PolygamousRanchKid writes "Kansas City's Catholic bishop was charged Friday with not telling police about child pornography found on a priest's computer, making him the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic official indicted on a charge of failing to protect children. Finn has acknowledged that he and other diocese officials knew for months about hundreds of 'disturbing' images of children that were discovered on a priest's computer but did not report the matter to authorities or turn over the computer."

lamaditx writes "The book Collective Intelligence in Action shows you how to apply theory from Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining to your business. The goal is to create systems which make use of data created by groups of people — i.e. social networks — and abstract from these to gain new or additional information. Some of you might think "just another kind of Web 2.0." This is one application you might think of, but the input and output format do not matter that much. You can use these methods anywhere as long as the amount of data is big enough. You will find some examples related to the latest web technologies to explain methods, but the code is rather generic. Also, you won't find a lot disturbing details about HTML, HTTP and the like." Keep reading for the rest of Adrian's review.

sdedeo writes "Less known than he deserves to be among American science fiction readers is Iain M. Banks. In his native United Kingdom, Banks' work is released in hardcover at the front of bookshops; here, those seeking his science fiction work, at least, must dig down into the trade paperbacks — and often find things out of print. Those who do discover him in the States are usually pleasantly surprised to find the writing far more clever and engagingly written than the low-budget production values imply. With Orbit's release of his latest work, Matter, as well as its planned re-release of some of his earlier classics, things look to change." Read below for the rest of Simon's review.

cgjherr writes "Ah, the technology history book, normally I'm not a fan. The writing is aloof and dry. The topics are vague, the history misinterpreted, and the lessons presented too vague to be applicable. And don't get me started on the illustrations, which are all too often pyramids with the authors perched at the top looking down on the lowly reader at the base. Thankfully, this book, "the myths of innovation" breaks all of these rules. It's an engaging, fun and quick read. The history is interesting, and the lessons presented are practical. I particularly like the author's tone. It's witty and light. Which makes this a very fast read, one that leaves you wanting even more by the end." Read below for the rest of Jack's review.

Last week you submitted questions for Dr. Herb Thompson, author of the latest Microsoft-sponsored Windows vs. Linux study. Here are his answers. Please feel free to ask follow-up questions. Dr. Thompson says he'll respond to as many as he can. He's registered a new Slashdot username, FFE4, specifically to participate in this discussion. All others claiming to be him are imposters. So read, post, ask, and enjoy.

Slashdot readers both contributed and helped moderate questions for the New Voters Project Presidential Youth Debate. You can read the answers below, but if you'd like to see an expanded introduction, thumbnails of the candidates, and different formatting, go to the Youth Debate page. And that's not all: We're supposed to get candidates' rebuttals on or about October 17, so don't touch that dial!

Daniel Jolley writes "I spend basically every waking hour online, and I have seen all kinds of crazy things on the Web over the years, yet I was amazed by some of the incredible things author Greg Holden describes in Internet Babylon: Secrets, Scandals, and Shocks on the Information Superhighway . This guy has gone where many fear to tread, digging up the goods on some of the Internet's most questionable, fascinating, oftentimes disturbing oddities. He has put all of this knowledge to a higher purpose, using it to describe the all-pervasive social change the Internet has wrought." Read on for the rest of Jolley's review.

Joanne Pransky's tongue is firmly in her cheek a fair amount of the time as she answers your questions, but much of what she says is thought-provoking, especially in light of speculations like Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation essays about the inevitable spread of robotic devices in our society.

Slashback with a followup on the perpetual motion DeLorean, a word on RIAA bank-account-jacking, a reminder about the fast-tracked vote on software patents in the EU, the real meaning of "high speed USB" and more. Read on below for the details.

Andrew Marlatt, the mind behind the insidious, sarcastic SatireWire, has finally gone Onion. Fans of that fine news source, in fact, are probably the first ones who should check out this new compendium -- 183 magazine-size pages -- of SatireWire stories. SatireWire is a deadpan Fortune/Forbes/CIO Magazine (with a touch of Adbusters) to the Onion's USAToday/Newsweek/Times. The book is called Economy of Errors, and puts a virtual bathroom library of stories from BusinessMonth Weekly (published semiannually every day) into one volume. (Read on for the rest of my review.)

cybrpnk2 writes: "The story is one of epic proportions: Boy genius gets PhD from Cal Tech at age 20, is the youngest recipient ever of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, writes the Mathematica simulation software used by millions of people, makes millions of dollars in the process, becomes enticed by the seductive lure of the Game of Life, and goes into a decade of seclusion to discover the secrets of the universe. You can catch up on the resulting speculation and hype here. The years of anticipation and publication delays came to an end Tuesday, May 14, 2002 with Stephan Wolfram's release of his opus, A New Kind of Science." Read on for cybrpnk2's review of Wolfram's much-heralded work.

