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Canada

Alberta Scientists Discover Largest-Ever Cache of Dinosaur Bones 154

Cryolithic writes "The largest cache of dinosaur bones ever found has been unearthed in Alberta. From the article: '... officials at the Royal Tyrrell Museum say the Hilda site provides the first solid evidence that some horned dinosaur herds were much larger than previously thought, with numbers comfortably in the high hundreds to low thousands. ... Rather than picturing the animals as drowning while crossing a river, a classic scenario that has been used to explain bonebed occurrences at many sites in Alberta, the research team interpreted the vast coastal landscape as being submerged during tropical storms or hurricanes. With no high ground to escape to, most of the members of the herd drowned in the rising coastal waters. Carcasses were deposited in clumps across kilometers of ancient landscape as floodwaters receded.'"
Image

Anti-Speed Camera Activist Buys Police Department's Web Domain 680

Brian McCrary just bought a website to complain about a $90 speeding ticket he received from the Bluff City PD — the Bluff City Police Department site. The department let its domain expire and McCrary was quick to pick it up. From the article: "Brian McCrary found the perfect venue to gripe about a $90 speeding ticket when he went to the Bluff City Police Department's website, saw that its domain name was about to expire, and bought it right out from under the city's nose. Now that McCrary is the proud owner of the site, bluffcitypd.com, the Gray, Tenn., computer network designer has been using it to post links about speed cameras — like the one on US Highway 11E that caught him — and how people don't like them."
Science

Submission + - Scientists Create Self-Replicating Synthetic Life (wired.com)

rhathar writes: As a sign of the end days, scientists have heralded our doom by creating self-replicating synthetic DNA. In a feat that is the culmination of two and a half years of tests and adjustments, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute inserted artificial genetic material — chemically printed, synthesized and assembled — into cells that were then able to grow naturally.
The Military

Scientists Turn T-Shirts Into Body Armor 213

separsons writes "Scientists at the University of South Carolina recently transformed ordinary T-shirts into bulletproof armor. By splicing cotton with boron, the third hardest material on the planet, scientists created a shirt that was super elastic but also strong enough to deflect bullets. Xiaodong Li, lead researcher on the project, says the same tech may eventually be used to create lightweight, fuel-efficient cars and aircrafts."

Comment Re:And what's the problem here? (Score 1) 826

Actually, even California says that forcible entry creates a reasonable assumption of fear AND that you do not have to retreat, even if retreating would provide your safety.

California Penal Code 198.5 sets forth that unlawful, forcible entry into one's residence by someone not a member of the household creates the presumption that the resident held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily injury should he or she use deadly force against the intruder. This would make the homicide justifiable under CPC 197. CALCRIM 506 gives the instruction, "A defendant is not required to retreat. He or she is entitled to stand his or her ground and defend himself or herself and, if reasonably necessary, to pursue an assailant until the danger ... has passed. This is so even if safety could have been achieved by retreating."

Comment Re:And what's the problem here? (Score 1) 826

Hell, even in California, where I live, which is considered an 'evil, anti-gun liberal state' when it comes to things like this says:

California Penal Code 198.5 sets forth that unlawful, forcible entry into one's residence by someone not a member of the household creates the presumption that the resident held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily injury should he or she use deadly force against the intruder. This would make the homicide justifiable under CPC 197[1]. CALCRIM 506 gives the instruction, "A defendant is not required to retreat. He or she is entitled to stand his or her ground and defend himself or herself and, if reasonably necessary, to pursue an assailant until the danger ... has passed. This is so even if safety could have been achieved by retreating."

Comment Re:Why? (Score 3, Informative) 540

OpenDNS doesn't follow the DNS standards, whereas Google's DNS does. From Wikipedia:

While the OpenDNS name resolution service is free, people have complained about how the service handles failed requests. If a domain cannot be found, the service redirects you to a search page with search results and advertising provided by Yahoo!. A DNS user can switch this off via the OpenDNS Control Panel but will lose content filtering ability. This behavior is similar to that of many large ISP's who also redirect failed requests to their own servers containing advertising. [12]

In 2007, David Ulevitch explained that in response to Dell installing "Browser Address Error Redirector" software on their PCs, OpenDNS started resolving requests to Google.com. Some of the traffic is handled by OpenDNS typo-correcting service which corrects mistyped addresses and redirects keyword addresses to OpenDNS's search page, while the rest is transparently passed through to the intended recipient.[13]

Also, a user's search request from the address bar of a browser that is configured to use the Google search engine (with a certain parameter configured) may be covertly redirected to a server owned by OpenDNS without the user's consent (but within the OpenDNS Terms of Service).[14] Users can disable this behavior by logging in to their OpenDNS account and unchecking "OpenDNS proxy" option.[15] Additionally, Mozilla users can fix this problem by installing an extension[16] or by simply changing or removing the navclient sourceid from their keyword search URLs.

This redirection breaks some non-web applications which rely on getting an NXDOMAIN for non-existent domains, such as e-mail spam filtering, or VPN access where the private network's nameservers are consulted only when the public ones fail to resolve.

Comment Re:It Hurts (Score 1) 320

Sorry, 'world wide flood' was a very bad choice of words. I didn't mean to suggest there actually was some armageddon type flood, but rather a very specific rise in the world's water levels caused disproportionately large floods at a relatively specific time in history.

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