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Submission + - Extinction awaits last 8 northern white rhinos. (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by reporter
reporter writes: The destructive force of human civilization is about to claim another victim. According to a report just issued by ScientificAmerican.com, "Only eight northern white rhinos exist in the world, all in captivity until recently. Two live in the U.S. at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Six more resided at Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic; four of those animals were crated up on Sunday and flown to Kenya, where it is hoped that living in their natural environment will inspire them to breed." If this breeding attempt fails, then our generation of human morons will witness the extinction of the northern white rhino.

Its population was "destroyed by rampant poaching for their horns, which are valued in traditional Asian medicine and as ornamental dagger sheaths in the Middle East. The northern white also lived in an area plagued by attacks by Sudan's Janjaweed militia, which made protecting that last wild population almost impossible."

How many more species will become extinct before we morons take a definitive stand to protect the earth from our own stupidity? Buddha damn the human race.
Windows

Submission + - Africa: CherryPal's $99 "odd lots" netbook (teleread.org)

Submitted by Robotech_Master
Robotech_Master writes: CherryPal, which Slashdot last covered back in 2008, has released a $99 netbook, the Africa, aimed at the developing world but (unlike the OLPC) available for sale to the consumer. But unlike most netbooks, the Africa is not actually made to a set design. Instead, it uses a hacker-like approach similar to the way home PC builders build their cheap beige boxes. CherryPal purchases odd lots of whatever components are available most inexpensively, builds netbooks out of them, and calls them Africas. The resulting machines will at least meet and may exceed the minimum specs given on CherryPal's website, and may be built around an ARM, MIPS, or X86-based CPU depending on what parts CherryPal has on hand at the time. The device ships with 'at least' Windows CE or CherryPal's custom 'Green Maraschino' Debian-based Linux distro.

Submission + - Feathered Dinosaurs Were Venomous Predators (wired.com)

Submitted by Dananjaya
Dananjaya writes: Early dinosaurs weren’t just covered in feathers. They were also poisonous.
Analysis of skulls belonging to different species of Sinornithosaurus, a group of feathered predatory theropods that lived 125 million years ago in what is now northeast China, shows skeletal features reminiscent of modern rear-fanged snakes and lizards.
Education

Submission + - The US Economy Needs More 'Cool' Nerds

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Steve Lohr writes in the NY Times that the country needs more "cool" nerds — professionals with hybrid careers that combine computing with other fields like medicine, art, or journalism but not enough young people are embracing computing — often because they are leery of being branded nerds and educators and technologists say that two things need to change: the image of computing work, and computer science education in high schools. Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, says Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation adding that the Advanced Placement curriculum concentrates too narrowly on programming. “We’re not showing and teaching kids the magic of computing," Cuny says. The NSF is working to change this by developing a new introductory high school course in computer science and seeking to overhaul Advanced Placement courses as well. The NSF hopes to train 10,000 high school teachers in the modernized courses by 2015 because knowledge of computer science and computer programming is becoming a necessary skill for many professions including jobs in science and technology, and also careers in marketing, advertising, journalism and the creative arts. “We need to gain an understanding in the population that education in computer science is both extraordinarily important and extraordinarily interesting,” says Alfred Spector, vice president for research and special initiatives at Google. “The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.”"

Submission + - The nuking of Duke Nukem (wired.com) 2

Submitted by Rick Bentley
Rick Bentley writes: How Duke got Nuked.

Duke Nukem Forever, the game that has been in development for 12 long years was finally cancelled in May. With too much runway, both in time and cash, development demonstrated its gas-like properties by expanding to fill all available space. Co-owner and project head George Broussard lead the team from when he was 34 years old until May 6th, 2009, when he was 46, w/o ever shipping a working game. He may have said it himself when he stated “It’s our time and our money we are spending on the game. So either we’re absolutely stupid and clueless, or we believe in what we are working on.”, or maybe both, as it turns out.

Although the shutdown was previously reported on Slashdot, this new Wired article goes in depth behind the scenes to paint a picture of a mushroom cloud sized implosion. Developers spending a decade in a career holding pattern for below market salary with "profit sharing" incentives, no real project deadlines, a motion capture room apparently used to capture the motion of strippers (the new game was to take place in a strip club, owned by Duke, that gets attacked by aliens), and countless crestfallen fans.

*Sniff*, I would have played that game.
Google

Submission + - Google - The Meaning of Open (blogspot.com)

Submitted by awyeah
awyeah writes:

At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses [...] in our industry there is no clear definition of what open really means.

