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Education

Submission + - NSW high school laptops used for games and chat (itwire.com)

Submitted by davidmwilliams
davidmwilliams writes: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd came to power on top of a raft of election promises, one of which included laptops for high school students. While the deployment was not without controversy thousands upon thousands have now been distributed in NSW. Yet, forum postings reveal students are using them for game playing and online chat right in front of oblivious teachers.

Submission + - Which PDA for the Linux Hacker? 3

Submitted by Lord Duran
Lord Duran writes: Lately I've decided I want to start working with a PDA; having looked at my dad's iPhone, the thing that really bugged me is the lack of power. For instance, I couldn't find a way to erase some 50 emails at once. Several other PDAs were better, but still — for a guy used to working with the GUI but if something quick and dirty needed, always uses the small Python or bash script, they all felt a little cumbersome.
I'd like to stress that I'm not interested in doing more with the PDA than the common user does — appointments, contacts, maybe a few games, a to do list.
So now I ask Slashdot — what PDA — or mobile OS — is best for the programmer type?
Government

Submission + - Nothing to Fear but Fearlessness Itself?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In last August's Is Technology Evil?, Robert X. Cringely voiced fears that Goldman Sachs and others were not so much evil as 'clueless about the implications of their work,' leaving it up to the government to fix any mess they leave behind. 'But what if government runs out of options?,' worried Cringely. 'Our economic policy doesn't imagine it, nor does our foreign policy, because superpowers don't acknowledge weakness.' And now Cringely's fears are echoed in We're Governed by Callous Children, currently the most-read WSJ story, in which Peggy Noonan frets: 'We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists — they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.' With apologies to FDR, do we have nothing to fear but fearlessness itself?
NASA

Hunt For Earth-Like Planets Delayed 56

Posted by Soulskill from the death-star-needs-new-brake-pads dept.
An anonymous reader sends along this excerpt from Nature News: "Kepler, NASA's mission to search for planets around other stars, will not be able to spot an Earth-sized planet until 2011, according to the mission's team. The delays are caused by noisy amplifiers in the telescope's electronics. ... The problem is caused by amplifiers that boost the signals from the charge-coupled devices that form the heart of the 0.95-metre telescope's 95-million-pixel photometer, which detects the light emitted from the distant stars. Three of the amplifiers are creating noise that compromises Kepler's view. The noise affects only a small portion of the data, Borucki says, but the team has to fix the software — it would be 'too cumbersome' to remove the bad data manually — so that it accounts for the noise automatically. He says that the fix should be in place by 2011." Mindful of Halloween's approach, NASA has put up a piece looking at some of the already-known exoplanets that wouldn't be very friendly to human life.
Windows

Submission + - Wait for Windows 7 SP1, support firm warns users (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Users should wait for Microsoft to work out the bugs in Windows 7 before jumping on the new OS, computer support company Rescuecom said on Friday. "From the calls we're getting, as well as our own experience in the past with all Microsoft's operating systems, we're recommending that people stick with their time-tested OS and wait for the dust to settle," said Josh Kaplan, president of Rescuecom. Citing a litany of reasons, ranging from the risk of losing data during an upgrade to tough economic times, Kaplan urged Windows users to put off upgrading to Windows 7 or buying a new PC with the operating system pre-installed. "There are some compelling reasons for both businesses and home users to move to Windows 7," Kaplan said, "so we're saying 'just wait for a bit.'" Upgrading an existing machine — whether it's running the eight-year-old Windows XP or the much newer Vista — is particularly risky, he added, especially if users haven't taken time to make a full backup before they migrate their machines. Some users have found that out first hand. Among the top subjects on Microsoft's support forum is one that has put some PCs into an endless reboot loop when their owners tried to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. Microsoft has not yet come up with a solution that works for all the users who have reported the problem, sparking frustration.

Submission + - The most influential people in open source (mindtouch.com)

Submitted by mmaney
mmaney writes: As part of its 2009 open source best practices research, MindTouch asked C and VP level open source executives who they thought are the most influential people in the industry today. The list is ranked by the effect these individuals have had on the open source industry. Over 50 votes from executives in Europe and North America were cast. There were a few surprises from outside of the open source industry. Steve Ballmer was voted in because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact. Vivek Kundra was voted in because of his contributions to the industry inside the US Federal Government. Notably absent however are any influential women.
Government

Submission + - UK govt fires drugs adviser for telling truth 2

Submitted by
David Gerard
David Gerard writes: "Professor David Nutt of Imperial College was chairman of the British government's advisory committee on the misuse of drugs — until today. On Wednesday night, he gave a speech ahead of a paper noting that on the basis of harm, alcohol was far more dangerous than ecstasy or cannabis. Today, Home Secretary Alan Johnson has fired Professor Nutt, saying that "It is important that the government's messages on drugs are clear and as an advisor you do nothing to undermine them." Such as inconvenient matters of reality-based thinking, apparently. He did this just in time for the six o'clock news, and the press is up in arms. Channel 4 journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy notes with amazement that "nobody will come on to defend Alan Johnson. They all prefer to issue statements that can't be questioned." It's already being tagged the War on Science."

