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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 94 declined, 32 accepted (126 total, 25.40% accepted)

Space

Submission + - Iran Has Put a Satellite into Orbit (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "Dear Iranian nation, your children have placed the first indigenous satellite into orbit," announced Iran's President Ahmadinejad yesterday. The satellite, named Omid ("hope"), was launched to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution. Video shown on Iranian television shows a Safir-2 rocket rising into the sky, as a follow-up to a test firing last August.
The Internet

Submission + - YouTube Passes Yahoo as #2 Search Engine (comscore.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "According to the latest ComScore rankings, YouTube's search traffic for August surpassed Yahoo's. The latter dropped roughly 5% in traffic from July. Among other things, this means that Google now owns both of the top two search engines. AdAge further speculates on Google's experimental "promoted videos" cost-per-click advertising on YouTube, suggesting the obvious: more money."
Math

Submission + - New Olympics Scoring: No More Perfect 10.0 (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "If you watch the Olympics gymnastics this year, you may be confused by the new scoring system which will let athletes score 14, 17, or even higher. The new rules are "heavy on math" and employ two panels of judges: one for technical difficulty, which adds points up from a score of zero; the other for execution and technique, which starts at 10.0 and subtracts for errors. The two numbers are then combined for the final score. As one judge put it, "The system rewards difficulty. But the mistakes are also more costly." The new rules were adopted after South Korea protested a scoring at the 2004 Olympics."
Social Networks

Submission + - Friendster Going Strong in Asia and Maybe in Court (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "Remember Friendster? Long surpassed by MySpace and Facebook, and a textbook case of social networking collapse, Friendster appears to be going strong in Asia, and has recently stolen Google's Asia chief for its new CEO. More ominously, though, a recent press release (PDF) notes that the company "was the first social networking company to launch key features, including the social graph server, a network activities tracker, and more... Friendster has been granted three fundamental patents and has more patents pending." Hello lawyers!"
The Courts

Submission + - Hasbro Sues Makers of Scrabulous Online Game (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "As today's lawsuit indicates, Hasbro has apparently had enough of Scrabulous, the online word game remarkably similar to Scrabble. Filed in New York, Hasbro's suit is against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, brothers from Kolkata, India, and asks the court to remove the Scrabulous application from Facebook, disable the Scrabulous.com web site, and grant damages and attorneys fees to Hasbro. Why did Hasbro tale so long to "protect" its intellectual property rights in court? They waited "in deference to the fans" until EA had launched the official Scrabble Facebook app earlier this month. EA's version has netted fewer than ten thousand players, versus Scrabulous' estimated 2.3 million. This was the next logical step for Hasbro after filing DCMA takedown notices against Scrabulous in January."
The Internet

Submission + - EBay Deal Signals the End for Individual Auctions (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "EBay's recent deal with Buy.com appears to be seriously irritating its veteran individual sellers. The deal allows Buy.com and other large fixed-price retailers to list millions of items on eBay without paying listing fees, and appears to be the direction that eBay will follow in the future. Understandably, individual sellers are outraged, like this blogger: "I've paid eBay many hundreds of thousands in fees over the past several years and believed them when they talked about a level playing field. And they just plain and simple are going back on their word." This comes after the dire prediction that eBay is losing its popularity. Will eBay recover from this?"
Privacy

Submission + - The Privacy Paradox: Don't Ask and They Won't Care (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "The New York Times has a piece up about the paradox of privacy: "normally sane people have inconsistent and contradictory impulses and opinions when it comes to their safeguarding their own private information." More specifically, it's all how you ask: if you don't talk about privacy, people won't worry about it. In one survey, "when the issue of confidentiality was raised, participants clammed up. For example, 25 percent of the students who were given a strong assurance of confidentiality admitted to having copied someone else's homework. Among those given no assurance of confidentiality, more than half admitted to it.""
Government

