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Comment There's a hole (Score 5, Funny) 200

There's a hole in the Mag Field, dear Liza, dear Liza,

There's a hole in the Mag Field dear Liza, a hole.

So fix it dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry,
So fix it dear Henry, dear Henry, FIX IT,

With what should I fix it, dear Liza dear Liza,
With what should I fix it, dear Liza with what?

With a Greenie, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry,
With a Greenie, dear Henry, dear Henry, with Greenie's (sigh),

Regards
Slashdot Girl

Handhelds

OpenMoko In Stores On July 4 212

ruphus13 writes "July 4 will be day when OpenMoko's Neo FreeRunner will be available to US consumers. Being Open Source, it is modifiable down to the core. From the article: 'The FreeRunner is based on a GNU/Linux, and it will initially ship with basic software to make calls, send and receive SMS, and manage contacts. But the company is encouraging users to write and install their own applications. Software updates will add features to the phone over time, and the company said an August update will enable location-based services.'"

Comment Ebay giving up? NOT (Score 2, Informative) 277

The latest story according to "The Sydney Morning Herald an Australian newspaper situated in New South Wales, States that Ebay is continuing to enforce it's Crap System 'Paypal' sucks! on us. SMH

For instance it is reported from the article that "Sellers are reporting that eBay is systematically deleting auction listings from sellers who state in their item descriptions that they "prefer" to be paid with non-PayPal methods, such as bank deposit."

This sordid story is not over and us Aussies can be 'Real Right Bastards' when we are not given a fair go.

Space

Huge Lenses To Observe Dark Energy 121

Iddo Genuth writes "UK astronomers, as a part of the Dark Energy Survey collaboration, have reached a milestone in the construction of one of the largest ever cameras to detect dark energy by completing the shipment of the glass required for the five special lenses. Each step in the process of completing this sophisticated camera brings scientists closer to detecting the invisible matter that cosmologists estimate makes up around 75% of our universe."
The Almighty Buck

EBay Abandons Plans For PayPal Monopoly 277

An anonymous reader writes "eBay's has lost its fight to ban all payment methods except PayPal. When Paypal originally announced the scheme it was to be global, but they began with a dry run in Australia to test the reaction of government and consumer authorities. In the public slanging match that followed between eBay and the regulatory ACCC, eBay spammed users claiming it was fighting for 'safety benefits for consumers.' Fortunately the consumers won. Conceded eBay vice president Simon Smith, 'While we disagree with the ACCC's draft notice, we have decided to withdraw the notification to stop any further confusion and disruption among the eBay community.' Nevertheless eBay insists PayPal is now always offered as a payment option. Have big corporations finally learned that they can go too far? More chillingly, if eBay had launched the scheme in America would they have gotten away with it?"
Space

Einstein's Theory Passes Strict New Test 243

FiReaNGeL writes with an excerpt from a story at e! Science News: "Taking advantage of a unique cosmic configuration, astronomers have measured an effect predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity in the extremely strong gravity of a pair of superdense neutron stars. Essentially, the famed physicist's 93-year-old theory passed yet another test. Scientists at McGill University used the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to do a four-year study of a double-star system unlike any other known in the Universe. The system is a pair of neutron stars, both of which are seen as pulsars that emit lighthouse-like beams of radio waves."
Medicine

What Is the Best Way To Disinfect Your Laptop? 545

akutz writes "I've had the flu since Tuesday afternoon. My wife picked me up from work with a temperature of 103.6 and it finally broke at 98.7 around 3am this morning. Yay. The problem is that I used my laptop during my periods of feverish deliriousness, contaminating my shiny 15" MacBook Pro with the icky influenza virus. I am asking my fellow Slashdotters if they have ever sought out a good way of disinfecting their lucky laptops after an illness. Do you use soap? A light acid bath? Just get the family dog to lick it until it looks clean?"
The Internet

An App to Boil Down Online User Reviews 82

An anonymous reader writes "Is this a glimpse at the future of the Semantic Web? A new startup named Pluribo has developed a technology that can auto-summarize user reviews on the internet. It is a Firefox extension that can take a webpage filled with reviews and condense it down into a couple of sentences. Currently, it just works with Amazon electronics, but the potential seems incredible. Ars Technica took an in-depth look."
Google

Google Gives Away Web App Security Tool 30

CWmike writes "Google has released for free one of its internal tools used for testing the security of Web-based applications. Ratproxy, released under an Apache 2.0 software license, looks for a variety of coding problems in Web applications. A 2006 survey by the Web Application Security Consortium found that 85.57 percent of 31,373 sites were vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks, 26.38 percent were vulnerable to SQL injection and 15.70 percent had other faults that could lead to data loss."
Portables

12,000 Laptops Lost Weekly At Airports 236

kthejoker writes "Apparently companies are even worse about losing our data than we suspected. From the article: 'According to a study of 106 major US airports and 800 business travelers published by the Ponemon Institute and Dell Computer, about 12,000 laptops are lost in airports each week. Only 30 percent of travelers ever recover the lost devices. Nearly half of the travelers say their laptops contain customer data or confidential business information.' Kinda scary..."
Software

Poker Program Battles Humans In Vegas 312

Bridger writes "Poker software called Polaris will play a rematch against human players during the 2008 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Developed by an artificial intelligence group at the University of Alberta in Canada, Polaris will be pitted against several professionals at the Rio Hotel between July 3rd and 6th. 'It's possible, given enough computing power, for computers to play "perfectly," where over a long enough match, the program cannot lose money,"' said associate professor Michael Bowling.'"
America Online

AOL Users Will Need to Pay $2 a Month For Phone Support 202

destinyland writes "8.7 million AOL subscribers face a new 20% fee increase next month — unless they agree to never call AOL's technical support lines. They'll have to use AOL chat for support or the online help "portal" unless their issue is a failed connection — and they're being enrolled in the program by default unless they opt out. Ominously, AOL used the exact same wording as when they quietly changed their terms of service to allow them to sell subscribers' home phone numbers to telemarketers. 'Your continued subscription to the AOL service constitutes your acceptance of this change.'"
Security

Lt. Col. John Bircher Answers Your Questions 232

A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Lt. Col. John Bircher, head of an organization with a difficult-to-navigate name: the U.S. Army Computer Network Operations (CNO)-Electronic Warfare (EW) Proponent's Futures Branch. Lt. Col. Bircher has answered from his perspective, at length, not just the usual 10 questions, but several more besides. Read on for his take on cyberwar, jurisdiction, ethics, and more.
Image

Oregon Man Plans 300 Mile Flight in Lawn Chair Screenshot-sm 7

Kent Couch plans on attaching 150 giant latex party balloons filled with helium to a lawn chair and flying from his home in Oregon to somewhere in Idaho, preferably Boise, this 4th of July weekend. This is actually Kent's third attempt. The first trip ended abruptly when he shot out too many balloons trying to descend and he had to use a parachute to land. This time Kent has corporate sponsorship, duct tape and zip ties for emergency repairs, extra clothes and a blanket to ward off the cold at higher altitudes. If all goes well, the lawn-chair pilot says he'd like to fly across the English Channel and even Australia. Assuming he can remember the lyrics to 'The Imagination Song,' Mr. Couch might even make it to Imaginationland one day.
Power

Freeze On US Solar Plant Applications Lifted 282

necro81 writes "Barely a month ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a freeze on applications for solar power plants on federally managed land, pending a two-year comprehensive environmental review. After much hue and cry from the public, industry, and other parts of government, BLM has today announced that it will lift the freeze, but continue to study the possible environmental effects. To date, no solar project has yet been approved on BLM land."

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