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Spam

Obama Beats McCain In Spam Landslide 154

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-isn't-that-unfortunate dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times runs an article about the spammers' choice of presidential candidate. From the article: 'According to Secure Computing Corp., spammers were nearly seven times more likely to slap Obama's name in the subject line than McCain's during September. The bulk of Obama's lead in the spam wars came from a massive blitz early in the month.' Secure Computing released additonal numbers for the past weeks, and McCain was able to close the gap in the latest spammers' poll."

Comment Re:Another Molyneux game (Score 1) 74

by ebolaZaireRules (#25022969) Attached to: <em>Fable II</em> Previews, Molyneux Opinions

From the description, it looks like syndicate 1... But I _know_ it had sound (and I can never get it working). Perhaps I should try the iso...

Syndicate was awesome, and even without sound, I enjoy it... I really should save my games though.

and after you play syndicate, try chaos overlords... I liked it so much, I'm 1/2 way through writing a clone (truth be told, I'm 1/2 way through quite a few projects).
Medicine

Lack of Sunlight Could Lead To Early Death 304

Posted by kdawson from the among-other-unpleasant-consequences dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Members of this community may want to venture out of the basement more often, because Dr. Harald Dobnig and his team have found that vitamin D deficiency leads to increased mortality. These results still hold when they take into account such factors as exercise and heart disease. Low vitamin D status has 'other significant negative effects in terms of incidence of cancer, stroke, sudden cardiac death and death of heart failure,' Dr. Dobnig said. The evidence of ill effects from low vitamin D 'is just becoming overwhelming at this point.' Vitamin D3 is usually produced by exposure to the UV-B in sunlight, but in high latitudes, especially in the fall and winter, insufficient UV-B gets through the atmosphere to produce enough vitamin D3, even with hours of exposure. The researchers are recommending that people at risk for deficiency take 800 IU of vitamin D3 daily. Just don't go overboard — as a fat-soluble vitamin, D3 is more capable of causing adverse effects at unnaturally high dosages. The human body tops out at producing about 10,000 IU per day." According to the Wikipedia entry linked above, the D2 (ergocalciferol) version -- available as a vegan product -- works approximately as well to supply humans with their needed vitamin D.
Businesses

A Hippocratic Oath For Scientists 366

Posted by kdawson from the remember-when-swearing-an-oath-mattered-neither-do-i dept.
grrlscientist writes "In response to what appears to be a growing problem of scientific misconduct, a group of people at the Institute of Medical Science at University of Toronto in Canada wrote a scientist's version of the Hippocratic oath. This oath (which is cited in the story) was recited by all graduate students in the biological sciences at the beginning of the 2007-2008 academic year." This blogger argues that merely reciting an oath is not going to help much when "...the corruption in 'science' is systemic. It is due to corporate science being run according to a business model instead of in accordance to an educational paradigm. It is due to unrestrained corporate greed combined with a tremendous disparity in power and income..."
Slashdot.org

Unexpected Slashdot Downtime 219

Posted by CmdrTaco from the zomg-what-a-night dept.
Netcraft confirmed it ... Slashdot was dying for several hours (along with SourceForge, which shares a corporate overlord and router). Some planned downtime from our provider apparently didn't come back up quite as planned. Sorry for the inconvenience. On the upside, we're moving to a new network and hardware soon, so the site should be much faster and more stable rsn.
Books

Journal Journal: Tapestry 5 - Building Web Applications

Journal by ebolaZaireRules

Tapestry 5
Building Web Applications
by Alexander Kolesnikov

All new programming tools, methodologies and frameworks have a 'learning curve'. Some are easier to pick up than others, and some are more effective than others. One thing that they all share, however, is that getting started is the biggest hurdle of all.

If you would like to set the bar as low as possible to begin with, this book (and Tapestry 5) are for you.
Government

Submission + - Your Identity is Safe with Us (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by TitusC3v5
TitusC3v5 writes: According to the BBC, the Next Generation Identification database is ready to see a $1bn contract award as of next month. As always, the administration assures us that "innocent people would have nothing to fear from the database. FBI assistant director Thomas E Bush told the BBC the targets would be what he called the 'bad guys' — terrorist and criminal suspects."
Mozilla

Submission + - Student given detention for using Firefox 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Several sites are reporting that a student has been given detention for using "Firefox.exe" to do his classwork. No, really. The student was in class, working on an assignment that necessitated using a browser. The teacher instructed him to stop using Firefox and to do his classwork, to which the student responded that he was doing his classwork using a "better" browser (it is unclear whether the computer was the student's own computer or not). The clueless teacher (who called the rogue program "Firefox.exe") ordered him to detention.
Censorship

Journal Journal: Uses Firefox instead of IE, gets detention

Journal by INT 21h

The school bureaucrats strike again: Two hours detention for using a different browser to do an assignment than expected (somehow I doubt using Opera/Safari/Konqueror/Galeon/etc. instead would have led to any other result.)

http://www.uploadgeek.com/uploads456/0/1197784327416.png

"Foxfire". Better name than iceweasel anyhow.
The Internet

Submission + - Rogers ISP Web Messages Anger Google

Submitted by Jumphard
Jumphard writes: Toronto based ISP, Rogers, potentially overstepped the boundaries [TheStar.com] of what an ISP can and cannot do. They recently tested out new "technology" that inserts Rogers messages into HTML pages served from other websites to inform users of their monthly bandwidth usage. This has changed the look and feel of Google Inc.'s webpage for Rogers subscribers, and Google hasn't taken the offense lightly. Google and other critics say it is the start of a slippery slope of ISPs botching net-neutrality and controlling the web as they see fit. Is this a simple case of a harmless new feature being taken the wrong way, or is Rogers on it's way to becoming the new People's Republic of China?
Patents

Submission + - Dell announces touchscreen and is immediately sued (informationweek.com)

Submitted by goombah99
goombah99 writes: Dell computer announced their foray into consumer touchscreen tablets using multitouch technology. And they are immediately sued in Texas by a company who's 1995 and 1997 patents cover "Portable computer with touch screen and computing system employing same". The claims seem to cover any touchscreen laptop or computing device. The Latitude XT's base price is $2,499, it has a 12.1-inch LED-backlit screen, a 1.06-gigahertz Intel Core 2 Solo processor, 1GB of memory, and a 40GB hard drive with Vista or XP. Battery life is said to be 5 hours and it weighs 3.5 pounds. The screen rotates from notebook with integral keyboard to tablet mode.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - PS3/X360 Orange Box Comparo: EA's fault?

Submitted by
fistfullast33l
fistfullast33l writes: "1Up's Gamevideos.com has posted a side by side comparison of the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Half Life Orange Box. The video shows that the PS3 definitely has some issues with slowdown, as previously discussed here on Slashdot. The biggest issues seem to occur during the jetski scene in the original HL2. However, upon closer review you can see that the largest lag (which really turns the game into a slideshow) actually occurs while the game is quicksaving, something the 360 does not actually do. This occurs right around 1:47 in the video. Is this the hardware's fault, or EA's fault for poorly implementing the Quick Save on the PS3? Not having played the game I couldn't say if the quicksave was controlled by the user, but it certainly makes you suspect whether the slowdown is actually a coding or hardware issue and rather a game design problem. Couldn't they have just scheduled the quicksave a little later?"

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