finnw - Slashdot User

Submission + - Leopard Login Phones Home (empowerthyself.com)

Submitted by Majesticsock on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @07:25PM

Majesticsock writes: Using the Little Snitch 2 security monitoring tool, a blogger discovered that Leopard is phoning home. Apple's newest OS contains a "loginwindow" process which sets up an encrypted connection to lcs.mac.com on port 443, but just what information is the new OS sending?

Submission + - Facebook is censoring Ron Paul

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @06:24PM

An anonymous reader writes: It appears that Facebook is censoring searches for "Ron Paul". Searches for presidential candidate "Ron Paul" in Facebook Groups yield zero results. The reason isn't because there aren't any Ron Paul groups — a search for "Paul" shows hundreds. For some reason, the search is blocked. Other candidate show up just fine. More than 500 groups show up for each of John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and others. TechCrunch has the story.

Submission + - London Stock Exchange Down Due to Glitch

Submitted by mormop on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @06:20PM

mormop writes: If like me you feel slightly ill when you see the Microsoft get the FUD adverts you may smile a little after reading that the London Stock Exchange that has achieved unprecedented reliability by switching to server 2003 was today shut down for an unprecedented period of time by computer failure. To quote TFA, a stockbroker who did not wish to be named said: "We are paralysed. Nothing like this has happened before. I am extremely annoyed."

How much does several hours lost trading cost? I know you shouldn't mock the afflicted but somehow I just can't stop myself.

Click here for TFA

Submission + - Money, Child Protective Services and Greed (associatedcontent.com)

Submitted by

jorghahaq

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @06:09PM

jorghahaq writes: "The money, corruption and abuse that really motivates Child Protective Services, a program put in place to protect our children and what happens to the families in the system."

Submission + - Pot-Smoking Teens function better (canada.com)

Submitted by

overcaffein8d

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @05:52PM

overcaffein8d writes: "A study in Switzerland reports that marijuana-using teenagers function at the same level or better than those who did not. Though more likely to skip class, they have about the same grades. However, teenagers who used both tobacco and marijuana did not do as well."

Submission + - Facebook Censors Ron Paul Groups

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @05:52PM

An anonymous reader writes: I'm a member of the "Ron Paul NCSU chapter group". Today I noticed a group news update that reads
"Facebook is no longer allowing searches for Ron Paul groups. Please send your friends links to this group if they want to join, since they will not be able to find it otherwise."
After two quick searches that produced the following results:
Displaying 1 — 10 out of over 500 group results for: Hillary Clinton
Displaying 1 — 10 out of over 500 group results for: Barack Obama
I searched for Ron Paul and saw the message.
"I've got nothing for you. Try a new search."
This is particularly interesting considering I am a member of both the national group, and my university's group. I suggest that all facebook members go Here and report this problem to facebook.

Submission + - How Migratory Birds Find Their Way Home (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by

grrlscientist

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @05:35PM

grrlscientist writes: "Is it possible that migratory birds can actually SEE the Earth's magnetic field and use it to find their way home?

From the article: Every year, millions of birds migrate to their breeding grounds and then back to their wintering grounds again. These birds' journies cover anywhere between several hundred to many thousands of miles, even when the skies are cloudy or dark. How do birds unerringly find their way to their destinations? Thanks to recent research on this topic, part of the answer might be the presence of a special protein in avian eyes that is sensitive to blue light, cryptochrome."

Submission + - Solar Wind Disrupts Planetary Metronome

Submitted by

Ponca City, We Love You

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @05:14PM

Ponca City, We Love You writes: "Measuring the rotation rate of a planet with no solid surface is no easy task, but it's important in determining how gas giant planets like Saturn form because a planet's rotation rate, along with its gravity field, sheds light on the size of any rocky core it may have. In the 1980s, NASA's Voyager spacecraft measured regular pulses of radio waves coming from Saturn every 10 hours and 39 minutes and postulated that they were due to a "bump" in Saturn's magnetic field carried around with the planet's rotation.The Cassini spacecraft recently showed that the period of the pulses varies by several minutes on a timescale of months and years and since Saturn is too massive for its spin rate to change so quickly, suggested that the pulses are not precisely tied to the planet's rotation rate after all. Now scientists in France have found that the time between pulses tends to increase when the solar wind is slower, and shortens when the solar wind speeds up leading them to suspect that the solar wind causes the spot of intense aurora activity in Saturn's atmosphere to move around leading to fluctuations in the time period between pulses."

