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Submission + - Man Shot by Police in Home of Danish Cartoonist

Submitted by dexmachina
dexmachina writes: More than four years later, the Danish cartoonist behind the famous Muhammad caricature is still a target. Kurt Westergaard, along with his wife and grandchild, was attacked in his home yesterday by a 28-year-old Somali man, alleged by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service to have ties to al-Qaeda. Police shot the intruder in the arm and leg and apprehended him. Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that originally published the cartoon, carried a statement from Westergaard. He writes that, while he had feared for his life, he has "turned fear into anger and indignation".
Government

Submission + - Mexico decriminalizes small-scale drug possession 4

Submitted by Professor_Quail
Professor_Quail writes: Mexico enacted a controversial law Thursday decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs while encouraging free government treatment for drug dependency. The law sets out maximum "personal use" amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities will no longer face criminal prosecution when the law goes into effect Friday.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft silently drops IE6 support on msn.com (seoinc.com)

Submitted by
lrvick
lrvick writes: "With the release of Bing, Microsoft had to make some modifications to MSN.com. In the process they silently stopped even trying to hack their own site to work in ie6. The new Bing search bar now drops down into the content over the top of other navigation links in IE6. Is this the excuse web developers everywhere have been waiting on to once and for all totally stop hacking things for IE6 as well?"
The Military

Airborne Laser Successfully Tracks, Hits Missile 287

Posted by Soulskill from the sweet-zombie-reagan dept.
fructose writes "The Airborne Laser managed to acquire, track, and illuminate a test missile a few days ago. According to the press release, the Boeing plane 'used its infrared sensors to find a target missile launched from San Nicolas Island, Calif ... issued engagement and target location instructions to the beam control/fire control system ... fired its two solid-state illuminator lasers to track the target and ... fired a surrogate high-energy laser at the target, simulating a missile intercept.' The sensors on board the missile confirmed the 'hit.' Michael Rinn, ABL's program director, said, 'Pointing and focusing a laser beam on a target that is rocketing skyward at thousands of miles per hour is no easy task, but the Airborne Laser is uniquely able to do the job.' The next steps will be to test the high-power laser at full strength in flight and do a complete system test later this year. Its success or failure will determine whether the project gets canceled. Looks like the Real Genius fans out there are finally living the dream."
Google

Submission + - New Google is the Old Microsoft?

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "From removing map options to aggressively inserting YouTube clips into search results, from giving websites with Google CheckOut special designations to pushing their mediocre real estate search, Galen Ward complains that Google is using their ostensibly open, egalitarian system to aggressively promote their own in-house products. So why should you give a bleep? Like Microsoft in the 90s, says Galen, Google can also snuff out competitors with their dominance, but in a less obvious, even more significant way. Google can kill a comparable or superior product overnight (or nearly cut traffic in half) through otherwise unattainable and unbuyable search results. Indeed, it only takes a veiled threat of Google entering a market, argues Galen, to give entrepreneurs pause."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - How VCs and script kiddies killed hacking (hou2600.org)

Submitted by
Death Metal
Death Metal writes: "I guess that's it: the frontier is over. We no longer have many different unknown and radically distinct approaches to the problem. We're all using variants of UNIX (Linux, MacOS) or VMS (Windows NT) and they're getting more not less similar. We're all connected with this giant network that it's easy to get on, if you have a credit card. Even theft of phone services wouldn't be a challenge or have any rewards.

So what are the mountains left for us to climb?

http://www.hou2600.org/2009/08/15/how-venture-capitalists-and-script-kiddies-took-over-hacking/"
Space

Submission + - Rocket to Launch Inflatable Re-entry Capsule (spacefellowship.com)

Submitted by
Toren Altair
Toren Altair writes: "Researchers from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., are working to develop a outer shell to slow and protect reentry vehicles as they blaze through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.

The Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment, or IRVE, looks like a giant mushroom when it's inflated. For the test, the silicon-coated Kevlar aeroshell is vacuum-packed inside a 16-inch (40.6 cm) diameter cylinder, but once it unfurls and is pumped full of nitrogen it is almost 10 feet (3 m) wide.

They will test a technology demonstrator from a small sounding rocket to be launched at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Va. The launch is scheduled for Aug. 17."
The Internet

Submission + - Study Finds MPAA Not Ready To Enforce Copyrights

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The MPAA regularly claims that Canada is a piracy haven that requires a DMCA. Yet a new study finds that the Hollywood studios don't even bother to register many of their biggest movies, a basic requirement for enforcing the law. Of the top 10 films of 2009, five have not been registered.
Math

Submission + - Wired Science News for Your Neurons Mathematical (wired.com)

Submitted by cloude-pottier
cloude-pottier writes: What do you do when Zombies attack? Turn to a mathematician to come up with a model for the spread of a zombie infestation, of course! Students at University of Ottawa and Carleton University have published a paper, in a book titled Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress detailing how to model the spread of a zombie population and various complications in managing the spread of the infestation. They even give humans a fighting chance in some cases! The original paper can be found at their professor's website.
Space

Submission + - Sun's outer atmosphere mystery solved (spacefellowship.com) 1

Submitted by
xp65
xp65 writes: "The mystery of why temperatures in the solar corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, soar to several million degrees Kelvin (K) --much hotter than temperatures nearer the sun's surface--has puzzled scientists for decades. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan's Hinode satellite reveal the culprit to be nanoflares. Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of heat and energy. "They occur within tiny strands that are bundled together to form a magnetic tube called a coronal loop," says Klimchuk. Coronal loops are the fundamental building blocks of the thin, translucent gas known as the sun's corona. The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth, our place in the universe."
Earth

Submission + - new hope for predicting earthquakes (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by
Kristina at Science News
Kristina at Science News writes: "Interviews with several geophysicists reveal that new data and new understandings about how earthquakes really happen inspires some hope in pursuing the short-term prediction of earthquakes. Read about the latest ideas on what we do and do not know about when large earthquakes happen, and see what two Italian scientists have to say about the large quake that hit central Italy in April."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Nanotech-biological hybrid could speed computers (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are working on integrating nanotechnology with biological materials to create more powerful computers, medical tools and even prosthetics. They announced this week that they have built a hybrid platform out of a mixture of biological and man-made materials. The platform is enabling them to build prototypes of what they're calling bio-nanoelectronic devices. "Electronic circuits that use these complex biological components could become much more efficient," said Aleksandr Noy, a lead scientist on the project, in a statement."

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