware. This prompted many to suspect the Zu...

Layzej writes "According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on...

Today marks the launch of RAGE, id Software's post-apocalyptic first-person shooter that's been in development for at least four years. Early response to the game is mixed, but mostly positive. Euroga...

An anonymous reader writes "Torrent Freak has an interesting interview with a former private investigator who was hired to track people who pirated software and movies. He relates some of the tactics ...

MojoKid writes "A new company, Adapteva, has announced its own entry into the field of many core, mesh-connected processors. The company's Epiphany architecture is an array of simple, RISC-based micro...

An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday Paris took a big step towards clean transportation as it launched the world's first electric car share program. Created by Vincent Bollore, the Autolib electric c...

An anonymous reader writes "The Wikimedia Foundation has enabled HTTPS for all of its projects (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, etc.), to enable secure log-in and browsing privacy. Their blog post goes ...

hypnosec writes "Smartphone maker Sony Ericsson has decided to work closely with developers creating custom Android ROMs for devices in order to learn from them. The company said in a blog post that i...

Zothecula writes "Those not content with getting a 2D top-down or 360-degree street level view of a planned route using Google Maps can now enjoy a virtual flight over the route thanks to Google addin...

akahige sends this excerpt from an article at TechDirt:"The Patent Examiner blog has the incredible story of Innovatio IP, a patent troll that recently acquired a portfolio of patents that its lawyers...

JSBiff writes "Bloomberg, among others, is reporting that the Japanese government has partially lifted the Fukushima evacuation order, allowing residents to return to five towns previously in the evac...

coondoggie writes "NASA today awarded what it called the largest prize in aviation history to a company that flew their aircraft 200 miles in less than two hours on less than one gallon of fuel or ele...

hazytodd was one of several readers to tip news of Sprint Nextel's plan to grab a piece of the iPhone action in order to halt the company's downward slide. According to a Wall Street Journal report, S...

tekgoblin writes "Earlier today Rhapsody, the biggest premium on-demand music service in the U.S., announced that they would be acquiring Napster and finalizing the purchase of the company by the end ...

sighted writes "Over the weekend, the robotic spacecraft Cassini buzzed Saturn's moon Enceladus and its intriguing geysers. Cassini flew just 62 miles above the moon's surface — and right throug...

wiredmikey writes "Hitachi-LG Data Storage, a joint venture between Hitachi and LG Electronics, has agreed to plead guilty and to pay a $21.1 million criminal fine for its part in a scheme to rig bids...

suraj.sun sends word that a recent Facebook patent application details specific methods for tracking its users while they're using other websites. Michael Arrington pointed out over the weekend that t...

Branded the "boss from hell" by his employees, 57-year-old William Ernst lost a court battle with ex-workers over unemployment benefits. An Iowa judge has decided that Ernst's "firing contest" memo wa...

He's Canadian, he's proven himself a successful comedic actor and writer, filmmaker, and musician, but (no matter what else he does) in many people's minds he will always be James Tiberius Kirk, capta...

snydeq writes "Dan Tynan takes us on a tour of the nine circles of IT hell, a place 'not unlike the underworld described by Dante in his Divine Comedy.' 'But here, in the data centers, conference room...

jfruhlinger writes "Nokia's announcement that it was developing a Linux distro for low-end smartphones, shortly after abandoning the Linux-based Meego OS for Windows Phone 7, was a little puzzling. Bu...

twoheadedboy writes "The UK Government has made a big commitment to the development of the 'wonder material' graphene, the most likely candidate to replace silicon in computing chips in the future. A ...

Trailrunner7 writes "There is a serious security issue with a variety of HTC Android phones that enables any app with Internet permissions to access a huge amount of private data on the device, includ...

MrSeb writes "The largest astronomical installation in the world is now operational. ALMA, or the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, is a vast radio telescope made out of 66 12- and 7-meter dish antennae...

