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Democrats

Fight Global Warming by Taxing 'McMansions'->

Submitted by
MCraigW
MCraigW writes "The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee this week announced a plan to fight global warming by reducing carbon emissions up to 80 percent by the year 2050. This would be done by raising gasoline taxes 50 cents per gallon and ending mortgage tax deductions on large houses, which the Michigan Democrat called "McMansions.""
Link to Original Source
Announcements

Cartoon Contest to Highlight Abuses of Science

Submitted by
Aaron Huertas
Aaron Huertas writes "Three top cartoonists have joined with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to kick off the organization's second annual "Science Idol" scientific integrity cartoon contest to draw humorous attention to a very serious issue: political interference in science. The judges for this year's contest include two Pulitzer Prize winners: Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles and "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau. They will be joined by Dave Coverly, whose cartoon "Speed Bump" has won the National Cartoonists Society's newspaper panel cartoon award twice, and James MacLeod, the Evansville, Indiana, history professor who won last year's contest. The Science Idol winner will get $500 and a free 3-day trip to the nation's capital to have lunch with Toles. All artists, amateur or professional, are welcome to participate. The submission deadline is May 22. Cartoons should address the abuse of science in general or highlight one or more of the ways in which science has been misused, ranging from the censorship of scientists to the manipulation of scientific reports. For contest rules and submission guidelines, go to: www.ucsusa.org/scienceidol."
User Journal

Journal: [parenting] Almost 4 months

Journal by FroMan

We visited some friends the previous week and met their new little daughter. She is 2 months old today. After the visit my wife and I both noted that she was jaundaced a little, but also very small for her age. Our friends took her into the doctor last week and it sounds like she is having some trouble with her liver and bile ducts. They will be running some additional tests this week and possibley doing some surgery. However, there is a high chance that she will need to have a liver tra

Hardware Hacking

Why Powered USB Is Needed Part 3: USB 3.0

Submitted by
Diablo-D3
Diablo-D3 writes "I've written a third, and hopefully final part, to the originally two part Why Powered USB Is Needed article that got Slashdotted two days ago, and this response is pretty much due to Slashdot users asking smart questions and poking a few holes in my argument. The third part covers how USB 3.0 essentially needs to follow in Firewire's footsteps to truly succeed and overcome people's views on USB as just a low bandwidth bus that no one uses seriously and, combined with New Powered USB, could overtake Firewire in high bandwidth applications."
Intel by OSTG

Journal: Parallel Programming 90

Journal by Shobhan_Intel
Hello Slashdot community. Shobhan and Clay here to talk about parallel programming this week, a topic that is both interesting and familiar to us. As processors for server, desktop and mobile platforms move from dual to quad core and beyond, software must be parallelized to best benefit from the potential performance gains now possible. Software developers have successfully introduced parallelism to their software through multithreading using Intel resources such as software development tools
Biotech

Possibly convert all transfusion blood Type O

Submitted by UnanimousCoward
UnanimousCoward writes "The BBC has an article that talks about a submission to Nature Biotechnology (not the current issue) in which scientists claim to have discovered a technique to convert all blood into Type O with the discovery of an enzyme that can strip the A and B antigens. This has implications to transform the stored blood supply into transfusable blood for all. It does not address the RH negative issue, though."
The Almighty Buck

Melting Coins Now Illegal In the U.S. 778

Posted by kdawson
from the facing-meltdown dept.
A number of readers have noted the action by the U.S. Mint to outlaw the melting down or bulk export of coins. This has come about because the value of the precious metals contained in coins now exceeds their face value. The Mint would rather not have to replace pennies (at a cost of 1.73 cents per) or nickels (at 8.74 cents). The expectation is that Congress will mandate new compositions for some U.S. coins in 2007.
Security

MySpace users have stronger passwords than corp...

Submitted by
Ant
Ant writes "This Wired News column reports Bruce Schneier's analysis the data from a successful phishing attack on MySpace and compares the captured user-passwords to an earlier data-set from a corporation. He concludes that MySpace users are better at coming up with good passwords than corporate drones. The article is a great state-of-the-password address, with lots of fun nuggets like "We used to quip that 'password' is the most common password. Now it's 'password1.' Who said users haven't learned anything about security?" ... Seen on Boing Boing."
Enlightenment

10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2007

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has a new list of wide-ranging technology terms it claims will be big in '07. From PRAM to BAN and SmartPills to data clouds, it's a pretty nice summary of upcoming and in-the-works trends across the board (with a podcast embedded). But what's missing? How reliable is the magazine's short-term impact meter for each must-learn term? How do their predictions from a year ago stack up now?"
United States

U.S. Mint makes law banning the melting of coins.

Submitted by meltzroth
meltzroth writes "The U.S. Mint has made a illegal to melt down coins and then resell the resulting metal for scrap, resulting in fines and prison time for those who decide to liquefy Lincoln.

This doesn't seem practical for coins they are currently producing since they are made up of layers of two or more metals, and the process of separating them would probably offset the profit. I imagine this primarily applies to pre-1982 pennies, which were made from pure copper.

Link
http://money.cnn.com/2006/12/14/news/melting/index .htm?cnn=yes"

When the ax entered the forest, the trees said, "The handle is one of us!" -- Turkish proverb