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Claymore Mine Found in Goodwill Donations 3

Posted by samzenpus from the protection-for-the-poor dept.
For some reason people in Arvada, Colorado are upset that someone left a claymore mine in the Goodwill drop box at a local strip mall. Police were notified and the Jefferson County Bomb squad disposed of the explosive. Officials say they don't know if the mine was operational or not. I guess the residents of Arvada don't think the disadvantaged deserve a secure perimeter.
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Man's Locust Farm Worries Neighbors 2

Posted by samzenpus from the grow-your-own-plague dept.
61-year-old Li Shuqi is only raising one of the ten plagues of Egypt but from the fuss his neighbors are raising you'd think he was working on all ten. Li has spent the last three years raising locusts. He has about two millions locusts living in five locust houses and sells them to Beijing restaurants where they are considered a delicacy. Li says, "My neighbours are constantly keeping an eye on my locust fields and checking the security of the meshes that prevent them from escaping."
Microsoft

Microsoft's Code Contribution Due To GPL Violation 508

Posted by samzenpus from the say-it-aint-so dept.
ozmanjusri writes "While Microsoft presented its recent embrace of the GPL as 'a break from the ordinary,' and the press spoke of them as going to great lengths to engage the open source community,' as is often the case with Microsoft, it turns out they had an ulterior motive. According to Stephen Hemminger, an engineer with Vyatta, Microsoft's Hyper-V used open-source components in a network driver and the company released the code to avoid legal action over a GPL violation. Microsoft's decision to embrace the GPL was welcomed by many in the open source community, but their failure to honestly explain the reason behind the release will have squandered this opportunity to build trust, something which is sadly lacking in most people's dealings with Microsoft."
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Taxpayer-Funded "Man Cave" Found At NY Capitol 6

Posted by samzenpus from the should-have-just-bought-a-warehouse dept.
Officials say that a pair of New York state employees used taxpayer money to creating a "man cave" at the Capitol Building. The pair transformed a maintenance area in a Capitol garage facility into the mother of all break rooms equipped with a TV, board games, DVDs, couches, rolling papers and marijuana scales. The two are suspended without pay and one is charged with marijuana possession and criminal use of drug paraphernalia.
Cellphones

Submission + - Employee Kills Self Over Losing iPhone Prototype

Submitted by hfsys
hfsys writes: A Foxconn employee in China killed himself Wednesday after losing one of the fourth generation iPhone prototypes. Foxconn has been contracted to manufacture the iPhones for Apple. The employee, apparently hit himself several times, then walked himself out a 12th story window. Despite it being called a 'Suicide' right now, Foxconn said it has suspended their security chief and turned him over to the police. In other news Steve Jobs is recovering well and was back on the Apple campus on Monday. "You guys are not getting paid to be a bunch of clowns!"... "Are you still a virgin?
Quickies

Submission + - The 40 Most Repeated Game Quotes (gamesradar.com)

Submitted by
Ant
Ant writes: "This five pages GamesRadar article on the 40 most repeated game quotes — "Film and television quotes are so entangled with our language that their origins are irrelevant to most speakers. We use Seinfeld-popularized neologisms and phrases constantly without considering how they became popular ('shrinkage,' 'close-talker,' 'not that there's anything wrong with that'). But games are a younger medium, and for a time were thought to be the realm of only children and socially-inept geeks. HA HA HA. NUH-UH! Hardcore gaming culture is wriggling its way into the mainstream as you read this (it had to make a brief stop at Hipster Town on its way, but it'll get there). Some of our in-jokes won't ever stick to the masses (a good thing), but as time goes by, videogames will inevitably secure a stronger influence on our culture's hive-database of quotable quotes. We, however, will always be the cool kids who were irritating each other with these gaming quips before the masses fully caught on..." Seen on ClassicGaming."
Math