Submission + - Clever desalinization (economist.com)

Submitted by jbeaupre
jbeaupre writes: The Economist reports on progress by a company called Saltworks on using saline gradients to do the heavy lifting of desalinization. In essence, Saltworks uses solar energy or waste heat to concentrate sea water. They then use the ionic gradient between the concentrated brine and 2 sea water streams to pull ions from from a 3rd sea water stream. It appears to work with entropy by trading the reduced entropy of the desalinated water against the increased entropy of "mixing" the brine and the other sea water streams. The article only discusses Na and Cl, but even just removing these ions is a step in the right direction.

Note to editor: I've linked to the Economist for 3 reasons: it has a better description of the process, a better diagram of the process, and is less likely to suffer from slashdotting.

Submission + - Unidentified Influenza Strain Appears in Ukraine (zik.com.ua)

Submitted by Octavarius
Octavarius writes: Over 70 patients have died from what an as-of-yet unidentified strain of viral influenza. From the article: "The course of the disease was very quick. The symptoms included very high temperature and short-wind cough. The disease started as an ordinary chill with headache and temperature. The symptoms lasted for a week before patient condition began to aggravate." The virus identification process will take from 1-2 weeks.

Submission + - H1N1 Vaccine Shortage- Electronic distributism? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
Marxist Hacker 42
Marxist Hacker 42 writes: "60 Minutes this Sunday will be reporting on how the CDC has put all it's eggs in one basket, so to speak with H1N1 vaccine production centralized in one small town in Pennsylvania. They knew that production was going to be a problem as early as August 25th, and in fact only ordered 40 million vaccinations for a country of 300 million people.

In this day and age of the Internet, when recipes and information fly around the world at the speed of light, why is AstraZenneca and the CDC centralizing production of this vaccine? Are there not empty factories available in every state in the union? Is there a shortage of chickens and eggs?

Why the heck are we counting on ONE small factory in PA to produce enough vaccine for the entire nation? Especially after the first batch came out slow?

There should be a flu vaccine factory in every state in the union- this would reduce shipping cost (flu vaccines need to be refrigerated) AND enable us to ramp up production from 0 to 300 million in a month to keep up with new mutations and pandemics, which are only going to get worse now that Tamiflu is common."
The Internet

Submission + - ICANN Could Pre-Register gTLDs To Placate Critics (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: Internet regulator ICANN is to be congratulated for succeeding in expanding the Internet beyond the Latin alphabet. However, those new characters can only be used to the left of the dot. While ICANN is preening about the new characters, it's facing a harder task in extending the Internet's global top-level domains (gTLDs), to the right of the dot. Here, it faces struggles with trademark owners and competing businesses — but ICANN is being criticised for acting slowly (as seen in transcripts of the Seoul ICANN meeting. It now seems likely the body will have a pre-registration scheme to gauge demand and placate critics by getting something moving on new gTLDs.
Software

Submission + - Software That Fixes Itself (technologyreview.com) 1

Submitted by shreshtha
shreshtha writes: Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT, is unabashed about the ultimate goal of his group's research: "delivering an immortal, invulnerable program." In work presented this month at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Big Sky, MT, his group has developed software that can find and fix certain types of software bugs within a matter of minutes.
Privacy

Submission + - E-mail Not Protected by 4th Amendment (volokh.com) 3

Submitted by DustyShadow
DustyShadow writes: In the case In re United States, Judge Mosman ruled that there is no constitutional requirement of notice to the account holder because the Fourth Amendment does not apply to e-mails under the third-party doctrine. "When a person uses the Internet, the user’s actions are no longer in his or her physical home; in fact he or she is not truly acting in private space at all. The user is generally accessing the Internet with a network account and computer storage owned by an ISP like Comcast or NetZero. All materials stored online, whether they are e-mails or remotely stored documents, are physically stored on servers owned by an ISP. When we send an e-mail or instant message from the comfort of our own homes to a friend across town the message travels from our computer to computers owned by a third party, the ISP, before being delivered to the intended recipient. Thus, “private” information is actually being held by third-party private companies."

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