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No Naked Black Holes 317

Science News reports on a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters in which an international team of researchers describes their computer simulation of the most violent collision imaginable: two black holes colliding head-on at nearly light-speed. Even in this extreme scenario, Roger Penrose's weak cosmic censorship hypothesis seems to hold — the resulting black hole (after the gravitational waves have died down) retains its event horizon. "Mathematically, 'naked' singularities, or those without event horizons, can exist, but physicists wouldn't know what to make of them. All known mechanisms for the formation of singularities also create an event horizon, and Penrose conjectured that there must be some physical principle — a 'cosmic censor' — that forbids singularity nakedness ..."

RealNetworks To Introduce a Simple DVD Copier 244

langelgjm writes "The New York Times reports that RealNetworks will begin selling RealDVD today, a software program designed to make copying DVDs a trivial task for the average user. Unlike free alternatives, which generally require some technical knowledge and make it difficult to copy an entire DVD with extras, etc., RealDVD claims to be able to copy the entire DVD, menus and all. While sure to raise the ire of Hollywood, the program does have significant limitations: the DVDs it makes will only be playable on the computer where they were created; or, users can pay $20 per computer to play the DVDs on up to five additional computers."
Slashback

Submission + - No Slashdot April Fools Jokes in 2008 8

An anonymous reader writes: Slashdot will not be participating in the April Fools jokes this year due to a lawsuit that was settled out of court with undisclosed terms stemming from the 2007 April 1st stunts. The false stories were determined to be too egregious by a yet to be named individual. Slashdot's parent company SourceForge, Inc. found it wiser to settle out of court then a lengthy battle that was obviously going to span several months.

The ponies will be missed.
Idle

Japan Appoints Cartoon Ambassador 1

Japan has created a new government position to promote animation and appointed a popular cartoon robot cat named Doraemon, their new "anime ambassador". The time traveling robot cat ambassador who loves to help his friends is a stark contrast to the more irritable and incomprehensible U.S. cartoon ambassador, Ookla the Mok.
Government

Submission + - Church of Scientology violates Federal Law (rapidshare.com) 5

FreedomToThink writes: "This is a very long story I'm sure the editors will have fun with, but I couldn't see how to cut it down at all.

On the eve of the Ides of March protest, from the source of the recent 'Anonymous' submitted CCHR leak on wikileaks, comes this message

"Dear $cientology,You attempt injunctions.I respond.Shall we continue the game? Much Love, DEEP CLAM"

Included was yet another PDF this time including yet more emails leaked from a Church of Scientology front group.

Vote Rigging?

From: "Mike Kaplan" <mkaplan@tampabay.rr.com>
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
Subject: Fw: RE-ELECT FRANK HIBBARD, MAYOR OF CLEARWATER
Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2008 11:53:07 -0400

See below. Everyone in Clearwater MUST vote. Every vote will be needed to be
sure Hibbard gets re-elected. The alternative is Rita Garvey who is an SP.

— Original Message —
From: Shelly <mailto:shelly.bauer@Earthlink.net> Bauer
To: Shelly Bauer <mailto:shelly.bauer@earthlink.net>
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2008 8:09 AM
Subject: RE-ELECT FRANK HIBBARD, MAYOR OF CLEARWATER

DO YOUR PART
RE-ELECT FRANK HIBBARD
MAYOR OF CLEARWATER
VOTE!!!
JANUARY 29TH
TAKE NOTHING FOR GRANTED!

Lunch with your preferred Presidential candidates for a high price?

ONE SEAT LEFT

I have arranged a private one-hour luncheon with Ron Paul on 11/28 in St.
Pete when he will be in town for the CNN/YouTube Republican debate.

This luncheon is reserved for $1000+ donors to Ron Paul's presidential
campaign. 19 people so far have paid and confirmed and will have the honor
and pleasure of having lunch and communicating with Ron Paul directly.


From the head of the "Non Proffit" CCHR Bruce Wiseman

Go the the HELP committee website. The link is here.
http://help.senate.gov/About.html
Here you will see the names of the Committee members on the left hand
side
of the page. Please go to the individual websites of the Republican =
members
(this will take just a bit of leg work on your part by putting their =
name
into Google) and calling their office or sending a fax to them (email is =
the
least effective) stating your opposition to S. 1375 The Mother's Act.


Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one "which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."