Submission + - NASA satellites to prevent infectious diseases (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @05:04PM

coondoggie writes: "NASA and its Applied Sciences Program will be using 14 satellites to watch the Earth's environment and help predict and prevent infectious disease outbreaks around the world. Through orbiting satellites, data is collected daily to monitor environmental changes. That information is then passed on to agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense who then apply the data to predict and track disease outbreaks and assist in making public health policy decisions. The use of remote sensing technology helps scientists predict the outbreak of some of the most common and deadly infectious diseases such as Ebola, West Nile virus and Rift Valley Fever. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/21654"

Submission + - Excel 2007 Multiplication Bug reverse-engineered

Submitted by finnw on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @05:03PM

finnw writes: Research scientist Chris Lomont has analyzed in depth the Excel 2007 "65535" bug. Summary from the article:

This note:

details how the bug works,

shows the bug is a rendering bug, not a math error as many reported,

shows how it was likely introduced by comparison to Excel 2002 and Excel 2000 behavior (the bug seems to have been inserted when updating an older 16-bit formatting routine to a 32-bit equivalent),

explains how the just released hotfix corrects the behavior, confirming the analysis of the bug,

and demonstrates why exactly twelve values out of more than 9*10^18 (approx 2^63) possible 64-bit floating-point values suffer from this bug.

One interesting point is that the affected routine appears to be written in x86 assembly language. Fortunately it doesn't appear to have caused a security hole.

Submission + - US Losing Foreign Talent to Europe (latimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @05:02PM

An anonymous reader writes: A Los Angeles Times editorial claims that recent legislation by the US Congress and European Union is driving highly skilled migrant workers from the United States to other countries, namely those in Europe. Does it make sense to have an annual H1-B quota? If such a quota was removed, how does that affect the salaries of IT workers in the United States?

Submission + - SCO Threatens to Sue Itself (groklaw.net)

Submitted by

Groklaw Reader

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @04:22PM

Groklaw Reader writes: "SCO's bankruptcy is nothing if not interesting. In trying to explain why it gave away one of its patents to a subsidiary right before filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection and why this isn't "fraudulent" it has offered an interesting legal filing to explain itself. Apparently, SCO wants to force the Court's hand in approving their plan to weasel out of this, otherwise SCO will be forced to sue itself. One can only hope."

Submission + - Cell phone viruses rising (yahoo.com)

Submitted by dnormant on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @03:40PM

dnormant writes: Just when you were getting the hang of protecting your computer from viruses, they must have sneezed and found your cell phone. One in every 10 phones is now a smart phone — capable of handling data and messaging. That means it's become easy and lucrative for hackers to attack your cell phone. And the dangers are just as real. From 2004 to 2006, the number of phone viruses doubled every month.

Submission + - Wolfram awards $25,000 for flawed proof

Submitted by on Monday October 29, 2007 @04:29PM

An anonymous reader writes: Slashdot readers will have seen an announcement by Stephen Wolfram offering a $25,000 prize for a proof or a disproof that a certain 2-state, 3-color Turing machine is universal. The prize was awarded on October 24th, 2007 to Alex Smith of Birmingham, UK.

However, according to discussion in the Foundation of Mathematics e-mail list, archives of which are available here, the members of the prize committee were "informed but not polled" as to the validity of the proof. The prize committee members were Lenore Blum, Greg Chaitin, Martin Davis, Ron Graham, Yuri Matiyasevich, Marvin Minsky, Dana Scott and Stephen Wolfram. On October 26, Martin Davis wrote to the FOM list that "The determination that Smith's proof is correct seems to have been made entirely by the Wolfram organization. My understanding is that the I/O involves complex encodings."

On October 29th, Stanford computer scientist Vaughan Pratt wrote to the Foundations of Mathematics list that the universality proof of the (2,3) Turing machine was flawed, asking "How did an argument containing such an elementary fallacy get through the filter?" Pratt points out that the fallacy of the proof could be used to "prove" the erroneous statement that a linear bounded automaton is universal. The text of Pratt's email is available here.

Submission + - Yahoo email down - Problem to affect all users

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Monday February 26, 2007 @04:36PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Yahoo email was down all day today morning. I went to yahoo's homepage to see if there was any indication of their recognition of this, but there was none. I was able to login into yahoo messenger and everything else. the Yahoo answers / problems with service section is full of people asking questions. Apparently Yahoo decided to play it non-chalantly when a user called. He was "told" that all yahoo users would have this problem. See here for more. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/;_ylt=Av2Jnc2XngC1uDp 2JRmqHiX89xd.?link=list&sid=396546412"

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