Slashdot

Yep.

"Two vehicles later drove on property, first truck with two rifles or shotguns in plain sight."

Egads, the ranchers had firearms mounted in their trucks! OH NOES, THEY MUST BE FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE OF MURDERING US, THERE IS NO OTHER POSSIBLE EXPLANATION!

Please, PLEASE take note that nobody said that threats were ever made, or that firearms were ever presented in a menacing way. For anyone that works with livestock, having long guns mounted in vehicles and handguns on one's person is absolutely normal, routine, and safe.

If I were running a ranch and a bunch of 20-somethings showed up on my private property, I would be taking pictures and making sure I had a weapon at hand, too.

I'm a fan of XKCD and love the idea of Geohashing, but these folks really should make an effort to notify landowners and get permission before entering private property.

There are no YEC's on slashdot. Wouldn't it be great if we could have just one thread about science without someone like mentioning them? Your post is as lame as when people rush in to type 1st post!!!

Newsflash: some people don't believe in science. Get over it.

Andy Updegrove writes "About two hours ago, Microsoft announced that it will update Office 2007 to natively support ODF 1.1, but not to implement its own OOXML format. Not until Office 14 is released (no date given so far for that) will anyone be able to buy an OOXML ISO-compliant version. Why will Microsoft do this after so many years of refusal? Perhaps because the only way it can deliver a product to government customers that meets an ISO/IEC document format standard is by finally taking the plunge, and supporting 'that other format.' Still, many questions remain, such as when this upgrade will actually be released, how good a job it will do, and whether the API Microsoft has said it will make available to permit developers to supply 'save to ODF' default plugins will be supported by a patent non-assertion promise allowing implementations under the GPL (the upgrade supplied by Microsoft will not allow ODF as the default setting)."

Are you seriously stating that you're considering a 190mhz machine, with 64MB of RAM, with a 640x480 8-bit display, as a web browser? Do you use the same web I do? Even applying CSS rules would crush that machine.

Recently at my university where I'm a student and a sys admin, we have been experiencing some odd outages, in particular since the 25th of September. The outages seemed to occur between 8 PM and 12:00 AM — peak gaming hours for our dorms. It just happens that Halo 3 came out on the 25th of September. Upon further investigation we found that our network routers were shaping TCP packets, but not UDP. Once we applied UDP shaping as well, all network outages ceased. Gamers complained, but university students attempting to access network resources such as our UNIX clusters were satisfied.

jabjoe writes "Russian artists from Moscow have created goggles with realtime image filtering. Among the Photoshop-like filters that can be applied is, interestingly, ASCII: you can view the world in real time as ASCII. Pointless but cool."

An anonymous reader writes "Over the past year Slashdot has pointed to many industry claims and governmental pressure over Canada piracy issues. Canadian law prof Michael Geist has produced Putting Canadian 'Piracy' in Perspective, a video that demonstrates how the claims are hugely exaggerated. For example, it shows how despite the MPAA's claim of movie piracy, Canada was the industry's fastest growing market last year. Similarly, while the recording industry says Canada is the world's top P2P country, the data shows that the Canadian music industry is experiencing record gains and that most of the decline from the major labels is due to retail pricing pressures."

An anonymous reader suggests we stop over to ZDNet for a case where Google may be stepping on the wrong side of that famous Don't Be Evil line. A Google staffer is offering to help the healthcare industry contain the damage that Michael Moore's film is about to do. (Here is the original Google Health Advertisement blog post by Lauren Turner; in case it disappears, it is reproduced in full in the ZDNet post.) Quoting from the Google post: "Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through 'Get the Facts' or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them? We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company's assets while helping users find the information they seek."

Pcol writes "For the past 13 years the University of Maryland School of Medicine has presented a historical clinicopathological conference where they consider famous historical medical cases such as the death of Alexander the Great and composer Ludwig van Beethoven and provide a modern diagnosis and treatment in each case. This year Dr. Thomas M. Scalea, physician-in-chief for the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center discusses if the world's first center for trauma victims could have improved the outcome had Lincoln's assassination occurred in 2007. "This could be a recoverable injury, with a reasonable expectation he would survive," Scalea said noting that assassin's weapon was relatively impotent compared to the firepower now on the streets today. The modern prognosis predicts that Lincoln might have conceivably recovered enough to return to the White House to complete his second term."

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slashdottit! tm

Kevlar_Sindome writes "Verse Studios announced today that they have officially 'changed everything', with the release of their first game: Fool's Gold. Fool's Gold lets players take on the role of the heroic gold farmer seeking profit from gold hungry characters who seem to have an unlimited amount of money to spend, but never enough time to spend it. Touted as the first Gold Farming Role Playing Game ( GF-RPG ), Verse Studios hopes to get a jump on starting a new game genre. Fool's Gold is free for download off the Verse Studios website."

Stony Stevenson writes "Microsoft has launched a marketing campaign that lets any student at an Australian university buy the Ultimate edition of Office 2007, usual price $1,150, for only $75 — a discount of about 93%. But when students go to the promotion site, Microsoft Live OneCare pops up a warning that the site may be a phishing scam. The warning reads: 'Phishing filter has determined this might be a phishing website. We recommend that you do not give any of your information to such websites. Phishing websites impersonate trustworthy websites for the purpose of obtaining your personal or financial information.'"

Jeff Pierce writes "AMD's CEO, Hector Ruiz, explained today why AMD's revenues won't meet expectations this quarter. According to Ruiz, this is because the company couldn't produce enough chips to meet growing OEM demand. (Funny he didn't mention the price war with Intel.) Also covered in the presentation is Ruiz's vision of what you might call "x86 everywhere." Ruiz thinks that the x86 processor market is by no means "mature," and that x86 will expand into home entertainment devices, appliances, education, and lots of other places where we don't even currently use microprocessors. AMD intends to have a big slice of that growing pie."

PreacherTom writes "Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that shoots about 300 times faster than it would take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum, to the point where the pulse seemed to exit the chamber before even entering it. Apparently, Uncle Albert is still resting comfortably: relativity only states that an object with mass cannot travel faster than light. Still, the results are sufficient to merit publication in the prestigious journal, Nature."

MilwaukeeCharlie writes "CIO Magazine is reporting some buzz about Firefox 3.0, due to be released later this year.

Some of the likely new features include:

• Offline support for web apps
• New paradigm for "bookmarks" and "history"
• Built-in database (SQL Lite), used for full-text indexing of the cache
• Support for Javascript 2

"

WebHostingGuy writes "Today the Dow Jones Industrial Index dropped a little over 3% in value. Stock market swings come and go but it is interesting that the sudden drop in the stock market is the result of a computer glitch. According to MSNBC, the computers running were not properly calculating trades. This led to the switch to a backup system which led to several seconds delay which impacted the Dow. Even now after the close of the market spokesmen for the NYSE Group Inc. could not confirm if all closing share prices were even valid."