An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo News is reporting that toxic toads imported from Hawaii to help control the beetle population that was ravaging Australia's sugar cane crops have instead become pests themselves. From the article: 'The toads can grow as large as dinner plates and weigh up to 4.5 pounds. Their heads and backsides are studded with rows of warts that secrete a milky white toxin called bufotoxin. Because Australia has no native toads, many native predators such as snakes, lizards and mammals are very sensitive to the toxin. So when the toads spread, they immediately kill off many of the region's top predators.'"

feminazi writes "Ars Technica is reporting that California Assemblyman Ed Chavez has proposed legislation that would require recipients of an educational technology grant program to educate their students in copyright law as well. There are three areas of education that would be required: 'ethical behavior in regards to the use of information technology,' 'the concept, purpose, and significance of a copyright,' and 'the implications of illegal peer-to-peer network file sharing.'"

d writes "Gamespot has an article about an association of prostitutes protesting the GTA games. Apparently, the sex workers of the Sex Workers Outreach Project aren't too happy about their ingame counterparts being treated violently in the GTA games. They note that the games are a bad influence on children, and might encourage rape and violent behavior towards prostitutes in real life."

Jacki O writes "According to their Web site the Space Elevator company Lifport recently managed to get their platform and climbing robot to the mile-high mark over the Arizona desert." From the announcement: "A revolutionary way to send cargo into space, the LiftPort Space Elevator will consist of a carbon nanotube composite ribbon eventually stretching some 62,000 miles from earth to space. The LiftPort Space Elevator will be anchored to an offshore sea platform near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, and to a small man-made counterweight in space. Mechanical lifters are expected to move up and down the ribbon, carrying such items as people, satellites and solar power systems into space."

Labyrrinth writes "The media blitz for the upcoming release of the new MMOG, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes has begun with 2 independent previews at IGN and Gamespot . From the article at Gamespot 'In days of old when knights were bold, elves with pointy sticks would totally beat up on a bunch of skeletons. You may have seen online games that take place in high-fantasy worlds, but recently, these games have become much more lenient on players, so that exploring, fighting, and even falling in battle has relatively minor consequences. Not since EverQuest of 1999 (a game that was infamously punishing back then and was clearly one of the main reasons why newer games got easier) has a new massively multiplayer game tried to offer a well-thought-out, but purposely steep, challenge.'" Normally I don't think previews are noteworthy, but Vanguard has been practically a black hole of information since development began.

WeAz writes "According to the Google Blog, Google has acquired Measure Map, an analytics system for blogs, from Adaptive Path. There is a limited beta test up and running over at the Measure Map Website. Many users have been using analytics to track stats on their sites - I wonder how this will stack up."

An anonymous reader writes "The Web is no longer a place where simple applications are tolerated; 'users have become more advanced, customers expect robustness and advanced error reporting, and managers are fired because an application goes down 1 percent of the time. It's your job then, to go beyond a simple Ajax application that requires a more thorough understanding of XMLHttpRequest.' This DevWorks article tries to help developers use Ajax to build a solid foundation in which an application handles errors and problems smoothly."

BartlebyScrivener writes to tell us the MIT Technology Review is reporting that even thought scientists know quite a bit about the brain, one researcher is trying to take it a step further towards understanding consciousness by implanting an electrode in his own brain. From the article: "Bill Newsome, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, has spent the last twenty years studying how neurons encode information and how they use it to make decisions about the world. In the 1990s, he and collaborators were able to change the way a monkey responded to its environment by sending electric jolts to certain parts of its brain. The findings gave neuroscientists enormous insight into the inner workings of the brain."

Jerry23 writes "This Saturday The Happening will bring Second Life to first life. The Electric Sheep Company, a new metaverse developer, has virtually recreated R&B Coffee in Washington DC for use in a mixed-reality party and benefit for the DC art scene and several local nonprofits. Real people will mingle with avatars via realtime video projections in the real and virtual R&B spaces, and MAKE Magazine's Phillip Torrone will be on-hand showing off his homemade Virtual Reality headsets and gloves. The whole world is invited to attend in DC or Second Life, whichever's closer for you." This is just conceptually a weird idea to me.

A user writes "The BBC is reporting that the British Government is working with Microsoft in order to gain backdoor access to hard drives encrypted by the forthcoming Windows Vista file system. Professor Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, urged the Government to contact Microsoft over fears that evidence could be lost by suspects claiming to have forgotten their encryption key."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have built a new nano imaging device which is 100 times faster than current technology. Not only is the 'FIRAT' (Force sensing Integrated Readout and Active Tip) much faster than the current 'AFM' (atomic force microscopy), it also is able to take movies and to simultaneously capture several physical properties of nanostructures, such as stiffness, elasticity or viscosity. In fact, the FIRAT probe, which works like a microphone, could one day replace AFM. One of the researchers commented that 'We've multiplied each of the old capabilities by at least 10, and it has lots of new applications.'"

SenseOfHumor writes "The Firefox memory leak is not a bug. It's a feature! The 'feature' is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment." From the article: "To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox's memory usage can climb dramatically. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web."

colorContrast asks: " I've currently got a Viewsonic VG700b, and as of recent, it has been giving me some trouble. Instead of showing real black, i'm now getting a red hue for black, and the pixels on the screen have become more pronounced than they used to be. The odd thing is that when I brought my monitor home over vacation, the problem was fixed for a short while, but now it appears to be broken again. Does anyone have any suggestions on if its time to get a new LCD, or if they know of a fix for this problem? (I have attempted to manually correct it by changing the colors but that did little.)"

Mini-Geek writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla Camino 1.0 has been released. The latest release includes a new tab bar appearance, pause and resume for downloads, improved advertisement and popup blocking, enhanced certificate support, bundled java embedding plugin, form fill from Address Book and inline search of history and bookmarks. See the Camino 1.0 Release Notes for more details."

The Cardboard God writes "The OSx86 Project is reporting that the intrepid hacker 'Maxxuss' has once again eluded Apple's security methods and cracked the latest release of Mac OS X for Intel, or 'OSx86', to run on standard x86 PCs. It seems Apple just can't win this eternal struggle with the hackers, as 10.4.4 included beefed up security designed to prevent similar hacking methods used on beta releases of the operating system. Is this a blessing for Apple, or simply a nuisance?"