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Education

Submission + - Learning on the road.

Submitted by
Patrik_AKA_RedX
Patrik_AKA_RedX writes: "Since I spend considerable amounts of time on the bus each day, I want to use that time productively. I combine a fulltime dayjob with evening classes, so reclaiming my time on the bus as study time would be very valuable to me.
Using books and binders or a laptop is not very practical, since I don't always have a seat and occationaly busses tend to be quite crowded.
My idea involves using an ebookreader like the Sony Reader, since most of my course notes are electronic. This solves the issue with thick books and large binders. But this still leaves the problem of taking notes.
A paper notebook requires two hands, a voice recorder gets me strange looks and writting on the sides of the bus has the problem of not always having the same bus.

My question is: what do you do to learn on the road? How do you take notes, what experiences do you have with Ebook readers (dedicated devices, PDA or other) in real life situations? Is it practical to use a PDA both as reader and notebook? Do you know of any sites or forums specific about this?"
Networking

Submission + - Open Linux Router Project Announced

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Phoronix has delivered word on the project announcement of the Open Linux Router. The Open Linux Router project hopes to start off where The Linux Router Project had left off. The Open Linux Router is looking to combine the functionality of several network services all into a single box (similar to m0n0wall or Smoothwall), but will feature expanded possibilities with its "true modular" design so that the end-user can quickly and easily customize the software. The first release of this Linux distribution will not be out until May or June, but some of the code is presently available via SVN. More information is also available through their new project website.
Privacy

Submission + - Identity Theft - The Massachusetts AG

Submitted by
Panaqqa
Panaqqa writes: "It looks like Martha Coakley, the newly sworn in Attorney General of Massachusetts, has been the victim of identity theft. A phone call from Dell computer tipped her off to somebody using her credit card information fraudulently. Interesting that the top prosecutor for the state would admit that the chances of catching the fraudster are "slim to none"."
Biotech

Submission + - Requiem for the Magic Bullets

Submitted by lordtagoh
lordtagoh writes: On Wired The age of antibiotics began in 1941 with the introduction of penicillin, which saved many thousands of lives during World War II. But the first sign that this new era of easily treatable bacterial infections would not last appeared just one year later, with the emergence of penicillin-resistant strains of Staphyloccocus aureus, a bacterium responsible for a wide variety of ailments from skin infections to fatal pneumonia. By 1970, more than 80 percent of the staph strains in hospitals had already become immune to the drug. Now a form of staph known as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staph aureus) that is resistant to nearly every known antibiotic is responsible for many of the tens of thousands of deaths a year from infections picked up in US hospital
United States

Submission + - Remember how much fun The Cold War was?

Submitted by
kingpetey
kingpetey writes: "Everyone knows that China just tested a missle system that can pick satellites out of space. Of course the US has had that technology since the late 1980s, and it turns out we've also been maintaining our Patriot-system based missle defense initiative (MDI), too. Good news: we want to deploy an MDI array in Poland and the Czech Republic. Even better news: Russia is pissed off about that. An article at NewScientist.com states that:
"A Russian general has criticised a US plan to place an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, calling it a threat to Moscow — but a senior US official denied that was its purpose. "Our analysis shows that the placing of a radio locating station in the Czech Republic and anti-missile equipment in Poland is a real threat to us," said space forces commander Lieutenat-General Vladimir Popovkin, according to Russian news agencies."
"
Encryption

A Competition To Replace SHA-1 159

Posted by kdawson from the securing-government-bits dept.
SHA who? writes "In light of recent attacks on SHA-1, NIST is preparing for a competition to augment and revise the current Secure Hash Standard. The public competition will be run much like the development process for the Advance Encryption Standard, and is expected to take 3 years. As a first step, NIST is publishing draft minimum acceptability requirements, submission requirements, and evaluation criteria for candidate algorithms, and requests public comment by April 27, 2007. NIST has ordered Federal agencies to stop using SHA-1 and instead to use the SHA-2 family of hash functions."
Networking

Submission + - China net use may soon surpass US

Submitted by GuerillaRadio
GuerillaRadio writes: The BBC is reporting that China could soon overtake the US to have the world's largest number of internet users, according to a state-controlled think-tank.
"We believe it will take two years at most for China to overtake the US," an official at the China Internet Network Information Center told state media. China had 137m internet users by the end of 2006, an increase of 23% from the year before, the centre reported. This figure means that more than 10% of the population is now online.
Announcements

Submission + - Quest - Text Adventure Games in the 21st Century

Submitted by
Alex Warren
Alex Warren writes: "Axe Software has released Quest 4.0, a game development system specifically designed for creating text adventure games. Like the text adventure games of the 1980's, players interact with a virtual world by typing in commands and reading descriptions. Quest brings this type of gaming up to date — both single-player and online multi-player games can be created, pictures and sounds can easily be included, and players can interact with the game by using the mouse.

