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Comment: I found it entertaining (Score 1) 201

by Mandrake (#36502628) Attached to: Review: <em>Green Lantern</em>
I guess I mostly found this movie entertaining because I went in expecting garbage, and was pleasantly surprised to find that unlike some other movies recently, there was a coherent plot, and the acting wasn't terrible. I concur that it wasn't as good as first class or thor, but I still found it to be an enjoyable movie, not half as bad as everyone seems to make it out to be.
Google

Google Earth to include Google Deep Sea ->

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes "You may have heard about the swash buckling adventures to be undertaken by Virgin Oceanic — visits to the bottom of the deepest parts of the oceans of the world. What you might not have noticed is that in the future we can all join in. The data from video cameras taken down on the five planned dives will be fed back to Google Earth.
As Sir Richard Branson said at the launch of Virgin Oceanic, more men have been to the moon than have ventured further down than 20,000 feet. As long as everything goes according to plan, the entire population should be able to experience a trip to the bottom of the oceans — if only virtually courtesy of Google Earth."
Link to Original Source
Media

Pirate Bay Retrial Denied, Judge Declared Unbiased 2

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes "A Swedish court has ruled that the judge in the PirateBay trial is unbiased and there will be no retrial. Stockholm District Court defended the judge's membership in copyright organizations as a necessity to "keep up with developments in the field" and that merely endorsing the idea of copyright law was not grounds for a mistrial. The defendants must now rely on the appeal process, while one defendant has written on their Twitter account that the PirateBay will also be suing Sweden for human rights violations."

Comment: The trouble with opting out (Score 1) 481

by Mandrake (#27695969) Attached to: Opting Out Increases Spam?
As someone who works at a company that sends a lot of email, we naturally have ways to opt out and to remove yourselves from our mailing lists. There is a BIG DIFFERENCE between removing yourself from the list or unselecting preferences than doing the CAN-SPAM opt out.

IF YOU CAN AVOID IT - JUST UNSUBSCRIBE YOURSELF.

When you do the can-spam opt-out-never-mail-me-again, we're required to keep it on file. We're also required to send this list of email addresses to every agency that markets for us saying they're not allowed to contact you on our behalf.

Now, I want you to read that last paragraph again. They're not allowed to contact you on our behalf, but they can (and almost always will) send other mails to those accounts. This means, through no fault of their own, the place you're opting out from has just given your valid email address to a bunch of other marketing firms.

Now, we have agreements in place with all these other firms that market with us, yadda yadda, and we seed them with dummy addresses so we know who has used our list of opt-outs to spam folks - but the reality is that the damage once it is done is done. and once that list goes out once it goes out 1000 times.

So, do yourself a favor, filter your mail, don't use the don't contact me again ever opt-outs, but unsubscribe if you want. It really sucks, but the law actually makes it easier to spam you rather than harder.

Space

NASA Names Space Station Treadmill After Colbert 383

Posted by Soulskill
from the running-man dept.
willith writes "The SF Chronicle reports on the results of the International Space Station Node 3 naming contest (which we previously discussed). Comedian and fake-pundit Stephen Colbert conducted a bombastic write-in campaign and repeatedly urged his show's fan base (the 'Colbert Nation') to stuff the ballot box with his name, which resulted in 'Colbert' coming in first in the write-in contest with almost a quarter-million votes. Although the Node 3 component will not be named 'Colbert' — NASA has instead chosen to call it 'Tranquility' — one of the Node 3 components will bear the honor: the second ISS treadmill, which will be installed in Node 3, will be named the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill. The formal announcement was made on the air yesterday at 22:30 EDT on the Colbert Report by astronaut Sunita Williams."
Medicine

