|
|
|
Top news on 23 September 2009 |
Dymaxion Car Being Restored
An anonymous reader notes that R. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Car is being restored by the company Crosthwaite and Gardiner. Only three of the vehicles were produced in the 1930s and only one survives. "Synchronofile.com has been granted the great honor of announcing the restoration of the Dymaxion Car — because our readers are now invited to help in the project. Can you identify the manufacturer for the component shown at the link?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Tax Dodge At Issue In Washington State
newscloud writes "With Washington State facing a billion-dollar biennial budget deficit, the spotlight again shifts to Microsoft's software licensing office in Reno, Nevada. 'Although the majority of its software development is performed in Washington State, Microsoft records its estimated $18 billion in licensing revenue per year through a corporate office in Reno, Nevada where there is no licensing tax. Just by enforcing the state's existing tax law from 2008 onwards, we could reduce Washington's revenue shortfall by more than 70 percent. Alternately, we could pursue the entire $707 million from Microsoft's thirteen years of tax dodging and cover most of the expected deficit going forward.' We have discussed Microsoft's creative capitalism in the past."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Brings Chrome Renderer, Speedy Javascript To IE
A month after we discussed Google's bringing SVG to IE, several readers let us know that Google is expanding the beachhead by offering Chrome's renderer and speedy Javascript execution in an IE plugin. This effort is in service of allowing IE to participate in Google Wave when that technology's preview is extended in a week's time. The plugin, currently in an early stage of development, is called Google Chrome Frame.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FDA OKs First Human Trial of Neural Stem Cell Therapy
An anonymous reader sends word that the FDA has approved a phase 1 trial for Neuralstem, a company with a patented stem cell procedure targeting ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and other spinal conditions. The company's CEO said in a press release, "While this trial aims to primarily establish safety and feasibility data in treating ALS patients, we also hope to be able to measure a slowing down of the ALS degenerative process." Results are expected in 2 years. The trial will involve 12 ALS patients who will receive stem cell injections in the lumbar area of the spinal cord. An information site for the disabled community adds hopefully: "If it makes it through all stages of testing, we will see if doctors are willing to [use] it on subjects that have injuries coming from physical injuries like diving accidents."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Court To Scammer, "Give Up Your House Or Go To Jail"
coondoggie writes "Too many online scammers get away with what amounts to a wrist-slap, but a case if Las Vegas this week seems to be heading the right direction. According to the Federal Trade Commission, a business opportunity scammer has been held in contempt for the second time by a federal court and ordered to turn over the title of his home in Las Vegas or face jail time. The court found that the operator of the scam, Richard Neiswonger, failed to deliver marketable title to his home, in violation of a previous court order entering a $3.2 million judgment against him, the FTC stated. The FTC charged that the defendant deceived consumers with false promises that they could make a six-figure income by selling his 'asset protection services' to those seeking to hide their assets from potential lawsuits or creditors."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Published Google Docs To Appear In Search Engines
dotancohen writes "Google plans to make all published documents from Google Docs users crawlable, if the documents are linked from a public Web site. No official announcement appears to have been made, just a short blog post on the subject by a Google employee in a help forum. (One comment on the ghacks.net post linked above says that email was sent to the admins of Google Apps accounts.) There does not seem to be any way to make an individual document not crawlable; you can only un-publish it, at which point Web links to it will not work any more." The move makes sense from one point of view — Google is just making crawlable a document linked from another crawlable document — but it's likely to catch a lot of people by surprise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Soviets Built a Doomsday Machine; It's Still Alive
An anonymous reader points out a story in Wired introducing us to the Doomsday Machine built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s — and that remains active to this day. It was called "Perimeter." The article explains why the device was built, and why the Soviets considered it to be something that kept the peace, even though they never told the US about it. "[Reagan's] strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. ... A few months later, Reagan... announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. ... To Moscow it was the Death Star — and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. ... By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, [an informant] says, was 'to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Making Data Unvanish
sertsa writes "Earlier this year a group of researchers at the University of Washington came up with a scheme to use peer-to-peer networks to store and, ultimately, to forget the keys for encrypted messages, causing them to 'Vanish.' Now a group from researchers from UT Austin, Princeton, and the University of Michigan has come up with a way to break this approach, by making a single computer appear to be many nodes on the p2p network. 'In our experiments with Unvanish, we have shown that it is possible to make Vanish messages reappear long after they should have disappeared nearly 100 percent of the time...'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US Wants UK Hacker To Pay To Fix Holes He Exposed
bossanovalithium writes "Gary McKinnon, whose tribulations we have followed for several years now, is the UK hacker trying to escape extradition to the US. It appears he is expected to foot the bill for the US Government patching holes his breaching uncovered — to the tune of $700,000. It's not really the norm for someone to pay for exploits to be patched — damages fixed, yes, but this is a very different thing." The article paraphrases Eugene Spafford as saying that the victim of a cybercrime should not take the blame. "If someone broke a door to rob a store, he said, it was usual to charge them the cost of the door." Isn't the McKinnon case more like charging him to buy the lock that had been missing when he walked in?Read more of this story at Slashdot.
