Slashdot Mirror

zacharye writes with a news post in BGR. From the article: "Sprint ... announced that it has filed a lawsuit with a federal court in the U.S. District of Columbia in an effort to block AT&T's planned $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom. The suit is related to the Department of Justice's lawsuit, which was filed on August 31st. 'Sprint opposes AT&T's proposed takeover of T-Mobile,' Sprint's vice president of litigation Suzan Haller said. 'With today's legal action, we are continuing that advocacy on behalf of consumers and competition, and expect to contribute our expertise and resources in proving that the proposed transaction is illegal.'"

MrSeb writes "LED headlamps are only just trickling onto the market — mostly on high-end cars — but now it seems a certain German automaker has plans for laser headlamps. 'Laser light is the next logical step in car light development ... for series production within a few years in the BMW i8 plug-in hybrid,' says BMW. Lasers have the potential to be simultaneously more powerful, more efficient, and smaller than other headlamp types. Before you get too excited, though: the output of laser headlights will be modulated for safety."

Billly Gates writes "A new operating system called Cosmo has been developed, written entirely in C#. It shows the naysayers you can write a full OS kernel without C. So far, you need Visual Studio to compile and run it, as Mono is not supported. However, the source code can be compiled with the Express editions of Visual Studio. The project plans to add VB.NET support soon."

An anonymous reader writes "For the first time, an electric motor has been made from a single molecule. At 1 nanometre long, it's the smallest electric motor ever. Its creators plan to submit their design to Guinness World Records, but the teeny motor could have practical applications, such as pushing fluid through narrow pipes in 'lab-on-a-chip' devices. E. Charles Sykes at Tufts University in Boston and colleagues anchored lopsided butyl methyl sulphide to a copper surface and flowed current through it."

First time accepted submitter khellendros1984 writes "Amazon's not the only big-name company planning on a budget-level tablet release; Lenovo recently announced their Ideapad A1 tablet as competition. It includes a 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU, along with other features more commonly seen on higher-priced tablets, such as dual cameras, bluetooth, GPS, wifi, and a MicroSD slot. Is this the start of the Android tablet price avalanche?"

An anonymous reader writes "Atari Inc. has launched another round of cease-and-desist letters targeted at what remains of its fan community. Having threatened homebrewers for the Atari 2600 and 8-bit systems, as well as emulator authors for mobile platforms like Android, they're now upping the ante by menacing Atari emulator authors on the Dreamcast and sites with Asteroids in the name (though in fairness, that site apparently once hosted a version of the Asteroids game). The working theory is that the company is planning a big push into the mobile market, and is trying to eliminate everything it believes could threaten its latest attempts at reviving the brand name. However, the emulators in question appear to have no copyrighted content from Atari, so it's unclear what exactly Atari believes the infringing material to be."

An anonymous reader writes "You may have heard that China sent a manned research sub down to the ocean deep this summer, marking a personal depth record of 5,000 meters (next year it will aim for a world record of 7,000 meters). Here's a story about the sub based on an interview with its designer in Wuxi, China. It's got some interesting new details: the designer had never actually seen a submersible before he set out to build the deepest diving research sub in the world; all the stuff he's built before has ended up in warehouses because the Chinese government only funded technological development, not use."

tekgoblin writes "Starz plans to remove all of its movies and TV shows from the Netflix streaming library after negotiations failed. Starz, which is owned by John Malone's Liberty Media, said they have ended talks with Netflix to renew a deal that ends February 28th. Netflix stands to lose a large amount of content, as Starz has licenses for first run Sony and Walt Disney movies."

It may be more PR stunt than a viable expansion plan, but the Japanese arm of Domino's Pizza is making plans for a lunar store. Construction firm Maeda Corp has drawn-up the plans for the dome shaped restaurant and figures it will take 70 tons of materials and pizza-making equipment. Even with the cost cutting measure or using mineral deposits on the moon to make the concrete, Domino's estimates the costs at Y1.67 trillion ($21.7 billion). In 2001 rival chain Pizza Hut made a delivery to the International Space Station, but Domino's hopes to become the preferred pizza of space with the moon store plan.

angry tapir writes "Sony says it will start selling a head mounted display that provides a 3D theater for music videos, movies and games, targeting people who prefer solitary entertainment rather than sitting in front of a TV with family or friends. Sony Corp said on Wednesday that the 60,000 yen ($A730) 'HMZ personal 3D viewer' is set to go on sale on November 11 in Japan, and is planned for the US and Europe, perhaps in time for Christmas, although dates have not yet been set. HMZ uses Sony's own OLED screen."

