LinuxWatch writes "'It's been long promised, but there it is now,' began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25 Linux kernel. He continued, 'special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before. That said, that was just the last particular regression fix I was holding things up for, and it's not like there weren't a lot of other fixes too, they just didn't end up being the final things that triggered my particular worries.' There were numerous changes in this revision of the OS. The origins of some of those fixes is detailed in Heise's brief history of this kernel update."
Foobar of Borg writes "AP is reporting that the US will soon be collecting the DNA of anyone who is arrested by federal law enforcement agency and any foreigner who is detained, whether or not charges are eventually brought. This begins to bring the US in like with the UK which, as discussed before on slashdot, is trying to collect DNA of 'potential criminals' as young as five. DHS spokesman Russ Knocke stated that "DNA is a proven law-enforcement tool.""
Business software company Epicor Software Corp. said Thursday its preliminary results show first-quarter profit and revenue will fall short of its own and Wall Street expectations, due to lower than expected... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:46 am
World business chiefs gathered here Thursday to discuss ways to tackle global warming as trans-Atlantic tensions emerged over how far industry should go to reduce emissions. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:45 am
UK-based Truphone, a VoIP service provider for Wifi enabled handsets, announced a 16.5 million ($32.7 million) second round of financing today, adding to the 12.5 million ($24.5 million) they raised a... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:13 am
By Wade Rawlins, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C. Apr. 17--Two major industrial accidents in North Carolina are spurring calls for tougher national standards over workplaces that expose employees and the public to certain hazards. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
OSCEOLA, Mo. -- Kevin Minnick of Knob Noster, Mo., celebrated a homecoming last week. He had been in New Jersey for the past several weeks, working on a construction project. But pressing business called him home last week. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
MOSCOW. April 16 (Interfax) - Russian and U.S. diplomats believe the protection of the environment in the Arctic region should be combined with its economic development, including the utilization of the natural resources of the continental shelf of the Arctic Ocean. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By M.K. Guetersloh BLOOMINGTON - Cost overruns on collecting public comments on a proposed new highway east of Bloomington-Normal will be paid for with federal money coming to McLean County. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By PJ LASSEK View a slide show of artist renderings of the plaza and playground. To see a conceptual video of the plan. The company will pay for a new plaza and playground in River Parks at 41st Street. When QuikTrip Corp. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By William C Bayne The Horn Lake Board of Aldermen voted Tuesday night to annex 9.12 square miles, extending the city boundaries westward to part of Lakeview Lake, west of U.S. 61. "I expect to file our petition with the Chancery Court clerk within a week," City Atty. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Anthony Minerva, The Miami Herald Apr. 17--Earthfest 2008 will be Sunday at the Crandon Park Visitors and Biscayne Nature Center all day. The event officially starts at 10 a.m., but preevent festivities begin with a 7 a.m. eco-fitness class on Crandon Beach and an 8 a.m. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By DON BEHM West Bend -- The Washington County Board on Tuesday agreed to add $771,000 to the cost of building a two-story addition for the Sheriff's Department and remodeling the emergency dispatch center and other offices, boosting the total price to nearly $5 million. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
Bob Grandchamp's op-ed, "Deer herds the victim of a foreign predator" (BDN, April 9) on the coyote's decimation of the deer herd is right on target. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Deb Riechmann WASHINGTON -- President Bush, stepping into the debate over global warming, plans to announce today a national goal for stopping the growth of greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
Lenovo today highlighted economic investment and job creation in the North Carolina community of Whitsett, as the company celebrated the grand opening of its first fulfillment center in the United States. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
Internet security company Check Point has released a new line of security gateways that offer a combination of firewall, IPSec, virtual private network, and intrusion prevention. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
