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Pickens writes "Aaron Rower has an interesting post on Wired with the "Top 5 Reasons it Sucks to be an Engineering Student" that includes awful textbooks, professors who are rarely encouraging, the dearth of quality counseling, and every assignment feels the same. Our favorite is that other disciplines have inflated grades. "Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films," writes Rower. "Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores." For many students, earning a degree in engineering is less than enjoyable and far from what they expected. If you want to complain about your education, this is your chance."

The results from the Urban Challenge are in! Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing team came in first (earning a $2 million prize), followed by Stanford's Stanford Racing team in second (earning $1 mil) and Virginia Tech's Victor Tango in third (earning $500k). Cornell's Team Cornell, University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University's Ben Franklin Racing Team, and MIT, also finished the race in that order.
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/

michuk writes "One Laptop Per Child project is currently working on the "Build 2 (B2) release of their "XO" laptop. The first pieces of the B1 series have been produced in November last year. The B2 prototypes are planned to be delivered to the interested countries for practical testing later this month. During this period of time, there have been some noticeable changes in the XO project. We are going to cover the essential ones in the progress report."

An anonymous reader writes "As everyone who uses Netflix knows, scratches on DVD are frustrating and create significant customer support costs. Blu-ray is the first major disc format to address the problem. The chemistry [1] [2] [3] behind these coatings a radical-curing urethane(meth)acrylate and a curing monomer, and is applied unformly over the disc. The results are impressive — this video shows a Blu-ray disc surviving steel wool and a pizza cutter, which would have destroyed traditionally-coated formats (e.g., CDs, DVD, or HD-DVD). Fewer scratched discs also means less waste."

buckminster writes "If you had any doubt about America's national priorities, consider this: Yesterday's bomb scare has become today's copyright violation. Those Aqua Teen Hunger Force signs that brought Boston to a halt earlier this week are now setting off copyright alarms on eBay. It's strange because the signs being auctioned are apparently authentic. Which means they aren't copies, and as a result are not in violation of copyright. Could it be that someone just wants these signs to go away so they won't suffer any more embarrassment? Medialoper has the details in How To Copyright An Atomic Bomb."

An anonymous reader writes "Used to be the community would post a story to Slashdot and it would be posted withing a few hours. Now, it takes one or two days or not at all. Lets take the Jim Gray story as an example. We all know he went missing at sea, but has Slashdot had a story since? Does Slashdot have a story about the wonderful response from the tech community? Does Slashdot have a story of how there are satellite images on Amazon's Mechanical Turk that really needs help from the community? http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=J0XZ58S TDWJZ5QY4F9M0 I think this classifies as "News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters" don't you? There is a NY Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/technology/03sea rch.html?ei=5094&en=e63424b964aacb08&hp=&ex=117056 5200&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1170539697- sHESUkHGhoG+uR/4/23nkw Other news sources have also picked up the story. Where is Slashdot when it matters?"

islisis writes "What would the world have been like if Microsoft had adopted a GNU policy for all of it's existing software at the height of it's period?"

I recently ran into a situation where several people have accused me of trying to tie the Holocaust into Global Warming by my use of the word "denier". My intention behind that word was, and has always been, to distinguish those who actively deny global warming from those who are merely skeptical (a smaller and smaller crowd all the time). However, I've recently seen more of this kind of argument. I have reason to believe that these people (or at least some of them) sincerely believe that there is an attempt to make such a bizarre connection.

So, my question is: what is a better phrase that still captures the essence that these people are not merely skeptics but head-in-the-sand individuals (at best) who are deliberately or ignorantly misrepresenting the existing science?

Terms I've considered:

• Global warming manipulator: No good. Sounds like they have giant weather-controlling machines.
• Global warming liars: Don't like it. Lacks specificity.
• Global warming shills: Still no good. Most of these people are tools (i.e., are being manipulated themselves), not shills.

Finally - for the few of you who actually are skeptical (I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that most of you understand and have few doubts about the climate science involved), I encourage you to read Scientific American's article devoted to answering real questions from real skeptics. As for the predictions of past IPCC reports (since the current (4th) IPCC has been an impetus for many of these discussions), I recommend this National Geographic article.

Anonymous Coward writes "One day my friend and I were sitting around shooting the breeze. After a few momments we looked at each other and commented on the dryer making a thumping sound. Feeling bewildered i stood up and went into the laundry room, upon opening the dryer door my black cat jumped out. A liitle shaken but still coherent he just causally sauntered off. My friend and I laughed for a while and realized the cat was in the dryer on full heat for about 15 minutes."

FreemanPatrickHenry writes "You can help search for Jim Gray using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. You must create a (free) account to participate.

Instructions from the site:
"You will be presented with 5 images. The task is to indicate any satellite images which contain any foreign objects in the water that may resemble Jim's sailboat or parts of a boat. Jim's sailboat will show up as a regular object with sharp edges, white or nearly white, about 10 pixels long and 4 pixels wide in the image. ...
Marked images will be sent to a team of specialists who will determine if they contain information on the whereabouts of Jim Gray."

Let's help our comrade who may be in grave danger!"

ubermiester writes "The NY Times is reporting on the massive effort among Silicon Valley's "best and brightest" to aid in the search for missing MS researcher James Gray, who went missing on Sunday while sailing the Pacific on his private boat, "Tenacious". The Coast Guard suspended its search of more than 100,000 square miles of ocean on Thursday, but "dozens of Dr. Gray's colleagues, friends and former students [continued the search] with the tool they know best: computer technology... A veritable Who's Who of computer scientists from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NASA and universities across the country spent sleepless nights writing ad hoc software, creating a blog and reconfiguring satellite images so that dozens of volunteers could pore over them, searching for a speck of red hull and white deck among a sea of gray pixels." One Coast Guard official noted, "This is the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen". Go geeks go!"

What if governments and insurance companies nip the incentive for the dangerous illegal organ trade by paying donors with free healthcare or cash? Plus: Indian Organ Mafia Busted In Bodyhack.

http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/topheadlines/~3/86025192/pay_organ_donor.html

ageor writes "It seems (not only) to me that DRM is about far more than intellectual property. It's also about monopoly and freedom of choice. It's one of those cases where us, the consumers, have to decide against accepting the new control-and-money-making-is-all-we-care-about industry's rules.

The whole matter is very well put in DRM, Vista and your rights where you can read about it and also follow the subject as deep as you like through numerous relevant links."

An anonymous reader writes "In Microsoft Loves Linux: What's With That?, Dr. Dobb's takes a deep dive into the five-year patent and technology sharing agreement between Microsoft and Novell, the vendor of SUSE Linux. What with consumer Vista being launched Jan. 30, and OS X due for the 'Leopard' update, the OS debate is raging. Which one do you think is best?"

An anonymous reader writes "Google organized a flyover of Sydney, Australia last Friday for Australia Day. The images taken on the day will be posted to Google Maps in a few weeks. A number of dotcoms spent hours making huge signs that would be visible from the air. It will be interesting to see whether Google will repeat the event in other cities. If they do, get prepared early. What sign would you make?"