An anonymous reader writes "Kevin Fenton was reading the Department of Justice's 2004 Inspector General report on pre-9/11 intelligence failures. Parts of it didn't make sense to him, so he decided to...

ocean_soul writes "Probably because nothing more threatening was happening and they need to prove their usefulness the school police at University of Wisconsin-Stout decided a Firefly poster with the ...

wiredmikey writes "As any IT security department knows, social networks pose a significant a threat to users across the board as they blindly click links which often lead to spam or other malicious si...

alphadogg writes "This year's Nobel Laureates have revolutionized our understanding of the immune system by discovering key principles for its activation. Scientists have long been searching for the g...

GovTechGuy writes "Verizon filed an appeal on Friday asking a federal court to strike down the FCC's net neutrality rules, which are scheduled to take effect on November 20. A federal judge tossed the...

destinyland writes "Amazon's going to disable 3G web browsing on their upcoming 'Kindle Touch 3G' — even though it was a prominent feature of the last generation of Kindles. Amazon will still al...

An anonymous reader writes with some sad news from Germany, as posted on the BerliOS front page, and sent by email to developers as well. An excerpt: "As an European, non-proprietary project BerliOS p...

An anonymous reader writes "Australia may consider excluding software from its second-tier patent system to better align the system with those of trading partners like Japan and Korea. A Government re...

daria42 writes "Remember when the RIAA started sending tens of thousands of letters to Americans who it had alleged had infringed copyright online, trying to get them all to settle out of court? Yeah,...

sciencehabit writes "Among the prolific paintings and other art in the 8 kilometer-long Rouffignac cave system in southwestern France are a number of unusual markings known as finger flutings, which a...

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 7 was released a couple days ago, and now the latest Web browser performance numbers are in. This article is the same series that ran benchmarks on Mac OS X Lion la...

First time accepted submitter SustainableJeroen writes "In less than two weeks the bi-annual World Solar Challenge will start. Around forty teams, mostly made up of university students from around the...

thecarchik writes "We already know a lot about the all-electric 2012 Tesla Model S sedan — but at a press event ahead of tonight's exclusive VIP event at the former Toyota NUMMI facility in Frem...

An anonymous reader writes "10 public-interest groups have asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook's various business practices. This demand comes right after two similar ones this ...

xmas2003 writes "I recently had cataract surgery with a Crystalens implant. With my cloudy yellowing (UV-filtering) natural lens removed, I see the world in a new light (more on that in a moment) as e...

revjtanton writes "In recent updates to some of its devices, HTC introduced a suite of logging tools that collected information. Lots of information. LOTS. Whatever the reason was, whether for better ...

The dispute between Mac cloner Psystar and Apple has been a long and twisty one; now, reader UnknowingFool writes that "Last week, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled mostly against Psystar ...

AZA43 leaps into the ranks of accepted submitters, writing "Russian security software vendor Elcomsoft has released an app that it claims can determine BlackBerry handheld passwords. The software supp...

First time accepted submitter wrecked writes "A trial judgment from British Columbia, Canada, found that Zoocasa, a real estate search site operated by Rogers Communications, breached copyright by scr...

First time accepted submitter recrudescence writes "Slashdot readers might remember the Touchbook announcement from Always Innovating stirring up a lot of excitement in the Slashdot community back in ...

wiredmikey writes "Author Robert Vamosi writes an interesting piece on how security researchers are using open source 'prototyping boards' and other open source tools now available via the Internet fo...

jfruhlinger writes "Much of the initial reaction to Amazon's Silk browser was interest in how it uses the cloud to speed up browsing. But at what cost? There are privacy concerns, of course, as Amazon...

theodp writes "Google is following in the footsteps of Apple and Microsoft. The London Evening Standard reports that the world's first 'Google Store' has opened in a PC World on London's gadget street...

SonicSpike sends word that Florida has changed how law enforcement deals with teenagers who send racy pictures to each other over their phones. Quoting CNN:"Before Saturday, a Florida teenager who sen...

alphadogg writes "For more than two years, the U.S. mobile industry has warned of an upcoming spectrum shortage, but two analysts at Citigroup don't buy it. AT&T, trade group CTIA and even officia...