EU Funding "Orwellian" Artificial Intelligence Snooping System
leonbenjamin writes "Britain's Telegraph reports on a five-year research programme, called Project Indect, which aims to develop computer programmes which act as 'agents' to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers. Its main objectives include the 'automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence.' Shami Chakrabarti, head of the UK's Liberty human-rights NGO, said: 'Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society. ... It's dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ASCIIpOrtal Has Been Released
maclizard writes "After much waiting, ASCIIpOrtal has now been released. Joe Larson, the man behind the game, has made sure to provide numerous mirrors so as to avoid the Slashdot effect that killed his site several months ago. An interview with Larson (part two here) is available as well."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Are Data Center "Tiers" Still Relevant?
miller60 writes "In their efforts at uptime, are data centers relying too much on infrastructure and not enough on best practices? That question is at the heart of an ongoing industry debate about the merits of the tier system, a four-level classification of data center reliability developed by The Uptime Institute. Critics assert that the historic focus on Uptime tiers prompts companies to default to Tier III or Tier IV designs that emphasize investment in redundant UPSes and generators. Uptime says that many industries continue to require mission-critical data centers with high levels of redundancy, which are needed to perform maintenance without taking a data center offline. Given the recent series of data center outages and the current focus on corporate cost control, the debate reflects the industry focus on how to get the most uptime for the data center dollar."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Finding the First Trillion Congruent Numbers
eldavojohn writes "First stated by al-Karaji about a thousand years ago, the congruent number problem is simplified to finding positive whole numbers that are the area of a right triangle with rational number sides. Today, discovering these congruent numbers is limited only by the size of a computer's hard drive. An international team of mathematicians recently decided to push the limits on finding congruent numbers and came up with the first trillion. Their two approaches are outlined in detail, with pseudo-code, in their paper (PDF) as well as details on their hardware. For those of you familiar with this sort of work, the article provides links to solving this problem — from multiplying very large numbers to identifying square-free congruent numbers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
French Deputies Want Labels On Photo-Altered Models
Psychophrenes writes "A number of French deputies are proposing to pass a law requiring all published photos that were modified by means of an image manipulation program to include a statement indicating that 'the photo was altered in order to modify the appearance of a person.' This indication is to be mandatory on all ads, packaging images, political posters and even art photos, and is considered a matter of public health, aimed at fighting anorexia." The related article is in French, but Google Translate does a pretty good job.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
$2,000 Bribe Bought Password To DC P.O. System
theodp writes "While the Administration is counting on new Federal CIO Vivek Kundra to simplify and speed the federal IT procurement process, it's doubtful he'll be able to reduce red tape to the extent that a former minion of his did at the scandal-rocked D.C. Office of the CTO. Exhibiting some truly out-of-the-box thinking, project manager Tawanna Sellmon not only processed phony invoices for the contractor at the center of the D.C. bribery and kickback scandal, she also gave him the password to the city's computerized database used to track purchase orders. Sellmon pleaded guilty last week for her role in the scam, which netted her an envelope containing $2,000 in cash, as well as an undisclosed number of $25-$100 gift cards."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
|
|