MOSCOW. April 16 (Interfax) - Proposed Russian legislation to tighten control of Internet media is be an essential means of crime prevention and would not mean censorship, a senior member of Russia's parliament argued on Wednesday. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By ELIZABETH M GILLESPIE SEATTLE -- Hundreds of coffee-obsessed consumers chimed in moments after Starbucks Corp. launched a Web site asking customers to pitch changes the company should make to revive its struggling U.S. business. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Patrick M. O'Connell, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Apr. 17--ST. LOUIS -- Every day for eight months, Chris Shepherd chatted online with a man she thought was her friend. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By PETER SVENSSON NEW YORK -- What's scary, funny and boring at the same time? It could be a bad horror movie. Or it could be the fine print on your Internet service provider's contract. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Shalini Singh NEW DELHI: The DoT is facing a fresh round of questions from the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) on its decision to reject auctions for 2G spectrum. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By MARIE SZANISZLO She was an assistant principal at a Boston-area high school three years ago when she discovered a MySpace.com page under her name - carrying her photograph and a series of disturbing messages from students. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By AIMEE DOLLOFF; OF THE NEWS STAFF ORONO - In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech University shootings, campuses across the country ramped up their security and beefed up their emergency notification systems. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
South Yorkshire Police is converging its voice and data networks to cut costs and improve services for its internal users and the public. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
The original version of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was published online Thursday among a "treasure trove" of the scientist's papers, photographs and other documents. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 10:50 am
TOKYO (Reuters) - Bend it, write on it, read it -- just don't try to fold it into a paper plane. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 10:42 am
HELSINKI (Reuters) - January-March underlying earnings at Nokia Oyj , the world's biggest maker of mobile phones, rose in line with expectations, it revealed on Thursday, but its view of... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 10:37 am
Adrian sez, I'm the lead designer for We Tell Stories - it's a website created for Penguin, in which six authors are telling six stories in ways that are completely original to the web. Our first... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 10:31 am
I'm the lead designer for We Tell Stories - it's a website created for Penguin, in which six authors are telling six stories in ways that are completely original to the web.
Our first story, The 21 Steps (a homage to The 39 Steps) was told over Google Maps; another was written live and displayed in real-time, in five hour-long installments, by Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. This week's was by Matt Mason ('The Pirate's Dilemma') and Nicholas Felton ('Felton Personal Annual Report'), and they created an infographic snapshot of teen life and the new media world.
We're really pleased with all these stories, but the final sixth story is coming out on Tuesday, and it's the one I'm most impressed by. It's basically an unholy cross between a text adventure, choose your own adventure, and dungeon map. Technically speaking, it's not very sophisticated, but it has an interface that I'm sure hasn't been done before.
It's written by Mohsin Hamid - author of the Booker-shortlisted 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist'. I would be the first to say that good novelists or screenwriters don't necessarily make good game writers, but in this case, Mohsin really nailed it and he wrote a story that shows a very deep understanding of interactive storytelling; it's called 'The (Former) General in his Labyrinth'.
Shares of IBM Corp. and eBay Inc. are poised for active trading on Thursday, as earnings season ramps up. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 10:17 am
Federal communications regulators on Thursday will examine the ways Internet service providers have been blocking and slowing Web traffic for some of their customers. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 10:17 am
By Andrew Liszewski Growing up I was fascinated with shuriken or 'ninja stars' as much as the next kid. I think it was partly because G.I. Joe made Snake Eyes out to be such a cool character, and partly... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 10:11 am
Officials defended China's efforts to stop rampant copying of movies and other goods, saying Thursday that 4,322 people were convicted of product piracy last year and promising special... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 9:53 am
By Evan Ackerman Super thin display panels are rapidly approaching the point at which they will cease to exist if you look at them sideways, as this minuscule 0.02mm (that's 0.0079 inch) 320 x 220 OLED... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 9:41 am
By Andrew Liszewski The Slip N' Slide brought most of the fun of a waterslide to every kid's backyard. And while the experience wasn't exactly like you'd get at a waterpark, at least you didn't have to... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 9:32 am
My Guardian colleague Mike Tomasky reveals much in his reaction to Jay Rosen’s post about the Off the Bus blogger who reported Barack Obama’s bitter comments. Tomasky thinks that news happens... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 9:32 am
Cellular News reports that an Iranian chess player competing in the Dubai Open Chess tournament has been expelled after he was found receiving text messages on his mobile phone - with tips for his next... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 9:30 am
