Slashdot

Bryan writes "A recent headline at Entertainment Weekly suggests that the '100 Best Reads' of the last 25 years do not include a single science book (not even a popular science book). In response, cosmologist Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has given an interesting analysis of EW's disappointing list, and Soul Physics is calling for suggestions on the Greatest Physics Books of the Last 25 Years. For all the great literature that science has produced in the last 25 years, EW's list seems to represent a major shortcoming in the field: it still isn't diffusing into popular culture." I'm not sure what Entertainment Weekly's standing to complain would come from. That aside, have science books ever in modern times been a driving force greater than ones intended as (mere) entertainment, religious instruction, etc? I'd put anything by Richard Feynman on this list, though.

Farakin brings us a story about how cameras in roughly 200 Chicago schools are being connected to police headquarters and the city's 911 emergency center. The goal of the effort is to "consolidate video surveillance," and it will involve both routine monitoring and real-time updates to officers on their way to a crisis. According the the Chicago Tribune, "The mayor acknowledged the cameras provide only limited security, citing a spate of shootings in recent days that have claimed young victims during after-school hours." The story also contains a video in which Mayor Daley indicated that he expects the cameras to serve as a deterrent now that people know they're under the eye of the police.

Tiller writes "CCP has released their biggest expansion to date for Eve Online, the space-based massively multiplayer online game. This new release, titled Trinity, overhauls every 3D model in the game, taking advantage of the latest features in today's graphics cards. The new content truly raises the visual bar for MMOGs and the Trinity trailer videos prove it. Interviews with the developers also reveal many of the new features, game-play changes and the estimated 50-man years that went into the effort. There is only one small problem — The upgrade you apply to enable the premium graphics also deletes your c:\boot.ini file. It is believed that the intention was to delete boot.ini in the root CCP install folder, not the root of the hard drive. Needless to say, CCP is now preventing users from downloading the upgrade and recommending users not reboot their systems until a fix is provided."

wattsup writes "You may recall the stampede that killed hundreds during a mass pilgrimage to Mecca in 2006. Catastrophic stampedes have periodically afflicted the event. The most recent one killed 345 people and injured 289.

Physicists at Dresden University of Technology in Germany studied video recordings of the 2006 stampede, and wrote visual-recognition software to track and measure the motion of individuals in the crowd. Borrowing from the physics of fluids, the scientists have now analyzed the stampede and have recommendations that could make this year's pilgrimage go smoothly."

theodp writes "Can't scrape up the bucks for junior college tuition? Don't worry, there's always MIT. By the end of 2007, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at MIT will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world thanks to OpenCourseWare (OCW). Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted. The cost? It's all free of charge."

A few nights ago I was reading my email when I got some phish; an email broken English stating that I MUST use their software. (Not included in the email but linked to instead) to access my Monster.com account. Notwithstanding Monster's WAY too lazy security policy on email addresses (I get a few "shipping coordinator" offers a week); something about this piqued my curiosity.

Since I hadn't seen this scam before, and like any halfway decent security professional I was in a machine on a DMZ, I followed the link, which my AV promptly screamed was a virus (go AVAST!), and then I decided to look at the domain hosting it. It was registered to someone in my own city, Seattle, and after five minutes on Google I had a pic of him and his wife not to mention contact info and a home address.

Ok, so here's the moral dilemma: Do I call up the guy whose identity was obviously stolen, or do I let him learn the hard way about personal data security? It's not a quick answer as, he could just as easily say I did it since I had enough skill to perform a whois lookup. We all know how well government officials deal with the intarwebs and its tubes; so I'm not looking to see if he tries to use me to recoup his losses. So what would you do in this situation?

Joebert writes "Thoose of you renting/leasing/ect out dedicated servers, what do you do inbetween tenants ?
Or, how do you go about screening tenants before letting them on your servers ?

How can people be sure that the online store they want to setup on your dedicated server doesn't have a "rootkit" left behind by a previous tenant that scrapes credit card numbers & email addresses from the transactions of any new tenants ?

With this "virtualization" stuff all over the place, wouldn't it be fairly easy for somthing like a "rootkit" to slip through the cracks ?"

MCRocker writes "Linux-Watch reports that in a Supreme Court appeal, 'Microsoft vs. AT&T', Microsoft and a surprise supporter, the Software Freedom Law Center, are effectively arguing against software patents.

SFLC is asking the Supreme Court to decide against U.S. patents applying to software that is copied and distributed overseas.

For nitty-gritty details, check out The Groklaw story."

limbicsystem writes, "I'm a scientist. I like Al Gore. I donate to the Sierra club, I bicycle everywhere and I eat granola. And I just read a very convincing article in the UK Telegraph that makes me think that the 'scientific consensus' on global warming is more than a little shaky. Now IANACS (I am not a climate scientist). And the Telegraph is notoriously reactionary. Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong? Because it seems to be solid, well researched, and somewhat damning of a host of authorities (the UN, the editors of Nature, the Canadian Government) who seem to have picked a side in the global warming debate without looking at the evidence. Hey, while I'm at it, why not look at the environmental cost of the Toyota Prius ;)." The author of the Telegraph piece is Christopher Monckton, a retired journalist and former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher. The Wikipedia article gives no evidence of any scientific training.