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`You're not entitled to this information.'

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef LLC, the Kansas-based meat producer, shouldn't be allowed to test beef for mad-cow disease on its own because it could hurt the U.S. cattle industry, a government lawyer told an appeals court.

The industry! The industry! Yes! We must protect the industry.

Larger meatpackers have opposed Creekstone's push to allow wider testing out of fear that consumer pressure would force them to begin testing all animals too.

Wouldn't want that now, would we?

Timely emails from the future. Just the thing for us procrastinators. (archive)

Kevin143 writes "A successful human-bear-pig chimera has been created for the first time. This is a huge breakthrough in science. Induced pluripotent stem cells were used because of the controversy surrounding the use of embryonic stem cells."
http://www.thinkgene.com/scientists-successfully-create-human-bear-pig-chimera/

yeak writes "Care to travel at 40mph on a surfboard without a wave? Hop on the MonoJet, a high-performance jet-powered surfboard for rivers, lakes, and the open ocean. http://www.ballerride.com/2008/03/31/monojet-the-40mph-surf-board/"
http://www.ballerride.com/2008/03/31/monojet-the-40mph-surf-board/

AaronRowe writes "Until recently, Wired has been way too hard on the proponents of creationism. After seeing the movie Expelled, which stars Ben Stein and reveals the conspiracy by academics to silence the proponents of intelligent design, we became convinced that religion is a big part of science. It needs some time in the spotlight too. As a sign of penance, our science desk has hired a full staff of religious zealots. It turns out that this has been a huge year for intelligent design research, we took a look back at some of the most important moments."
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/top-10-creation.html

Anonymous Coward writes "Watch as Joel Christopher lay out the plan to turn the small rural fishing and farming village of Tabango, Leyte, Philippines into a FIRST WORLD CYBER-RESORT"
http://masterlistbuilder.com/blog/watch-the-tabango-first-world-by-2010-live-video-streaming/

Dynamoo writes "Context-sensitive ads are all the rage, but Telephore is the first one to bring them to your mobile phone.. nope, not text messages, but spoken ads that interrupt your call!

What is even more troubling is that Telephore analyzes your conversations with a sophisticated voice recognition system and stores them for later reference. Is this too much power to give to a private company? There's some further analysis and some leaked info that indicates that this could be a real privacy nightmare.. what's worse, is that it may well be coming your way very soon."
http://www.mobilegazette.com/telephore-08x04x01.htm

CSMastermind writes "Google today released a new feature: Google Time. It's a service that allows users to send emails at any time, even the past! From the main page: "Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option." Main Page: https://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html"
https://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html

michaelmalak writes "In perhaps his most informative article this millenium, Dvorak lays down the implications of a bill just passed by Congress (with Ron Paul in the House and Ted Kennedy in the Senate being the only dissenting votes) that will, if Bush signs it as expected, auction off the 2.3-GHz to 2.9-GHz WiFi spectrum by 2012. It is expected that private entities such as Comcast will buy it up to allow WiFi to continue, but with subscriber fees of course."

An anonymous reader writes "Visiting www.hope.net, the pleasant family image of presidential hopeful Barack Obama and family seems to have been defaced. The hack points back to Hilary Clinton, but the text of the defacement says it wasn't Hillary but instead blames the media. Is this the type of "change" we are "hoping" for?"

An anonymous reader writes "Slashdot will not be participating in the April Fools jokes this year due to a lawsuit that was settled out of court with undisclosed terms stemming from the 2007 April 1st stunts. The false stories were determined to be too egregious by a yet to be named individual. Slashdot's parent company SourceForge, Inc. found it wiser to settle out of court then a lengthy battle that was obviously going to span several months.

The ponies will be missed."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to new memory benchmarks, Firefox 3 uses less memory than other major browsers, including Opera. Due to all the complaints about memory leaks, they've integrated new technology like FreeBSD's jemalloc and a new XPCOM cycle collector. The cycle collector in particular is very important, because it can find many memory leaks caused by faulty extensions and correct them, so buggy extensions will no longer have the impact they once did. They've also modified the cache settings, so they're no longer quite so gluttonous and they no longer bother storing certain things like decompressed image data. With this new low-memory diet, there's even talk of Firefox 3 being more competitive on mobile devices."

Acer is considering introducing an open, or standards-based gaming console into the market, company's sernior vice-president told BetaNews: "Wong said that, beyond "openness," all of the Acer-branded systems being eyed right now, including the game machine, are envisioned as offering new and innovative form factors and applications." Currently global gaming market is dominated by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, with $480 million worth of gaming hardware sold in the United States in a single month, with projected 2008 spending of $6.4 billion just in the US.

It's hard for large organizations that move at glacial speeds to compete with individuals taking their content and creating new distribution systems, revenue streams and business models, but the fall of the major record labels taught the rest of the corporate world a lesson. Matt Mason from Torrentfreak did a keynote speech (video) at The Medici Summit, telling us that in many cases, piracy is helping people to innovate and create new legitimate market spaces.

Particularly I found his speech very interesting for one powerful reason: The businesses that fight pirates now, were pirates themselves when they were starting. Including Hollywood and the Music Industry. If you want to convince someone that piracy is not as evil as he claims, show him this video and he'll have his world turned upside down.

crocoduck writes "A new coalition has been formed to lead the fight against software patents. 'Software Foundation, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center, the End Software Patents (ESP) project aims to challenge the legal validity of patents that do not specify a physically innovative step.' According to the ESP, over $11.4 is wasted on software patent litigation, and that the patent trolls' driftnet is ensnaring innocent companies. ' Some examples of companies that have recently faced software patent infringement suits include Burlington Coat Factory, the Green Bay Packers, and Kraft Foods. As our society becomes more and more dependent on software, the impact of these lawsuits will escalate sharply. ESP's report also points out that technological innovation in the software industry flourished profoundly prior to the court rulings that made software patentable.'"
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080228-patent-reform-coalition-aims-to-abolish-software-patents.html