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Democrats

Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat 1124

Posted by kdawson from the crossing-the-aisle dept.
Akido37 was one of many readers letting us know that US Sen. Arlen Specter has changed parties to become a Democrat. This gives the Democrats 59 seats in the Senate, and 60 if and when Al Franken gets seated from Minnesota. However, Specter said in his announcement that he will not be an automatic 60th vote for breaking Republican filibusters. While the senator's move seems to have surprised many Republicans, it is understandable to moderate Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who said, "You haven't certainly heard warm encouraging words of how they [Republicans] view moderates. Either you are with us or against us." Specter noted that in his home state of Pennsylvania, 200,000 formerly Republican voters switched party allegiance last year.
The Courts

RIAA Gives Up In Atlantic Recording v. Brennan 230

Posted by timothy from the wasn't-one-of-the-ghostbusters-named-ray? dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Atlantic Recording v. Brennan, the landmark Connecticut case in which the first decision rejecting the RIAA's 'making available' theory was handed down, the RIAA has finally thrown in the towel and dismissed its own case. Mr. Brennan never appeared in the case at all. In February, 2008, the RIAA's motion for a default judgment was rejected for a number of reasons, including the Court's ruling (PDF) that there is no claim for 'making available for distribution' under the US Copyright Act. The RIAA moved for reconsideration; that motion was denied. Then, in December, the RIAA's second motion for default judgment was rejected. Finally the RIAA filed a 'notice of dismissal' ending the case."

Comment Re: Not 120Hz input @1920x1080 for DLP. (Score 1) 261

by tetsu96 (#26375309) Attached to: NVIDIA Offers 3D Glasses For the Masses
From TFA:

The magic behind keeping the full resolution image lies with the TI SmoothPicture technology that uses the mirror array and optical actuator of a DLP display system to slightly modify the left and right channel frames and then optically offset the grid pattern created in the above diagram. With the high switching speed of the mirrors of the DLP technology all of the original pixels in the image can be displayed with a 8ms field time and thus allowing the display to show 60 effective frames in under a second (8ms x 120 = 960 ms). An added benefit of this offset and displacement method that the DLP technology uses is that the images on the screen are somewhat softened thus lessening edge artifact. Oh, and also, you can get DLPs in sizes up to 73-in; who doesnâ(TM)t want to take on the zombies with that kind of screen?

So DLPs are effectively interlacing pixels instead of scanlines and using an actuator to achieve full resolution. The DLP chip is really outputting 960x1080P / 120Hz, but interlaced together to produce the image at 1920x1080 / 60Hz. The difference of 3D of course is the way each 2 frames interlace (part of same image or split in the way 3D would be).

Comment Re:That's the point though... (Score 1) 1589

by tetsu96 (#26062463) Attached to: When Teachers Are Obstacles To Linux In Education

"The problem is zealots see everything as a threat or challenge; and believe compromise and cooperation is selling out"

This is a perfect description of the teacher in question.

If the reply wasn't confrontational in the same way, then it may have been more receptive.

It's like meeting a drunk woman in a bar that calls you an a$$hole because you're a man and that they're all no good. Sure, you could tell her to go f'erself, but if you sympathize and buy her drinks, you can find out that she just got dumped and can work your way into her pants in no time.
Supercomputing

Jaguar, World's Most Powerful Supercomputer 154

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the minimum-requirements-for-crysis dept.
Protoclown writes "The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), located at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) in Tennessee, has upgraded the Jaguar supercomputer to 1.64-petaflops for use by scientists and engineers working in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion. The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of the Cray XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system. Jaguar is now the world's most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research."
Businesses

How 10 Iconic Tech Products Got Their Names 247

Posted by timothy from the slash-dev-slash-random dept.
lgmac writes "Think Windows Azure is a stupid name? Ever wonder how iPod, BlackBerry and Twitter got their names? Author Tom Wailgum goes inside the process of creating tech product names that are cool but not exclusionary, marketable, and most of all, free of copyright and trademark gotchas. Here's the scoop on ten iconic tech products and how they got their monikers, plus a chat with the man responsible for naming Azure, BlackBerry, and more. (What's the one he wishes he'd named but didn't? Google.)"
Science

How To Cloak Objects At a Distance 136

Posted by samzenpus from the can-you-see-me-now dept.
KentuckyFC writes "All invisibility cloaks to date work by hiding an object embedded inside them. Now a group of physicists have worked out how to remotely cloak objects that sit outside a cloaking material. The trick is to make the cloaking material with optical properties that are exactly complementary to the space outside them. Complementary means that the material reverses the effect the space has on a plane wave of light passing through it. To an observer this space would appear to vanish. The scientists say that to cloak an object sitting outside the cloaking material, first measure its optical properties and then embed a "complementary image" of the object within the cloak. So a plane wave is first distorted by the object but then restored to a plane by the complementary image of the object within the cloak (abstract). An observer sees nothing. This method has another benefit. Objects hidden in conventional cloaks are blinded because no light enters the cloaked region. But objects that are remotely cloaked like this should still be able to see their surroundings."
The Almighty Buck

Stealing From Banks One Cent at a Time 313

Posted by CmdrTaco from the not-like-atm-fees-steal-from-you dept.
JRHelgeson writes "In a story strangely reminiscent of Superman 3, a 'hacker' allegedly stole over $50,000 from PayPal, Google Checkout as well as several unnamed online brokerage firms. When opening an online brokering account it is common practice for companies such as E-trade and Schwab to send a tiny payment — ranging from only a few cents to a couple of dollars — to verify that the user has access to the bank account listed. According to the story, the attacker wrote a script that opened thousands of accounts at dozens of these providers. He was arrested not for taking the money, but for using false names in order to get it."
Software

The Most Annoying Software Out There 885

Posted by timothy from the to-kick-while-down dept.
superglaze writes "ZDNet UK has a very entertaining round-up of the most annoying software out there, and everything from RealPlayer and Adobe Reader to Java and Norton Antivirus gets a kicking. 'The internet has brought us many joys. It's rewritten the rules of business and pleasure. And pain. For it allows what may have seemed like bright ideas at the time ('let's use it to make sure our customers have the latest software', for example) to turn into a stinking pit of misery — usually, but by no means always, after marketing gets its fangs in.'"
Music

RIAA Not Sharing Settlement Money With Artists 233

Posted by kdawson from the play-nicely-now dept.
Klatoo55 writes "Various artists are considering lawsuits in order to press for their share of the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars the RIAA has obtained from settlements with services such as Bolt, KaZaA, and Napster. According to TorrentFreak's report on the potential action, there may not even be much left to pay out after monstrous legal fees are taken care of. The comments from the labels all claim that the money is on its way, and is simply taking longer due to difficulties dividing it all up."

Real-Time Computer-Based Translation in Iraq 338

Posted by timothy from the remember-the-curse-of-the-babelfish dept.
[TheBORG] writes "The U.S. military has been testing software on laptops that translate English to Arabic and Arabic to English to have conversations with Iraqis without the need to have a Arabic linguist on hand. 'This year the military's Joint Forces Command has been testing laptops with such software in Iraq. When someone speaks into a microphone attached to the computer, the machine translates it into Arabic and reads that translation aloud over the PC's speakers. The software then translates the Arabic speaker's response and utters it in English.'" (See this related story from last year about this daunting machine-translation task.)

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