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The Internet

Submission + - Using the Earth to Cool Your Data Center (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by
1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: "With data centers using enormous amounts of electricity, some companies are using the earth to reduce their power bills. Prairie Bunkers plans to use geothermal cooling in a Nebraska project that will convert former World War II ammo bunkers into data centers. This follows news that an Iowa data center used geothermal cooling to achieve the highest rating possible for energy-efficient buildings. Geothermal cooling uses vertical wells housing closed-loop piping systems filled with water or coolant. The cool earth allows the underground piping system to serve as a heat exchanger."
The Internet

Submission + - UK Officially Proposes to Cut-Off Internet Pirates (ispreview.co.uk)

Submitted by
MJackson
MJackson writes: "The UK government has officially proposed an amendment to its Digital Britain report, which would include the controversial measure of suspending illegal file sharers from their ISP. The disconnection proposal was originally ruled out in favour of letter warnings and technical measures (service speed reductions, website blocks etc.). That followed several years of largely unproductive wrangling between consumer groups, ISPs and Rights Holders. Law firms currently track suspected illegal P2P activity by monitoring IP addresses, which are assigned to every computer when you go online, yet IP's can easily be spoofed, redirected, shared over big networks or even hijacked (open Wi-Fi etc.). The download itself could also be encrypted, making it nearly impossible for the ISP to verify; but of course the UK has ignored all that."
The Internet

Cory Doctorow Says DIY Licensing Will Solve Piracy 189

Posted by samzenpus from the well-that-was-easy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The founding editor of Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow, has written a report about 'do-it-yourself' digital licensing, which he's touting as the panacea for piracy. Doctorow's solution for content creators is two-fold: get a Creative Commons license and append some basic text requiring those who re-use your work to pay you a percentage of their gross income. Doctorow refers to this as the middle ground between simply acquiring a Creative Commons license and hiring expensive lawyers for negotiations. He calls do-it-yourself licensing 'cheap and easy licensing that would turn yesterday's pirates into tomorrow's partners.'"

Comment Re:Tools exist (Score 1) 209

by comcn (#27731631) Attached to: Cross-Distro Remote Package Administration?

...and to add to that, all servers have an Apt proxy setting pointing them to a squid proxy, so security.debian.org doesn't get hit hard either - this is something that anyone can do, even without a local mirror.

The whole system was not described in one measly little /. post...

Comment Re:Tools exist (Score 3, Informative) 209

by comcn (#27728085) Attached to: Cross-Distro Remote Package Administration?

As another "sub 7-digit guy" - there is a reason for this... There is no way I'm going to let over 60 servers automatically install patches without me checking them first! Download, yes. Install, no.

At work we use cfengine to manage the servers, with a home-built script that allows servers to install packages (of a specified version). Package is checked and OK? Add it to the bottom of the text file, GPG sign it, and push it into the repository. cfengine takes care of the rest (our cf system is slightly non-standard, so everything has to be signed and go through subversion to actually work).
Democrats

Talk to This Year's Quirkiest Senatorial Candidate 364

Posted by Roblimo from the plenty-of-substance-behind-the-laughs dept.
Not many candidates for the U.S. Senate are 4'9" tall and only have one hand. But Oregon Democrat Steve Novick qualifies on both counts -- and uses them as pluses in his TV ads. Like this one, where he shows why he's the best beer-drinking partner among all the candidates. Or this one, where it's obvious why he's for "the little guy." Also, as far as we know, he's the only candidate this year for any major office who has his own brand of beer. And his online campaign manager is a major Slashdot junkie, too, which is certainly in his favor. But will humor and oddness get Steve into the Senate? We don't know. So ask him. In fact, ask him anything else you'd like about campaigning and politics. He's promised to respond, and seems like the kind of guy who will give interesting answers, at that. (Please follow Slashdot interview rules, as always.)
Biotech

Submission + - How silicon-based drugs could treat cancer

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "The lives of almost living organisms on Earth, including ourselves, are carbon-based. And when we're sick, we're exclusively treated with carbon-based medicines. But now, a team of chemists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison had a bright idea. Why not replace carbon atoms by silicon atoms? And by modifying a drug named indomethacin, used to treat arthritis and some cancers, they found that silicon medicines may have extraordinary therapeutic value for treating human disease. The modified drug both slowed the growth of cancer cells and killed cancer cells directly. Right now, the researchers only have worked with a specific drug — and in their labs. So I guess a vast amount of work needs to be done before silicon-based drugs could be used on humans. But read more for additional details and references about this discovery."
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - World of Warcraft now the size of New York City

Submitted by
DeadBugs
DeadBugs writes: "World Of Warcraft has passed 8 Million subscribers. This would put it on par with the population of New York (the largest city in the United States). With the first expansion coming out since the game was released, the game could easily pass 10 million people.

From the press release: "Since debuting in North America on November 23, 2004, World of Warcraft has become the most popular MMORPG around the world. Today, World of Warcraft is available in seven different languages and is played in North America, Europe, mainland China, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.""
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Laptop Keyboard Surgery

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "The Dell Latitude CPx line of laptop is notorious for having keyboards go bad and mine was no different. Not all the keys would stop working, just the 8, I and K keys. I've tried all the various fixes but to no avail, cleaning the contacts, removing parts of the metal keyboard tray that was supposedly shorting, etc, ect. They would work for a few days then it would be back to typing with the on-screen keyboard. If I pounded my fist in just the right place I could get it to work but only until I moved the laptop again. This was getting irritating, time for some surgery."
Windows

Submission + - Scanning a Windows filesystem mounter under Linux

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Not trusting Windows's security, I'm never running that OS on the bare-metal. I only run Windows from VMWare, QEMU and now Xen (and, no, I don't play games). With those three emulation/virtualization solutions, it's possible to mount the Windows filesystem from Linux. Presuming I know to mount the Windows filesystem from Linux, how do I do to scan this filesystem from Linux? Are there good free anti-viruses for Linux that will find Windows viruses and trojan and whatnot? If there aren't any, would installing a good anti-virus under Wine be an option? Or could I use *another* virtual Windows OS to which I'd 'hook' the filesystem I want to scan (for example making the system I want to scan's "C:" drive available as the D: drive on a known "good" Windows system)? How should I go about this? What are the gotchas? For example can the registry of an offline system be scanned, the MBR, etc.? I'd like to know how fellow /.ers solved that problem.
Privacy

Submission + - UK road taxing petition gains support

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A petition against the planned tracking system for UK car drivers is starting to gain support from the public now. The UK government plans to have a black box fitted to every vehicle which would allow a satellite system to track their journey with prices starting from as little as 2p per mile raising to as much as £1.34 per mile. However, such as system could be also be used to track the exact location of the vehicle at any given time and should you accidently creep over the speed limit you could find yourself in receipt of a ticket. A recent cost analysis on the average user showed a non working mum taking her kids to school paid £86 per month which is a massive increase from the current £160 per year.

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