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Submission + - MIT Student arrested at Airport for LED Art (google.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: An MIT student was arrested today at Logan Airport because she "had a computer circuit board and wiring in plain view over a black hooded sweat shirt she was wearing" when talking to a staffer at an information booth. She was visiting the airport to greet an arriving friend. She was wearing the shirt at a Career Fair earlier to stand out, and apparently didn't change before entering the airport. The police believed the object was a bomb and she was surrounded by a group of officers with submachine guns. Didn't the city learn its lesson from the Aqua Teen Hunger Scare?
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - MIT Student Arrested for "Bomb Art"

Submitted by Damocles the Elder
Damocles the Elder writes: Apparently Boston remains a place where you shouldn't show off your computer parts. According to a pair of local news outlets, an MIT student was arrested for wearing what's being called "fake bomb art" in a Boston airport. FTA:

Star Simpson, 19, had a computer circuit board and wiring in plain view over a black hooded sweat shirt she was wearing, said State Police Maj. Scott Pare, the commanding officer at the airport. "She said that it was a piece of art and she wanted to stand out on career day," Pare said at a news conference. Simpson was "extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used...[s]he's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."
NASA

Submission + - Nobel Laureate "disses manned spaceflight"

Submitted by perturbed1
perturbed1 writes: Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg "disses manned spaceflight" according this Article, calling the International Space Station(ISS) "an orbital turkey," saying that "no important science has come out of it." Weinberg points to NASA's treatment of its Beyond Einstein program (designed to test the Theory of General Relativity) as an example of the agency's misplaced priorities, commenting that "if we suddenly run into extra expenses in the manned spaceflight program, that will be put on the back burner, just as has been done time and time again by NASA."

Weinberg forgets about the largest scientific payload of the space program designed for the ISS, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a particle physics experiment designed to search a dark matter signature in cosmic rays. Another Nobel laurate, Samuel Ting leads AMS which cost about $1.5 billion and has been long waiting for a shuttle flight as discussed in this article.

Encryption

Australia Cracked US Combat Aircraft Codes 280

Posted by kdawson from the end-run-around-the-bureaucracy dept.
SpamSlapper writes "Former defense minister Kim Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes in the 1980s to enable the shooting down of enemy aircraft. The radar on Australia's US-made Hornets could not identify most potentially hostile aircraft in the region — they were set up for European threats — but despite many requests, the codes were not provided, so 'In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves.' The Americans knew what the Australians were doing and were intrigued by the progress they made."
HP

Submission + - Oxford University wins prize for oldest HP-UX

Submitted by Kelpie
Kelpie writes: HP launched a competition in April, to locate the oldest HP-UX installation in continuous service. The server that won belongs to Oxford University Press (OUP), the publishing arm of the elite university, and it's still running happily after more than 10 years of service. The publisher has 11TB of data stored on its main systems alone, including 5TB in production. Its old HP-UX systems sit happily in a data center alongside its multicore, hi-tech alternatives.
Quake

Submission + - Older Men + Younger Women = Longer Lifespan (go.com) 1

Submitted by
Ant
Ant writes: "According to this three page ABC News story, scientists say older men coupling with younger women increased human lifespan. Scientists think they've found one of the reasons why humans defy evolution theory and live well beyond their reproductive life. It's all those old guys latching on to younger women and passing their good genes down to their kids... Seen on Shacknews."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Head of FSF, Stallman talks at CERN

Submitted by perturbed1
perturbed1 writes: The founder of the FSF which just released GPLv3, Richard M. Stallman, gave a talk at CERN a few weeks ago where he talked about the ethics and practice of free software. A video of his talk is now available in the free ogg format through this site. After explaining the motivation and ethics of free software, RMS went into the history of GNU/Linux (around minute 49 in the video), insisting that GNU be included in the name of the distribution to give credit to the free software developers who do not work on the kernel and to avoid confusion. "This confusion led people to think that the whole system was Mr. Torvalds' work and [...] think that the whole system came from his vision of the world." What was surprising was the ensuing was a rather strong criticism of Linus Torvalds, the main developer of the kernel. Starting at the 57th minute:

"Torvalds does not support the ideas of freedom that I have been telling you about. He never did. [...] He calls himself apolitical which refers to the political position that we should make important political decisions according to short term practical convenience. He says he values powerful reliable software and that's all. He is against the idea that all users should have freedom and he has demonstrated this by conspicuous involvement with non-free software. [...] What I object to is that people think that our work was done by him and when our work serves as the platform for him to state his views and to drown us out. [...] So please call the system GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux. [...] But, there is something more important at stake and that's called freedom. There are people who would like to take away your freedom. The only way to keep your freedom is if you are prepared to defend it. " (Listen on for more... )

Who knows? Maybe /. will lead the way by renaming the "Linux" section, the "GNU/Linux" section?

