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Your Rights Online: Amazon Wants Patent For Inserting Ads Into Books on Friday July 03, @08:02PM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 03, @08:02PM
from the it-was-the-best-of-times,-it-was-comcastic dept.

books

theodp writes "Three Amazon inventors set out to correct what they felt was a real problem: that 'out-of-print or rare books ... typically do not include advertisements ... the content is fixed and, therefore, has not been adapted to modern marketing.' Their solution is spelled out in newly-disclosed Amazon patent applications for On-Demand Generating E-Book Content with Advertising and Incorporating Advertising in On-Demand Generated Content. From the patent apps, here's what the future of reading may look like: 'For instance, if a restaurant is described on page 12, [then the advertising page], either on page 11 or page 13, may include advertisements about restaurants, wine, food, etc., which are related to restaurants and dining.' So, what would a delightfully-tacky-yet-unrefined Hooters ad do for your Hemingway experience?"

IT: Fake Tamiflu "Out-Spams Viagra On Web" on Friday July 03, @07:11PM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 03, @07:11PM
from the stiff-competition dept.

spam

cin62 writes "The number of Internet scammers offering fake versions of the anti-swine flu drug Tamiflu has surpassed those selling counterfeit Viagra, reports CNN. Since the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, was declared a global pandemic last month, there has been an increase in the number of Web sites and junk emails offering Tamiflu for sale. 'Every Web site that used to sell Viagra is now selling Tamiflu. We are pretty sure that the same people are making the Tamiflu as are making the Viagra,' said Director of Policy for the UK's Royal Pharmaceutical Society." This news fits in nicely with a report Wired ran a couple weeks ago about the hysteria behind H1N1.

Technology: Source Code of Several Atari 7800 Games Released on Friday July 03, @06:22PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 03, @06:22PM
from the good-way-to-start-an-education dept.

programming

jadoon88 writes to share a series of old Atari 7800 games that have been unofficially open sourced. "Remember Dig Dug or Centipede or Robotron? They used to be favorites when Atari's 7800 series was still around. Since the era of those consoles is over, and a different world of interactive reality gaming has taken over, Atari has unofficially released source code of over 15 games for the coders and enthusiasts to admire the state-of-the-art (because this is what it was back then). During those times, nobody would have imagined in their wildest dreams the games that Atari's developers floated into the gaming thirsty market and instantly swept across continental boundaries. But things changed soon after that and a company once regarded as one of the most successful gaming console manufacturers and developers faded away in the pages of our technology's hall-of-fame."

Ask Slashdot: How To Get Your Program Professionally Marketed? on Friday July 03, @05:30PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 03, @05:30PM
from the doesn't-twitter-solve-all-problems-everywhere-now? dept.

business

one-man orchestra writes "I'm the sole programmer of a small, multi-platform, commercial audio program (a spectrogram editor). After over 6 months on the market, I realized that the program would never just sell itself, and that I need some real marketing done for it. Being a one-man orchestra is becoming increasingly difficult; I only can devote so much time to marketing, my skills in that department are lacking, and I'd much rather spend more time coding. Despite my lackluster part-time marketing effort, I still manage to make a modest living out of the sales. My logical assumption is that with someone competent taking care of that part, revenue could greatly scale up. But what's the right way to go about doing this? What type of people/company do I need to contact? What to expect? What to look out for?"

Your Rights Online: Professor Gets 4 Years in Prison for Sharing Drone Plans With Students on Friday July 03, @04:38PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 03, @04:38PM
from the read-before-you-sign dept.

court

Hugh Pickens writes "Retired University of Tennessee Professor Dr. John Reece Roth has been sentenced to four years in prison after he allowed a Chinese graduate student to see sensitive information on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones. In 2004, the company Roth helped found, Atmospheric Glow Technologies, won a US Air Force contract to develop a plasma actuator that could help reduce drag on the wings of drones, such as the ones the military uses. Under the contract, for which Roth was reportedly paid $6,000, he was prohibited from sharing sensitive data with foreign nationals. Despite warnings from his university's Export Control Officer, in 2006, Roth took a laptop containing sensitive plans with him on a lecture tour in China and also allowed graduate students Xin Dai of China and Sirous Nourgostar of Iran to work on the project. 'The illegal export of restricted military data represents a serious threat to national security,' says David Kris of the US Department of Justice. 'We know that foreign governments are actively seeking this information for their own military development. Today's sentence should serve as a warning to anyone who knowingly discloses restricted military data in violation of our laws.' During his trial, Roth testified that he was unaware that hiring the graduate students was a violation of his contract. 'This whole thing has not helped me, it has not helped the university,' said Roth. 'And it has probably not helped this country, either.'"

