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Journal Journal: Extremism is mainstream on the internets. 1

The web is a great place for free political speech. It is also a beautiful informational tool. But if you are looking for total anonymity, the internet is not great. It does, however, give people the feeling of total anonymity and that is the perfect environment to see people as unfettered, morally unrestrained, emotionally spastic versions of their public face.

News

Chimps Found Making Own Weapons to Hunt for Food 410

Pojut writes "The Washington Post has an article involving chimps and weapons. Apparently, there have been direct observations of chimps in the west African savannah modifying sticks to create spears. They then use these spears to kill small mammals and eat them. It is the first time that an animal other than a human has been directly observed in crafting a weapon for the purpose of hunting or killing."
Announcements

Submission + - Pirate Bay permanantly quits plans for own nation

Jared writes: "The world's most famous BitTorrent pirates decide to permanently drop anchor in their home country of Sweden, saying the whole affair was really for them to be able to "look on Google Maps and find ourselves there." In a response from an ADMIN over at The Free Nation Foundation, which split from BuySealand to form a group of the truly committed, he writes that "Personally, I'd like to say I 'saw it coming', but truthfully, I can't. What I can say, though, is that I'm not all that surprised, especially after the roller coaster ride their forums took." — Now I just wonder what the guys who donated a share of the $25,000 bucks The Pirate Bay has in collected in donations so far think about the fact that their money was simply a big Google Earth ad. Refunds anyone?"
Google

Submission + - Google Losing Its Favourite Game?

An anonymous reader writes: Data sources are not reliable at all but early results from Alexa and Compete show that Google is significantly impacted by Microsoft's new Vista — Live initiative. Vista pushing Live, the question is will the average user Joe come back to his old good Google or will he sacrifice a little search quality difference for uninterrupted and frictionless experience?
Puzzle Games (Games)

Submission + - Old islamic tile patterns show modern math insight

arbitraryaardvark writes: "Reuters reports Medieval Muslims made mega math marvel.
Tile patterns on middle eastern mosques display a kind of quasicrystalline effect that was unknown in the west until rediscovered by Penrose in the 1970s.
"Quasicrystalline patterns comprise a set of interlocking units whose pattern never repeats, even when extended infinitely in all directions, and possess a special form of symmetry."
It isn't known if the mosque designers understood the math behind the patterns.
page 2 of story."
Software

Submission + - Apple's Open Calendar Server vs Microsoft Exchange

DECS writes: Apple is leveraging the power of open source development in a new effort to directly target Microsoft Exchange Server. The new standards based, open source Calendar Server will debut this year with Leopard Server; the source itself is already available at MacOSForge.org under the Apache 2.0 license. Rather than trying to copy Microsoft's tools, Apple is building its own vision of collaborative workgroup services. Why Apple is offering a calendar server might come as a surprise. Apple's Open Calendar Server vs Exchange Server puts Apple's efforts in the context of existing collaboration software, from IBM's Lotus Notes, to Novell's GroupWise, Microsoft's Exchange, MeetingMaker and others.
Censorship

Submission + - Why won't news media sites accept anonymous tips?

An anonymous reader writes: Investigative journalism is dead in America.

The news media in a democracy is supposed to act as a guardian of the public interest and as a watchdog on the activities of government. Judging by the media cheerleading before the invasion of Iraq, we know that is no longer the case.

A good way to judge how much the American media cares about what the American public thinks is to try to submit a story idea or news tip anonymously to any major news web site. The Internet is the most popular and easy to use media in history. Every major news organization has a web site and they put out what they consider to be their product. What they don't do is listen. Not a single major news organization web site is set to accept anonymous news tips from the public. Not one. A few small town papers do and I applaud them for their courage. Some of the independent sites like Drudge Report do. But not ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN. Not Time or Newsweek. In fact, I can find no major publication that does.

What are the news media afraid of? Has the government or their corporate owners pressured them to always be able to identify their sources? Are they afraid that some tips may make the entrenched powers look bad? The American news media is deaf to the Internet and laughs at protecting anonymity.

For all the glamour of the media protecting "Deep Throat" from being identified, that is a very rare case and it happened a long time ago. In today's media, Deep Throat's DNA would have to be on file with the NSA before the NY Times would listen to him.

