18040968
submission
alphatel writes:
Apparently, on December 6th 2010, Google enacted a number of search improvements, such as being bad to customers, or expected changes to exact match domains. Which of these affected results for Wikipedia entries is unknown but several highly referenced pages have become eerily de-ranked by the new algorithms.
17929928
submission
alphadogg writes:
Daniel Ellsberg, the man responsible for outing the now famous Pentagon Papers in 1971, and a group of ex-intelligence officers have thrown their weight behind WikiLeaks and its founder, saying the current attempt to label WikiLeaks' leaks as trivial compared to the Pentagon Papers is wrong.
The Pentagon Papers include 7,000 pages of documents collected by the U.S. military about decision making during the Vietnam war that showed U.S. leaders believed early on that the war could not be won and would lead to many more casualties than ever stated publicly.
In a statement, http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/12/07-13 Ellsberg and associates said comparisons saying the Pentagon Papers were good while WikiLeaks' material is bad is, "just a cover for people who don't want to admit that they oppose any and all exposure of even the most misguided, secretive foreign policy. The truth is that EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time."
On his own blog, http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/open-letter-to-amazon Ellsberg said he would no longer use Amazon.com due to its "cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating its hosting of the WikiLeaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers."
17926354
submission
cold fjord writes:
Wired Science has a story on a new theory that tries to explain dark matter, and the balance of regular matter with antimatter. This theory may even be testable.A new hypothetical particle could solve two cosmic mysteries at once: what dark matter is made of, and why there's enough matter for us to exist at all. ...Together with physicists Hooman Davoudiasl at Brookhaven National Lab and David Morrissey of TRIUMF, Tulin and Sigurdson suggest a way to solve the problem of missing antimatter: Hide it away as dark matter. The details are published in the Nov. 19 Physical Review Letters.
17544182
submission
Barence writes:
PC Pro has an investigation into how the materials found inside PCs are linked to a long-running war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that’s cost five million lives. The focus is on tantalum (used to store electricity in capacitors), tin (used as solder in many electronics), tungsten (used in phone-vibration devices) and gold. Human rights groups blame Western manufacturers and consumers for fuelling the trade in such minerals, claiming it funds warlords to buy arms and ammunition. However, PC manufacturers claim there's little or nothing they can do to halt the trade in blood minerals. "OEMs and manufacturers cannot say with full confidence that our products do not contain minerals from conflict zones in the DRC,” said Michelle Mosmeyer, a sustainable communications manager for Dell. “The mining of metals can be many stages removed from the final product.”