Science: Fermilab Detects "Doubly Strange" Particle on Friday July 03, @04:02PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 03, @04:02PM
from the they-don't-build-em-like-they-used-to dept.

math

DynaSoar writes "While its cousin/competitor site, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, remains offline, Fermilab's Digital Hadron Calorimeter continues to produce significant results. Recently Fermilab announced discovery of the Omega-sub-b baryon, a 'doubly-strange' particle. This baryon, containing two strange quarks and one bottom quark, has six times the mass of a proton. 'The Omega-sub-b is the latest entry in the "periodic table of baryons." Baryons are particles formed of three quarks, the most common examples being the proton and neutron. ... The observation of this "doubly strange" particle, predicted by the Standard Model, is significant because it strengthens physicists' confidence in their understanding of how quarks form matter. In addition, it conflicts with a 2008 result announced by CDF's sister experiment, DZero. In August 2008, the DZero experiment announced its own observation of the Omega-sub-b based on a smaller sample of Tevatron data. This result contradicted some predictions of the Standard Model, suggesting a "new physics." The new result leads to the possibility that the prior results are not accurate.'"

Your Rights Online: Copyright Should Encourage Derivative Works on Friday July 03, @03:47PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 03, @03:47PM
from the greed-is-a-powerful-drug dept.

news

Techdirt has an interesting look at copyright and the idea that an author is the originator of a new work. Instead, the piece suggests that all works are in some way based on the works of others (even our own copyright law), and the system should be much more encouraging of "remixing" work into new, unique experiences. "Friedman also points back to another recent post where he discusses the nature of content creation, based on a blog post by Rene Kita. In it, she points out that remixing and creating through collaboration and building on the works of others has always been the norm. It's what we do naturally. It's only in the last century or so, when we reached a means of recording, manufacturing and selling music — which was limited to just those with the machinery and capital to do it, that copyright was suddenly brought out to 'protect' such things."

Technology: Open Source Facing a Difficult Battle For Cloud Relevance on Friday July 03, @02:55PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 03, @02:55PM
from the someone-get-a-rock-and-a-sling dept.

software

A recent eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady caught the attention of Matt Asay, who breaks down the difficulty of this David and Goliath problem. "In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those 'horses,' in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging 'Goliath' are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business. Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is 'a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today.' He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds."

Science: Phoenix Lander Discovers Nighttime Snowfall On Mars on Friday July 03, @02:02PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 03, @02:02PM
from the time-to-build-a-martian-snowman dept.

mars

Many outlets are reporting on the recently released results of the various experiments and observations of NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander. Most notable is the discovery of nighttime snowfall on the planet, lending credibility to the idea of a hypothesized active water cycle based on earlier data collection. "The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings. The overall conclusion is that the northern pole has an active water cycle. This had been suggested by a variety of evidence from orbital sensors, as well early images returned from Phoenix. It's also not a huge shock, given the seasonal growth and retreat of the polar ice cap. Still, Phoenix provided some significant details on the cycling of water in the area where it landed."

Technology: Seattle Data Center Outage Disrupts E-Commerce on Friday July 03, @01:11PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 03, @01:11PM
from the no-sigmas-for-you dept.

internet

1sockchuck writes "A major power outage at Seattle telecom hub Fisher Plaza has knocked payment processing provider Authorize.net offline for hours, leaving thousands of web sites unable to take credit cards for online sales. The Authorize site is still down, but its Twitter account attributes the outage to a fire, while AdHost calls it a 'significant power event.' Authorize.net is said to be trying to resume processing from a backup data center, but there's no clear ETA on when Fisher Plaza will have power again."

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Your Rights Online: Amazon Wants Patent For Inserting Ads Into Books on Friday July 03, @08:02PM

IT: Fake Tamiflu "Out-Spams Viagra On Web" on Friday July 03, @07:11PM

Technology: Source Code of Several Atari 7800 Games Released on Friday July 03, @06:22PM

Ask Slashdot: How To Get Your Program Professionally Marketed? on Friday July 03, @05:30PM

Your Rights Online: Professor Gets 4 Years in Prison for Sharing Drone Plans With Students on Friday July 03, @04:38PM

Science: Fermilab Detects "Doubly Strange" Particle on Friday July 03, @04:02PM

Your Rights Online: Copyright Should Encourage Derivative Works on Friday July 03, @03:47PM

Technology: Open Source Facing a Difficult Battle For Cloud Relevance on Friday July 03, @02:55PM

Science: Phoenix Lander Discovers Nighttime Snowfall On Mars on Friday July 03, @02:02PM

Technology: Seattle Data Center Outage Disrupts E-Commerce on Friday July 03, @01:11PM

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News for nerds, stuff that matters

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Stories

Your Rights Online: Amazon Wants Patent For Inserting Ads Into Books on Friday July 03, @08:02PM

IT: Fake Tamiflu "Out-Spams Viagra On Web" on Friday July 03, @07:11PM

Technology: Source Code of Several Atari 7800 Games Released on Friday July 03, @06:22PM

Ask Slashdot: How To Get Your Program Professionally Marketed? on Friday July 03, @05:30PM

Your Rights Online: Professor Gets 4 Years in Prison for Sharing Drone Plans With Students on Friday July 03, @04:38PM

Science: Fermilab Detects "Doubly Strange" Particle on Friday July 03, @04:02PM

Your Rights Online: Copyright Should Encourage Derivative Works on Friday July 03, @03:47PM

Technology: Open Source Facing a Difficult Battle For Cloud Relevance on Friday July 03, @02:55PM

Science: Phoenix Lander Discovers Nighttime Snowfall On Mars on Friday July 03, @02:02PM

Technology: Seattle Data Center Outage Disrupts E-Commerce on Friday July 03, @01:11PM

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