Borneo's pygmy elephants may be descendants of an extinct Javan elephant race, saved by chance by an 18th century ruler, according to a new study released Thursday. The study suggests... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 9:22 am
By Luke Anderson Have you ever dreamt of having some sort of superhuman power? Perhaps you'd like super strength, or even something as simple as super hearing. Well thanks to these strange Batphones you'll... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 8:45 am
By Luke Anderson Have you ever been kept up at night because your bedroom is too warm? I've always thought that it was better to have it cold than warm at night. My logic is simple; there are only so many... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 8:44 am
jaxtr, a Silicon Valley startup that lets users bypass a carrier's international phone charges via the Web, said it is offering free mobile phone text messages between 38 countries. [via stuff] ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 8:40 am
On Tuesday afternoon, Comcast put out a vague, jargon-filled press release about working to create a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for users of peer-to-peer file-sharing software. The release has... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 8:36 am
TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese company is developing a robotic suit that could help people with diseases such as muscular dystrophy move their limbs again, local media reported. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 8:30 am
South Australia state said Thursday it would ban plastic bags from next year after a meeting of environment ministers failed to agree on a national programme to address the issue. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 8:24 am
NEW YORK, April 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Siftsort.com has signed a multi-year agreement with IAC to provide their family document storage solution as a human resource benefit... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 7:45 am
In the 120 years since several dozen cylinders were crafted in France to serve as the world's standards of the kilogram, their weights have been mysteriously fluctuating. The result is a race to redef... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 7:00 am
Bustling overseas business and the weak dollar help boost the bottom line. Benefiting from a weak dollar, online... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 7:00 am
About half of the public facilities now reach out to youths with video game nights. Some return on nongaming nights to read books. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 7:00 am
But some carriers are leery of offering the service on European flights. For a decade, the French author and comic... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 7:00 am
sm62704 writes "I found this New Scientist article interesting, as I was actually alive (albeit very small) when Bikini Atoll was H-bombed. The article says that the reason the reefs are now flourishing is because they are mostly undisturbed by humans, who are afraid of the radiation. Background levels there are now 'similar to that at any Australian city,' while nearby islands haven't been so lucky.'When I put the Geiger counter near a coconut, which accumulates radioactive material from the soil, it went berserk,' says Maria Beger of the University of Queensland in Australia."
Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob's cooked up Super Blockquote, a Flash version of Breakout in which you operate the little paddle in order to smash the blockquoted words of corporate shills. Sheer genius!
Link,
Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets
John A. Wheeler, a visionary physicist and teacher who helped invent the theory of nuclear fission, gave black holes their name and argued about the nature of reality with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Apr 2008 | 5:36 am
Randall Roberts at the LA Weekly crunched all the data for bands in the 2008 lineup for the Coachella music fest. Excel spreadsheets in turn generated charts and graphs based on gender of lead singer, ethnicity of artists, YouTube hits, Pitchfork ratings, Country of origin, region of the US from which the act hails -- and so on. Link to essay, and here's the data analysis.
SpaceWesterns.com is an online fiction magazine filled with stories that blend themes from western fiction with science fiction, including long-running serials. There's some really lovely stuff here -- the genres mesh surprisingly well at times. They've just reprinted my 1998 story Craphound, the first professional sale I ever made, which is about an alien with a yard-sale jones who discovers that he really, really likes old time cowboy toys.
Link
owlgorithm writes "A USC research group has created software, named ARMOR (Assistant for Randomized Monitoring over Routes), that will be used at LAX Airport to make security and police operations there truly unpredictable. The software records the locations of routine, random vehicle checkpoints and canine searches at the airport, and police provide data on possible terrorist targets, based in part on recent security breaches or suspicious activity. The software then makes random decisions (which are thankfully based on calculated probabilities of terrorist attacks) and tells the police where to dispatch and when. The most notable detail is that terrorists who had access to ARMOR still wouldn't be able to predict the searches."
