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Sharks Seen Swimming Down Australian Streets 210

As if the flood waters weren't bad enough for the people of Queensland, it now appears that there are sharks swimming in the streets. Two bull sharks were spotted swimming past a McDonald’s in the city of Goodna, Butcher Steve Bateman saw another making its way past his shop on Williams street. Ipswich councillor for the Goodna region Paul Tully said: "It would have swam several kilometres in from the river, across Evan Marginson Park and the motorway. It’s definitely a first for Goodna, to have a shark in the main street."

Comment Re:Seconded. (Score 2, Informative) 525

Not to mention lack of well insulated houses. Any heating won't do you any good (unless you live in apartments, but that too can vary). With the high energy costs here it's more economical to wear coats if it gets that cold.

Then again, Canadian winters have trained me well, I laugh at people who complain about the cold here.

Comment Will not work and easy to abuse (Score 4, Insightful) 340

All someone interested in breaking this system at a basic level needs to do is to gain access to some popular server to put some code (plain HTML img tags, or javascript if site is vulnerable) that will automatically do searches based on those "monitored" search terms when a user-agent accesses it. This will incriminate all innocent parties that browse those "infected" pages (as if something like is bad), which naturally flood the monitoring tools with garbage.

Comment Re:Sure the MPAA wasn't worried about piracy? (Score 1) 344

Why would you need to place cameras some specific distance apart to record what is essentially two constant stream of frames?

It's relatively trivial to replay the capture, all that is required are two projectors with a polarizing filter over each lenses turned in a way that so that it would work with the users' polarized glasses. Then synchronize the two streams temporally and spatially onto the screen (and play it out of the correct projector), and enjoy your 3D movie.

Comment Re:How about reducing latency instead? (Score 1) 137

Not that fast. Circumference of Earth (~40 000 km) / Speed of Light in vacuum. (~300 000 km/s) = 0.133s.

Also, speed of light in glass fiber is about 2/3 that, so it will take light 0.2 seconds to travel around the globe in a glass fiber. Don't forget most routers take the light signals they receive, convert it into electric signals so the circuits can route the packets, before converting them back to light again. At least this is the case until full optical packet switching becomes prevalent.

Comment Re:Only 10 types of people. (Score 1) 599

This joke is dumb, one could extend it to this:

There are 10 types of people in this world: those don't know number system other than decimal, those that think this is binary, and those that know this might be tertiary.

Security

Submission + - Cracked linux boxes used to weild windows botnets (computerworld.co.nz)

m-stone writes: From ComputerWord:

"The vast majority of the threats we saw were rootkitted Linux boxes, which was rather startling. We expected Microsoft boxes," said Dave Cullinane, eBay's chief information and security officer, speaking at a Microsoft-sponsored security symposium at Santa Clara University.

Because Linux is highly reliable and a great platform for running server software, Linux machines are desired by phishers, who set up fake websites, hoping to lure victims into disclosing their passwords.

"We see a lot of Linux machines used in phishing," said Alfred Huger, vice president for Symantec Security Response. "We see them as part of the command and control networks for botnets, but we rarely see them be the actual bots. Botnets are almost uniformly Windows-based."

The Courts

Submission + - Cisco lost rights to iPhone trademark last year?

An anonymous reader writes: An investigation into the ongoing trademark dispute between Cisco and Apple over the name "iPhone" appears to show that Cisco does not own the mark as claimed in their recent lawsuit. This is based on publicly available information from the US Patent and Trademark office, as well as public reviews of Cisco products over the past year. The trademark was apparently abandoned in late 2005/early 2006 because Cisco was not using it. TFA: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=236
Data Storage

Submission + - Solid state disks - 64GB from PQI, 32GB from SanDi

CravingForPerformance writes: Taiwanese firm PQI announced a 64GB solid state disk with a Serial ATA connector. This is the industry's first 64GB SSD with a SATA connector. The company also says the first 128GB drives will arrive sometime this year. Also new is a 32 GB SSD for notebooks from SanDisk. The price of this SSD is unavailable but it's expected that it will add a $600 premium to the price of a notebook. The 32GB SSD from SanDisk is roughly twice as fast as a regular notebook HDD.
Music

Submission + - Senate bill S.256 aims to restrict internet radio

JAFSlashdotter writes: If you enjoy MP3 or OGG streams of internet radio, it's time to pay attention. This week US Senators Lamar Alexander, Joseph Biden, Dianne Feinstein, and Lindsey Graham in their collective wisdom have decided to reintroduce the "Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music (PERFORM) Act". This ARS Technica article explains that PERFORM would restrict our rights to make non-commercial recordings under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, and require satellite and internet broadcasters to use "technology to prevent music theft". That means goodbye to your favorite streaming audio formats, hello DRM. The EFF said pretty much the same when this bill last reared its ugly head in April of 2006. It's too soon to get the text of this year's version (S.256) online, but it likely to resemble last year's S.2644, which is available through Thomas. Last year's bill died in committee, but if at first you don't succeed...
Editorial

Journal Journal: Ethics of Ashley X or how some ethicist's are total idiots

From the article:

"THE case of a severely mentally and physically disabled girl whose parents have stunted her growth so she remains a manageable and more portable size has divided medical ethicists...She has a severe brain impairment known as static encephalopathy and cannot walk, talk, keep her head up in bed or even swallow food." University of Pennsylvania ethicist Art Caplan said the case was troubling and reflected "slippery slope" thinking among parents who belie

KDE

Submission + - Factual Inaccuracies in Posted KDE Preview Article

Troy Unrau writes: "(put this in your backslash please)

Regarding the KDE Features Sneak Preview article that was posted here earlier, I have a few corrections to make of that authors article (and one complaint). First, the screenshot shown of the K-Menu that is supposedly for KDE 4 is not accurate. That shot is of kickoff, a SuSE linux customization for KDE that is already available for KDE 3.5.5 for SuSE and other users. Second, it states of Plasma "And the surprise of all things is that it will be possible to run the beautiful Dashboard widgets of Mac OSX in KDE 4.0." which is not true. It will run desktop widgets, but not the Mac OSX ones. And lastly, the first portion of the article is a blatant ripoff of an article I had previously written for dot.kde.org about SVG in KDE... of which he stole some screenshots without any credit whatsoever, not even a link. In fact, the whole article contains nothing but derivative, uncredited material, factual inaccuracies, and ads. Thankfully for him, he got posted to slashdot so his adstream should go up. Please note that dot.kde.org is running a series called "The Road to KDE 4" which is exposing features of KDE 4 on a weekly basis that are carefully checked for accuracy by the members of KDE actually responsible for each of those features."

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