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Ololiuhqui writes "During the writer's strike, Joss Whedon came up with a musical idea. Now his diabolical plan is about to be unleashed in the form of a streaming-only release, with a DVD shortly to follow. The three-part Doctor Horrible series stars Neil Patrick Harris as the eponymous doctor, Felicia Day as the woman of his dreams, and Nathan Fillion as the doctor's nemesis, Captain Hammer. Reportedly made for 'less than six figures,' the series has already received rave reviews and will no doubt showcase Whedon's musical facility, as well as his proven ability to squeeze the most out of a budget."

I suppose next you'll try to convince everyone that Al Gore did in fact NOT invent the Internet.

gollum123 notes an extensive article from the NYTimes on the evidence that the military, since the time of the buildup to the Iraq war, has been manipulating the military analysts that are ubiquitous on TV and radio news programs, in a protracted campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's war efforts. "Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity of military analysts on the major networks, is a Pentagon information apparatus... The effort... has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air. Several dozen of the military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members, or consultants. Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks. ...[M]embers of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access."

Reuters is reporting that "Miami police could soon be the first in the United States to use cutting-edge, spy-in-the-sky technology to beef up their fight against crime. A small pilotless drone manufactured by Honeywell International, capable of hovering and "staring" using electro-optic or infrared sensors, is expected to make its debut soon in the skies over the Florida Everglades. If use of the drone wins Federal Aviation Administration approval after tests, the Miami-Dade Police Department will start flying the 14-pound (6.3 kg) drone over urban areas with an eye toward full-fledged employment in crime fighting. "Our intentions are to use it only in tactical situations as an extra set of eyes," said police department spokesman Juan Villalba." http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN1929797920080326?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

The article also mentions that US Border Patrol is also looking to deploy similar technology to provide surveillance at the North Dakota border with Canada. Which, may promise some relief for North Dakotans who have been plagued by wealthy Canucks sneaking over the border at night to buy a new Lexus.
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN1929797920080326?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

The US quit making Plutonium in 1988 and NASA needs it for power systems for deep space probes — where sunlight is not strong enough to use solar panels. Apparently, the US has been buying plutonium from Russia since 1992 — nice way to keep the stuff from bad guys — just buy it and ship it off planet... works for me.
http://www.space.com/news/080306-nasa-plutonium-shortage-fin.html

Start buying Cold War nuclear shelters and piling up the canned food, because Boeing Advanced Systems has started System F6, "DARPA's Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft United by Information Exchange space technology program." In other words: multiple, networked specialized spacecraft swarms that are intelligent enough to perform a single coordinated task together, like analyzing the crops or deciding to destroy humanity, Skynet-style. Actually, it could completely change satellites for the better, according to some experts.
http://gizmodo.com/363617/boeing-to-design-new-darpas-networked-swarm-spacecrafts/

An anonymous reader writes "We've known for ages that IPv4 was going to run out of addresses — now, it's happening. IPv6 was going to save us — it isn't. The upcoming crisis will hit, perhaps as soon as 2010, but nobody can agree on what to do. The three options are all pretty scary. This article covers the background, and links to a presentation by Randy Bush (PDF) that shows the reality of the problem in stark detail."

Hugh Pickens writes "Contrary to previous beliefs, identical twins are not genetically identical. Researchers studied 19 pairs of monozygotic, or identical, twins and found differences in copy number variation in DNA which occurs when a set of coding letters in DNA are missing, or when extra copies of segments of DNA are produced. In most cases, variation in the number of copies likely has no impact on health or development but in others, it may be one factor in the likelihood of developing a disease (pdf). "Those differences may point the way to better understanding of genetic diseases when we study so-called discordant monozygotic twins....a pair of twins where one twin has a disorder and the other does not," says Carl Bruder, Ph.D. "If twin A develops Parkinson's and twin B does not, the region of their genome where they show differences is a target for further investigation to discover the basic genetic underpinnings of the disease.""

The W3C just gave SPARQL the stamp of approval. SPARQL is a query language for the Semantic Web, and differs from othe query languages in that is usable across different data sources. There are allready 14 implementations of the spec, which is a lot. Most of them are free software. There are also billions of relations out there that are queryable, thanks to the Linking Open Data project. The structured data of Wikipedia are now queryable at DBpedia. Also, have a look at Ivan Herman's presentations.

Lets have an example: You could do this on dbpedia.org (with the standard prefixes you find there) and it will return computer scientists born before 1945: SELECT ?name ?birth ?death ?person WHERE { ?person skos:subject <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Computer_scientists> . ?person dbpedia2:birth ?birth . ?person foaf:name ?name . OPTIONAL { ?person dbpedia2:death ?death } FILTER (?birth < "1945-01-01"^^xsd:date) . } ORDER BY ?name

1sockchuck writes "A Bay Area startup is planning to build data centers on cargo container ships, which would be docked at piers in major Internet markets. The company, known as IDS (International Data Security) says it plans to use biodiesel to power its generators and use heat from equipment to manage temperature on board the ships, reducing their reliance on grid power. IDS is telling prospects that it hopes to eventually have more than 20 floating data centers docked at ports around the U.S."

Cars that drive themselves — even parking at their destination — could be ready for sale within a decade, General Motors Corp. executives say. "This is not science fiction," Larry Burns, GM's vice president for research and development, said in a recent interview. GM plans to use an inexpensive computer chip and an antenna to link vehicles equipped with driverless technologies. The first use likely would be on highways; people would have the option to choose a driverless mode while they still would control the vehicle on local streets, Burns said. He said the company plans to test driverless car technology by 2015 and have cars on the road around 2018.

mamono writes "I've recently (about two weeks ago) dumped Windows for Kubuntu. So far I've been able to find apps for everything I used to do in Windows but recently I've found a need for hard drive recovery. In the past I've used R-Tools, GetDataBack, BadCopy Pro and OnTrack. Most recently I needed to undelete files which ntfstools worked fine for. I'm now thinking ahead for when I may need to recover data from dying hard drives. My favorites have always been GetDataBack and OnTrack for dead drives and BadCopy Pro for flash media and CD/DVDs. Is there any Linux equivalents to these programs?"

Cobalt Jacket writes "The U.S. Department of Defense has announced that Selective Availability (SA) would "no longer be present in the next generation of GPS satellites." (referring to GPS III) Existing satellites have had the feature disabled by President Clinton since 2000, but SA can be activated at any time. SA was one of the principle stated reasons for the European Union and European Space Agency's backing of the Galileo program. This will not affect the GPS IIF spacecraft which will be launched over the next few years, though it is unlikely that SA will ever be utilized on those satellites."
http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=11335

Google Earth flies with NASA to revisit the moon landing sites and let visitors conduct their own lunar explorations.
http://www.news.com/2300-11397_3-6208860-1.html?part=rss&tag=6208860&subj=news