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Submission + - Firm can't fire man for 1.8 cent theft (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BERLIN (Reuters) A German company that fired a man for the theft of 1.8 euro cents (two U.S. cents) worth of electricity had no grounds for sacking him, a court ruled, dismissing the firm's appeal against his reinstatement.

Network administrator Oliver Beel lost his job after charging his Segway, a two-wheeled electric vehicle, at work in May 2009. After he connected the vehicle to the firm's power source for 1-1/2 hours, his boss asked him to remove it.

Twelve days later Beel found himself without a job.
Idle

Submission + - Internet Petitions Stephen Colbert To Hold 'Restor (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by
jamie
jamie writes: "A grassroots campaign has begun to get Stephen Colbert to hold a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to counter Glenn Beck's recent "Restoring Honor" event. The would-be rally has been dubbed "Restoring Truthiness" and was inspired by a recent post on Reddit, where a young woman wondered if the only way to point out the absurdity of the Tea Party's rally would be if Colbert mirrored it with his own "Colbert Nation.""
Idle

Submission + - Student Shocks Own Nipples, Sues Teacher (wbztv.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Associated Press reports that a New Hampshire high school student who connected electrodes to his nipples that were plugged into the wall, severely shocking him, is suing the teacher, the school district, and the city because the teacher failed to warn him not to do so. Student Kyle Dubois attached a wire to his nipples, cooperated with another student to attach a second wire to the other nipple, and a third student plugged them in. A classmate captured the event on cell phone video (http://wbztv.com/video/?id=88175@wbz.dayport.com). Kyle and his parents claim that he didn't know it was dangerous and the teacher's failure to warn him resulted in permanent brain damage. If I was the teacher's attorney, I would be tempted to argue that there is strong evidence the brain damage was present before the incident took place.
Earth

Powerful Sonar Causes Deafness In Dolphins 323

Posted by Soulskill from the sorry-flipper dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Mass strandings of dolphins and whales could be caused because the animals are rendered temporarily deaf by military sonar, experiments have shown. Tests on a captive dolphin have demonstrated that hearing can be lost for up to 40 minutes on exposure to sonar and may explain several strandings of dolphins and whales in the past decade. Most strandings are still thought to be natural events, but the tests strengthen fears that exercises by naval vessels equipped with sonar are responsible for at least some of them. For example, in the Bahamas in March, 2000, 16 Cuvier's beaked whales and Blainville's beaked whales and a spotted dolphin beached during a US navy exercise in which sonar was used intensively for 16 hours (PDF). 'The big question is what causes them to strand,' says Dr. Aran Mooney, of the University of Hawaii. 'What we are looking at are animals whose primary sense is hearing, like ours is seeing. Their ears are the most sensitive organ they have.' In the experiment, scientists fitted a harmless suction cup to the dolphin's head, with a sensor attached that monitored the animal's brainwaves, and when the pings reached 203 decibels and were repeated, the neurological data showed the mammal had become deaf, for its brain no longer responded to sound. 'We definitely showed that there are physiological and some behavioral effects [from repeated, loud sonar], but to extrapolate that into the wild, we don't really know,' said Mooney."

Feed Engadget: Macedonia to give every student a PC (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Desktops

While the OLPC continues its slow rollout and finds its price slowly climbing, it looks like other companies are aggressively going after NickNeg's target markets -- Macedonia just announced a deal with NComputing to provide every student with a thin client "classroom computing device" that will link up to an account on a Linux server PC. The deal calls for NComputing to deliver 180,000 of the devices at a price that's only quoted as "less than half the cost of any other proposed solution," -- a number we're guessing is in that all-important $100 range. Macedonia's schools were also impressed with the device's ability to be remotely updated and maintained, a feature that significantly cuts support costs. No word on when Macedonians will see these things pop up in schools, but we'd bet quite a few people in other countries wouldn't mind getting their hands on one either.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Movies

Submission + - Children of Men and game storytelling (surrealgamedesign.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: The storytelling in the movie Children of Men is simple, but effective. Perhaps the techniques used in this movie can give us hope for meaningful stories in games, too... Read more here.

In the case of Children of Men, a story was delivered where:
  • The viewer didn't need to track more than the very next objective at any one time.
  • The backstory was explained in snippets over the course of the main story.
  • The characters' motivations were never more than 1-2 layers deep.
  • The characters' progression was primarily driven by geographic advancement (e.g. "we must go here").
  • Very moving story moments were created simply by placing the characters in an interesting place and letting the viewer's imagination do the rest.

Feed Techdirt: NY Times Does The Math: Pay Walls Don't Make Business Sense (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
As was rumored last month, the NY Times has decided to pull the plug on its TimesSelect paywall service, making all NY Times content from 1987 forward free online (they're also making all of the content from 1851 to 1922 free, but that's already in the public domain). This move comes two years after the paywall was first put in place. At the time, we were one of many who pointed out that this was going to make the NY Times a lot less valuable, and it seems that the business folks at the NY Times finally did the math and came to the same conclusion. They note that subscription growth was slowing (something that was obvious over a year ago) as advertising growth was ramping -- and that they hadn't counted on how many people would be drop-in visitors, coming from other sites. That seems like an odd statement, since it was quite obvious more than two years ago that search engines and other sites tended to drive a tremendous amount of traffic to news sites. Either way, like others before it, the NY Times should be congratulated on doing the right thing, while questioned for what took it so long (or even what made the company make the mistake in the first place).
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Nebraska Senator Sues God (wired.com)

Submitted by
ThelpDealio
ThelpDealio writes: "A Nebraska Senator, Ernie Chambers, has filed suit against god in Chambers v. God in order to stop terror threats.
In the suit, (PDF) he states that god "has made and continues to make terroristic threats of grave harm to innumerable persons." including "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like.""
Google

Submission + - The downside of Monopolies

Submitted by
Bucc5062
Bucc5062 writes: "About two months ago I was discovering an new old band called October Project which had success in the mid 90's. Great sound, amazing vocalist. That got me to looking for any video on the band. I found two MTV style videos from their hit songs on YouTube (now google video). I then found two live videos from a show called FX. (Live on FX 11/29/95). I watched the videos and reveled in seeing this band live, even in the TV studio.

A couple of weeks go by and I would like to see the live videos again. Shocked I am as the Live FX shows have been suspended. What? I try a general search and almost every link leads back to YouTube and no ability to see the videos. Why? No reports as to why. No statements, just that these two videos are not unavailable for viewing.

So I discover a problem with centralized data. Once any large entity takes over a pool of data, removing it from the public control is subject to the whims of the very small minority. Every link I could find save two was linked to YouTube. Social networking is good, but when it is co-opted like YouTube then it is not good, because a few can now censor the many.

In the case of October Project and (Live on FX 11/29/95), I cannot see how blocking these videos would be good for any one. Google suspended the account that held the videos, but what is even worse, everyone linked to YouTube thus in one chop, Google cut access to some great video of a great band. I ask the Slashdot community, is there an alternative to YouTube Is the a way to stop censorship of data by the few, and is there way to get those two videos back into the public eye?"

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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