Continuing in our week-long look back at the first 6 months of Boing Boing tv, we revisit an episode in which...
BBtv co-editor David Pescovitz takes a trip into the alternate reality of pop surrealist artist Tim Biskup. And it's definitely a trip. Then, sculptor Chris Yates demonstrates how he makes a Diesel Sweeties wooden Red Robot from start to finish, slightly faster than normal.
Stony Stevenson writes "New figures suggest that 92.3 percent of all email sent globally during the first three months of 2008 was spam. The data from Sophos also indicated that 23,300 new spam-related web pages were created every day during the period, or one about every three seconds. For the first time Turkey's contribution to the global spam problem puts it in the top three offending countries. Compromised computers in Turkey are now responsible for relaying 5.9 percent of the world's junk email, compared to 3.8 percent in the final quarter of 2007."
People who really, really, really like melty dairy products and bread -- rejoice. A new competitive sport is emerging in cities across America. "Grilled Cheese Invitationals" are kinda like a WWF tournament meets hot Velveeta, and the queso combat is coming next to LA, this Saturday, April 19.
The sammich definitions are as follows:
The Missionary Position: White bread, orange cheese (Cheddar or American) and butter or margarine only.
Spoons: Any kind of bread, any kind of butter and any kind of cheese (or combination of cheeses) but no additional ingredients.
The Kama Sutra: Any kind of bread, any kind of butter, and any kind of cheese (or blend of cheeses) plus additional ingredients.
The Honey Pot: Any kind of bread, any kind of butter, any kind of cheese (or blend of cheeses), and any additional ingredients, but a sandwich that is sweet in flavor, or would best be served as dessert.
Link to info on this weekend's LA event. These people are not kidding, there are rules.
An anonymous reader writes "From the MySQL User's Conference, Sun has announced, and former CEO Marten Mickos has confirmed, that Sun will be close sourcing sections of the MySQL code base. Sun will begin with close sourcing the backup solutions to MySQL, and will continue with more advanced features. With Oracle owning Innodb, and it being GPL, does this mean that MySQL will be removing it to introduce these features? Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything."
In 1977 when Jeremy Eaton was 13 years old, he sent a letter to the editor of The Incredible Hulk. They ran his letter, along with his mailing address. Shortly after, he received a letter from Wendy Wilson. Jeremy saved the letter and posted it on his blog. It's a terrific story.
Wendy lived in Kingston, Jamaica. Her letter arrived in early August, just a few weeks after I’d first discovered my name and address had become a part of the Marvel Universe. Her envelope, a delicate, soft, airmail blue, cut like a cyclone through my introverted, adolescent existence, spewing a flurry of feminine considerations. She told me of her eyes. Black eyes, she said, with a poetic force beyond her years. She told me of her hair. Black hair, she teased. She told me of her body. Slim build, with lovely shape, she smiled, seeming to literally breathe from the lightly-scented, decorative note paper, stationary that featured an illustration, in the lower left-hand corner, of two Keane-styled children, a boy and a girl, dressed respectively in overalls and a petticoat, tromping barefoot through a pasture of bright daisies. This idyllic drawing was accompanied by a script-written quote: “We’re not the only ones in love… we just think we are”, to which Wendy had coyly added Remember m, remember e, put them together and remember me. She went on to inform me she was, in no uncertain terms, a very pretty and attractive girl, very romantic and fun-loving. She told me her favorite sports were lawn tennis, table tennis, and basket ball (two words in Jamaica, apparently). She told me her ambition was to become an airline stewardess, “otherwise known as a ground hostess”. She told me that, in her spare time, she would be a singer.
