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Comment Where's the money? (Score 2, Insightful) 211

by WombatDeath (#28911201) Attached to: CentOS Administrator Reappears

People have been donating money to centos.org, presumably wishing to further the goals of the project. Is this money (plus the advertising revenue) still available for its intended purpose?

Not accusing anyone of anything, but this question is quite important and doesn't seem to be addressed in the update.
Enlightenment

Submission + - Mugabe's new surveillance law

Submitted by 3orge
3orge writes: Mugabe has signed off on a surveillance law "allowing the security services to intercept postal, internet and telephone communications. The law also establishes a state-run communications monitoring centre. Officials say the new law is meant to provide security and prevent crime but critics say it is aimed at stifling opposition to Mr Mugabe. Both houses of parliament approved the new law in June." Words springing to my mind — US, Bush, "potential for abuse", pot, kettle.
Power

Submission + - Untapped Energy Below Us (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by
EskimoJoe
EskimoJoe writes: "BASEL, Switzerland — When tremors started cracking walls and bathroom tiles in this Swiss city on the Rhine, the engineers knew they had a problem. "The glass vases on the shelf rattled, and there was a loud bang," Catherine Wueest, a teashop owner, recalls. "I thought a truck had crashed into the building." But the 3.4 magnitude tremor on the evening of Dec. 8 was no ordinary act of nature: It had been accidentally triggered by engineers drilling deep into the Earth's crust to tap its inner heat and thus break new ground — literally — in the world's search for new sources of energy. On paper, the Basel project looks fairly straightforward: Drill down, shoot cold water into the shaft and bring it up again superheated and capable of generating enough power through a steam turbine to meet the electricity needs of 10,000 households, and heat 2,700 homes. Scientists say this geothermal energy, clean, quiet and virtually inexhaustible, could fill the world's annual needs 250,000 times over with nearly zero impact on the climate or the environment. A study released this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said if 40 percent of the heat under the United States could be tapped, it would meet demand 56,000 times over. It said an investment of $800 million to $1 billion could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equaling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S."
Censorship

Submission + - UK teachers want to ban Youtube

Submitted by WombatDeath
WombatDeath writes: The UK's Professional Association of Teachers is demanding that Youtube be shut down in order to remove threatening and bullying video footage from the internet. Following cases in which teachers have struggled to have individual clips removed, a spokeswoman for the PAT said that "Being exposed to ridicule, whether as an adult or young person, is a humiliating and frightening experience," adding "In the short term confronting this problem must be the closure of sites encouraging the cyber-bullying." Are new measures necessary to counter online bullying or, as Youtube asserts, are its existing processes able to deal with such situations?
Science

A Step Towards an Invisibility Cloak 172

Posted by kdawson from the who-goes-there dept.
An anonymous reader alerts us to work out of Purdue University in Indiana, where researchers have produced a design for a method of cloaking objects of any shape and size at a single wavelength of visible light. The math for such an invisibility effect was worked out last year at Duke and in the UK, but the new work, to be published in Nature Photonics this month, is the first practical design. The lead researcher, Vladimir Shalaev, notes that even though the current design works only at a single wavelength, and so would not convey true invisibility, it could still be useful — against, for example, night-vision goggles or laser target designators. Shalaev calls the technical challenge of producing an all-wavelengths cloak "doable in principle."

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