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Australia

Aussie City Braces For Worst Flood In 118 Years 214

Posted by CmdrTaco from the good-luck-down-there dept.
aesoteric writes "As parts of the Australian state of Queensland either experience or prepare for the worst floods to ravage the state in over 100 years, Australia's techies have taken it upon themselves to keep communications services on as the crisis unfolds. One man is mirroring flood information from a faltering Brisbane City Council website, and others have opened WiFi channels in their neighbourhood whilst mobile signal gets choked. But there is major damage to telco networks — at least one major fibre link has been severed by flood waters, telephone exchanges have been knocked offline and cell towers put on battery or generator back-up (or offline altogether). On a sombre note, the floods have claimed 10 lives, including children, and 78 people are still missing after facing a torrent of water up to 8 metres (26 feet) high."

Comment Re:Facebook (Score 1) 200

by patrikas (#31940984) Attached to: Facebook and the "Social Graph"
Exactly.. after all it's monopoly and IMHO it's much more better to have many different community driven wiki-like sites/services having different goals. Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and friends, Slashdot :).. Music, event websites and so on. Facebook is obviously taking too much these days - net in the net.
Windows

Submission + - Rogue McAfee update strikes police, hospitals

Submitted by Stephenmg
Stephenmg writes: A detection update from McAfee (DAT 5958) falsely labelled the svchost.exe as the Wecorl-A virus, sending a core Windows system file into quarantine in the process. Infected computers became inoperable and went into a continuous reboot cycle. Reported victims include Kansas City Police Department and and the University of Kansas Hospital and about a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island. PCs also went haywire at Intel. Personally, I think it was correct.
Security

Submission + - Cybercrime talks fail due to national perspective? (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ever suspect there's more to the international community's failure to move on cyber security than those pesky Russians? A recent paper by an international think tank exposes some interesting points of agreement in government positions across the world. Which begs the question, how can businesses and IT experts take advantage of this and force some movement?
Crime

Twins' DNA Foils Police 209

Posted by Soulskill from the now-i-wish-i-had-a-twin dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that James and John Parr were both arrested after watches worth £10,000 were stolen from a shopping center. Police found blood on a piece of glass at the scene of the crime and traced it back to the 25-year-old identical twins through DNA tests. But James and John both denied the theft and, because they have identical DNA, it has been impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt which twin is responsible. 'The police told us that they knew it was one of us, but we both denied it,' says James. 'I definitely know I didn't do anything wrong. I was watching my daughter that night.' Now the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has concluded that it cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt who was responsible. 'Unless further evidence becomes available, we are unable to authorize any charge at this time,' says CPS spokesman Rob Pett. 'This is certainly not something that we regularly encounter.' Identical twins have hindered police investigations a number of times since the advent of DNA testing. In Malaysia last year, a man suspected of drug-smuggling and sentenced to death was released when the court could not prove whether it was he or his twin brother who committed the crime."

Comment GNU Screen and vim is all you need (Score 2, Informative) 193

by patrikas (#30599918) Attached to: IDEs With VIM Text Editing Capability?
Vim has so many IDE features (autocompletion, ctags, syntax), hundreds of plugins that let you customize your environment.. snippets, Doxygen, debugging, compiling.. I'll only suggest you one thing: better concentrate on improving your Vim environment than searching for any other tool that embeds it. Use Vim with GNU Screen after all, that'll give you true IDE experience.
Image

Music By Natural Selection 164

Posted by samzenpus from the survival-of-the-grooviest dept.
maccallr writes "The DarwinTunes experiment needs you! Using an evolutionary algorithm and the ears of you the general public, we've been evolving a four bar loop that started out as pretty dismal primordial auditory soup and now after >27k ratings and 200 generations is sounding pretty good. Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed. We got some coverage in the New Scientist CultureLab blog but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time. We recently upped the maximum 'genome size' and we think that the music is already benefiting from the change."
NASA

Simulation of Close Asteroid Fly-By 148

Posted by Soulskill from the close-enough-to-feel-the-vacuum-breeze dept.
c0mpliant writes "NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have released a simulation of the path of an asteroid, named Apophis, that will come very close to Earth in 2029 — the closest predicted approach since humans have monitored for such heavenly bodies. The asteroid caused a bit of a scare when astronomers first announced that it would enter Earth's neighborhood some time in the future. However, since that announcement in 2004, more recent calculations have put the odds of collision at 1 in 250,000."

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