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Comment Re:Lack of Interest in Science (Score 1) 737

by dubdays (#26023403) Attached to: What the Papers Don't Say About Vaccines

The sad reality is that most people are put-off by anything scientific. I sometimes wonder if the lack of interest has anything to do with lack of intelligence. Science uses some technical terms, and you have to be able to understand ideas and concepts in detail. Many people can't (or don't want to) do this, maybe because it takes them longer to figure things out. So, they resort to the pseudo-news and other things that require little thought.

Unfortunately (and I think we all pretty much realize this), the average IQ of Slashdotters is probably about 25 points higher than society's average, and, if true, would surely cause us to gravitate to the sciences.
Microsoft

Ballmer Ordered To Testify In 'Vista Capable' Case 235

Posted by CmdrTaco from the take-the-stand-monkey-man dept.
alphadogg writes "A federal judge in Seattle has ordered Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to testify in a class action lawsuit against Microsoft that alleges the company misled consumers in a marketing campaign for its Windows Vista operating system in which computers sold with an older Microsoft OS were labeled 'Vista Capable' when in fact they could only run a basic version of Vista. Ballmer has unique personal knowledge of facts surrounding the case, therefore he must face questioning, Judge Marsha Pechman of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle ruled, according to court documents released late Friday."
Bug

OpenSUSE Beta Can Brick Intel e1000e Network Cards 129

Posted by timothy from the price-of-progress dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Some Intel cards don't just not work with the new OpenSUSE beta, they can get bricked as well. Check your hardware before you install!" The only card mentioned as affected is the Intel e1000e, and it's not just OpenSUSE for which this card is a problem, according to this short article: "Bug reports for Fedora 9 and 10 and Linux Kernel 2.6.27rc1 match the symptoms reported by SUSE users."
Privacy

Senator Proposes to Monitor All P2P Traffic for Illegal Files 626

Posted by Zonk from the kind-of-strains-the-mind-to-think-about-huh dept.
mytrip writes "Senator Joe Biden (D-Del) has proposed an ambitious plan, costing on the order of $1 billion, aimed at curtailing illegal activities via P2P networks. His plan involves utilizing new software to monitor peer-to-peer traffic on an ongoing basis. 'At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders."
Robotics

Doctors To Control Robot Surgeon With Their Eyes 99

Posted by kdawson from the no-saccades-please-we're-operating dept.
trogador writes "Researchers from Imperial College London are improving the Da Vinci surgical robot by installing an eye-tracker, which allows surgeons to control the robot's knife simply by looking at the patient's tissues on a screen. Tracking the eyes can generate a 3D map, which in turn can make moving organs — like a beating heart — appear to stand still for easier operation. Other features include 'see-through' tissues on the surgeon's screen (so tumors can be seen underneath tissues) and 'no-cut' zones, places where the robot won't allow the surgeon to cut by mistake. Says ICL Professor Guang Zhong Yang, 'We want to empower the robot and make it more autonomous.'"
Government

White House Email Follies 205

Posted by kdawson from the exchanging-notes dept.
Presto Vivace forwards a link detailing a recent House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the White House missing emails mess. David Gewirtz's report, carried in OutlookPower and DominoPower (in 6 parts, keep clicking), makes for scary reading. "If, in fact, the bulk of the White House email records are now stored in bundles of rotting PST files, all at or above their maximum safe load-level, that ain't good in a very big way... I object to using the inaccurate and inflated claim of excessive cost as a reason to avoid compliance with the Presidential Records Act."
Censorship

Mayor of Florence Sues Wikipedia 196

Posted by CmdrTaco from the vote-quimby dept.
ZioBit writes "Florence Mayor Leonardo Domenici and one of the city assessors are suing (Google translation) Wikipedia on the basis of a (possible) defamation regarding the handling of public parkings assignation to a private company, "Florence Parking". The apparent problem is that both of their wives are members of the board of directors of "Florence Parking", and Wikipedia is reporting it."
The Internet

