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Submission + - Obama is sung to about WikiLeaks (sfgate.com)

Submitted by xkr
xkr writes: Willie Brown, who was mayor of San Francisco and Speaker of the California State Assembly for 30 years, reports in today’s San Francisco Chronicle that Naomi Pitcairn got by the secret service in a private fundraiser to serenade President Obama, along with some other surprise protesters, with a long song protesting the imprisonment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the man accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. The president signaled the secret service to let them finish singing, then asked Nancy Pelosi, “Is this your gift to me?”

Submission + - Is Anti-Matter Gravitationally Repulsive? (physorg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new paper attempts to show how CPT symmetry (charge, parity, and time) and Einstein's General Theory implies that matter and anti-matter should be gravitationally repulsive. The author (who unfortunately plugs his book in the article) believes that this could eliminate the need to postulate dark energy and possibly even dark matter.
Data Storage

Submission + - Self-Wiping Hard Drives From Toshiba (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Toshiba announces a family of self-encrypting hard disk drives engineered to automatically invalidate protected data when connected to an unknown host. Data invalidation attributes can be set for multiple data ranges, enabling targeted data in the drive to be rendered indecipherable by command, on power cycle, or on host authentication error.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Fellow Hackers Blast Geohot For Sony Settlement (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: The hacker who settled with Sony after the company sued him for modifying his PlayStation 3 console is getting a lot of flak for not taking the fight further.

Hotz himself may have set the stage for some of the criticism. In an earlier blog post he wrote, "What if SCEA tries to settle? Let's just say, I want the settlement terms to include OtherOS on all PS3s and an apology on the PlayStation blog for ever removing it. It'd be good PR for Sony too, lord knows they could use it. I'm also willing to accept a trade, a legit path to homebrew for knowledge of how to stop new firmwares from being decrypted."
One commenter, "MX," says, "Sure, it's nice that it's over and people can move on with their lives... but I just think people expected a bit more of a fight than this."

Some were more pointed, such as "Night Breed." "So basically you settled for a job and took people's money giving them a false hope of settling for their rights? What do you plan to do with the money that was donated to you to provide a cushion for the legal battle? I hope you will be paying all those people back since you obviously didn't live up to your word."
Space

Submission + - 20 Myths about Yuri Gagarin's Mission

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 50 years ago today, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter orbit. That's a fact. Here are some things that are not facts: He was picked for the mission due to his peasant origins; his capsule contained a self-destruct button; he was later assassinated; and the whole damn mission was a hoax.
Government

Submission + - NIH secret plan for shutdown (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by mapkinase
mapkinase writes:

Any public discussion of the contingency plans is forbidden "for political reasons," says one high-level official, explaining that the government can't look like it's preparing for a shutdown. Even internal e-mails are now verboten, this source said; instead, planning has been done the old-fashioned way, by word of mouth.

Submission + - Why are A: and B: lost on so many computers?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A: used to be my floppy drive, and B: was sometimes there on computers with two of them. But I haven't had a floppy drive for many years. Now pretty much all PCs I see (I repair them) have drive partitions from C: and on, with DVD drives and removable media (SD, etc.) coming after. If I plug in an SD card into my laptop it comes up as G: by default; I set it to A:. Why isn't A: the default?

Submission + - Columbia University ending the Kermit Project (columbia.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Columbia University has announced that the Kermit Project will be ended in July 2011, after more than 30 years in existence. Open Kermit (C-Kermit) will remain available, but without any support or ongoing development; Kermit-95, which cannot be open-sourced, will remain available for license purchases but without support or maintenance.

Submission + - Kodak Relationshifft removes unwanted exes (kodak.com)

Submitted by
telekon
" rel="nofollow">telekon writes: "Tired of spending hours on Facebook untagging and deleting photos after every breakup? Pruning your Flickr stream too much of a hassle? Kodak has a solution. "We protect precious memories of the places you have been and the people you shared them with, minus the person with whom you just changed your relationship status — we call it Relationshiffft""

Submission + - GoDaddy CEO Kills Elephant, injures brand (smh.com.au)

Submitted by VTEX
VTEX writes: GoDaddy.com CEO Bob Parsons posted a graphic video of himself killing an elephant in Zimbabwe on his blog Thursday. GoDaddy is taking a lot of heat for the video, which details Parson's recent elephant hunt.
Idle

Submission + - France's new measure of well-being: Boredom (publicradio.org)

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "France is the latest country to move beyond Gross Domestic Product — or GDP — to measure economic success. And unlike many countries these days, the French are not switching to measures of well-being and happiness. Instead, the French Office of Economic Analysis has announced plans to systematically measure ennui."

Submission + - Pioneer Anomaly Solved By 1970s Computer Graphics (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
Frans Faase
Frans Faase writes: "A new computer model of the way heat is emitted by various parts of the Pioneer spacecraft, and reflected off others, finally solves one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics. Previous calculations have only estimated the effect of reflections. A computer modeling technique called Phong shading was used to work out exactly how the the emitted heat is reflected and in which direction it ends up travelling. Taking into account the reflections on the antenna seem to make the anomaly disappear."

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