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Biotech

Submission + - Reversal of Alzheimer's symptoms within minutes

Submitted by afeeney
afeeney writes: Researchers have found that spinal injections of Etanercept, which inactivates excessive amounts of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF) can reverse symptoms of Alzheimer's Disease within minutes.

While TNF is a vital part of the immune system, excessive amounts are associated with various autoimmune diseases.

If this discovery is replicated in a wider range of subjects and becomes a viable cure for Alzheimer's, it could affect literally billions of lives, for people with Alzheimer's, their caretakers and loved ones, and the many who consider the possibility of Alzheimer's one of the most dreaded possible consequences of aging.
Lord of the Rings

Submission + - Peter Jackson to direct the HObbitt (yahoo.com)

Submitted by AssTard
AssTard writes: There you go, that dude who directed the movies about the Leprechauns running around from the Druids, and also the King Kong movie (much better than Lord Of The Rinds IMHO), he's gonna direct the Hobbitt Movie, where they tell about the muppetts crafting The Ring out of titanium/gold alloy back in the days before Jesus. Here's the story from Yahoo! NEW YORK — Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema have reached agreement to make J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit," a planned prequel to the blockbuster trilogy "The Lord of the Rings." ADVERTISEMENT Jackson, who directed the "Rings" trilogy, will serve as executive producer for "The Hobbit." A director for the prequel films has yet to be named. Relations between Jackson and New Line had soured after "Rings," despite a collective worldwide box office gross of nearly $3 billion an enormous success. The two sides nevertheless were able to reconcile, with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) splitting "The Hobbit" 50/50, spokemen for both studios said Tuesday. "I'm very pleased that we've been able to put our differences behind us, so that we may begin a new chapter with our old friends at New Line," Jackson said in a statement. "We are delighted to continue our journey through Middle Earth." Two "Hobbit" films are scheduled to be shot simultaneously, similar to how the three "Lord of the Rings" films were made. Production is set to begin in 2009 with a released planned for 2010, with the sequel scheduled for a 2011 release. New Line Cinema is owned by Time Warner. Sony and Comcast are among the owners of MGM. (ADDS detail, quotes, background. SUBS overline to CORRECT that Jackson will produce, sted direct, films.)
Television

Submission + - Tiger Team: Penetration Testing TV Series Dec 25 (courttv.com)

Submitted by ChazeFroy
ChazeFroy writes: CourtTV (TruTV) has a new series starting Dec 25 at 11 pm called Tiger Team. It follows a group of elite penetration testers hired to test organizations' security using social engineering, wired/wireless penetration testing, and physically defeating security mechanisms (lock picking, dumpster diving, going through air vents/windows). They do all of this while avoiding the organizations' various security defenses as well as law enforcement. The stars of the show also did a radio spot this morning in Denver, and its MP3 is here.
Lord of the Rings

Submission + - Peter Jackson Will Produce "The Hobbit" (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Soldrinero
Soldrinero writes: After years of bitter fighting with the studio and nail-biting by the fans, the word has come out that there will be a "Hobbit" movie and it will be produced by Peter Jackson. Actually, the story will be split into two movies, to be released in 2010 and 2011. Time to start getting your costumes ready for the premier!
Lord of the Rings

Submission + - PJs making The Hobbit (stuff.co.nz)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Peter Jackson has announced that The Hobbit is being made. The story will be in 2 films, and shot simultaneously like Lord Of The Rings. Filming is set for 2009 with the first part expected for release in 2010. "A decision still has to be made on who will direct the films, who will be cast and where they will be filmed."
Enlightenment

Submission + - Virus, not cell phones, killed 1 in 4 U.S. bees (msn.com)

Submitted by
Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: "Colony Collapse Disorder is characterized by the rapid disappearance of a colonies' bees, even if there are adequate stores of food in the hive, MSNBC is reporting. The bees just seem to fly off into oblivion — hinting that the malady somehow affects the insects' navigational sense or learning ability. Some scientists had proposed that cell-phone radiation was disrupting bee colonies."
Quake

Submission + - Complete Quakecon '07 Coverage: id Tech 5 Unveiled (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
bigwophh
bigwophh writes: "Top to bottom coverage of Quakecon 2007 has just been posted at HotHardware. The article includes a multitude of images and information from all of Quakecon's events, including id's keynote address in which John Carmack revealed details of the id tech 5 engine, NVIDIA's kick-off event, and all of the vendor displays. They also have pictures of all of the case mod contest winners, the lovely Frag Dolls, and news about a handful of yet to be released titles including Rage, Left 4 Dead, John Woo's Stranglehold, and Quake Wars: Enemy Territory. There's even a bit of information regarding the upcoming movie based on id's Wolfenstein franchise."
Quickies

Submission + - Human origins theory tested by recent findings. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by annamadrigal
annamadrigal writes: The BBC new is reporting on findings presented in nature which suggest that Homo Errectus and H. Habilis were in fact sister species which co-existed.