Foo Shackelford asks: "At my University I have noticed a disturbing trend and was wondering if there are any other students, faculty, or staff who have concerns about the web based anti-plagiarism service called Turnitin.com? Turtnitin.com is supposed to be is a placebo for plagiarism where students submit papers for analysis. While plagiarism is by all accounts bad and should not be tolerated, the implementation of Turnitin.com on University campuses leaves many questions unanswered. If you read their terms of use it appears that students papers become the property of Turnitin.com. Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted and students have no choice in this matter. Where are the rights of the student? Also, there appears to be no warrantee to the accuracy of the service. Where does this leave the student who is accused of plagiarism? It would be nice for those who decide to implement the usage of services like these within their institutions to look beyond the placebo and consider issues of privacy, intellectual property, and most of all trust relationship that they hold with their students. Any thoughts on this?" We last touched on a related issue in this article on students GPLing their work. Might such a solution work here in terms of protecting a student's right to use any work that they submit to other sites/services that have implicit contracts like the one described here for Turnitin.Com?

Thank reader mblumber for this review of Scott Adams's God's Debris, newly republished in hardcover after starting out life a few years ago as an e-book. For those who've never seen Adam's serious side, this is an interesting introduction.

In the last week or two, some of the media and political institutions responsible for providing clarity and coherent information appear to be unraveling under the stress of coping with terrorist attacks, especially the anthrax problems, casualties and resulting hysteria. One striking trend: technology has spawned too much instant and unfiltered media. This new, mostly screen-driven strain of Hypermedia are becoming a health and civic hazard all of their own, transmitting huge amounts of data and misinformation and fear along with real news. Learning how to cope with this Hypermedia -- especially in a crisis -- is now as critical to survival as combatting terrorism.

In the wrong hands, scientific discovery can be scary stuff. This first-rate book by a British biophycist describes some of the most infamous tales in scientific history and how they happened.

John Schwartz and Michael Osterholm's new book Living Terrors paints a bleak picture of the preparedness of the United States -- and really the entire world -- for bioterrorism. Given the recent reports on the almost total lack of security in places like Russia's facility for holding the smallpox virus, their Cold War manufacturing of thousands of tons of the stuff, and the FBI sting operation of someone in Las Vegas trying to buy anthrax, the book's subject matter hits even closer to home.

There's almost no political discussion offline about the fuzzy boundaries between human and other "lifeforms" -- clones, cyborgs, mutants, AI. That topic has mostly fallen to Hollywood, which has taken up the issue in a series of movies -- Blade Runner, Gattaca, The Matrix, X-Men. Some of these movies are masterpieces. Some, like "The Sixth Day" are less ambitious. They are just entertaining. (Note: As some of you have noticed, we're doing a regular Sunday tech culture column devoted to certain movies, TV programs, music and books with tech themes.)

Jon's Hellmouth series stands as one of the most important things that have ever appeared on Slashdot. When the dust settled following its original posting, we started talking about ways to get its message to those outside of the Slashdot community. Read on to see what we decided, what happened, and finally the first chapter of the Hellmouth book.

New York's big multinationally-owned publishing houses have been waving wolfbane and crosses at the Net for a decade. Now they've started hyping their e-book offerings as proof that they are becoming hip, responsive, interactive. "E-books" is the latest buzzword in publishing, made up of companies that are about as open as the NSA. Maybe the publishers ought to consider the real lessons of Net and try being as open and innovative as some of their successful young interactive writers. After all, there's money in it.

akira-x writes "I spotted a link to an interesting (and disturbing) article on Gnutella News regarding some comments that were made by Steve Heckler, senior vice president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. According to him, Napster WILL lose, because "The [music] industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams. It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what." The disturbing part is what Heckler says Sony will attempt to do to help them win: "Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this," Heckler told the Summer Forty-Niner. "We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [Internet-service provider]. We will firewall it at your PC." "