- Kilobot, a swarm robot cheap enough to deploy as an actual swarm
According to Clay Dillow, in a cross post from Popular Science to io9, the $14 bots developed at the Self Organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard may not be able to do anything useful just yet, but that isn’t the point. It is one thing to build a swarm wholly as a simulation, something else altogether to get one cooperating under real world conditions. Kilobot is intended primarily to test out the communication and coordination functions that are thought to be the key to the effectiveness of a large number of simple machines acting in concert, an idea whose scale has been held back by the prohibitive cost of most bots. - Xiph.org, makers of open media codecs, submit comments for FTC workshop
Slashdot links to a post on Xiph.org site explaining their recommendations. They are largely aimed at reducing or eliminating the threat of submarine patents as expressed against standards. The idea is to end implicit threats never followed up without disclosure. It reads to me like a means to encourage a put up or shut up situation. - Case that could test the GPL, at least in Germany
Glyn Moody at ComputerWorld has an excellent write up of the case against software maker, AVM, who is clearly trying to argue their way out of the copy-duty imposed by the copyleft clause of the GPL. Moody highlights a sequence of arguments by the defendants that reveal not only that this misunderstand the GPL but also don’t get how licenses that depend on a condition on copyright work. Ideally the judge in question will uphold the GPL, assuming the case doesn’t merely go to settlement as most compliance situations do. - Homebuilt 8-bit computer built by high school student, Jack Eisenmann via Slashdot
- Bitcoin prices plummet on hacked exchange, Ars Technica
- Bitcoin exchange closed after attack, The H Security
- Japan’s 8-petaflop K Computer is the fastest on earth, thinq via Slashdot
- Microsoft approved jail-breaking tool for Windows phone coming soon, ReadWriteWeb
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