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Yeah... because comparing videos of people "hacking" to videos on how to kill people (through suicide bombing or slitting throats) is really a fair comparison.

thinkingpen writes "Read/Write web is carrying an interesting story about Firefox 3. From the article — "An interesting tidbit came out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn't able to attend). Robert O'Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because you'll be able to use your web apps — like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, etc — in the browser even when offline. I deliberately mentioned all Google web apps there, because of course this plays right into Google's hands." Now thats web 3.0 ?"

nickull writes "Gunnar Helliesen muses about the great firewall of Norway: "My country is going off the deep end. A Computer Crime Panel study group established by the Norwegian Government has issued a proposal to the Justice Department for a new law that would force all ISPs (Internet Service Providers) in Norway to actively censor the Internet. If this proposal were to become law, Norway would have stricter Internet censorship than China." more — http://archives.listbox.com/247/200702/0064.html"

nadamsieee writes "Wired's Luke O'Brian recently reported about Congress' latest attempt to reform the patent system. In the article O'Brian tells of how "[w]itnesses at Thursday's hearing painted a bleak picture of that system. Adam Jaffe, a Brandeis University professor and author of a book on the subject, described the system as "out of whack." Instead of "the engine of innovation," the patent has become "the sand in the gears," he said, citing widespread fears of litigation." The House Oversight Committee website has more details. How would you fix the patent system?"

brendotroy writes "Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image's worth of data into a photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact. Squeezing that much information into so small a space and retrieving it intact opens the door to optical buffering — storing information as light."

An anonymous reader writes "Rich Internet Applications is the new buzz-phrase for Web 2.0, and a key component of the substance behind Web 2.0 is Adobe Flash. Have some fun this Friday afternoon and learn how to create Rich Internet Applications, integrate Adobe Flash movies into your applications and generate Flash movies dynamically with the Ming library."

garion888 writes "Solar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011 "looks like its going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. — NASA

Sunspot Maxima bring increased solar winds which can wreak havok on electrical systems...be sure to stock up on your tinfoil before it all runs out."

Lorg writes "After extracting and analyzing the appearance count of external links on wikipedia, it seems that Wikipedia's external links have a distribution similar to Zip's law. This is another example of a 'natural' phenomenon that obeys Zip's law, and another interesting facet of Wikipedia."