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Submission + - Anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy now says her kid may not have had autism (hollywoodlife.com)

Submitted by latuZimZactly
latuZimZactly writes: This is priceless, except of course for the thousands of children who weren't vaccinated because of FUD like this.

Celebrity, and former Playboy centerfold (so I heard, I only buy it for the articles), now says oops.

For the backstory, read one of many takedowns by Phil Plait.

Maybe Phil could replace her on The View. His hair isn't as nice, but he has a great smile.

Comment Ummm (Score 1) 108

by Iconoc (#45082323) Attached to: Kickstarter For Open Source GPU
This is so ridiculous I don't even know where to start. Whoever is promoting this has no idea what is involved.

If you want to learn, buy a Xilinx demo board with a VGA or HDMI connector. You can learn something from it, and begin to see what a huge amount of work something like this requires.

Leave your high-minded ideas for open source (or free money from Kickstarter) and get a vague of idea of what you are proposing. The costs to fab anything are enormous. A $35 PCI-Express video card with no fan is a much better bargain.

Comment Really? (Score 1) 1191

by Iconoc (#45008087) Attached to: Come Try Out Slashdot's New Design (In Beta)
Please don't "improve" slashdot. I quit scanning CNBC because the website is similar to this "new" look. I like a dense page with information and could care less what picture a bored mod selected to go with an article.

This look is not an improvement.

There is an early Bloom County cartoon about how the UI should hurt the user. It was funny. Leave it alone.
The Internet

ICANN's Trademark Clearinghouse Launching Today 49

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the no-domain-for-you dept.
itwbennett writes "If you want to protect your brand before ICANN rolls out the new gTLDs (generic top-level domains), here's your chance. The clearinghouse will allow trademark owners to register their marks for an annual fee of between $95 and $150. The clearinghouse 'doesn't necessarily prevent trademark infringement or cybersquatting, but it does help trademark owners and brand owners somewhat in mitigating the damage that might occur,' said Keith Kupferschmid, general counsel and vice president of IP policy and enforcement for the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA). 'We've been telling brand owners it's not that expensive to protect themselves and they ought to do it.'" All of the new TLD registrars will be required to check the trademark clearinghouse before issuing domains, preemptively squashing trademark disputes.
Science

New Research Sheds Light On the Evolution of Dogs 374

Posted by samzenpus from the a-caveboy-and-his-dog dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The first dogs descended from wolves about 14,000 years ago but according to Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods humans didn't domesticate dogs — dogs sought out humans and domesticated us. Humans have a long history of eradicating wolves, rather than trying to adopt them which raises the question: How was the wolf tolerated by humans long enough to evolve into the domestic dog? 'The short version is that we often think of evolution as being the survival of the fittest, where the strong and the dominant survive and the soft and weak perish. But essentially, far from the survival of the leanest and meanest, the success of dogs comes down to survival of the friendliest.' Most likely, it was wolves that approached us, not the other way around, probably while they were scavenging around garbage dumps on the edge of human settlements. The wolves that were bold but aggressive would have been killed by humans, and so only the ones that were bold and friendly would have been tolerated. In a few generations, these friendly wolves became distinctive from their more aggressive relatives with splotchy coats, floppy ears, wagging tails. But the changes did not just affect their looks but their psychology. Protodogs evolved the ability to read human gestures. 'As dog owners, we take for granted that we can point to a ball or toy and our dog will bound off to get it,' write Hare and Woods. 'But the ability of dogs to read human gestures is remarkable. Even our closest relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos — can't read our gestures as readily as dogs can. 'With this new ability, these protodogs were worth knowing. People who had dogs during a hunt would likely have had an advantage over those who didn't. Finally when times were tough, dogs could have served as an emergency food supply and once humans realized the usefulness of keeping dogs as emergency food, it was not a huge jump to realize plants could be used in a similar way.' This is the secret to the genius of dogs: It's when dogs join forces with us that they become special," conclude Hare and Woods. 'Dogs may even have been the catalyst for our civilization.'"

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The sooner all the animals are extinct, the sooner we'll find their money. - Ed Bluestone

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