Nearly twelve months my senior, Wendy was, in essence, a fourteen year-old siren, a rock I’d gladly have smashed into, ultimately perishing of starvation, thirst, and delirium. In my already-fevered imagination, one fed on the hyperbole of Smilin’ Stan Lee and the voluptuous curves of Jack Kirby (the curves of his female characters, not his), I saw Wendy calling me onward, urging me to leave my 25¢ vessel, a flimsy, pulp-hewn, four-color yacht held together by staples, to join her, to lose myself in her smooth, brown limbs.
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that the initial rumor of the SWORDS robots being pulled out of Iraq — and its subsequent correction — were just that: sensationalizing in the blogosphere. Popular Mechanics has a lengthy update to its original scoop, digging into the sketchy responses from defense contractors when pressed about the bot's actual duties in battle. From the article: 'Although others have used our story to generate a false online rumor about these armed UGVs, the nature of those "technical issues" that Gotvald mentioned in his statement, and that Qinetiq and Foster-Miller have yet to address directly, remains a mystery. Until someone can explain why SWORDS lost its funding, and what exactly it is — and isn't — being used for in Iraq, the rumors are likely to continue. If this is the dawn of the era of robotic infantry, things are off to a decidedly rocky start.""
Mike Baehr of Fantagraphics writes: "We recently received a large package of original art from Al Jaffee for our upcoming complete Humbug collection. Here's just one amazing example." Link
Film cameras allow their users to split time into smaller pieces than the human eyes can perceive, as in this video filmed at 2,000 frames per second of a water balloon exploding and then collapsing.
Prepare your own pair of stylin' stereoscopic specs for the 3-D premiere of "Wanderlust," Björk's newest music video, which opens on Wired.com Monday, April 21.
Prepare your own pair of stylin' stereoscopic specs for the 3-D premiere of "Wanderlust," Björk's newest music video, which opens on Wired.com Monday, April 21.
We asked specifically about three drugs: methylphenidate (Ritalin), a stimulant normally used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder but well-known on college campuses as a ’study aid’; modafinil (Provigil), prescribed to treat sleep disorders but also used off-label to combat general fatigue or overcome jet lag; and beta blockers, drugs prescribed for cardiac arrhythmia that also have an anti-anxiety effect.
The most popular of the drugs used by respondents to Nature’s poll seem to have fairly mild neuroenhancing effects, says Chatterjee, who calls the massive media interest in these drugs “neurogossip”. Nevertheless, the numbers suggest a significant amount of drug-taking among academics. As Eisen’s April Fool’s prank [about about a NIH crackdown brain doping] spread from blog to blog, it was hard to tell who was in on the joke and who was taking the announcement at face value. Although tricking people was a goal, Eisen had been aiming for something so ridiculous that most would chuckle. Instead, he worries that he might have hit a nerve: “I think it did make it less funny because it is actually too real.”
Steve Boggan writes about the Church of Santo Daime's spread into the UK. The church uses a powerful hallucinogen called ayahuasca as a sacrament.
The Church of Santo Daime (“holy give me” in Portuguese) was born in the 1930s out of the experiences of a Brazilian rubber-tapper named Raimundo Irineu Serra, or Mestre (Master) Irineu, as followers call him. He was born in 1892 to African parents in Maranhão in the northeast of Brazil and travelled to Acre in the northwest in 1912 to find work during a boom time for the rubber industry. In 1930 he was given his first taste of ayahuasca by indigenous shamans - medicine men - and spent eight solitary days and nights in the rainforest, experiencing a series of visions and receiving instructions from the Virgin Mary, whom he called the Forest Queen, that formed the basis of a new religion.
It was predominantly Christian with an emphasis on nature - on the spirits of the rainforest - and it espoused spiritual growth through the drinking of ayahuasca during carefully defined rituals. In subsequent years Mestre Irineu shared his teachings, experiences and ayahuasca with growing numbers of fellow rubber extractors before building his own church, Alto Santo, on the outskirts of Rio Branco in Acre.