To create a game, users need no programming knowledge, as the visual editor displays everything in plain English. Users can create sophisticated game behaviour by following the on-screen prompts. A full tutorial and reference guide is included.

Text adventure games provide a great introduction to concepts in programming. You can get started creating a game very quickly, because you don't need to spend large amounts of time and money creating graphics. It's great to get people using their imaginations — text adventures are to video games what books are to films.

Quest can also be used to create text-based role-playing games (RPGs), training materials, simulations and more.

Text adventures have a number of uses within educational contexts. System requirements are low, so they work on most school PCs. They are accessible for sight-impaired students, unlike highly graphical games. For teaching English, getting students to create their own text games gets them to think in detail about characters and settings in an original way. For teaching ICT or Information Technology, creating a game gives students an introduction to designing an information system, and considering other users. The included tutorial gives an introduction to variables, subroutines (procedures), functions and concepts in object-oriented programming. For teaching History and Geography, Quest can be used to create an interactive world for students to explore.

Games can feature rooms, objects, characters, containers, and surfaces. Objects can be picked up and dropped, used and given to characters. Scripts can make things happen in the game — they can move the player, move and hide objects, display menus, call subroutines, functions, loops, conditional statements and more. All of these are available from the plain English interface. Instead of programming by typing in commands, users simply select a command from a list and follow the on-screen prompts.

Quest 4.0 is available now for USD $39.95 (GBP £19.95) from the website at www.axeuk.com/quest. A free trial version, limited to creating smaller games, can also be downloaded from the website.

Quest runs on Windows 98, 2000, ME, XP and Vista."
Privacy

Submission + - Swedish bill to sniff internet traffic presented

Submitted by
swehack
swehack writes: "The Swedish defense minister today presented a bill(Swedish) to let FRA(National Defence Radio Establishment) listen to all internet and radio traffic sent over Swedish borders. Internet service providers will be forced to allow access to their border points where FRA will be allowed to filter for certain search patterns. The search patterns the FRA will filter traffic for will be decided by the FRA. The swedish minister of defense, Mikael Odenberg, noted that the bill only applies to outsie threats, information transferred between two swedes will not be used."
Space

Submission + - NASA observes Lunar Transient Phenomena

Submitted by
IZ Reloaded
IZ Reloaded writes: "NASA's Meteoroid Environment Group monitored the night side of the Moon in Nov. 2005 and in 107 hours of observing, they tallied 20 lunar meteors + at least 60 Earth-orbiting satellites + one airplane + one terrestrial meteor = 82 in all. From the press release (with cool videos): This is the first systematic count of lunar night-side phenomena. "It gives astronomers an idea of what to expect when they undertake a lunar monitoring program from Earth." Cooke's prime target is lunar meteors — flashes of light that occur when meteoroids hit the Moon's surface. "Of the 20 lunar meteors we've seen so far, about half come from well-known meteor showers such as the Leonids and Geminids. The other half are random meteoroids that take us completely by surprise." NASA is preparing to send astronauts back to the Moon and the agency is understandably interested in how often this happens."
Books

Submission + - Book Review: End Of Dayz

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Review O Matics's rather good review of End Of Dayz; "The Electric Stapler", one of the hundred or so textfiles making up the "End of Dayz" compilation, opens with a rather profound statement: "This is my first article for SOL," the author writes, "and the main reason I'm writing it is because no-one in the real world will listen to me." As dependant on mathematics as computers are, it is amazing the amount of art people have been able to produce with them, both as a medium and a vehicle. In the early days of home computing, for a few hundred dollars budding artists could create pictures, music, poetry and literature electronically in their own homes — and later, thanks to the proliferation of modems, they began sharing their creations with other kindred souls. What eventually grew out of this online artistic culture were "scenes," the most eclectic of the bunch being what was referred to as the "textfile scene."

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