Submission + - http://math.rejecta.org/

Submitted by snorb
snorb writes: Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences. The inaugural issue is now available. It includes minor or traditionally unpublishable results, non-traditional ideas and proof techniques, misunderstood genius, results based on questionable assumptions, and controversial papers and open letters.
Security

Submission + - Hacking Nuclear Command And Control

Submitted by
The Walking Dude
The Walking Dude writes: "The International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND) has released an unclassified report exploring the possibility of cyber terrorists launching nuclear weapons. Ominous exploits include unreliable early warning sensors, unsecure nuclear weapons storage, transportation blunders, breaches in the chain of command, and the use of Windows on nuclear submarines. A traditional large-scale terrorist attack, such as the 2008 Mumbai attacks, could be combined with computer network operations in an attempt to start a nuclear war. Amidst the confusion of the traditional attack, communications could be disrupted, false declarations of war could be issued on both sides, and early warning sensors could be spoofed. Adding to this is the short time frame in which a retaliatory nuclear response must be decided upon, in some cases as little as 15 minutes. The amount of firepower that could be unleashed in these 15 minutes would be equivalent to approximately 100,000 Hiroshima bombs."
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Yelling At Telemarketers Leads To Arrest 13

Posted by samzenpus from the do-you-know-how-to-get-blood-out-of-carpet dept.
BotScout writes "An Ohio man, fed up with deceptive junk mail, made the mistake of losing his temper while on the phone with a St. Louis company pitching an extended auto-service contract. Now he finds himself behind bars, where he is charged with making a terrorist threat and is being held on $45,000 bond. According to court documents, Charles W. Papenfus, 43, allegedly told a sales representative during a May 18 telephone call that he would burn down the building and kill the employees and their families. He was indicted for making a terrorist threat, a Class D felony; and he could be sentenced to up to four years in prison if convicted. I get a lot of this kind of junk mail too, but I usually just call their 800 number and waste as much of their time as possible."
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Children Investigated For Laughing Too Loudly 19

Posted by samzenpus from the joy-eaters dept.
Officials from a noise pollution team are investigating claims that the children at Osmund and Andrew's Primary School laugh "unbearably" loudly. In addition to the excessive laughter, neighbors complain that the children kick footballs against the school's chain link fence, the sports teacher shouts during lessons, and the kitchen routinely runs out of cinnamon rolls on chili day. Headmaster John Thorpe said, "Children have to be educated somewhere and there are obvious good reasons why it should take place in residential areas. Bearing that in mind, it is inevitable that there will be a range of different responses to that from residents. We have always adopted a good neighbor policy and done whatever we can to mitigate disturbances. Some people will say that the sound of children laughing and playing together can be quite uplifting. As a teacher, I think it's good to hear children running around and thoroughly enjoying their lives."

Comment Wireless? (Score 1) 208

by piphil (#28666365) Attached to: Stealing Data Via Electrical Outlet
Surely half the job has been done by the increased use of wireless keyboards? I know they're generally short-range transmitters, but wouldn't it be relatively easy to reverse-engineer the wireless communication of various company's wireless devices to create a universal listening device?

Comment Why 118? Well... (Score 5, Informative) 244

by piphil (#16442607) Attached to: Element 118 Created

A lot of people seem to be dismissing this as without a practical use. However there is method to the seemed madness of making ever-bigger nuclei. Elements tend to be either stable or unstable - carbon is stable, uranium is not. This stability is caused by the arangement of protons/neutrons in the atoms' nucleii. I'm not exactly sure why this occurs - I'm a biologist, I'm not really meant to know - but whether or not a nulceus is stable or not follows a pattern determined by "shell-model" calculations (see here for the science bit).

So although making 3 atoms of 118 doesn't seem to amount to much, especially as it instantly falls apart, it's another step on the way to making th first of the synthetic heavy elements in a "stability island". It's thought that such a material could have strange and useful properties. Or it could be a complete waste of money and be boring as hell. I don't know, but that's the point of research at the end of the day...

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