Slashdot

skeazer writes "Tucked away in a 1,200-page bill now in Congress is a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras in their students' homes. It sounds Orwellian, but the paragraph — part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act — is all but assured of becoming law by the fall. No one in Congress objects to it."

An anonymous reader writes "Former NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell — a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission — has stunningly claimed aliens exist. And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions — but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades. Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as 'little people who look strange to us.'"

Iddo Genuth writes "Researchers at Purdue University are developing a miniature refrigeration system, small enough to fit inside laptop computers. According to the researchers, the implementation of miniature refrigeration systems in computers can dramatically increase the amount of heat removed from the microchips, therefore boosting performance while simultaneously shrinking the size of computers."

the4thdimension writes "MySpace has joined a coalition of other big-name e-services in support of OpenID. If you aren't familiar with the OpenID coalition, they are a group that seeks to allow users to create a single account/password set to be used on a number of services. Such services already signed up include: Google's Blogger, Wordpress, AOL, Yahoo, Vox, LiveJournal, and others." Reader gbjbaanb adds a link to the BBC's coverage and points out that MySpace's 100 million users would mean nearly a doubling of the approximately 120 million OpenID accounts now in use, writing: "Initially support is to use MySpace OpenIDs as providers only — i.e. you cannot logon to MySpace with an OpenID created elsewhere, but that policy will change in the future. This should help to make OpenID the de-facto login mechanism for the Internet, now if only Microsoft would support it, there are plenty OSS OpenID libraries available."

Hyppy writes "A Louisiana man died after a police officer hit him with a Taser 9 times. Baron Pikes was Tasered six times in three minutes by a law enforcement officer. He was then shocked three more times with the 50,000-volt device. The coroner reported that it's possible Pikes was already dead when he was shocked the final two times. Now, a prosecutor must decide whether the police officer, since fired, will face charges."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/07/22/taser.death/index.html

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from the Victoria Times Colonist: "After a remarkable 37-year experiment, University of Alberta scientist David Schindler and his colleagues have finally nailed down the chemical triggers for a problem that plagues thousands of freshwater and coastal ecosystems around the world." Punchline: "Phosphorus."

Geoffrey.landis writes "Some of you may have heard me talk about colonizing Venus. Well, for those who haven't, Universe Today is running story about floating cities on Venus. It's a reasonable alternative for space colonies — after all, the atmosphere of Venus (at about 50 km) is the most Earth-like environment in the solar system (other than Earth, of course). '50 km above the surface, Venus has air pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0C-50C range, a quite comfortable environment for humans. Humans wouldn't require pressurized suits when outside, but it wouldn't quite be a shirtsleeves environment. We'd need air to breathe and protection from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.'"

Stupid imperialistic units. I have to divide every amount of feet by three to understand what they are meaning. Why can't you guys just follow the rest of the world?

samzenpus writes "I find Sarah to be a hit-or-miss comic, often a miss but this pretty funny. It may not be the easiest way to break the news but at least there is no room for ambiguity. The best part has to be that Damon did it."

samzenpus writes "The thing that interests me about this video is how by just adding a beep you can change something completely innocent into something that seems vulgar. There is a consumer/advertising perception study in here somewhere. Also, perceived puppet profanity is funny."

Shodan writes "Earlier this week I had mentioned a third party application in my article, called vLite which has capability of stripping-down Windows Vista. This application has earned a bit of fame by allowing people to make their Vista installations more lightweight, removing unwanted components and implementing various speed tweaks."
http://www.shodan.in/2008/02/02/microsoft-warns-users-who-strip-windows-vista-using-vlite/

bagboy writes "From Nature GeoScience, an abstract detailing how recent volcanic eruptions under the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is influencing ice floes. Ongoing volcanic heat production may also cause changes in the dynamics. This article from ars also walks through it."
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n2/abs/ngeo106.html

Australian open source developers typically earn triple the national median salary and are likely to be in a relationship, according to an Australian Open Source Industry and Community census.

The self-selected online survey suggests 57 percent were hobbyists who don't get paid to work on open source, 24 percent were working on open source in their paid job part of the time, while 10 percent worked on open source full time. Interestingly, the highest paid group was those working full time on open source projects.

mattsgotredhair writes "Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory are developing nano-tech solar panels that absorb energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, just outside the range of what is visible to the eye. The sun radiates a lot of infrared energy, some of which is soaked up by the earth and later released as radiation for hours after sunset. The team estimates individual nanoantennas can absorb close to 80 percent of the available energy. According to Physicist Steven Novack, "Double-sided panels could absorb a broad spectrum of energy from the sun during the day, while the other side might be designed to take in the narrow frequency of energy produced from the earth's radiated heat.""

spgass writes "Gizmodo has attempted to showcase the best lego sets of all time. I see the yellow castleland I remember enjoying playing with as a kid. I remember waking my parents up early on the weekend. They'd get down a lego set for me to play with and go back to sleep. Congratulations to Lego for 50 years."
http://gizmodo.com/349929/best-lego-sets-in-history/