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United States

Submission + - 57 mpg? That's so 20 years ago 6

Submitted by
maclizard
maclizard writes: "I wish my car got 57 miles to the gallon.

From the article:
'The CRX HF got an Environmental Protection Agency-estimated 57 mpg gallon in highway driving. Today, the most fuel-efficient non-hybrid Civic you can buy gets an EPA-estimated 34 mpg on the highway. Even today's Honda Civic Hybrid can't match it, achieving EPA-estimated highway mileage of just 45 mpg. The Toyota Prius, today's fuel mileage champ, gets 46 mpg on the highway.'"
Biotech

Submission + - Larger human brain led to larger penis (pressesc.com) 2

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "The human penis is comparatively larger than that of the other great apes because of our comparatively larger brains, gynecologist Edwin A. Bowman explains in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Through millions of years evolution the infant babies' skulls became larger in order to accommodate bigger brains, explained Dr. Bowman. This in turn led to a female pelvis become larger to allow women to give birth to children with larger brains, and this led to the female vagina also becoming less tight."
Patents

Submission + - Alexander Graham Bell: Patent Theif? (msn.com)

Submitted by
DynaSoar
DynaSoar writes: "MSNBC is carrying an AP article reviewing a book due out January 7, that claims to show definitive evidence that Bell stole the essential idea for telephony from Elisha Gray http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22400009/. Author Seth Shulman shows that Bell's notebooks contain false starts, and then after a 12 day gap during which he visited the US Patent Office, suddenly show an entirely different design, very similar to Gray's design for multiplexing Morse code signals. Shulman claims that Bell copied the design from Gray's patent application and was improperly given credit for earlier submission, with the help of a corrupt patent examiner and aggressive lawyers. Shulman also claims that fear of being found out is the reason Bell distanced himself from the company that carried his name. And if Gray Telephone doesn't seem to roll off the tongue, Shulman also noted that both of them were two decades behind the German inventor Johann Philipp Reis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Reis who produced the first working telephony system."
Caldera

Submission + - SCO Receives Nasdaq Notice Letter (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This somewhat amusing press release of sorts tells us one of those things we've all been waiting a while for. SCO(X) has announced that: that it received a Nasdaq Staff Determination letter on December 21, 2007 indicating that as a result of having filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Panel has determined to delist the company's securities from the Nasdaq Stock Market and will suspend trading of the securities effective at the open of business on Thursday, December 27, 2007. PJ at Groklaw has surmised that with effectively zero cash resources left, Novell doesn't stand to get much more than SCO's furniture, if even that. Ding dong, is the wicked witch finally dead yet?
Google

Submission + - Google's Algorithm allows shady tactics (seoblackhat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google has been oddly silent about the possibility, but it seems like a very real likelihood that it is possible to damage the google search rankings for your competitor's sites by off site linking schemes that are completely out of the control of the site owners. Now it seems like many black hat seo services will offer the service..... so if you rank 11th for a valuable term, it may be possible to use black hat tactics (or pay a small fee to an expert) to get your competitors knocked out of those coveted top 10 spots.
Government

Submission + - Libraries on Canadian DMCA: Don't restrict rights (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by thirty-seven
thirty-seven writes: The Canadian Library Association is speaking up in the ongoing debate on copyright reform in Canada. They urge the federal government to keep the rights of consumers in mind when drafting new copyright laws. The CBC article mentions how rigid copyright laws could outlaw the timeshifting of TV shows or backing up a music CD for private use.

The CLA's press release has a list of concerns, including not making Crown copyright more restrictive, specifically naming the American DMCA as something to avoid, and saying:

New copyright legislation must be carefully crafted so that it punishes copyright-infringing behaviour but does not ban devices that might be used to circumvent technological prevention measures.
The Courts

Submission + - Playing Mortal Kombat Used as defense

Submitted by techpawn
techpawn writes: "The "Mortal Kombat" explanation that two Colorado teens are using in a murder case won't work as a defense. Two Teens killed a 7 year old emulating moves from the Mortal Kombat video game. "There is no such defense as, 'The video game made me do it.' It won't even act as mitigation at sentencing if these teens are convicted," legal analyst Scott Robinso One of the 17 year old defendants claims he didn't stop due to intoxication. One wonders if he heard "FINISH HER" while drunk.
The Internet

Submission + - Porn Industry to Take on BitTorrent Sites (torrentfreak.com) 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Porn industry representatives gathered at an anti-piracy conference last week to discuss solutions to the ever growing amount of pirated porn that's traded on BitTorrent sites and other P2P-networks.
"Piracy is becoming a serious problem for the adult industry. It is estimated that 5% of all files being shared on public BitTorrent trackers are adult content, and most of these files are copyrighted. In an attempt to stop these sites from spreading their content the porn industry organized an anti-piracy conference."
The Courts

