Hugh Pickens writes "The high stakes standoff between Iran and the U.S. over the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for one-fifth of the world's oil, escalated this week as Iran's navy claimed to have recorded video of a U.S. aircraft carrier entering the Port of Oman and the deputy chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Hossein Salami rejected U.S. claims that it could prevent Iran from closing the strait. To drive the point home, Iran has started a 10-day naval exercise in the Persian Gulf to show off how it could use small speedboats and a barrage of missiles to combat America's naval armada while in a report for the Naval War College, U.S. Navy Commander Daniel Dolan wrote that Iran has acquired 'thousands of sea mines, wake homing torpedoes, hundreds of advanced cruise missiles (PDF) and possibly more than one thousand small Fast Attack Craft and Fast Inshore Attack Craft.'" (Read more, below.)

MrSeb writes "Firefox 9 is now available — but unlike its previous rapid release forebears where not a lot changed, a huge feature has landed with the new version: the JavaScript engine now has type inference enabled. This simple switch has resulted in a 20-30% JS execution speed increase (PDF), putting JaegerMonkey back in line with Chrome's V8 engine, and even pulling ahead in some cases. If you switched away from Firefox to IE or Chrome for improved JS performance, now is probably the time to give Firefox another shot."

After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it's finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I created this place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college. Since then it has grown to be read by more than a million people, and has served Billions and Billions of Pages (yes, in my head I hear the voice). During my tenure I have done my best to keep Slashdot firmly grounded in its origins, but now it's time for someone else to come aboard and find the *future*. Personally I don't have any plans, but if you need to get ahold of me for any reason, you can find me as @cmdrtaco on twitter or Rob Malda on Google+. You could also update my mail address to be malda at cmdrtaco dot net. Hit the link below if you want to read some nostalgic saccharine crap that I need to get out of my system before I sign off for the last time.

An anonymous reader writes "The annual Perseid meteor shower, which is caused by debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle and has been observed for about 2000 years, will be hampered this year by the full moon. The full moon falls on August 13, and is also called 'Grain Moon' or 'Green Corn Moon.' During this time, the moon rises about the same time the sun sets, and sets at about the same time the sun rises. This will create difficulty in viewing the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks on the night of Friday and into the early morning of Aug. 13."

malraid writes "As a nerd who used to love science back in high school (specially physics), I now find myself completely disconnected from any and all scientific developments and news. How do you try to stay up to date with scientific developments? Science journals? Whatever makes it into Slashdot's front page? Books? Magazines? I'm looking for something engaging and informative, for not something that will require me to go and get a PhD just to be able to comprehend."

Stoobalou writes "The cat and mouse game between Apple and the jailbreaking community continues unabated as an updated version of PwnageTool hits the web just hours after apple updated its iOS mobile operating system to lock out the JailbreakMe PDF-based exploit."

An anonymous reader writes "Linus just released the first -rc of the next kernel series, but rather than continuing development as the Linux 2.6.40 kernel, he has renamed it to be the Linux 3.0 kernel." And he's tacked on a second dot and another zero (3.0.0), at least for now, because many scripts expect and rely on a three-part kernel version.