Slashdot, I'm glad you're one of the few that still does accept a story idea without knowing the author. Keep fighting the good fight.
Supercomputing

Submission + - First quantum computer demoed, plays sudoku

prostoalex writes: "Canadian company D-Wave Systems is getting some technology press buzz after successfully demonstrating their quantum computer that the company plans to rent out. Scientific American has more of technical description of how the quantum computer works as well as possible areas of application: "The quantum computer was given three problems to solve: searching for molecular structures that match a target molecule, creating a complicated seating plan, and filling in Sudoku puzzles." There are also some videos from the demo."
Education

Submission + - Substitute teacher gets 40 years for porn popups

alphamugwump writes: Substitute teacher Julie Amero faces up to 40 years in prison for exposing kids to porn using a classroom computer.
From the Arstechnica article:

Amero was substituting for a middle-school English class and asked the regular teacher permission to use the computer to e-mail her husband. The teacher granted her permission, and asked her not to log him out of the computer. Amero, the self-professed techno-noob, then left the room to use the restroom, and upon her return says that she found several students gathered around the machine looking at a web site. A series of unfortunate events occurred from this point on, resulting in a slew of pornographic pop-ups appearing on the screen. The onslaught continued despite Amero's attempts to close the windows.

According to The Register

When the students told their parents what had happened, they told the administration, who vowed that Julie would never work in the classroom again. But they went further. The 40-year-old substitute teacher was arrested, indicted, tried and here is the kicker on January 5, 2007, she was convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child (Conn. Gen. Stat. 53-21). Indeed, she was originally charged with exposing 10 children in the seventh grade class to the materials on the internet, but six of the charges were dropped.

I guess "Ambush Porn" really is dangerous.
Movies

Truth in Ratings Act Reintroduced 302

dropgoal writes "Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas (and GOP presidential candidate) has reintroduced the Truth in Ratings Act. Like the previous version that failed to pass last year, Sen. Brownback's bill would make the FTC responsible for overseeing the video game ratings system and possibly result in a unified ratings system for games, movies, and TV. The ESRB would also have to review all game footage before issuing a rating. Currently, the ESRB hands out ratings after viewing a reel with representative content prepared by the developers. Sen. Brownback thinks that's not enough. 'Video game reviewers should be required to review the entire content of a game to ensure the accuracy of the rating. The current video game ratings system is not as accurate as it could be because reviewers do not see the full content of games and do not even play the games they rate', he said."
Programming

Submission + - Wisdom of Crowds Forgets "Pong" From Top 1

An anonymous reader writes: This list, built out with the help of Slashdotters and numerous others, is much closer now to being a definitive list of the top 150 contributors of all time to the nexus of technologies that first spawned the Internet, and since have helped maintain and expand it. The list was previously discussed on Slashdot in a shorter, earlier version/ Despite the wisdom of crowds, it still doesn't yet include Paul Allen or Seymour Cray, nor Zimmerman (PGP), Tomlinson (@), or Bushnell (Pong).
Sci-Fi

Submission + - New SciFi Series

gribbler writes: This week a Vancouver based company debuted a teaser for their new SciFi show called Sanctuary, a compelling new science fiction series. Sanctuary's cast is led by internationally-recognized actor Amanda Tapping (Stargate: SG-1, Stargate Atlantis). Created by veteran science fiction writer/producer Damian Kindler, Sanctuary also stars Robin Dunne (Dawson's Creek, The Big Hit, Species 3) and Emilie Ullerup (Battlestar Galactica). "The future of media is convergence: television, video gaming and social networking will combine to become a single, powerful entertainment medium," says Marc Aubanel, co-founder of Stage 3 Media(TM). "Sanctuary is poised to be at the forefront of this revolution." Here are a few links to some info and the website with the trailer.
XBox (Games)

Submission + - How To Tell If You Have the "Quiet" Xbox 3

Janet Oreily writes: "Gameworld Network writes:

"Using this comparison image you should be able to recognise which drive is yours, based on the look of the DVD tray. If you've purchased an Xbox 360 recently, chances are you have the quieter Benq drive. Personally I've had a Toshiba drive from day one and have never thought it was too loud, though I wouldn't turn down a quieter one. The order of the drives, from loudest to quietest is as follows: Hitachi, Toshiba, Benq.""

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