Submission + - FBI Forensic Evidence Discredited

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Washington Post reports that the FBI has abandoned comparative bullet-lead analysis, the technique using chemistry to link crime-scene bullets to ones possessed by suspects on the theory that each batch of lead had a unique elemental makeup, after the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect's gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence." The report added that it found that bullets packaged 15 months apart — a span that assumed separate batches of lead — had the exact composition, potentially undercutting the theory that each batch was unique and that it found that bullets in a single box often had several different lead compositions. NAS says that the flaw is in using a statistical method called chaining (pdf) in which the analyst sequentially compares crime scene bullets to a set of reference bullets assembling them into groups of compositionally indistinguishable bullets which can lead to the formation of artificially large sets of matching bullets. The government has fought releasing the list of the estimated 2,500 cases over three decades in which the FBI performed the flawed analysis."
Biotech

Submission + - Has Science Become Corrupted?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Has Science Become Corrupted?

An award winning science author, Gary Taubes has written a book that pans the medical community's treatment of the obesity epidemic. By itself, that isn't particularly worth our time. Diet books are a dime a dozen and we don't cover them on Slashdot anyway.

What is interesting is that it looks like the medical community is behaving in a very unscientific manner. Taubes points out that the current medical orthodoxy has no basis in research. In fact, all the available research points in quite another (more traditional) direction. Here is BoingBoing's take on the story. You can follow the link from there to an excellent podcast of an interview with Taubes on CBC's 'Quirks and Quarks'.

The medical community seems to defer unthinkingly to authority. For instance, when Britain's most respected paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow came up with a crackpot theory (which I thought we have covered on Slashdot but can't find) that sent innocent people to jail, the courts and the medical community bought it hook line and sinker. Of course, he isn't the only one in that boat. Pathologists all over the world have sent innocent people to jail. There's a case in Ontario, Canada right now of a pathologist who screwed up more than twenty cases and sent several people to jail.

People who study expert behavior have found that people need feedback to maintain their expertise. If they don't get the feedback by the nature of the system or because others are too intimidated/lazy to disagree with them, their behavior becomes non-expert. Ericsson points out that surgeons get better as they get older but mammographers don't. Surgeons get feedback immediately. The patient lives or dies. Mammographers may never find out if they are right or wrong.

So, has medicine become a non-science? Is it mostly a non-science? Somewhat? Can physicists feel smug with their repeatable experiments or do they have some 'splainin to do about string theory?
Space

Submission + - Incredible Holmes Comet grows bigger than the sun (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The Sun is no longer the largest object in our solar system. The recently visible-to-the-naked-eye Holmes comet has achieved that distinction today. The comet has a larger gas and dust cloud known as the coma, and consequently it has a larger diameter than the sun according to astronomers at the University of Hawaii. Scientists don't seem to have a guess as to how big it will ultimately become. The Holmes coma's diameter on Nov. 9 was 869,900 miles (1.4 million kilometers), based on measurements by Rachel Stevenson, Jan Kleyna and Pedro Lacerda of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. The sun's diameter, stated differently by various sources, is about 864,900 miles (1.392 million kilometers). http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/21947"
Announcements

Submission + - Japanese high tech toilet makers aim for USA (japanesecustomer.com)

Submitted by
Peter Hanami
Peter Hanami writes: "Japanese high tech toilet makers are now aiming for the USA. The washlet may be soon become a household word in the USA. Japanese high tech toilets are a luxury item that once tried are hard to resist. A heated seat, a bidet, air freshner and some models even dry, meaning the user doesn't need to use toilet paper. A must have item in Asia, will Japanese high tech toilets find a place in the USA market?"
The Media

Submission + - Hurricane Expert Calls Gore Theory "Ridiculous (smh.com.au) 5

Submitted by DrWho520
DrWho520 writes: ONE of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".
Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.
Announcements

Submission + - The Internet Turns 10 (in Vietnam) (vietnamnet.vn)

Submitted by
corigo
corigo writes: "I still remember when we got our first dialup account here in Ho Chi Minh city in December of 1997. In the beginning individuals were not allowed access and you had to have a company license to get a dialup account. Ten years on where is the internet in Vietnam? Internet access and usage has climbed from 200,000 in the year 2000 to 16,700,000 in 2007 or almost 20% of the population! (http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia/vn.htm)

Vietnam is preparing a symposium for the 10 year anniversary of internet in Vietnam. So what is next for Vietnam? Majors players like Intel, Canon, Renesas, Acer, Brother, etc. are currently investing Billions of dollars into manufacturing and assembly in Vietnam and Vietnam is struggling to build a software development outsourcing market. I'll tell you what I'm hoping for, cheaper internet access. A single Fixed IP aDSL line still costs $200/month!!!"

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