Submission + - U.S. Government Halts All Solar Energy Projects (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "The U.S. Government's Bureau of Land Management, overwhelmed by applications for large-scale solar energy plants, has declared a two-year freeze on all new projects until it completes an extensive environmental impact study. The study will also produce "a single set of environmental criteria to weigh future solar proposals, which will ultimately speed the application process." The freeze means that current applications will continue to be processed — plants producing enough electricity for 20 million average American homes — but no new applications will be accepted until the study is complete. Solar power companies are worried that this will harm the industry just as it is poised for growth, while others see the temporary hold as a necessary step before the industry gets too big."
Biotech

Submission + - IBM to Help Sequence the Chocolate Genome (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "The New York Times reports this morning that IBM will work with Mars — the candy company who makes M&Ms and Snickers, among other things — on a five year project to sequence the cocoa genome. According to Howard-Yana Shapiro, global director of plant science at Mars, the goal is to "discover the genetic building blocks of traits like disease and pest resistance, drought tolerance and perhaps flavor." Additionally, the project's results will be available for free from the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture."
Power

Submission + - First U.S. Offshore Wind Power Park in Delaware (cnn.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "Offshore wind power company Bluewater Wind has announced an agreement to build America's first offshore wind turbine park off the coast of Delaware. "Each turbine [will sit on] a pole about 250 feet above the waterline... the units are to be constructed to withstand hurricane-force winds. From the shore, the park will be visible only on clear winter days, and the turbines will be nearly invisible during summer months when Rehoboth Beach fills with vacationers. Each blade on the three-blade rotor is to be 150 feet long.""
Privacy

Submission + - Deutsche Telekom Secretely Tracked Phone Calls (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "German telephone giant Deutsche Telekom has admitted to secretly tracking the phone calls between board members and journalists, in an effort to identify media leaks about internal affairs. As noted by the German Journalists' Association, "This company has special access to the records of its customers.... That means it has a special obligation to be trustworthy." DT denies having eavesdropped; it merely tracked the calls dialed."
Censorship

Submission + - Johnson & Johnson Loses Major Trademark Lawsui

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "As previously discussed on Slashdot, the health-products giant Johnson & Johnson sued the American Red Cross over use of the ubiquitous "red cross" logo. J&J has lost. The presiding judge said Johnson & Johnson's claim against the organization was doubtful because the manufacterer entered into a brand-sharing promotional agreement with the American Red Cross in 1986 — not to mention that the two organizations agreed to share the logo way back in 1895. Sounds like J&J may need to crack open some Tylenol and Band-Aids."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Video Game Actors Don't Get Their Due (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "The New York Times reports today about Michael Hollick, the actor who provided the voice of Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto IV. Although the game has made more than $600 million in sales for Rockstar Games, Hollick earns nothing beyond the original $100K he was paid. If this was television, film, or radio, Hollick and the other GTA actors could have made millions by now. Hollick says, "I don't blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games. Yes, the technology is important, but it's the human performances within them that people really connect to, and I hope actors will get more respect for the work they do within those technologies." Is it time for video game actors to be treated as well as those in other mediums?"
Television

Submission + - On DVRs, Youngsters Skip Ads Less Than Seniors (adage.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "In analyzing DVR viewing research, Ad Age has noted something unexpected: older DVR users are more likely to skip ads than younger DVR users. The skew is particularly apparent among men: 50% of seniors skipping all the ads, but only 20% of teens do so. Women of any age group tend to be around 35%. Ad Age hypothesizes that younger viewers "just pay attention to other media when the ads are on TV or, worse yet, perhaps the TV is just 'background music'...." I always thought that ad skipping was a major benefit of DVRs. Do you skip all the ads?"
Software

Submission + - Make Your Own Fonts, In a Web Browser (fontshop.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "Although it's been up for a few weeks, today is the official launch of FontStruct, a web-based font creation tool. That's right: in your web browser, you can build your own typeface, and download it as a TrueType font. The site's user agreement requires you to release your creations online under one of the Creative Commons licenses. The typefaces tend to be a little blocky, but it's still impressive (and a great way to pass time)."

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