Clarence writes "After some 30,000 years of silence, the Neanderthal race is once again speaking thanks to some advanced computer simulation. A Florida Atlantic University professor is using software vocal tract reconstructions to emulate the speech of our long-dead distant relatives. 'He says the ancient human's speech lacked the "quantal vowel" sounds that underlie modern speech. Quantal vowels provide cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another, says Robert McCarthy, who was talking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11. In the 1970s, linguist Phil Lieberman, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, inferred the dimensions of the larynx of a Neanderthal based on its skull. His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.'"
Rembrandt, a small Pennsylvania company that owns a tech patent it says is part of the digital broadcasting standard used by the TV networks, is suing 14 companies for millions of dollars in royalties. Critics call Rembrandt a “patent troll” and one defendant calls the patents “invalid and unenforceable.”
Rembrandt, a small Pennsylvania company that owns a tech patent it says is part of the digital broadcasting standard used by the TV networks, is suing 14 companies for millions of dollars in royalties. Critics call Rembrandt a “patent troll” and one defendant calls the patents “invalid and unenforceable.”
desmondhaynes writes "Is Linux ready for the masses? Is Linux really being targeted towards the 'casual computer user'? Computerworld thinks we're getting there, talking of Linux 'going mainstream 'with Ubuntu. 'If there is a single complaint that is laid at the feet of Linux time and time again, it's that the operating system is too complicated and arcane for casual computer users to tolerate. You can't ask newbies to install device drivers or recompile the kernel, naysayers argue. Of course, many of those criticisms date back to the bad old days, but Ubuntu, the user-friendly distribution sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth's Canonical Ltd., has made a mission out of dispelling such complaints entirely.'"
Republican lawmakers have accused Google of manipulating the FCC auction by bidding high enough to trigger open-access provisions and then walking away. The FCC says Google did the "honorable" thing.
mikkl666 writes "In their official blog, Google announces that they are experimenting with technologies to index the Deep Web, i.e. the sites hidden behind forms, in order to be 'the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines'. For that purpose, the engine tries to automatically get past the forms: 'For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML'. Nevertheless, directions like 'nofollow' and 'noindex' are still respected, so sites can still be excluded from this type of search.'"
Randy Pausch, the terminally ill professor whose "Last Lecture" became an overnight YouTube sensation, now has a book out that's landed atop Amazon.com.
Wendy lived in Kingston, Jamaica. Her letter arrived in early August, just a few weeks after I’d first discovered my name and address had become a part of the Marvel Universe. Her envelope, a delicate, soft, airmail blue, cut like a cyclone through my introverted, adolescent existence, spewing a flurry of feminine considerations. She told me of her eyes. Black eyes, she said, with a poetic force beyond her years. She told me of her hair. Black hair, she teased. She told me of her body. Slim build, with lovely shape, she smiled, seeming to literally breathe from the lightly-scented, decorative note paper, stationary that featured an illustration, in the lower left-hand corner, of two Keane-styled children, a boy and a girl, dressed respectively in overalls and a petticoat, tromping barefoot through a pasture of bright daisies. This idyllic drawing was accompanied by a script-written quote: “We’re not the only ones in love… we just think we are”, to which Wendy had coyly added Remember m, remember e, put them together and remember me. She went on to inform me she was, in no uncertain terms, a very pretty and attractive girl, very romantic and fun-loving. She told me her favorite sports were lawn tennis, table tennis, and basket ball (two words in Jamaica, apparently). She told me her ambition was to become an airline stewardess, “otherwise known as a ground hostess”. She told me that, in her spare time, she would be a singer.
The Church of Santo Daime (“holy give me” in Portuguese) was born in the 1930s out of the experiences of a Brazilian rubber-tapper named Raimundo Irineu Serra, or Mestre (Master) Irineu, as followers call him. He was born in 1892 to African parents in Maranhão in the northeast of Brazil and travelled to Acre in the northwest in 1912 to find work during a boom time for the rubber industry. In 1930 he was given his first taste of ayahuasca by indigenous shamans - medicine men - and spent eight solitary days and nights in the rainforest, experiencing a series of visions and receiving instructions from the Virgin Mary, whom he called the Forest Queen, that formed the basis of a new religion.