An anonymous reader writes with news that the Open Document Format 1.2 specification has finally been approved."The most important improvement to ODF 1.2 is the newly built spreadsheet support. The ol...

sydneyhype writes "Facebook's recently announced Timeline feature is up against legal action from an online social-scrapbooking company that has been in business since 2008. The company, Timelines.com...

DJCouchyCouch writes "I have a Kobo Touch eReader that comes with a bare-bones web browser. Since the screen is E-Ink based, the browsing experience is pretty poor due to the low refresh rate of the s...

mikejuk writes "Kerckhoffs' Principle suggests that there is no security by obscurity — but perhaps there is. A recent paper by Dusko Pavlovic suggests that security is a game of incomplete info...

tekgoblin writes "AT&T has started tossing out warnings for users that fall into the top 5% of data users on their wireless network. AT&T announced this change back in July and is now starting...

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla is developing its own 3D engine called Gladius as part of a wider Paladin project whose aim it is to bring 3D to the web. As all programmers know, the best way to l...

New submitter quax writes "Michael Nielsen, who co-authored the book on Quantum Computing, released a set of short video lectures on his blog this summer (link to Google cache). They make a great intr...

jjp9999 writes "More than 70,000 websites were compromised in a recent breach of InMotion. Thousands of websites were defaced and others had alterations made to give users a hard time accessing their ...

itwbennett writes "Nokia is going after the low-end smartphone market with a Linux-based OS code-named 'Meltemi.' The phones are expected to cost under $100 without subsidies. A Nokia spokesman's no-c...

An anonymous reader writes "According to a manufacturing cost breakdown, it turns out Amazon is willing to sell its new Kindle Fire at a $10 loss. An analyst estimates that the Kindle Fire, priced at ...

theodp writes "Hal in 2001: 'I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that [open the pod bay doors].' Kinect in 2011: 'I'm sorry, Dave Jr. I'm afraid I can't do that [tune in to the Spice Channel].' A M...

New submitter Jimme Blue writes "An employee of the State Department is under investigation and may be fired for 'disclosing classified information.' Or, as others might call it, posting a link to Wik...

wiredmikey writes with this excerpt from a Wall Street Journal report:"The U.S. ushered in a new CIA-led counterterrorism program in Yemen on Friday, sending unmanned aircraft to kill an American-born...

packetrat writes "I was at OmniTI's Surge conference today, which turned out to be, among other things, a meeting of the cult of DevOps. Ars Technica covered the keynote and some of the presentations,...

In his first accepted submission, pjstevns writes "The heat is on! With the rising use of online systems for school administration the battle for open and accessible solutions is here, now. Parents ar...

sydneyhype writes "The Australian National Broadband Network is open for business. The 14,000 residents on the first roll-out will be able to order an NBN service (current ISP contract permitting). In...

First time accepted submitter FlatEric521 writes "The BBC is reporting that for the first time since 1996 IBM's market value has exceeded Microsoft's. The values cap a sustained period in which IBM's ...

First time accepted submitter buxy writes "Roland Mas and me [Raphael Hertzog] are the authors of a French Debian bestseller. We want to translate this book into English and publish it under a license...

hackingbear writes with an article from Reuters about Foxconn's plans to move iPad production to Brazil. From the article: "A much-hyped $12 billion plan for Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn to produce ...

angry tapir writes with an excerpt from a Techworld article: "Nokia is planning to lay off an additional 3,500 employees, as the company continues to restructure after announcing its decision to focus...

gusoline writes "Since I'm now living in Brazil (originally from the U.S.), I'm looking for a reliable, trustworthy proxy service I can use to both access services I've used for a long time (Pandora, ...

