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Submission + - Mystery illness from meteor crash is solved. (nationalgeographic.com)

Submitted by Technician
Technician writes: The meteor that crashed in Peru caused a mystery illnesses. The cause of the illness has been found. The meteor was not toxic. The ground water it contacted contains arsenic. The resulting steam cloud is what caused the mystery illness. "The meteorite created the gases when the object's hot surface met an underground water supply tainted with arsenic, the scientists said." http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070921-meteor-peru.html There is a very good photo of the impact crater in the article. The rim of the crater is lined with people for a size comparison.
Security

Submission + - Cops, trojans and censorship (misaustralia.com)

Submitted by
retrofuturist
retrofuturist writes: "The Australian Financial Review has run front page story today about how that Australia's federal cops not only want the power to legally use trojans against suspects, they also want powers to be able to filter the Web. That has a LOT of people very concerned ... Trojans: Cybercrime bid to hack the hackers http://www.misaustralia.com/viewer.aspx?EDP://20070924000019439852&magsection=news-headlines-home&portal=_misnews&title=Cybercrime+bid+to+hack+the+hackers Censorship: Net censor plan raises hackles http://www.misaustralia.com/viewer.aspx?EDP://20070924000019439760&magsection=news-headlines-list&portal=_misnews&title=Net+censor+plan+raises+hackles"
The Internet

Submission + - Too many productivity tips = complete lack thereof (stopdoingnothing.com)

Submitted by
patrick24601
patrick24601 writes: "A jewel of mine from http://stopdoingnothing.com/ The human brain can only handle so much information in a short period of time. As I approach 40 I am learning this limit very well. So whenever I see an article, blog posting, email, etc. that says '98 tips to a more productive life' I instantly delete it. I can tell before even pulling up the list that this is a list of items that is impracticle for me to absorb in a single sitting. Or in a single week. Or in a single month. If you ever sit down and listen to a great music jam session (primarily Jazz/R&B IMO) you will find out that the silence in the music is just as important (if not more) as the actual notes that are being played. You cannot always have noise. Just a good guitar riff or kick drum every now and then in the hook can make for a great tune. So if I subscribe to several productivity RSS feeds, and at least once a week I see a post about ' The top 38423 ways to promote your blog' or '98432 ways you can have everything you want right now' I will be forever trying to keep up with all of the items. The end result is that I will be LESS productive than I was when I started. No thank you sir! My advice to you: Don't read these posts, or if you do just glaze over the first 10 to see if you see anything new. Otherwise delete it because it will just fry your brain trying to implement. Odds are anyways you've already read them in the past month."

Feed Engadget: OLPC announces $399 "Give 1 Get 1" holiday XO promo (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Laptops

Starting November 12th you can finally fork over some cash for an XO and get one shipped to your door -- as long as you're willing pay double for some kid in a developing nation to get one as well. It'll cost you $399, which is hardly a bargain given the other cheap-as-free laptops making the rounds these days, but the XO is undoubtedly novel, and we imagine not a few nerds will want to get their hands on one this holiday season, or at least bestow the little green machine upon one of their nerdling progeny. Apparently this offer, which has been rumored for quite a while now, will only last for a limited time -- OLPC News has it on good authority the promo will go for two weeks, and the machines will ship to your door in time for Christmas -- but it's never to early or late to donate toward the project in general. $200 will build and ship a laptop to one of those millions of kids who totally needed to be playing Doom yesterday.

[Via OLPC News]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Feed Science Daily: Vitamin E Trials 'Fatally Flawed' (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
Generations of studies on vitamin E may be largely meaningless, scientists say, because new research has demonstrated that the levels of this micronutrient necessary to reduce oxidative stress are far higher than those that have been commonly used in clinical trials. Researchers recently concluded that the levels of vitamin E necessary to reduce oxidative stress are about 1,600 to 3,200 I.U. daily, or four to eight times higher than those used in almost all past clinical trials.
Programming

Submission + - Lisaac : The first prototype object compiler (u-strasbg.fr)

Submitted by
Ontologia
Ontologia writes: "Lisaac is a new prototype based object language. It stands as a Self and SmallTalk successor and takes some Eiffel ideas like genericity and contract programming. The goal of the project is to provide a high level language as fast as C.
In fact, with some benchmarks on an mpeg2 decoder rigorously translated from C, Lisaac is 17% faster to 44% slower than C, for 40 % less lines of code with lots of gcc optimizations.
Lisaac provides a lot of powerful features thanks to the prototype based object model : Absolutely all is object, contract programming, dynamic inheritance, block type which is a list of instruction giving functional programming facilities, and so on..

The 0.12 version, distributed in GPLv3, is the latest stable version for the 0.2 specification.
Lisaac was convincing enough for writing IsaacOS, a fully object operating system. IsaacOS runs on five different architectures."

A Database for the Office? 156

Posted by Cliff from the something-to-start-small-and-build-on dept.
travellerjohn asks: "I work in a small company (200 people in 7 offices), where the staff uses Microsoft Access to create various databases. Most of the time they lose interest before the databases become complex or important enough to warrant the IT department getting involved. However, from time to time, someone turns up at our door looking for help with their pet project, often starting with statements like 'it should work over the intranet' or questions like 'why can't it store documents and pictures?' or 'how do I control user access?' When we sit them down and explain how much it will cost to rewrite their database in PHP/VB/JSP, or whatever we sound unhelpful and expensive. What database tool does Slashdot recommend I provide our staff? It has got to be easy to use, web enabled, capable of storing documents and pictures and offer user level security. We have tried Sharepoint with some success but that is pretty limited, too, and I have looked at Oracle Application Express. Open source would be good, but I would pay for the right product. Any suggestions?"

Microsoft to Turn to Driver Quality Ratings System 333

Posted by samzenpus from the four-stars dept.
QT writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft is finally trying to do something about PC driver problems. A new crash-report-driven Driver Quality Rating system will be used in Windows Vista to rate drivers. Drivers that rate poorly in real world use by users will lose their logo certification status, which would be bad news for OEMs and the device manufacturers themselves. Maybe now submitting crash reports will feel more useful? This is long overdue."

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