This challenges the view that the upright humans evolved from the tool users.
The Internet

Submission + - 365main releases root-cause of data-center outage

Submitted by linuxwrangler
linuxwrangler writes: 365main has issued a root cause report and FAQ about the failure that took out prominent sites like Craigslist. It was not, as initially reported, a drunk employee but rather two failures. The generator failure was caused by a setting in the Detroit Diesel Electronic Controller that wasn't allowing memory to be reset correctly resulting in engine misfires and failed engine-starts. The problem has been duplicated and is reportedly now fixed. 365main has updated controllers on all its Hitec rotary UPS systems and shared its findings with other Hitec users. Meanwhile, the half-second outage in colo-7 was caused when a brief power-surge hit it's primary side causing it to attempt to switch to secondary power. Unfortunately, the secondary side was already powering three other colo-rooms so the transfer was refused and the PDU switched back to primary 490ms later.
Programming

Submission + - Are Industry Standards really this low?

Submitted by
segafreak
segafreak writes: "I'm a Software Engineering Student from the UK about to enter my final year. During this summer I have been on placement at a large software company (which shall remain unnamed), and while my experience hasn't been entirely negative, I'm appalled by some of the practises that seem commonplace — minimal or non-existant documentation, prototype quality code being sold to customers, lack of comments in code, and worst of all large projects coded and maintained by a single programmer! Having spoken to several of my classmates, I've discovered the situation to be similar all across the region. So fellow Slashdotters, my question is this: is our Industry really this bad? Or have my classmates and I just been shockingly unlucky?"
Networking

Submission + - Cisco co-founder pitches optics for the enterprise

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "Cisco co-founder pitches optics for the enterprise

Len Bosack's company, XKL LLC, has announced an optical transport system called DXM, a 1-rack unit device supporting up to 100Gbps that lets companies with access to dark fiber to build their own point-to-point metro-area optical link.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/080607-bosac k-optics-product.html

Bosack does some numbers crunching in this interview with Network World: "A DS-3 is usually a couple thousand dollars a month, depending on where you are and where it's going. For a fiber ring around a metro area, if you're only stopping in three or four places you get a monthly recurring charge in the $20,000/month range. And there's a one-time cost to get to the fiber rings, and it's usually $20,000 per location. That's when you actually have to dig a ditch to get there. There's the cost of the equipment, which in our case is, for a 100Gbps pizza box, is 1/8 of $1 million, basically. Four of those is $500,000 in equipment. You got yourself 200Gbps of bandwidth out of that ... that gives you 10 cents per megabit per second. Even if it were 10 times more expensive, it's such a change that it's almost astounding that people shouldn't be running to do this because it changes what they do in their business. They stop arguing about a scarcity."

  http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/080607-bosac k-xkl-qa.html"
Privacy

Submission + - Google Toolbar Always Reports Your URLs to Google

Submitted by Anonymous
Anonymous writes: The Google Toolbar in Firefox is sending every URL I visit to Google, even though I'm not logged in to my Google account, even though I have a web history turned off for my account, and even though I have Safe Browsing/Enhanced Protection mode turned off (hidden away in Firefox's Tools > Options > Security > "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is suspected of forgery". I can see the URL transmitted to Google with the Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin.

This is a Privacy and Security issue. The Google privacy policy clearly states in the first bullet that the Toolbar will not transmit URLs to Google unless I explicitly tell it to.

—
Information we collect

        * The Google Toolbar automatically sends only standard, limited information to Google, which may be retained in Google's server logs. It does not send any information about the web pages you visit ( e.g., the URL), unless you use Toolbar's advanced features or use Safe Browsing in Enhanced Protection mode. You do not need to provide any personal information in order to download and use the Google Toolbar.
—

I have explicitly turned off all of these features, but it still sends URLs.

Here's an example: if I visit a web site like http://wikipedia.org/ , and Live HTTP Headers shows (some info masked):

—
http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?sourceid=n avclient-ff&features=Rank&client=navclient-auto-ff &googleip=O;64.233.161.99;146&ch=...&q=info:http%3 A%2F%2Fwikipedia.org%2F

GET /search?sourceid=navclient-ff&features=Rank&client =navclient-auto-ff&googleip=O;64.233.161.99;146&ch =...&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fwikipedia.org%2F HTTP/1.1
Host: toolbarqueries.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070718 Fedora/2.0.0.5- 1.fc7 Firefox/2.0.0.5 pango-text GoogleToolbarFF 3.0.20070525
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,tex t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q= 0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: __utma=...

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Server: GWS/2.1
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Encoding: gzip
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2007 15:32:25 GMT
—

Clearly, a request was sent to Google with my URL and Google accepted the request, in clear violation of their Privacy Policy. Worse yet, it sends the url in the clear! So if there is any session or security information on the URL, it is there for the world and Google to see.

My Google Toolbar, as much as I used to love it, disappears today.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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