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Submission + - Grandjury sans indictment ends opiod/pain advocacy (slate.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Without indictment, a grand jury in Kansas has bankrupted and effectively silenced the Pain Relief Network for opposing the prosecution of a doctor who provided high-dose opiate prescriptions to sufferers of chronic pain. The group's founder Siobhan Reynolds has been under investigation for a publicity campaign against the prosecution of the now-convicted "pill mill" doctor. Reynolds took out a billboard against the prosecution, and the prosecutor responded with a grand jury subpoena of all records relating to her previous support of other doctors by pretrial coaching and by organization of patients on their behalf. Due to Grand Jury secrecy rules, all internal proceedings as well as those related to the subpoena challenged have been sealed. The subpoena challenge was upheld by the 10th Circuit and declined by the Supreme Court while the grand jury investigation continues.
Science

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why can't I remember? (geekybodhi.net)

Submitted by GeekyBodhi
GeekyBodhi writes: Late last year a neurological disorder robbed me of cognitive abilities and 27 years of memories. I have since re-learnt basic everyday skills (such as walking) and professional skills that help me as a technical wordsmith for Linux Format and PCPlus magazines. But I haven't recalled my past, be it studying, writing two books, hundreds of articles for Linux.com, IBM developerWorks, Linux Magazine, etc. I have all my brain CT and MRI scans up on XRFiles.com. If you are, or know of a neurologist, or a physician interested in studying the brain, and can help me recall my memory, I'd appreciate your opinion.

Submission + - Alerting Co-workers to "Headphones On" 1

Submitted by SeeSp0tRun
SeeSp0tRun writes: Some of us in the IT field have had the pleasure (or displeasure) of being in a server room or data center for multiple hours a day. To drone out the noise, I had invested in a nice pair of noise-cancelling headphones. A short time later, a job change came along, and I was in an office more often than a noisy room. I prefer to work with headphones, and tend to get more work done more quickly, however, it can be difficult to alert co-workers to my deafened condition. An email to everyone is obviously not a solution, and the form factor leaves nothing to be seen from behind. Has the Slashdot community run into this problem, and if so, were there any creative solutions to this problem? My initial idea has been a set of Christmas lights lining my cube, when on, headphones are in. The holiday season will not last forever, so a new solution may be in order, come January!

Submission + - Framework fatigue: How many frameworks do I need t (jeviathon.com)

Submitted by chris.hardin
chris.hardin writes: Have you ever heard of "framework fatigue"? This term is meant to describe the creep of hundreds of third-party frameworks into development projects. Ten years ago, there wasn't a whole lot of choice out there for Java, so the average number of third-party libraries included in a project were 1-5, but today, the average has grown to around 30. You've got Spring, Hibernate, JUnit, Struts, Commons, TestNG, Joda, Unitils, DBUnit, iBatis just to name a few in the Java space and each of these have dependencies on other libraries and those have dependencies on others. While I don't think that choice is a bad thing, and while I tend to use 20-30 third-party libraries in a project, I do think that there have been certain side effects of this that have been detrimental to technology. I am going to address what I think is the biggest from an administration perspective.
Earth

Submission + - Sahara Solar to Power Half the World by 2050 (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: A Japanese/Algerian effort called The Sahara Solar Breeder Project employs a simple concept revolving around the pure silica in the sand of the Sahara Desert. The silica can be used to build vast solar arrays which will then provide the power and means to build more solar arrays in a classic breeder model. They would then use DC powerlines utilizing high temperature superconductors. The lead of the project points out that silica is the second most abundant resource in the Earth's crust. The project has lofty goals to harness the Sahara's energy has a few requirements — including 100 million yen annually — but also the worldwide cooperation of many nations and the training of the scientists and engineers to create and man these desert plants. The once deadly wasteland of the Sahara now looks like a land rich in an important resource: sunlight.

Submission + - It's life Jim but not as we know it, (nasa.gov)

Submitted by Nyh
Nyh writes: NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Nobel prize for Graphene (nobelprize.org)

Submitted by bugsbunnyak
bugsbunnyak writes: The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for the discovery of graphene to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. Graphene is a novel one-atom-thick lattice state of carbon which has demonstrated unique quantum mechanical properties. These properties derive in part from the 2-dimensional nature of the material: quantum interactions are constrained to the effectively planar dimension of the lattice. Graphene holds promise for physical applications including touch screens, light cells, and potentially solar panels.

Geim becomes the first scientist to achieve a Nobel prize despite earlier winning the highly-coveted Ig Nobel in 2000 for his studies of diamagnetic levitation — also known as The Flying Frog: http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/

Submission + - Human Waste Power Plant Goes Online (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: A biomethane project that turns human waste into eco-friendly gas has now gone live. The project is now converting the treated sewage of 14 million Thames Water customers into clean, green gas and is pumping that gas into people's homes. Hoped to be the first of many such installations, the process starts when one of Thames Water's 14 million customers flushes the loo. The waste makes its way to the Didcot sewage works to begin its treatment and/or recycling. The solids, or sludge, go on to be warmed up in huge vats so that bacteria can break down any biodegradable material in a process known as anaerobic digestion.
Google

Submission + - False Start: Google Proposes Faster Web (conceivablytech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The IETF has received a proposal to modify the Transport Layer Security (TLS) from Google. The company believes that an abbreviated handshake in a client-server connection could speed up Internet connections. Google claims that, with relatively little effort, the encrypted connection to some websites could be accelerated by about 150 ms. The company estimates that about 5% of all websites would need modifications to support the technique.
Microsoft

Submission + - Ballmer Promises Microsoft Tablet By Christmas (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told an audience at the London School of Economics, that there will be tablets running Microsoft’s Windows operating system available by Christmas. “We as a company will need to cover all form factors,” he told an audience of students and press. “You’ll see slates with Windows on them – you’ll see them this Christmas.” Mind you, if he's talking about the rumoured HP Windows 7 slate, he may not be so pleased when it appears. A recent Youtube video showed a supposed prototype which has been described as a "trainwreck in the making".
Hardware

Submission + - Wave goodbye to BIOS and say hello to UEFI (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by The Installer
The Installer writes: It would seem that after MANY MANY long years of dealing with a simple system that prevents users from having "instant on" terminals, there is hope in site! Yes, that's right kids, BIOS may be on it's way out.

From the article: "UEFI started life as an Intel specification but has now changed into a general standard that offers similar boot and runtime services as the BIOS, but has the advantage of not being specifically tied to any processor architecture. It also has a different approach to dealing with the process of identifying and activating hardware prior to handing over to the OS. For example, instead of telling the operating system that there's a mouse attached to a specific port, UEFI simply recognizes that somewhere in the machine there's a device that behaves like a mouse."

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