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Comment Re:April Fool (Score 1) 1582

I wonder how many idiots are going to post in this thread just to get the April fool achievement.

That one's probably just a joke anyway. And considering that this is a real feature, I doubt these posts would count. Anyone who posts here just to get a possibly-fake achievement truly is an April Fool. Um... Conficker made me do it.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Journal Entry

April Fools.

Seriously, there's nothing here.

Data Storage

Submission + - Internet Archive Gets 4.5PB Data Center Upgrade (computerworld.com)

Lucas123 writes: "The Internet Archive, the non-profit organization that scrapes the Web every two months in order to archive web page images, just cut the ribbon on a new 4.5 petabyte data center housed in a metal shipping container that sits outside. The data center supports the Wayback Machine, the Web site that offers the public a view of the 151 billion Web page images collected since 1997. The new data center houses 63 Sun Fire servers, each with 48 1TB hard drives running in parallel to support both the web crawling application and the 200,000 visitors to the site each day."
The Courts

RIAA Threatens Harvard Law Prof With Sanctions 333

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Unhappy with Harvard Law Professor Charles Nesson's motion to compel the deposition of the RIAA's head 'Enforcer', Matthew J. Oppenheim, in SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, the RIAA threatened the good professor with sanctions (PDF) if he declined to withdraw his motion. Then the next day they filed papers opposing the motion, and indeed asked the Court to award monetary sanctions under Rule 37 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure."

Comment Re:Death Coil (Score 4, Interesting) 1114

This is common, but from a kid's perspective, most would rather be sitting quietly or reading a book than doing more *work* than everyone else has to do.

You try "sitting quietly" for an hour of so in an exam room. It is just so much more fun than work, especially when it's a multi-day test - oh boy, another hour of sitting quietly tomorrow! Let me tell you, I would have gladly read the phone book if it had been an option, but outside material (even if it was only for use after the test) was never allowed in these tests when I was in high school way back in the olden days of the 1990s. In fact, I did manage to pass some time after a math test once by staring at log tables, so I imagine that a phone book would have been good for at least an hour. You were lucky if you could even get a piece of paper to doodle on in these types of tests. I remember that I was only able to get through one of them because I had a few Weird Al albums memorized, and that wore thin after two or three days. As far as I'm concerned, "sitting quietly" is nothing short of psychological abuse. And yes, I am bitter; some things just can not be forgiven.

Privacy

Submission + - Justice Department Says FBI Misused Patriot Act

An anonymous reader writes: In a report just released by the Justice Department, as predicted by many including those on Slashdot, the FBI has misused and abused the PATRIOT Act to illegally gain access to information about people living in the United States.

From the article:
FBI agents sometimes demanded the data without proper authorization, according to a 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. At other times, the audit found, the FBI improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances.

..."we believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities," the audit concludes.
The Matrix

Journal Journal: Man kicked off Quantas flight for bush-bashing Tee Shirt 13

Reuters Reports that a man wearing a Tee Shirt with a picture of Dubya and subtitled "World's number 1 terrorist" was ejected from a Quantas flight from Melbourne to London simply for his dress. Quantas' statement was that "comments made verbally or on a T-shirt which had the potential to offend other tra
Music

Music Companies Mull Ditching DRM 318

PoliTech writes to mention an International Herald Tribue article that is reporting the unthinkable: Record companies are considering ditching DRM for their mp3 albums. For the first time, flagging sales of online music tracks are beginning to make the big recording companies consider the wisdom of selling music without 'rights management' technologies attached. The article notes that this is a step the recording industry vowed 'never to take'. From the article: "Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, cellphones, portable music players and compact discs without limit. Partially, the independents see providing songs in MP3 as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales. Should one of the big four take that route, however, it would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their monopoly over the worldwide distribution of music in the past decade and allowed file-sharing to take its place."
Science

Scientists Find 'Altruistic' Center of the Brain 223

davidwr writes "A team of researchers at Duke University published a paper linking the brain's posterior superior temporal cortex to altruistic behavior. The BBC also picked up the story. If confirmed this has applications in neurology, psychology, child-rearing, and a host of other domains. From the BBC piece: 'Using brain scans, the US investigators found this region related to a person's real-life unselfish behaviour. The Duke University Medical Center study on 45 volunteers is published in Nature Neuroscience. The participants were asked to disclose how often they engaged in different helping behaviours, such as doing charity work, and were also asked to play a computer game designed to measure altruism.'"

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