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Comment OMG Bold! And Italic! And Colors! (Score 2, Interesting) 737

Now it is possible to change text inside the bounding text box and also use certain styles! For example select a word and press a “Bold” or “Italic” button. You can also change the size, line-height and font! Not just that – meanwhile it is also possible to change the color of certain words and characters.
This feature is absolutely great!

Bold, italic, and colors!? Is this a joke?

Government

China's Influence Widens Nobel Peace Prize Boycott 360

c0lo writes "Not only did China decline to attend the upcoming Nobel peace prize ceremony, but urged diplomats in Oslo to stay away from the event warning of 'consequences' if they go. Possibly as a result of this (or on their own decisions), 18 other countries turned down the invitation: Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco. Reuters seems to think the 'consequences' are of an economic nature, pointing out that half of the countries with economies that gained global influence during recent times are boycotting the ceremony (with Brazil and India still attending)."
Cellphones

FCC To Allow Texting To 911 321

tekgoblin writes "The FCC is looking into allowing people to report incidents to 911 via SMS from their mobile phones. They are also considering mobile video to show the 911 service what is going on. The current 911 system handles around 230 million calls per year with most of the calls being from mobile phones. One situation influenced this move to allow texting to 911 was the Virginia Tech shooting. 'The technological limitations of 9-1-1 can have tragic, real-world consequences,' the release said. 'During the 2007 Virginia Tech campus shooting, students and witnesses desperately tried to send texts to 9-1-1 that local dispatchers never received. If these messages had gone through, first responders may have arrived on the scene faster with firsthand intelligence about the life-threatening situation that was unfolding.'"
Transportation

Heroic Engineer Crashes Own Vehicle To Save a Life 486

scottbomb sends in this feel-good story of an engineer-hero, calling it "one of the coolest stories I've read in a long time." "A manager of Boeing's F22 fighter-jet program, Innes dodged the truck, then looked back to see that the driver was slumped over the wheel. He knew a busy intersection was just ahead, and he had to act fast. Without consulting the passengers in his minivan — 'there was no time to take a vote' — Innes kicked into engineer mode. 'Basic physics: If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the delta difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together,' Innes explained."
Government

Submission + - Department of Treasury Sites Hacked (ditii.com)

lord_rotorooter writes: A few Department of Treasury Web sites (bep.treas.gov and moneyfactory.gov) hosted by a third party were hacked on Monday redirecting visitors to a malicious site in Ukraine and later tracking IP addresses. The Department of Treasury did not identify the provider that hosted the sites, but did acknowledge in a statement that it "entered the cloud computing arena last year." What is not mentioned in any of the articles is the fact that every bank in the US has to access these sites for various purposes every day. I am not sure why this is not making front page news.

Other links:
http: //www.informationweek.com/news/government/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224700780
http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/usa-treasury-website-hacked-using-exploit-kit/

Image

US Grants Home Schooling German Family Political Asylum 1324

A US judge has granted political asylum to a family who said they fled Germany to avoid persecution for home schooling their children. Uwe Romeike and his wife, Hannelore, moved to Tennessee after German authorities fined them for keeping their children out of school and sent police to escort them to classes. Mike Connelly, attorney for the Home School Legal Defence Association, argued the case. He says, "Home schoolers in Germany are a particular social group, which is one of the protected grounds under the asylum law. This judge looked at the evidence, he heard their testimony, and he felt that the way Germany is treating home schoolers is wrong. The rights being violated here are basic human rights."

Comment Re:Here's A Tip, Folks (Score 3, Interesting) 313

Acquisition of a trait (by whatever means) would never amount to a significant percentage of the gene pool of an organism unless it proffered some usefulness.

Though a popular view, that's not true. Assuming 'trait' means an independent mutation, then that trait can go to fixation in a population by simple chance (the expectation is that this happens to 1/2N mutations). Also, genes that are physically near each other on the genome tend to be passed as a set. Therefore, it is likely that a completely neutral, or even slightly disadvantageous mutation, that happens to be near an advantageous mutation (or a mutation that won the mating lottery and is heading toward fixation) will also be propagated throughout a population. There are other more esoteric reason why this could happen too, but a strictly adaptationist view of evolution was dropped in the 60s.

Comment Re:Here's A Tip, Folks (Score 1) 313

Evolution does not require selection. Genetic drift, purely stochastic changes in a population due to sampling when mating, is sufficient to cause changes in a population. More specifically, it is expected that 1/2N of the total mutations that arise in a population (where N is pop size) will randomly drift to fixation in a population. This means more mutations drift to fixation in smaller pops. It also means that reproductively isolated pops will drift apart, even if they have exactly equal selection.
Privacy

Submission + - Forensics Meets Its Match: New Tools Thwart Police (cio.com)

rabblerouzer writes: "Antiforensic tools have slid down the technical food chain, from Unix to Windows, from something only elite users could master to something nontechnical users can operate. "Five years ago, you could count on one hand the number of people who could do a lot of these things," says one investigator. "Now it's hobby level." Take, for example, TimeStomp. Forensic investigators poring over compromised systems where Timestomp was used often find files that were created 10 years from now, accessed two years ago and never modified."
Spam

Submission + - First Hand Account of a Botnet Waking Up

Talaria writes: This is the first hand account, from a large U.S. broadband provider, of what happened when a zombie botnet — their customers' compromised computers — woke up and started attacking. As a total of more than 3000 customer computers woke up and started spewing Russian spam, this security team member details what occurred.
Space

Submission + - Manhattan's Stonehenge Sunset (scienceandthecity.org)

lehtaylor writes: "Today the concrete towers that line Manhattan's streets will catch the light like the stone plinths of Britain's Stonehenge structure and the sun will line up perfectly with the East-West streets on the city's grid. Read more here."
Power

Submission + - Seawater as fuel

wsawyer writes: "Fla. Man Invents Machine To Turn Water Into Fire. A Florida man may have accidentally invented a machine that could solve the gasoline and energy crisis plaguing the U.S. John Kanzius is a former broadcast executive from Pennsylvania who wondered if his background in physics and radio could come in handy in treating the disease from which he suffers: cancer. Kanzius, 63, invented a machine that emits radio waves in an attempt to kill cancerous cells while leaving normal cells intact. While testing his machine, he noticed that his invention had other unexpected abilities. Filling a test tube with salt water from a canal in his back yard, Kanzius placed the tube and a paper towel in the machine and turned it on. Suddenly, the paper towel ignited, lighting up the tube like it was a wax candle. "Pretty neat, huh?" Kanzius asked. Check out the story at http://www.wpbf.com/news/13383827/detail.html"
Bug

Submission + - The Straight Dope on Colony Collapse Disorder

friedo writes: "Slashdot has been covering the bizarre story of Colony Collapse Disorder — the mysterious disappearance of agricultural beehives all over North America. Now the Straight Dope has weighed in with the unsurprising conclusion that much of the panic is no more than simple media hype. "[T]there's no reason at this point to think European honey bees are going to be wiped out, now or ever. The die-offs so far appear to affect some beekeepers more than others, sometimes in the same area. That's one reason scientists are so puzzled, but it strongly suggests the losses may have something to do with how individual beekeepers are managing their bees. The "significant percentage" of failing hives is still a drop in the bucket when viewed against the global population of honey bees, and there are lots of beekeepers (even in the U.S., which appears hardest hit) who have not had, and may never have, significant losses of colonies. Plenty of honey bees remain to replace the ones that have died."

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