Submission + - How many queries is too many queries for a CMS? (vbulletin.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After being in active development for over a year with five beta versions and four release candidate versions, vbulletin 4 went gold today. I am not a very technical guy and while they "extensively tested the product and are confident that they have eliminated all known 'show stopper' issues" — it seems unreasonable to have upwards of 200 queries in a content management package. So that begs the question, how many queries are too many queries for a content management solution?
Technology

Submission + - GM rolls the last big block V-8 off the line (buffalonews.com)

Submitted by
DesScorp
DesScorp writes: "It's the end of an era in auto technology, as the very last big block V-8 engine from GM has rolled off the production line. The L18 engine was the last variant of an engine that had been in continuous production for over 50 years. The big blocks powered everything from the classic muscle cars of the 60's and 70's, to heavy duty trucks today. News last June triggered a rush of orders for the engine. The Buffalo News reported "When GM said last June the L18 would be eliminated by year’s end, the announcement triggered another show of devotion to the product. Some customers ordered two years’ worth of L18s, to put on the shelf for future use". More than 5 million big blocks have been produced over the engine's history."
Google

Submission + - Proof of the coming mobile revolution (infoworld.com)

Submitted by GMGruman
GMGruman writes: AT&T's 3G woes, and its woeful mishandling of them, have given mobile broadband a black eye. But new reports show that 2010 will be the year that 3G networks become capable of handling the boom in mobile Web traffic — and the year that businesses stop fighting users who want to bring in their own smartphones and instead learn to manage them. The surveys by Morgan Stanley and Forrester Research paint a picture of major mobile transitions that will lead to device diversity and 3G networks that can handle more traffic and cost the carriers less on a per-megabit basis, without incurring extra costs by the carriers to deploy. This blog ties together these trends and developments to show why the mobile revolution will happen.

Submission + - A Data Center Powered Entirely By the Wind (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by 1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: An ISP in Illinois may be the first company in the U.S. to power its data center entirely with wind power from an on-site turbine. While some data centers use utility power that is sourced from wind generation, and developers have unveiled ambitious plans for huge wind-powered server fams, few have pursued on-site wind turbines. Other World Computing is small enough to power its data center with a single 194-foot high wind turbine, and also uses geothermal cooling, an emerging trend among facilities in the MidWest.
The Internet

Submission + - This American Life Podcast Bandwidth Costs $130k (idealog.us)

Submitted by newscloud
newscloud writes: I was surprised to hear Ira Glass ask for donations to cover This American Life's $130,000 annual expenses in podcasting bandwidth. Firstly, I thought Apple paid for the bandwidth costs of iTunes podcasts. Then, I wondered why popular shows like this would shy from using BitTorrent for distributing its podcast. In less than two minutes, I installed Miro and began listening to This Life's latest, #1 Party School. Why doesn't the show create a custom version of Miro that auto-subscribes to the show on installation? Should donors pour good money after bad costly technical solutions — or am I missing something? Has telco propaganda successfully poisoned innovation on BitTorrent?
Censorship

Submission + - The Chinese Route to a Web Free of Porn (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite waves of glamouring campagins based upon concepts like "for the children", "the western web" as a whole provides little to no isolation of pornography. Which is why the chinese are now marching their way to a place where no countries have been to: a web without porn. Recent regulations include closing down "vulgar" mobile sites, disconnecting "obscene" servers & restricting domain registrations. Yet the breaking news for monday is they are planning to enforce a whitelist on foreign domains: in particular, any e-commerce will have to register locally and obey chinese law before they get "whitelisted". Domains will otherwise be "irresolvable" to chinese internet users. Meanwhile the government is promoting this campaign heavily, calling it a "fresh start". It seems the chinese will have to do without the internet, before starting to get rid of porn.

Submission + - Alternate 2009 Copyright Expirations

Submitted by jrincayc
jrincayc writes: It's nearly the end of 2009. If the 1790 copyright maximum term of 28 years was still around, everything that had been published by 1981 would be now be public domain, so the original Ultima and God Emperor of Dune and would now be public domain. If the 1909 copyright maximum term of 56 years (if renewed) still existed, everything that was published by 1953 would now be public domain, freeing The City and the Stars and Forbidden Planet. If the 1976 copyright act term of 75* years (* it is more complicated) still existed, everything published by 1934 would now be public domain including Murder on the Orient Express. But thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act nothing in the US will have it's copyright term expire until 1923 works expire in 2018.
Biotech

Submission + - Ants form living pothole plugs

Submitted by
mikesd81
mikesd81 writes: "Bristol University has an article about army ants ( Eciton burchellii ) lead the way in highway maintenance. From the article: "Certain army ants in the rainforests of Central and South America conduct spectacular predatory raids containing up to 200,000 foraging ants. Remarkably, some ants use their bodies to plug potholes in the trail leading back to the nest, making a flatter surface so that prey can be delivered to the developing young at maximum speed."

The raid always remains connected to the nest by a trail of forager traffic, along which prey-laden foragers run back to the nest which the path can be full of "pot holes". The study, by Dr Scott Powell and Professor Nigel Franks at the University of Bristol, and reported in the June issue of Animal Behaviour, shows that these living 'plugs' improve the quality of the surface. Their experiments showed that individuals size-match to the hole they plug and cooperate to plug larger holes. "We did this by getting the ants to literally 'walk the plank', said Powell. "We inserted planks drilled with different sizes of hole into the army ants' trails to see how well different sizes of ant matched different sizes of pot hole. Indeed, they fit beautifully", explained Franks. This study provides rare quantitative evidence from animal societies that extreme specialisation by a minority can significantly improve the performance of a majority to benefit the group as a whole."

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