The Matrix

Submission + - GalaxyZoo - hotor not for Galaxys

Submitted by nikmal
nikmal writes: GalaxyZoo, another project which harnesses the power of the collective intelligence of the internet — to classify a million galaxies. By taking part, you'll not only be contributing to scientific research, but you'll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before and get a sense of the glorious diversity of galaxies that pepper the sky. (also you will prevent the current researchers from going mad with boredom...)
Sci-Fi

Submission + - The Galaxies Need You Now ! (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
hansley
hansley writes: "We need the help of all slashdotters to scour the galaxies and name them in the name of 'man'. well sort of..anyway, we need your help to test couple of theories on how galaxies evolved and how to classify them (the exciting bit)."
Debian

Submission + - Ubuntu Deveopers Ignoring Critical Flaw?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Seems there is a lot of buzz on the bug reporting forum about Ubuntu
Linux and it's problem supporting many USB devices, many USB scanners,
and even some USB Teletype devices for the hearing impaired. The
Ubuntu Manifesto clearly states that "every computer user should be
given every opportunity to use software, even if they work under a
disability." Various work-arounds have been offered, none of which
work well for everyone. One "work-around" suggested was to recompile
the kernel, disabling the "USB-SUSPEND" option (which is part of the
problem). While this no doubt would work, how many of the people who
switched to Ubuntu solely because it was supposed to be user friendly
and didn't require an IT degree to use would be able to do this? And
do they expect a blind person to be able to follow the directions on
the screens when selecting the recompiling options? What was meant by
"even if they work under a disability?"

Developers insist that the power-saving USB_SUSPEND function (it's
debatable among laptop users how well this works anyway) is more
important than supporting the USB devices that don't work with this
function enabled, and this function is enabled by default in the
kernel itself.

The problem is marked "low" in importance for fixing the kernel. A new
Linux kernel that fixes this problem is available to the developers
and could be incorporated into Ubuntu before the next release. From
developer's feedback, this doesn't look likely to happen, as it
doesn't seem to be important. We'll have to wait and see if the Ubuntu
Manifesto really means anything, or if it is just empty words. Many
are waiting to see if this issue is resolved in the next release
(Gutsy Gibbons) and will decide whether to switch to one of the other
distros available if it is not fixed by then. I must admit, for the
most part, reading the bug reporting forum, the Ubuntu community has
been very patient. Will their patience wear out before the problem is
fixed? We will have to wait and see.

The bug reporting forum can be read here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sane-bac kends/+bug/85488
Space

Submission + - 100 years of astronomical data to be digitized.

Submitted by Maximum Prophet
Maximum Prophet writes: Anyone with a spare $5,000,000, please contact the people in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/science/10astro. html
Harvard has over 100 years of glass photographic plates taken from observatories all over the world. They've built a special scanner, but need funds to complete the project. Perhaps they should talk to Google?
Announcements

Submission + - CERN announces Collider delay

Submitted by perturbed1
perturbed1 writes: physorg.com reports: "Speaking at the 142nd session of the CERN Council today, the Organization's Director General Robert Aymar announced that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will start up in May 2008, taking the first steps towards studying physics at a new high-energy frontier."

Such a delay was foreseen due to the quadrupole accident which we discussed here previously. This gives extra time for Fermilab physicists to try to understand the latest interesting hints of the Higgs boson, as well as give much needed extra-time for the detectors at CERN to get ready for data taking. Given that it will be fall before the LHC detectors take any useful data from collisions at 14TeV, could Fermilab collect enough data for a 5-sigma discovery by then?

NASA

Submission + - NASA Claims to have found New Ring of Dark Matter

Submitted by perturbed1
perturbed1 writes: The story on physorg.com says "Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a ghostly ring of dark matter that formed long ago during a titanic collision between two galaxy clusters." Previously, NASA had announced a press conference today, generating a discussion here last week. The team's paper has been accepted for publication in the June 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal. Until the details are revealed in the publication, the NASA press release will have to suffice.

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