Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: Re:Life fills a space defined by its environment (Score 4, Insightful) 238

by jakosc (#33289564) Attached to: Did Sea Life Arise Twice?
Despite the BBC article's title and the slashdot summary, this story is not about whether *life* evolved twice---it's about whether *animals* evolved twice. The issue here is that they have discovered relatively complex sponge-like organisms before a catastrophic event (snowball earth). This means either that 1) snowball earth wasn't that bad, didn't kill them off, and more complex animals (including us) might have evolved from them or 2) it killed them off, and animals evolved a second time once it was over.
OS X

Kvetching about Leopard Server->

Submitted by
jammag
jammag writes "John Welch reviews the Leopard server and finds it impressive — but not perfect. Many of his minor complaints center around user interface issues (ironically for Apple), like the hassle involved with configuring Server Admin, and the cumbersome user list in the Directory App. He suggests an Outlook Web Access, or OWA layer, for Leopard server's groupware. His bottom line: "Overall, Mac OS X 10.5 Server is a big improvement, but it's not completely done yet.""
Link to Original Source
Patents

UK Government rejects copyright term extension-> 1

Submitted by
e6003
e6003 writes "The UK Government has responded to a report from the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee which (inter alia) had backed the extension of phonographic performance copyright from its present 50 years. The Government response [PDF document] notes (in response to paragraph 28 on page 15 of the PDF) that the Gowers Report considered the call for a term extension on economic and moral grounds but rejected all the arguments in favour of term extension, as did an EU Commission report. The Response concludes, "Taking account of the findings of these reports, which carefully considered the impact on the economy as a whole, and without further substantive evidence to the contrary, it does not seem appropriate for the Government to press the [European] Commission for action at this stage." Pleasingly, the Response also notes "The Government will undertake a public consultation this Autumn about making an exception to copyright legislation to allow format-shifting for private use." It's technically an infringement of copyright in the UK to rip CDs to your iPod and even the music industry has agreed something needs to be done about this."
Link to Original Source
Censorship

Bush takes over federal science->

Submitted by
amigoro
amigoro writes "Through an Executive Order that gives political appointees final say regarding science-based federal agency regulations and the appointment of an anti-educationist to head the Office of Management and Budget, US President George W. Bush is attempting to insulate his administration from congressional accountability while effectively turning federal scientists into White House puppets, a group of scientists warned today."
Link to Original Source
Media

UK rejects lengthening of copyright->

Submitted by timrichardson
timrichardson writes "The British Government has rejected extending copyright for sound recordings. This is an important development in the face of trends to extend copyright duration, although it leaves British copyright protection for music recordings at a shorter duration than for written works. The decision was despite fierce lobbying from the large British music industry. The music industry will now lobby direct to the European Commission, but without the support of the national government, its position is significantly weakened. British copyright for music recordings therefore remains at 50 years after the death of the artist, in contrast to 95 years in the US and 70 years in Australia."
Link to Original Source
The Courts

Court convicts Skype for breaching GPL

Submitted by terber
terber writes "In Munich a German court once again upheld the GPL2 and convicted Skype (based in Luxembourg) of violating GPL by selling the Linux-based VoIP phone "SMCWSKP 100" without proper source code access. Skype later on added a flyer to the phones with an URL where to obtain the sources, but the court found this insufficient as this was in breach of GPL section 3. Plaintiff was once again Netfilter developer Harald Welte, who runs http://gpl-violations.org/. The decision is currently only available in German at http://www.ifross.de./ News source (German): www.golem.de/0707/53684.html"
Software

Idle Scripting Language->

Submitted by
Thomas Lauer
Thomas Lauer writes "Idle is a scripting language based on Lua
(see http://www.lua.org/ ).

Lua is a mature and efficient language, sporting an easy-to-understand
syntax and extraordinary extensibility. Idle inherits these features
and includes some extensions to the Lua core language of its own.
However, the main difference to Lua is the integration of an extensive
runtime library and the included compiler.

The project is focused on producing a small but powerful scripting
language that is easy to deploy and easy to use and that can produce
small, portable executable files. (Of course, it is always possible to
run Idle scripts through the interpreter.)
To this end the Idle compiler creates .exe files which only depend on
the Idle runtime DLL (which currently weighs in at less than 160 KB). A
script of, say, 50 KB will produce an executable of roundabout 35 to 40
KB that can be run on other machines without the need of installing
anything.

Idle supports the following features out of the box:
* full Perl-compatible regular expressions
* many operating system additions like file locking, directory walking,
    pipes, process creation, ...
* networking and sockets
* simple macro processing
* fully transparent reading of files and Idle code from inside archives
    (.zip and .7z archive types)
* dynamic call facility allows arbitrary calls into external DLLs
* embedding interface to Perl and Tiny C
* multi-threading allows multiple Idle tasks to execute in parallel
* Win32 API functions (clipboard, registry, ...)
* and more.

Some of the functionality is based on existing products and libraries
(mostly Lua itself, the PCRE regular expression library, LuaSocket and
PhysicsFS).

This pre-alpha release is only available for systems running Windows
2000 and later versions. Later versions may support Linux and similar
systems.

More information, downloads and preliminary documentation:
http://idle.thomaslauer.com/"
Link to Original Source
Security

Attackers Gain Full Control of iPhone

Submitted by i_like_spam
i_like_spam writes "The NYTimes is running a story about an iPhone flaw that has been found and documented by researchers from Independent Security Evaluators. Attackers were able to gain full control of the iPhone either through WiFi or by visiting a website with malicious code. The exploit will be demostrated at BlackHat on Aug. 2nd at 4:45pm. Until then,

Details on the vulnerability, but not a step-by-step guide to hacking the phone, can be found at www.exploitingiphone.com, which the researchers said would be unveiled today.
"
Security

New Iphone Hole Allows Full Control

Submitted by i_like_spam
i_like_spam writes "The NYTimes is running a story about a new Iphone flaw that has been found and documented by researchers from Independent Security Evaluators. Attackers can gain full control of the Iphone either through WiFi or by visiting a website with malicious code. From the article:

Details on the vulnerability, but not a step-by-step guide to hacking the phone, can be found at www.exploitingiphone.com, which the researchers said would be unveiled today.
"
United States

Robot aircraft crush worldwide enemies - from Nev.->

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes "The first unmanned attack squadron in aviation history will arrive in Iraq today looking to deliver 500-pound bombs and Hellfire missiles to the enemy — all from the comfort of a US Air Force base in Nevada. The General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper can be controlled via satellite link thousands of miles away from operational areas. The planes are launched locally, in this case Iraq and Afghanistan, but can be controlled by a pilot and sensor operator sitting at computer consoles in a ground station, or they can be "handed off" via satellite signals to pilots and sensor operators in Nevada's Creech Air Force Base or elsewhere. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1756 0"
Link to Original Source

I can read your mind, and you should be ashamed of yourself.