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The Courts

Submission + - SanDisk Sues 25 Companies for Patent Infringement (yahoo.com)

dnormant writes: SanDisk said it filed suit against 25 companies, in three different rounds, in two venues on Wednesday, seeking to prevent those companies from shipping products SanDisk says infringe its patents.
Announcements

Submission + - '55 Science Paper Retracted to Thwart Creationists

i_like_spam writes: The New York Times has an interesting story about a paper published in 1955 by Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College. The paper, entitled "Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life", speculated on the chemical qualities of earth in the Hadean time, billions of years ago when the planet was beginning to cool down to the point where, as Dr. Jacobson put it, "one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive." Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, but today it is winning Dr. Jacobson acclaim that he does not want — from creationists who cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention. So after 52 years, he has retracted it.
The Internet

Submission + - San Francisco free Wi-Fi plan falls through (sfgate.com)

r writes: Earthlink backs out of contract negotiations to blanket San Francisco with free Wi-Fi, citing money problems. From the SF Chronicle article: The contract, which was three years in the making, had run into snags with the Board of Supervisors, but ultimately it was undone when Atlanta-based EarthLink announced Tuesday that it no longer believed providing citywide Wi-Fi was economically viable for the company. ... EarthLink spokesman Jerry Grasso said that EarthLink was willing to work with San Francisco but had decided that it "was not willing to work in the business model where EarthLink fronts all the money to build, own and operate the network."
Software

Submission + - Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages

paleshadows writes: Researchers at UCSC developed a tool that measures the trustworthiness of each wikipedia page. Roughly speaking, the algorithm analyzes the entire 7-year user-editing-history and utilzes the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable: If your contribution lasts, you gain "reputation", whereas if it's edited out, your reputation falls. The trustworthiness of a newly inserted text is a function of the reputation of all its authors, a heuristic that turned out to be successful in identifying poor content. The interested reader can take a look at this demo (random page with white/orange background marking trusted/untrusted text, respectively; note "random page" link at the left for more demo pages), this presentation (pdf), and this paper (pdf).
Spam

Spammer Robert Soloway Arrested 383

Mike writes "Yahoo is reporting that US prosecutors captured Robert Soloway, a prolific Internet marketer responsible so much junk e-mail they called him "Spam King." Soloway was arrested in Seattle, Washington, a week after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. Soloway is accused of using botnets to disguise where e-mail originated and of forging return addresses of real people or businesses for his mass mailings. If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars."
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Doctor Who to be Axed (again) (thesun.co.uk)

twofish writes: "According to UK tabloid The Sun Hit UK Sci Fi program Doctor Who will reportedly be killed again next year after the end of the fourth season.

Producer Russell T. Davies has decided to bring the hit sci-fi show to a close so he can concentrate on other projects, according to the article. The paper adds that Davies and other senior staff are feeling the strain of the heavy workload imposed by the show nine months a year of 16-hour days and plan to resign en-masse.

Davies, a long time fan of Doctor Who, relaunched the series in 2005, 16 years after the original series was axed. The program is currently mid way through it's third season on UK TV."

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