Are Human Beings Organisms Or Living Ecosystems? 397

Posted by Soulskill
from the little-of-column-a,-little-of-column-b dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Every human body harbors about 100 trillion bacterial cells, outnumbering human cells 10 to one. There's been a growing consensus among scientists that bacteria are not simply random squatters, but organized communities that evolve with us and are passed down from generation to generation. 'Human beings are not really individuals; they're communities of organisms,' says microbiologist Margaret McFall-Ngai. 'This could be the basis of a whole new way of looking at disease.' Recently, for example, evidence has surfaced that obesity may well include a microbial component. Jeffrey Gordon's lab at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published findings that lean and obese twins — whether identical or fraternal — harbor strikingly different bacterial communities that are not just helping to process food directly; they actually influence whether that energy is ultimately stored as fat in the body. Last year, the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project to characterize the role of microbes in the human body, a formal recognition of bacteria's far-reaching influence, including their contributions to human health and certain illnesses. William Karasov, a physiologist and ecologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that the consequences of this new approach will be profound. 'We've all been trained to think of ourselves as human,' says Karasov, adding that bacteria have usually been considered only as the source of infections, or as something benign living in the body. Now, Karasov says, it appears 'we are so interconnected with our microbes that anything studied before could have a microbial component that we hadn't thought about.'"
Government

Slashdot Mentioned In Virginia Terrorism Report 779

Posted by kdawson
from the true-americans dept.
megamerican alerted us to a leaked document (PDF) from a Virginia Fusion Center titled "2009 Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment." The document is marked as "Law Enforcement Sensitive," not to be shown to public. Citizens for Legitimate Government has a write-up. Slashdot gets a mention on page 45 — not as a terrorist organization itself, but as one of the places that members of Anonymous may hang out: "A 'loose coalition of Internet denizens,' Anonymous consists largely of users from multiple internet sites such as 4chan, 711chan, 420chan, Something Awful, Fark, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Slashdot, IRC channels, and YouTube. Other social networking sites are also utilized to mobilize physical protests. ... Anonymous is of interest not only because of the sentiments expressed by affiliates and their potential for physical protest, but because they have innovated the use of e-protests and mobilization. Given the lack of a unifying creed, this movement has the potential to inspire lone wolf behavior in the cyber realms." According to the report, cell phones and digital music players have been used to transfer plans related to criminal activity, and therefore presumably could be grounds for suspicion. Podcasting is also suspicious.
First Person Shooters (Games)

id Releases Open Source Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone 232

Posted by Soulskill
from the ach-mein-leben dept.
An anonymous reader writes "id Software has released a port of the classic Wolfenstein FPS to the iPhone. Some of the coding was done by John Carmack himself, who also used original code combined with new code from Wolf3D Redux. The original code was open sourced years ago, and enthusiasts have been updating it, which made the port considerably easier for id. It's available in the iTunes App Store, but the source is available for free at id's website." Carmack also posted a detailed writeup about the decision to bring Wolf3D to the iPhone, including design notes and a few snippets of code. At the end, he says, "I'm going back to Rage for a while, but I do expect Classic Doom to come fairly soon for the iPhone." Kotaku got a chance to try the game at GDC: "It's not just a good reproduction of the original, it seems better."
Censorship

FOIA Request For Pending Copyright Treaty Denied 364

Posted by kdawson
from the let-the-sunshine-in dept.
Penguinisto writes "According to CNET, Knowledge Ecology International's FOIA request for information about ACTA was denied. ACTA is the pending copyright treaty believed to have been authored by lobbyists for the content cartels. Even stranger, the denial cited 'national security reasons (PDF). While it is not unusual for the White House of any administration to block FOIA requests for national security reasons, one would think that a treaty affecting civil interests alone wouldn't qualify for such secrecy. Not exactly sure what involvement the former RIAA mouthpiece Donald Verelli (a recent Obama pick for the DOJ) may have in this." KEI is not alone; the European Parliament wants to see the ACTA documents too.
Science

Higgs Territory Continues To Shrink 118

Posted by kdawson
from the hoggamus-higgamus dept.
PhysicsDavid writes "Announced this morning by Fermilab, the possible territory for the Higgs boson has shrunk even further. Combined results from the CDF and DZero experiments at the Tevatron have ruled out the existence of the Higgs with a mass between 160 and 170 GeV/c^2 with 95% confidence. At 90% confidence the Higgs is ruled out between about 157 and 185 GeV/c^2. Here is Fermilab's press release. If the Higgs is to be found at the lighter end of the currently allowed range of 114 GeV/c^2 to 185 GeV/c^2, its detection will be harder than at the heavier end due to the kinds of signals that the Large Hadron Collider and the Tevatron will see. Some physicists think that a lighter Higgs will be easier to spot at the Tevatron as the background processes which obscure the faint signal are not as prevalent in those experiments."

Short people get rained on last.