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Submission + - Teen stunned at portrayal as Mass. bombing suspect (bostonherald.com)

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: The 4chan crowd, poring over images of the Boston marathon, identified two dark-skinned and bag-carrying suspects (among others). This was then picked up by The New York Post, who ran the image on Thursday's front page with the headline "Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon". And now, a completely innocent teen now finds himself scared to leave his home.

Submission + - Gunfire at MIT's Stata Center, Officer Dead 13

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Earlier tonight, The Tech broke news that gunshots were reported at MIT near 32 Vassar Street (the Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences), and one officer was shot and taken to Mass General Hospital. MIT's Emergency Information page also reports that injuries have been reported. From the midnight update, 'Police are sweeping the campus at this time, please continue to stay indoors and remain inside until further notice.' Sadly, CNN is now reporting that the university police officer has died. Look for updates on Twitter.

Submission + - Shooting at MIT (mit.net)

Submitted by Aphonia
Aphonia writes: There was a shooting at MIT. A police officer is down, near the home of CSAIL.
"Update on shooter incident. Responding agencies continue to investigate the situation. The scene is outside of Building 32 (Stata) and 76 (Koch) near Vassar and Main Streets. Injuries have been reported. The situation is still very active and we ask everyone to stay inside. "

Comment Re:Capturing Asteroids (Score 1) 151

One of the side thoughts I had about this was military applications. If we can capture asteriods or chunks of rocks, can we drop them into orbit to land on a city? A non-nuclear threat? I was of course thinking of the book "The moon is a harsh mistress".. Otherwise, why is NASA so interested in the topic?

Reminds me of this oldie-but-goodie on the evolution of warfare:

- Throw rock
- Hit other guy with stick
- Throw rock with stick on the end of it
- Shoot stick with rock on end of it at guy with curved stick
- Hit rock with fire, make copper, bronze, iron, steel rocks to put on ends of stick
- Put fire in tube, throw rock with fire
- Put fire in metal tube, throw metal rock with fire
- Put fire in metal rocks, drop exploding rocks on other guy
- Drop rocks made of unstable atomic metals on other guy
- Head for the asteroid belt. Throw rock

Submission + - Internet engineers punk'd on April Fools' Day (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The Internet's premier standards body has punk'd the network engineering community with the release of a phony Internet Draft as it does each April Fool's Day. This year's joke is a document entitled Draft Random Access File Transfer http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-draft-draft-00 or DRAFT for short. Its fictional author is Diana Raft or D.Raft. Hints that the document is phony include the corporation that employs D. Raft — RAFT Corporation — as well as its location at "Kendall Rectangle," a reference to the Kendall Square neighborhood of Cambridge, Mass.

Submission + - Remote Island Adopts Dothraki Language (badatlanguage.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The tiny island of Tristan da Cunha is officially the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world with few connections to the outside and access only by sea when the notoriously stormy south atlantic co-operates which is not often. Entertainment options are limited and LARPing in Game of Thrones style has become massively popular, so much so that the islanders have declared Dothraki to be an official language, alongside English.

Submission + - 24-hour Switch to IPv6-only Proposed for June 8th (version6.ru)

Submitted by
Roman Mamedov
Roman Mamedov writes: "Often cited as one of the reasons of slow IPv6 uptake, is the lack of Internet resources and services that require IPv6 for operation or access. In other words, "why bother implementing IPv6, if every website is accessible on IPv4 anyways?" To do something about this, let's continue the trend set by the World IPv6 Day in 2011 and World IPv6 Launch in 2012, this year by World IPv6 Jump, turning off IPv4 on your websites and services for 24 hours!"

Submission + - Dell, Raymond Unveil 'One Smartwatch Per Child'; Icahn Erupts

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As Dell's (DELL:NASDAQ GS) board reviews three competing proposals for taking the company private, including a $24.4 billion deal led by founder and CEO Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners, the company has announced it is entering the suddenly crowded smartwatch sweepstakes along with Apple, Google, and Samsung. The twist is that Dell's product will target the low end of the market — the extreme low end, in the words of CEO Dell, because 'that's where most of the world's customers are'. Dell's smartwatch, projected to cost just 19.99 USD ($319.99 before Dell's mail-in rebate) will allow children in developing countries to communicate via voice and text, collaborate on school activities, and perform native-to-English voice and text translations with the help of Dell's new ARM supercomputer. Dell says premium models will also perform translations in the reverse direction, i.e. English-to-native. Open Source advocate Eric S. Raymond, who joined Dell for the conference call, stated 'this is the beginning of what I call the Bazaar Wrist model of the mobile Internet. It'll be a battle of ideas against what I call the Office Tower Wrist model that Apple and Google will be selling.' Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who recently launched a rival bid for Dell, labeled the product an 'a pig in the poke' as well as a 'distraction and extreme waste of shareholder value', adding that his $7.44 Wal-Mart watch 'works just great for me and probably anyone else'.

Submission + - Radio Shack TRS-80 vs. Commodore 64: Battle of the Titans (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "The one and only Jeff Cogswell is back with a new article comparing the two biggest competitors in the home-computing business: the Commodore 64 and the Radio Shack TRS-80. What does he have to say about these absolutely cutting-edge machines? The TRS-80 simply can't stand up to the awe-inspiring Commodore 64, which features the latest processor from MOS Technology, the 6510. Best of all, the C-64s graphics processor can display up to 16 colors simultaneously, and it can create a full screen made up of 320 x 200 "dots." But the TRS-80 has some good points, as well, including a whopping 512 K of memory (not that you'll ever use that much, anyway). As Cogswell writes: "Let’s cover these two bad boys and provide a totally unbiased review unencumbered by any alleged kickbacks (including a brand new daisy wheel printer and a case of Schiltz Beer) from Commodore, the maker of the awesome machine known as the Commodore 64.""
Security

Submission + - ISIS Lab Fixes Computer Security! (poly.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NYU-Poly's ISIS lab has teamed up with tech giants to once and for all solve the problem of computer security. Expect more news to follow!
Government

Submission + - Defcad.org seized, shut down (defcad.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Defcad has been shut down. The Defcad/Defensedistributed crowd has been indicted on multiple counts which can be viewed at defcad.org.
Unix

Submission + - Quick, somebody tell SCO! More patent trolling on UNIX (theregister.co.uk) 2

Submitted by
donak
donak writes: "It seems SCO has competition : A company registered in minor league tax haven the Cook Islands, but with a subsidiary in Delaware, lawyers in the patent-troll heaven of East Texas and an office in Sydney, Australia, has asserted intellectual property rights over all versions of Unix and “Unix-like derivatives” and plans to seek royalties from every company that has ever used the operating system.
Quoting the "anonymous spokesperson" : “It's clear that some far-sighted Unix pioneer created this daemon even though it has only become useful in the last few years,” he said, “That the insight is significant is obvious from the fact the code has been copied not only throughout Unix but into the Windows code stream via NT, and Apple's world via BSD. It appears to us that NSFW is also present throughout the code base of every significant Linux distribution,” he added."

Submission + - Indies Grab the Controls at Game Developers Conference (nytimes.com)

Submitted by RougeFemme
RougeFemme writes: Indies beat out mainstream studios for most of the Game Developers Choice Awards. "FTL: Faster Than Light", an independent game financed by a Kickstarter campaign, won the award for Best Debut. Because of the growing success of the indies, Eric Zimmerman, game designer and instructor at the NYU Game Center, is cancelling the Game Design Challenge that he's held at the conference for the last 10 years. “The idea of doing strange, bizarre, experimental games is no longer strange, bizarre or experimental.”

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