Game development studio Cyanide launched their real-time strategy interpretation of George R. R. Martin's acclaimed fantasy series A Game of Thrones yesterday. You can see a trailer and a few screensh...

harrymcc writes "Back in August of 2010, I rounded up 32 tablets — existing, announced, and rumored — that weren't the iPad. So much has happened to tablets since then that I decided to re...

dutchwhizzman writes "Amsterdam-based Usenet wholesale provider News Service Europe has been mandated by a court to remove all copyright-infringing content on their servers, or face severe financial p...

zacharye writes "BGR has uncovered a security flaw on AT&T's version of the Samsung Galaxy S II that renders Android's unlock pattern feature completely useless. Using a simple workaround, the sec...

jfruhlinger writes "One of Oracle's stated purposes when it bought Sun more than two years ago was to create full-stack appliances: SPARC servers running Solaris or Oracle Linux and Oracle's suite of ...

eldavojohn writes "The CBC reports on new research that shows thousand-year-old ice shelves (much different than sea ice) are breaking up and have been reduced by half in a region of Canada over the l...

adeelarshad82 writes "How long does your cell phone carrier retain information about your calls, text messages, and data use? According to data gathered by the Department of Justice, it can be as litt...

Nemilar writes with this excerpt from VentureBeat:"Who will save what's left of Palm from HP's bumbling? It could be Amazon, as the online retailing giant is in serious negotiations to snap up Palm fr...

New submitter maeltor writes "Reports poured in this morning that Microsoft's security products, namely Microsoft Security Essentials and Forefront Client Security, were flagging Google Chrome as a vi...

New submitter nfn writes "MIT has published a new paper (abstract), along with a video of a working prototype, of what they're describing as an 'Artificial Leaf' that separates water into oxygen and h...

CProgrammer98 writes "BBC News reports that cities may soon get their own operating system. From the article: 'The Urban OS works just like a PC operating system but keeps buildings, traffic and servi...

Back in 1982, John Flansburgh, John Linnell, and a drum machine formed They Might Be Giants. Over the last 29 years TMBG have released 15 studio albums, won 2 Grammy Awards, and have become one of the...

An anonymous reader tips news that Mozilla has released the beta version of Firefox 8, only a few days after going live with the final version of Firefox 7. According to the announcement, the big chan...

oker sends this quote from The Atlantic:"With Carnegie Mellon's cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person's online identity takes less than a minute. Tools ...

hypnosec writes "The Free Press has filed a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission, challenging the net neutrality rules laid out by the regulator. The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed in...

An anonymous reader writes "Boston Dynamics, the company that created the BigDog quadruped robot, has unveiled a new, bigger system called AlphaDog. AlphaDog, a DARPA-sponsored project, can carry a pa...

FleaPlus writes "During a talk at the National Press Club, SpaceX's Elon Musk revealed the company's plans for making their Falcon 9 rocket fully reusable. A rendering depicts the first stage, upper s...

snydeq writes "Despite early successes on the Web, the latter years of Flash have been a tale of missed opportunities, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'The bigger picture — which I've ...

itwbennett writes "The patent licensing agreement between Microsoft and Samsung this week set off a firestorm of childish tit-for-tat between Microsoft and Google. But more telling is what Samsung had...

donniebaseball23 writes "The top one percent of iOS game developers earn over a third of the gaming revenue made on the App Store, according to a new survey of iOS developers. The survey, set up by Ca...

An anonymous reader writes "Several years ago Laurence Kembell-Cook unveiled Pavegen floor tiles, which capture kinetic energy from footsteps and convert it to electricity. Now after two years of prod...

First time accepted submitter THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER writes "I have 10-15 old hard drives I want to trash, some IDE and some SATA. Even if I still had IDE hardware, I don't want to wait several weeks to...

Trailrunner7 writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft released an announcement about the disruption of the Kelihos botnet that was responsible for spam messages, theft of sensitive financial information, ...

hypnosec writes "It hasn't been long since the BlackBerry maker Research In Motion announced that its QNX based tablet device, the PlayBook, will be supporting Android implementation on it. However, i...

alphadogg writes "The quirky Ig Nobel prizes honoring some of the world's funniest if not the most practical academic research will be handed out tonight at 7:30 EST at Harvard University. The theme t...