President Bush Releases US Broadband Policy 190

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the twice-nothing-is-still-nothing dept.
Ars Technica is reporting that while most people wouldn't know we have a national broadband policy in place, the president claims that not only do we have a plan, it's working spectacularly well. "That's the main conclusion of the just-released 'Network Nation: Broadband in America 2007' [PDF] report from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). What's shocking about the report isn't what it covers [...], but what it leaves out: it doesn't contain a single extended discussion of the fact that the US has been slipping in a worldwide broadband rankings throughout the decade."
Space

SpaceShipTwo Design and Pics Released 245

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-i'll-never-be-able-to-afford dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Designs and photos for Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic's new suborbital spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, and its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, have been released." Lots of specs and numbers if you're interested in that sort of thing although nothing hugely detailed.
Sun Microsystems

Can Sun Make MySQL Pay? 273

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oops-to-late dept.
AlexGr submitted a nice followup to last weeks billion dollar Sun buyout of MySQL. He notes that "Jeff Gould presents an interesting analysis in Interop News: How can an open source software company with $70 million or so in revenue and no profits to speak of be worth $1 billion? That's the question Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been trying to answer since he bought MySQL last week. Like most commercial open source companies, MySQL makes money by enticing well-heeled customers to pay for an enterprise version of its product that comes with more bells and whistles than the community version it gives away for free. It appears though that the additional features of the Enterprise version are not enough to compensate for the revenue-destroying effects of the free Community alternative. What else could explain the surprising fact that MySQL has quietly filled out its open source portfolio with a closed source proprietary management software tool known as Enterprise Software Monitor?"
The Military

Pentagon Working on "Human Fear" Weapons 310

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the smells-like-... dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Animals use pheromones to attract each other for sex, and warn each other of danger. Now, Wired reports, military researchers are working to harness the 'human fear' pheromone to create a scent of terror. The pheromone could lead to smell-based terrorist sensors, and new weapons that rely on 'contagious' stress."
Data Storage

Windows Home Server Corrupts Files 459

Posted by timothy from the handy-for-plausible-deniability dept.
crustymonkey points out a ComputerWorld article which says that "Microsoft Corp. has warned Windows Home Server users not to edit files stored on their backup systems with several of its programs, including Vista Photo Gallery and Office's OneNote and Outlook, as well as files generated by popular finance software such as Quicken and QuickBooks." Crustymonkey asks Don't back up your files to Windows Home Server, as recommended by Microsoft themselves? I'm not exactly sure what the point is in having a home server if you can't back up files on it."
Caldera

SCO Receives Nasdaq's Delisting Notice 208

Posted by timothy from the well-there's-always-licensing-the-name dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This somewhat amusing press release of sorts tells us one of those things we've all been waiting a while for. SCO(X) has announced that 'it received a Nasdaq Staff Determination letter on December 21, 2007 indicating that as a result of having filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Panel has determined to delist the company's securities from the Nasdaq Stock Market and will suspend trading of the securities effective at the open of business on Thursday, December 27, 2007.' PJ at Groklaw has surmised that with effectively zero cash resources left, Novell doesn't stand to get much more than SCO's furniture, if even that. Ding dong, is the wicked witch finally dead yet?"
Communications

Alexander Graham Bell - Patent Thief? 280

Posted by timothy from the game-of-telephone-but-with-patents dept.
DynaSoar writes "MSNBC is carrying an AP article reviewing a book, due out January 7, that claims to show definitive evidence that Bell stole the essential idea for telephony from Elisha Gray. Author Seth Shulman shows that Bell's notebooks contain false starts, and then after a 12-day gap during which he visited the US Patent Office, suddenly show an entirely different design, very similar to Gray's design for multiplexing Morse code signals. Shulman claims that Bell copied the design from Gray's patent application and was improperly given credit for earlier submission, with the help of a corrupt patent examiner and aggressive lawyers. Shulman also claims that fear of being found out is the reason Bell distanced himself from the company that carried his name. And if Gray Telephone doesn't seem to roll off the tongue, Shulman also noted that both of them were two decades behind the German inventor Johann Philipp Reis, who produced the first working telephony system."

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