Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Read the EULA (Score 1) 557

by ErichTheWebGuy (#40614883) Attached to: Is It Time To End Our Love Affair With the QWERTY Keyboard?
Section (3) (a) reads in part: "Users acknowledge that certain details may be provided to third parties ... provision of such information is necessary for IP owner to operate its business" and (3) (b) reads in part: " Users acknowledge that information about them may be transmitted between countries to other entities that IP owner has commercial contracts with" Sounds legit - what could possibly go wrong?

Comment Actually (Score 0) 470

by ErichTheWebGuy (#34993240) Attached to: LibreOffice 3.3 Released Today
I think it makes a prefect case for open source ideals. The fork from the original OOo demonstrates a commitment to the values that open source encompasses. If a company scoops up a project and will likely destroy it, just fork it and make it better. You can also look to Mambo (and countless others) for a similar story.
It's funny. Laugh.

MacGyver Physics 165

Posted by Zonk from the hard-not-to-like-that-fellow dept.
counterfriction writes "This month's issue of Symmetry, a magazine jointly published by SLAC and Fermilab, is featuring an article that points out the sometimes extemporaneous and unconventional solutions physicists have come up with in (and out of) the laboratory. From the article: 'Leon Lederman ... used a pocket knife, tape, and items on anyone's grocery list to confirm that interactions involving the weak force do now show perfect mirror symmetry, or parity, as scientists had long assumed.'"
Television

AT&T To Offer TV Over Phone Lines 303

Posted by Zonk from the next-up-is-radio-via-peanut-butter dept.
ppadala writes "AT&T is upgrading their phone lines to offer video programmes over phone line. The service, called U-verse TV will be available in parts of Southern California communities initially. Channel lineups will be similar to traditional cable and dish offerings. AT&T is insisting that, 'This offering is on par with those of its cable rivals. But AT&T claims that it offers customers more for their money, including fast channel changing, video-on-demand, three set-top boxes, a digital video recorder, a picture-in-picture feature that allows viewers to surf channels without switching channels and an interactive program guide.'"
Science

US Opposes G8 Climate Proposals 845

Posted by Zonk from the gotta-love-smog-as-an-export-commodity dept.
elrond writes "The US appears to have summarily rejected draft proposals for G8 members that would have agreed to tougher measures for controlling greenhouse gas emissions. The BBC reports that leaked documents have indicated the positions of the various world powers, from the timetable-setting of Germany to the US's intractable stance. Red ink comments on the documents hint at the US's irritation: 'The US still has serious, fundamental concerns about this draft statement. The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses 'multiple red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to ... We have tried to tread lightly but there is only so far we can go given our fundamental opposition to the German position.'"
Security

Simple Comm Technique Beats Quantum Crypto 164

Posted by Zonk from the dot-dot-dash-dot-dot-dash-dash-dot dept.
Atario wrote us with a link to a New Scientist article about an innovative new way of encrypting communications. An engineer at Texas A&M may have a way to exploit the thermal properties of a wire to create a secure channel. The result could be an effectively impenetrable way of securing communications, possibly outperforming quantum cryptography keys. "In their device, both the sender Alice and the receiver Bob have an identical pair of resistors, one producing high resistance, the other low resistance. The higher the total resistance on the line, the greater the thermal noise. Both Alice and Bob randomly choose which resistor to use ... Half the time ... they will choose different [resistances], producing an intermediate level of thermal noise, and it is now that a message can be sent. If Bob turns on his high resistor, and records an intermediate level of noise, he instantly knows that Alice has chosen her low resistor, in essence sending a bit of information such as 1 or 0. Kish's cipher does this many times, sending a random series of 1s and 0s that can form the basis of an encryption key, the researchers say."
Media

Free Ads Can Be Really Expensive 141

Posted by Zonk from the inverse-kinematics dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Companies are finding that this 'Web 2.0' user participation thing sometimes isn't all its cracked up to be. The New York Times reports on the efforts of big companies to harness consumer enthusiasm for assistance with advertising. Heinz, for example, is running a campaign asking users to submit videos using their product in inventive ways. The problem, of course, is that most of the submissions are utterly terrible. The result is a headache in terms of quality control and making use of the turned in submissions. 'Heinz hopes to show more than five of them, if there are enough that convey a positive, appealing message about Heinz ketchup, he said. But advertising executives who have seen some of the entries say that Heinz may be hard pressed to find any that it is proud to run on television in September. "These are just so bad," said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive of the Kaplan Thaler Group, an advertising agency in New York that is not involved with Heinz's contest. One of the most viewed Heinz videos -- seen, at last count, more than 12,800 times -- ends with a close-up of a mouth with crooked, yellowed teeth. When Ms. Kaplan Thaler saw it, she wondered, "Were his teeth the result of, maybe, too much Heinz?"'"

Slashdot Top Deals

Surprise due today. Also the rent.

Close