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The Courts

SCO Wanted To Gag Torvalds, Moglen 168

Posted by kdawson from the can't-say-that dept.
An anonymous reader passes on word of court documents filed by IBM on Friday. The documents contain a copy of a letter, dated 2004, from SCO to IBM's lawyers stating that they tried to keep Linus Torvalds from making disparaging public statements about SCO, speculating erroneously that IBM was the principal funder of OSDL, where Torvalds worked at the time. Quoting: "The company also tried to silence Eben Moglen, the Columbia University professor who, until this month, was a director of the Free Software Foundation, and Eric Raymond, a controversial open-source advocate, saying they claimed to be IBM consultants."
Space

Submission + - Stephen Hawking Goes ZeroG in NASA's Vomit Comet

Submitted by
NewsCloud
NewsCloud writes: "The trip Slashdot described last month is complete. MSNBC reports that Cosmologist Stephen Hawking has experienced zero gravity: "Zero Gravity co-founder and chief executive officer Peter Diamandis, signaled with his fingers that the world-famous physicist went weightless eight times." Before the flight, Hawking said, "I have been wheelchair-bound for almost four decades, and the chance to float free in zero-G will be wonderful,". The article describes special precautions were taken to ensure his well-being. I thought it might kill him but I'm inspired by his accomplishment."
Linux

Linux Kernel 2.6.21 Released 296

Posted by Zonk from the a-long-awaited-penguin dept.
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.21 after months of development. This release improves the virtualization with VMI, a paravirtualization interface that will be used by Vmware. KVM does get initial paravirtualization support along with live migration and host suspend/resume support. 2.6.21 also gets a tickless idle loop mechanism called 'Dynticks', built in top of 'clockevents', another feature that unifies the timer handling and brings true high-resolution timers. Other features are: bigger kernel parameter-line, support for the PA SEMI PWRficient CPU and for the Cell-based 'celleb' Toshiba architecture, NFS IPv6 support, IPv4 IPv6 IPSEC tunneling, UFS2 write, kprobes for PPC32, kexec and oprofile for ARM, public key encryption for ecryptfs, Fcrypt and Camilla cipher algorithms, NAT port randomization, audit lockdown mode, some new drivers and many other small improvements."

Feed Humanizing Elder Care May Extend Patients' Lives (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
An intensive comparative study of two nursing home units using contrasting approaches to dementia care for elders with severely disturbed behaviors finds that "humanizing" approaches to dementia care may not only extend quality of life for patients, but also their length of life.
Censorship

Submission + - Law student facing expulsion over online joke

Submitted by
The Xoxo Reader
The Xoxo Reader writes: "AutoAdmit/Xoxohth, the popular law student message board which has previously been criticized for its free speech policy, is in the news again. In the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, an anonymous poster started a thread titled "Just decided not to do a murder-suicide copycat at Hastings Law". Although most posters assumed it was a joke in the "anything goes" spirit of the board, UC Hastings officials decided the risk was serious enough to evacuate the school. The poster later came forward voluntarily and identified himself as a law student at UC Berkeley. Berkeley's dean is now recommending that the student be expelled. As more and more people adopt online personalities in internet communities and virtual worlds, will there always be some issues that can never be free of real-life implications?"
United States

Submission + - Legal System and Free Speech

Submitted by
David Jobes
David Jobes writes: "I have also recently seen and now better understand why the courts and legal system of the Govt seems so screwed up. These are the ppl who are screaming for better methods for tracking internet activities and crimes, but at the same time they do not want to be monitored themselves. If soemoen wants to implement the same or similiar tracking, logging and monitoring systems, the all, the fed jugdes and lawyers, hide behind, that is a violation of thier privacy, and disallow it to happen. It is the same old do as i say not as i do, story.

I also see daily that we have more and more contractors doing govt work, now that is not all bad, becuase it helps the economy out, and helps to drop un-employment. What i see as the bad part of this is, that Citizens, but foriegn workers. They all speak english just long enough to get along with thier managers and co-workers, but then they spart speaking the native language, and not socializing with their co-workers. The problem i have with this, is that in this time of turmoil in the world, and the fact that we are now fighting terror at home and abroad, how much longer are we going to keep funding the foriegn nationals who support the terror groups we are trying to catch..

We have all become to complacent in our living, that we now overlook the core foundations and fundamentals that we have fought for so long to have and keep. I am not saying we should be like other countries and treat visitors to this country, without the respect they deserve, but what i am saying, is that we stay consistent in the way we deal with all the countries, and not play favorites, to those countries that choose not to be open, free and follow the basic humanitarian foundations we require.

Now the reason I have posted here, or more like an update is, because i posted this article on my blog, i was terminated by my employer to me this is goes against the freedom of speech and press, and this was basically posted as personal comennts and views on the issues raised on the OReilly Factor several weeks ago."
Robotics

Submission + - What do you think of lethal robots in war?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Mobile Robot Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology is inviting us to participate in an opinion survey conducted as a part of an important research project under a grant from the Army Research Office. The goal of this survey is to determine how acceptable the robots capable of lethal force in warfare are to different people of varying backgrounds and positions. In addition to having your voice heard, you may also be interested in learning more about robotics and the challenges that face it. Sign up for the survey here.
Debian

Journal Journal: Just to annoy ya I am going to run it in a Chroot 1

Journal by Elliot_Lin
I installed debian on my server a few days ago... that was fun. After I got through the downloading that is expected I went to install webmin... apt-get install webmin ... no... apt-get install webmin-core .... no again. So I wget the damn webmin configuration and install it. Then I restore my DNS configuration through it. But guess what? It can't use it as debian have gone out of their way to move EVERYTHING around. I mean EVERYTHING. It was impossible to sta

Feed Antivirus is dead? (com.com)

From feed by cnetfeed
Blog: Despite theories that new threats are simply too fast, stealthy, and targeted for tried-and-true antivirus software, antivirus is not dead. But its role has changed.
Linux Business

Submission + - Linux Kernel 2.6.21 Released

Submitted by
Daishiman
Daishiman writes: "The new Linux kernel has been released, with a host of notable features. Linus Torvalds writes on the Linux Kernel Mailing List:

"If the goal for 2.6.20 was to be a stable release (and it was), the goal for 2.6.21 is to have just survived the big timer-related changes and some of the other surprises (just as an example: we were apparently unlucky enough to hit what looks like a previously unknown hardware errata in one of the ethernet drivers that got updated etc)."

Other notable feature is the new scheduler."

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