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Education

Submission + - Wikimedia COO a felon (physorg.com) 1

Submitted by
ArrayIndexOutOfBound
ArrayIndexOutOfBound writes: "physorg.com has an article about Carolyn Doran, COO of Wikimedia. "Before she left [Wikimedia] in July, Carolyn Bothwell Doran, 45, had moved up from a part-time bookkeeper for the Wikimedia Foundation and spent six months as chief operating officer, responsible for personnel and financial management. At the time, she was on probation for a 2004 hit-and-run accident in Virginia that had landed her seven months in prison. Doran had multiple drunken-driving convictions, and records show earlier run-ins for theft, writing bad checks and wounding her boyfriend with a gunshot to the chest.""

Feed Engadget: Acer kicks out Extensa 4620 laptops on the cheap (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Laptops

Sure, Acer may be marketing its Extensa lineup to small business owners, but there's nothing that says bargain hunters can get in on one, too. The 14.1-inch Extensa 4620 comes loaded with Windows XP Professional (sorry, Vista aficionados), 1GB of RAM, a 120GB hard drive, dual-layer DVD burner, 802.11a/b/g WiFi, gigabit Ethernet, a 56k modem, GMA 3100 graphics chipset and a six-cell Li-ion good for around two hours. The first of the two 4620 iterations (that'd be the 6294, break out the pencils!) sports an Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 CPU, while the 4620-4054 rocks a T2310. According to Acer, both of the lappies are available now throughout North America for $799 and $699, respectively.

[Via I4U News]

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Education

Submission + - Canadian copyright "reform" denounced

Submitted by wakim1618
wakim1618 writes: In Canada, ctv news (the country's largest broadcaster) reports that libraries urge balance in pending copyright reforms". In particular the Canadian Library Association has issued a press release arguing that these amendments make the same mistakes as the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

"American law makes no differentiation in penalty between a counterfeiter circumventing technical protection measures for illegal profit and an individual circumventing technical protection measures to make a single copy... Our challenge is with the Hollywood lobbyists and the recording industry who are trying to take rights away from ordinary Canadians"

Feed Science Daily: El Niño Affected By Global Warming (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
Scientists have made some unexpected findings about the recent evolution of the ENSO system. Investigation of marine sedimentary drill cores enabled them to retrace the changes in the ENSO's functioning since the XVIIth Century to the present. Results showed a 2C fall in temperature of the waters of the Humboldt current system for the period 1820-1878. This time corresponds to the end of the Little Ice Age yet coincides with a warming of the Earth.
The Media

Submission + - Computerworld eats babies. (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by Lerc
Lerc writes: Computerworld has posted a response to people who called them on their use of the term Bricked in a recent article. They are standing beside their use of the term. It seems they support the idea of misleading headlines in order to gain reader attention arguing that the body of the article still provides accurate information. "The facts in the article are clear and straightforward, and if the headline gets the attention of one user who *won't* walk up to you Wednesday morning with a cheesed laptop, I think you'll agree the verbal slap upside the head is worth it."
Government

Army Buys Macs to Beef Up Security 342

Posted by Zonk from the shiny-red-firewall dept.
agent_blue writes "The Army is integrating Macs into their IT network to thwart hack attempts. The Mac platform, they argue, is more secure because there are fewer attacks against OS X than Windows-based systems. 'Military procurement has long been driven by cost and availability of additional software--two measures where Macintosh computers have typically come up short against Windows-based PCs. Then there have been subtle but important barriers: For instance, Macintosh computers have long been incompatible with a security keycard-reading system known as Common Access Cards system, or CAC, which is heavily used by the military. The Army's Apple program, created [in 2005], is working to change that.'"
Power

Silicon Valley Startup Prints $1/watt Solar Panels 519

Posted by Zonk from the printing-money-and-energy dept.
GWBasic writes "A Silicon Valley start-up called Nanosolar has shipped its first solar panels — priced at $1 a watt. That's the price at which solar energy gets cheaper than coal. While other companies have been focusing their efforts on increasing the efficiency of solar panels, Nanosolar took a different approach. It focused on manufacturing. 'The company [has developed] a process to print solar cells made out of CIGS, or copper indium gallium selenide, a combination of elements that many companies are pursuing as an alternative to silicon.'" The outfit also happens to be backed by Google, a fact that's getting some attention at tech media sites.
Transportation

High Efficiency Hybrid Car Planned For 2009 371

Posted by Zonk from the way-better-than-the-gas-guzzlers dept.
An anonymous reader writes "You may have heard some of the hype last month when California-based Aptera let out first word of its allegedly super fuel-efficient (and cheap) Typ-1 electric vehicle. A video test drive and gee-whiz specs breakdown at the Popular Mechanics site proves that this thing is for real. The plan is to have a vehicle that goes 120 miles on a single lithium-phosphate pack charge for 2008, with a 300-mpg model to follow by 2009. Aptera is also mentioned in Wired's new cover story as one of several early front-runners for the Automotive X Prize."
Software

Alpine 1.00 Brings Pine Back 204

Posted by Soulskill from the old-friend-new-face dept.
TreeDork alerts us that Alpine 1.00 has now been released by the University of Washington. The full source and documentation are available."On the surface, Alpine will appear strikingly similar to the Pine Message System, and it is upwards-compatible for existing Pine users. Alpine is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The source code has been reorganized from the ground up to separate the user interface code from the underlying email engine itself. All of the source needed to build Unix, Windows, and Web-based mail user agents is included.
Privacy

More Details Emerge On Domestic Spying Programs 282

Posted by kdawson from the government-and-business-a-sittin'-in-a-tree dept.
The feed brings us this NYTimes story giving new details on the telecom carriers' cooperation with secret NSA (and other) domestic spying programs. One revelation is that the Drug Enforcement Agency has been running a program since the 1990s to collect the phone records of calls from US citizens to Latin America in order to catch narcotics traffickers. Another revelation is what exactly the NSA asked for in 2001 that Qwest balked at supplying. According to the article, it was access to the company's most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls.
Transportation

Auto Mileage Standards Raised to 35 mpg 746

Posted by Zonk from the change-of-pacing dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The Senate just passed a bill that will increase auto mileage standards for the first time in three decades. The auto industry's fleet of new cars, sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and vans will have to average 35 mpg by 2020, a significant increase over the 2008 requirement of 27.5 mpg average. For consumers, the legislation will mean that over the next dozen years auto companies will likely build more diesel-powered SUVs and gas-electric hybrid cars as well as vehicles that can run on 85 percent ethanol. Automakers had vehemently opposed legislation in June that contained the same mileage requirements and Fortune magazine reported that American automakers were starting the miles-per-gallon race far behind Japan and that the new standards could doom US automakers. At the time, Chrysler officially put the cost of meeting the proposed rules at $6,700 per vehicle. The White House announced the President will sign the bill if it comes to his desk."
Science

Recent Human Evolution May Have Been Driven By Self-Selection 448

Posted by Zonk from the masters-of-our-domain dept.
Slur writes "The New York Times reports an insightful theory of Human evolution that gives credit for our accelerated evolution to the evolving brain. By virtue of our aesthetic and utilitarian preferences we ourselves have been responsible for molding the present human form and consciousness. Applied to other species we call it 'artificial selection,' but the new theory implies we did it all quite naturally, unconsciously, and that the exponential evolutionary acceleration we have achieved as a species in recent time is just what you'd expect. It also suggests that the current lull in our physical evolution is by 'choice' as well."

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