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User Journal

Journal Journal: Rethinking Intelligence

Journal by stuffduff
This weekend as I was digging for information about pacemaker lead extraction, and made one of those accidental, serendipitous discoveries that I found extremely interesting. The page I ended up on was http://snipurl.com.nyud.net/236gn [American Scientist Online]. This review article by J. Scott Turner on Mile Hansell's Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture had in interesting image, that of an amoebic 'test' which is
Movies

Journal Journal: Help Cheeta Get His Star!

Journal by stuffduff
As a kid I can remember Cheeta's work in the dozen Tarzan movies made with Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller and actress Maureen O'Sullivan. Cheeta is now the recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest living non-human primate. Let's get Cheeta his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame!

From the site: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/GoCheeta/

User Journal

Journal Journal: Stories from the omelet line

Journal by stuffduff

When Fred started working the omelet line I was still bringing in my own little containers of eggbeaters. He used to tease me that his eggs weren't good enough. And I would always have to pry open a corner of the carton for him so the eggs would be ready to pour because the containers were so very difficult to open with gloves on. Then he surprised me one day with the news that the Nebraska Cafe had started carrying a new product, which was low cholesterol so I didn't have to bring my eggbeat
Microsoft

Submission + - VBA Going Away, Mac's Now, PC's Soon 2

Submitted by Nom du Keyboard
Nom du Keyboard writes: As Microsoft drops support for older Office file formats, it looks like Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is also going soon. Mac Office 2008 has dropped it in favor of enhanced support for AppleScript, and Office 2009 is scheduled to lose it in favor of Mac incompatible Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) or Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). This sounds like the Mother of All Backwards and Cross-Platform Incompatibilities — especially since there appears to be no transition period where both the old and new scripting languages will be simultaneously supported. And as past experience with Visual Studio .NET has shown, upgrade tools are far less than perfect. So is Microsoft shooting themselves in the upgrade foot here?
Caldera

Submission + - Best Example of SCO's Absurd Claims

Submitted by
UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: "Groklaw has posted IBM's explanation of SCO's claims about control of derivatives. For those who haven't been paying attention, SCO claims that IBM had no right to put their original code like JFS and RCU into Linux because IBM had access to and used SysV code, methods, and concepts in AIX and Dynix. For SCO, all of Dynix and AIX are derivatives and thus under the control of SCO regardless of who actually wrote the code. IBM's addendum illustrates that if the court accepts that argument, then SCO could claim that they own all internet devices like Blackberry's and satellites because TCP/IP (while developed independently by BSD) was included at one time in the past with AT&T Unix code."
Mars

Submission + - Massive Ice Deposits on South Pole of Mars

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "It has been discovered that the red planet has a 2.3 mile thick ice layer the size of Texas on its southern pole. That's enough water to cover the planet in 36 feet (almost 11 meters) of water. Although some scientists still aren't satisfied and predict more water somewhere on Mars: "... it appears perhaps 10 percent of the water that once existed on Mars is now trapped in these polar deposits. Other water may exist below the planet's surface or perhaps some was lost into space through the atmosphere.""
Security

Submission + - Black Hat Woman: Researcher Who Hacked Vista

Submitted by ancientribe
ancientribe writes: 26-year-old Polish researcher Joanna Rutkowksa has already hacked the Windows Vista kernel, administered a Blue Pill to an operating system, and pioneered rootkit detection research, but she still doesn't know how to drive a car. In this Dark Reading up-close profile of Rutkowska, she talks about her fears that security research is too heavily focused on prevention rather than detection, and how she'd like to be a private "I" or a fiction writer someday.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=119 576&WT.svl=news1_2

Submission + - Learning Assembly programming

Submitted by
intelinsight
intelinsight writes: "How relevant or useful is it to learn Assembly programming language in the current era? Consider this question in the lieu of the current s/w development needs and also the claims of the Assembly lovers for it being a language giving one insights of the internal working of a computer."
The Internet

Submission + - X/HTML 5 Versus XHTML 2

Submitted by
Vlad Alexander
Vlad Alexander writes: "The competition to become the next markup language for the Web is heating up. The article X/HTML 5 Versus XHTML 2 focuses on the two specifications vying to become the successor to HTML 4.x and XHTML 1.x, and looks at what's cool and what's uncool about these two competing technologies.The emergence of XHTML 2 and, latterly, of HTML 5, is in response to the need to meet user demand for rich Web-based applications, the need to generate better search results, and requirements to make the Web more accessible to people of all abilities and using all types of devices. XHTML 2 and HTML 5 essentially take different approaches to these issues, and each will have different impacts on the future development of markup languages."
Google

Submission + - Massive Google hard drive survey

Submitted by
CristianoMonteiro
CristianoMonteiro writes: "Google studied a hundred thousand SATA and PATA drives with between 80 and 400GB storage and 5400 to 7200rpm, and while unfortunately they didn't call out specific brands or models that had high failure rates, they did find a few interesting patterns in failing hard drives. One of those we thought was most intriguing was that drives often needed replacement for issues that SMART drive status polling didn't or couldn't determine, and 56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags. See story."
User Journal

Journal SPAM: Vanuatu cargo cult marks 50 years 2

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

Residents of the South Pacific island of Tanna worship an American "messiah" named John Frum who first appeared to them in the 1930s. According to a village elder quoted in a recent Smithsonian article, John promised to someday return and "he'll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him. Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful th

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