roby2358 writes " TrenchMice is a new community-moderated website that provides 'inside opinions and insights' about businesses and employers. But instead of the reporting bias toward management and venture capitalists that is so common in the mainstream media, on TrenchMice the opinions and information come from posts by the people in the trenches. Users — who can post anonymously if they choose — can provide topics, scoops, or comments, and there is a thorough rating system. To keep the site from turning into a 'whack-a-company' fest, users build up 'Cred' (something like Karma) as they provide insights on companies and employers. The site is based in Seattle and most of the early content is about Seattle companies, but they have ambitions to grow nationwide, with a goal is to see if a site based completely on open-source technology, and rigorously community moderated, can run on a pretty much automatic basis. Could be an interesting model for future social sites if it takes off. Full disclosure: I know these guys and have posted on the site, but I don't work for them."

Kevin C. Tofel writes "Using a simple concept, iPhotoMEASURE software can measure any objects you can take a picture of. Include a printout of a 7.5- or 15-inch square in the photo and the software can measure any distance or object in the pic to within 99.5% accuracy. Although geared towards contractors, there's any number of consumer usage scenarios as well. Enough to justify a $99 price tag? Jury's still out on that."

destinyland writes "Friday police arrested 64-year-old Keith Henson. In 2000 after picketing a Scientology complex, he was arrested as a threat because of a joke Usenet post about "Tom Cruise Missiles." He fled to Canada after being found guilty of "interfering" with a religion, and spent the next 6 years living as a fugitive. Besides being a digital encryption and free speech advocate, he's one of the original Burr-Brown/Texas Instruments researchers and a co-founder of the Space Colony movement."

tabandmountaindew writes "Too much time is wasted re-implementing code that someone else has already done, for the sole reason it's faster than finding the other code. Previous source code search engines, such as google codesearch and krugle, only considered individual files on their own, leading to poor quality results, making them only useful when the amount of time to re-implement was extremely high. According to a recent newsforge article a fledgling source-code search engine All The Code is aiming to change all of this. By looking at code, not just on its own, but also how it is used, it is able to return more relevant results. This seems like just what we need to unify the open-source community, leading to an actual common repository of unique code, and ending the cycle of unnecessary reimplementing."

w1z4rd writes "According to an article in the Guardian, scientists and economists have been offered large bribes by a lobbying group funded by ExxonMobil. The offers were extended by the American Enterprise Institute group, which apparently has numerous ties to the Bush administration. Couched in terms of an offer to write 'dissenting papers' against the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, several scientists contacted for the article refused the offers on conflict of interest grounds."

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Microsoft beat out Johnson & Johnson for the top spot in the annual Wall Street Journal survey of the reputations of U.S. companies. Bill Gates's personal philanthropy boosted the public's opinion of Microsoft, helping to end J&J's seven-year run at No. 1. From the article: 'Mr. Gates demonstrates how much the reputation of a corporate leader can rub off on his company. Formerly chief executive officer and now chairman of Microsoft, he contributed to a marked improvement in the company's emotional appeal. Jeanie Cummins, a survey respondent and homemaker in Olive Hill, Ky., says Mr. Gates's philanthropy made her a much bigger fan of Microsoft. "He showed he cared more for people than all the money he made building Microsoft from the ground up," she says. "I wish all the other big shots could do something like this." To be sure, some respondents still complain that Microsoft bullies its competitors and unfairly monopolizes the software business. But such criticism is less biting and less pervasive than it was just a few years ago.'"

An anonymous reader asks: "I got a R&D job offer with a large company in Philadelphia area last week. It includes a relocation package that they told me was standard for my position. After I accepted the offer and made plans to terminate my current job, the recruiter handed me off to their relocation department, where I was told that my relocation package is significantly less than what I was promised. The relocation manager tells me that whenever there is conflict between their relocation policy and the offer, their internal relocation policy supersedes. Is this type of switch-and-bait common practice in corporate America? If you have gone through this nightmare before, any advice on how to respond to it?"

gollum123 writes "Reports about a study that found microwave ovens can be used to sterilize kitchen sponges sent people hurrying to test the idea this week — with sometimes disastrous results. A team at the University of Florida found that two minutes in the microwave at full power could kill a range of bacteria, viruses and parasites on kitchen sponges. They described how they soaked the sponges in wastewater and then zapped them. But several experimenters evidently left out the crucial step of wetting the sponge. "Just wanted you to know that your article on microwaving sponges and scrubbers aroused my interest. However, when I put my sponge/scrubber into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off," one correspondent wrote in an e-mail to Reuters."

ianchaos writes "There's no better way to assure the eventual destruction of mankind than by the event sponsored by Singapore's Defence Science and Technology Agency. Newscientist has a good writeup of the robot challenge, which is to build a robot that can operate autonomously in urban warfare conditions, moving in and out of buildings to search and destroy targets like a human soldier."

Lo5 writes with the excellent news that Dell is selling desktop computers without Windows preinstalled. They are called "n Series"; you can choose from Dimension E520, E521, or C521 desktops. The hard drive comes unformatted.

Several readers wrote in to let us know that Wal-Mart is planning to buy SUSE Linux vouchers from Microsoft in the course of building out its infrastructure. These are the support vouchers that Microsoft must distribute to hold up its end of the bargain with Novell. Wal-Mart has been a customer of Red Hat Linux. CBR Online notes that the deal is not entirely unexpected because Microsoft's COO, Kevin Turner, is the former CIO of Wal-Mart.

ReluctantRefactorer writes with an article in the Register reporting that Blu-ray copy-protection technology has been sidestepped by muslix64, the same hacker who bypassed the DRM technology of rival HD DVD discs last month. From the article: "muslix64's work has effectively sparked off a [cat]-and-mouse game between hackers and the entertainment industry, where consumers are likely to face compatibility problems while footing the bill for the entertainment industry's insistence on pushing ultimately flawed DRM technology on an unwilling public." WesleyTech also covers the crack and links the doom9 forum page where BackupBluRayv021 was announced.

Second five-eighth writes "The Amiga is alive and sort of well (you can get the OS, but not the hardware), and Ars Technica has a review of the final version of AmigaOS 4. New features include limited memory protection, 3D display drivers, an improved suite of applications (the bounty for porting Mozilla to AmigaOS has yet to be claimed), and much better 680x0 emulation. Perhaps most telling, the reviewer was able to move his daily writing workflow from Windows XP to AmigaOS 4.0: 'Not only was it possible to do this, but having done so I feel no urge to switch back. It is nice to not have any distractions when working — there is no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications, no constant reminders for updates or to download new virus definitions and even if the worst happens and the system locks up, it takes only seven seconds to reboot and get back to a functional desktop.'"

The AP reports that the first anti-missile defense system has been installed for testing on a commercial jet, a FedEx cargo carrier. The system is intended to detect the launch of a shoulder-fired missile at takeoff or landing, and disable the missile with a laser beam. Sen. Barbara Baxter (D-California) is one of the supporters of the system. She and other members of Congress are hoping to equip all US commercial passenger liners with this system in 20 years, at a cost of billions of dollars. Is this good common sense or the costly future of a society hobbled by fear of terrorism?

Stony Stevenson writes "Even while Cisco Systems is suing Apple for violating its iPhone trademark, an open-source enthusiast is accusing Cisco itself of infringing copyright in the same product. From the article: "Cisco has not published the source code for some components of the WIP300 iPhone in accordance with its open-source licensing agreement, said Armijn Hemel, a consultant with Loohuis Consulting and half of the team running the GPL Violations Project, an organization that identifies and publicizes misuse of GPL licenses and takes some violators to court."