First time accepted submitter neBelcnU writes "It's still early, but there are findings for the recent losses of a Proton and Soyuz rockets. There was a procedural error in the Proton's flight planning, and the 3rd stage gas-generator is the center of attention in the Soyuz. From the article: 'The Soyuz investigation has not formally issued its findings or recommended corrective actions. A launch schedule for the next manned flight to the International Space Station will not be decided until the commission completes its work.'"

tekgoblin writes "Google plans to use data from its +1 button to re-order search results and keep spammers at bay. While this would bring Google’s search engine into the social networking era, it would also create a new avenue for blackhats to manipulate search results. From the article: '"Google will study the clicks on +1 buttons as a signal that influences the ranking and appearance of websites in search results," a spokesman wrote. "The purpose of any ranking signal is to improve overall search quality. For +1's and other social ranking signals, as with any new ranking signal, we'll be starting carefully and learning how those signals are related to quality."'"

jjp9999 sends word of a game in development that mashes up Super Mario Bros. and Portal. Dubbed Mari0 by its developer, the game is being built on the Löve framework and will be released for free. The original Super Mario Bros. levels will be included, as well as some puzzle-style maps and a level editor. They also plan to include simultaneous multiplayer.

holy_calamity writes "A startup called MobileWorks claims to offer human-level intelligence to any piece of software, with APIs for image, text or speech processing that crowdsource tasks to workers in India. Unlike Amazon's Mechanical Turk, jobs can be sent in by software without human help and can also be completed in 'real time' with a turnaround of a few seconds. The company claims that for problems like OCR and image recognition it makes more sense to find ways to use human intelligence than developing complex custom algorithms." Not a bad plan — sounds like they've lifted a page from the business model of captcha-cracking spammers.

CWmike writes "Microsoft said today it will 'ribbonize' the file manager in next year's Windows 8, adding Explorer to the short list of integrated applications that already sport the interface in Windows 7. Microsoft's Alex Simons, director of program management, released screenshots of the new ribbon interface planned for Explorer (scroll way down). 'We evaluated several different UI command affordances including expanded versions of the Vista/Windows 7 command bar, Windows 95/Windows XP style toolbars and menus, several entirely new UI approaches, and the Office style ribbon,' explained Simons. 'Of these, the ribbon approach offered benefits in line with our goals.' Plans by Microsoft and others to ribbonize applications have often met resistance. 'We knew that using a ribbon for Explorer would likely be met with skepticism by a set of power users, but there are clear benefits,' Simons said."

An anonymous reader writes "A blog post published by Mozilla community contributor Tyler Downer claims the Mozilla Triage QA process is broken, and he believes that the rapid release implementation does not work with their current method of handling bugs. Quoting: 'I understand that change takes time, and there is always a delay between planning a change, and the implementation. But with Triage, time is our enemy. We currently have 2,598 UNCO bugs in Firefox that haven’t been touched in 150 days. That is almost 2600 bugs that have not been touched since Firefox 4 was released. ... In Spring 2010, we hit roughly 13,000 UNCO bugs in the Firefox product on BMO. 13,000!!! We currently have 5,934. While this is an improvement, that is 6,000 bugs in Firefox that could be shipping today, and enhancements that could be making the web better (of course it isn’t that high, but the potential is there). This is several thousand contributors that we have told "Thank you for filing a bug report with us. We don’t really care about it, and we are going to let it sit for 6 months and just ask you to retest when you know it isn’t fixed, but thank you anyway."'" Update: 08/29 19:46 GMT by S : Downer has made another blog post clarifying the bug issue. Updated title and summary to reflect that he was a volunteer, not a Mozilla employee.

Buffaloaf writes "The brilliant minds at Singularity University are developing an internet of things they dub the Matternet which plans to deliver drugs and other small necessities to people in extremely remote locations by UAV. From the article: 'This particular class of S.U. was focused on solving problems for "the next billion people," those without access to modern technology. Matternet tackled the problem of getting drugs and diagnostic or test materials to people in rural areas in developing countries that don't have access to passable roads during rainy seasons. The company proposed building a network of robotic drones to deliver medication quickly and very cost-effectively--even less than a guy on a dirt bike costs.'"

With his first accepted Slashdot submission, Zandamesh sends this excerpt from ZDNet: "On earth, nuclear reactors are under attack because of concerns over damage caused by natural disasters. In space, however, nuclear technology may get a new lease on life. Plans for the first nuclear power plant for the production of electricity to be used by manned or unmanned bases on the Moon, Mars and other planets have been unveiled at the 242nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. 'The reactor itself may be about 1 ½ feet wide by 2 ½ feet high, about the size of a carry-on suitcase. There are no cooling towers. ... The team is scheduled to build a technology demonstration unit in 2012."

angry tapir writes "Apparently the age of 'superpoking' social network friends and throwing sheep at them is coming to a close. Google plans to shut down the social applications developed by Slide, a company it acquired a year ago for US$182 million. Slide products include SuperPoke, and photo management and decorating tools like Slideshow and FunPix. Slide's applications like Slideshow were very popular on MySpace during its heyday, and found success on other social networking sites, including Facebook, where the sheep-throwing feature of SuperPoke caught on, entertaining and annoying many."

jjp9999 writes "Markus 'Notch' Persson, the creator of Minecraft, showed off some features of the upcoming v1.8 at PAX, which includes the long-awaited adventure update. The video shows off villages, which Notch says can usually be found near the player's spawn point, as well as improved graphics and a few other gameplay tweaks. Notch says he and his team plan to release the update soon, but may release it in increments, since 'there's so much we need to clean up.' Regardless, the next version of Minecraft looks stunning, with some much-needed direction to the gameplay that could rekindle interest."