An OCMB (Operation Clambake Message Board)regular adds :

I downloaded myself a copy and started looking through them. I found an interesting one on pages 47-48.
http://rapidshare.com/files/99292051/CCHRLeak3.pdf.html

Karin Pouw of OSA of CofS writes a message.
It's forwarded by Michael Genung. He's the guy who runs ACSR, Association for Citizens Sociel Reform. http://www.citizensforsocialreform.org/ ["CSR Background and Philosopy: CSR was founded in 2001 by a group of Scientologists and other like-minded individuals concerned with the escalating social ills in society. CSR's purpose is to work with in the field of public policy to bring about more effective and humane solutions to these social ills of illiteracy, criminality substance abuse and general decay of character."]

Then it's forwarded by Doyle Mills, of LEAF fame (Letters to the Editor Attack Force).
Then it's forwarded by Mary C. (possibly one of two Mary C's I'm thinking of, but unsure).
Then it's forwarded by Mike Kaplan, another person who runs an email list and forwards CCHR type stuff to CofS members.

If that ain't stringing a line from the CofS to CCHR and the CofS front group ("grassroots") movements, then I don't know what is!


Apologies in advance as the Enturbulation servers will not be up to a slashdotting so the Coral Cache link is here Enturbulation Discussion (already cached for you)

ANYONE CAN REPORT TAX FRAUD DIRECTLY TO THE IRS : http://www.irs.gov/compliance/enforcement/article/0,,id=106778,00.html It does require that you print out and mail in an actual hardcopy, but it does not require you to identify yourself.

Just a casual user passing on a message from the Enturbulation forum, this is already out there, there's no reason to attack the messenger."

Comment John Scalzi on why it won't work (Score 1) 370

John Scalzi wrote a hilarious exchange on his blog the sums up perfectly why this idea is made of fail:

Sony BMG spokesperson: We're pleased to announce we are the final major music corporation to release electronic tracks without that pesky DRM! All you have to do is leave your house, go to a selected retail outlet, buy a special card there, go back to your house, scratch off the back of the card to find a code, go to our special MusicPass Web site, enter said code, and download one the 37 titles we have available, from Celine Dion to the Backstreet Boys!

Kid #1: Or, in the time it takes me to jump through all those hoops, I could just download all 37 of those albums off of Pirate Bay.

Kid #2: Or, I could just scratch off the back at the store, record the pin number, go home and download the album through a Tor connection, so you can't trace my IP number.

Kid #1: Also, what's with this first slate of artists? Celine Dion? Backstreet Boys? Kenny Chesney? Barry Manilow? Are you high?
There's much more, but I didn't want to jack his entire post.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Porn Industry Warms Up to Blu-ray

An anonymous reader writes: Just when you thought it was safe to buy an HD DVD player, the adult video industry has capitulated to Blu-ray. Digital Playground (DP), a technology trend-setter in the porn business, will ship its first Blu-ray title in a couple of weeks. The move augurs well for the high-def DVD format, which seemed all but dead in the influential porn world just one year ago. That's when DP dropped Blu-ray in favor of HD DVD. Having first embraced Blu-ray for its superior capacity and alleged content security, DP decided at the last hour to go with HD DVD instead and released its first four titles early this year. So why go with Blu-ray? DP founder Joone explains, "A lot of people were emailing that bought a PlayStation and they were basically saying, 'When are you guys going to release Blu-ray?'"
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Gravity Defying Carpet very much possible (newlaunches.com) 2

SK writes: "A flying carpet, just like the one in Walt Disney's creation 'The Arabian Nights' may soon be a reality. Laminarayan Mahadevan along with his colleagues at Harvard studied the aerodynamics of a flexible, rippling sheet moving through a fluid. Based on their study, the researchers came to the conclusion that making a carpet that would stay aloft in air may be possible. Mahadevan says that to stay afloat in air, a sheet measuring about 10 centimetres long and 0.1 millimetres thick would need to vibrate at about 10 hertz with amplitude of about 0.25 millimetres."
Space

Submission + - Intergfalactic particle beam spotted

sm62704 (mcgrew) writes: New scientist lightheartedly reports:

A new weapon of intergalactic war has been found. A jet of hot gas and high-energy particles is shooting out from the core of a galaxy called 3C321 and hitting a neighbour, a new study reveals.

Galaxies have been known to ram into each other, but this is the first known example of attack by particle beam
It goes on with less jocularity to explain this phenomena. And before any of you quip 'that was no moon', actually it was a black hole.
Censorship

Submission + - Wikipedia COO was Convicted Felon (theregister.co.uk) 4

An anonymous reader writes: From the Register:

"For more than six months, beginning in January of this year, Wikipedia's million-dollar check book was balanced by a convicted felon. When Carolyn Bothwell Doran was hired as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation, she had a criminal record in three other states — Virginia, Maryland, and Texas — and she was still on parole for a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) hit and run that resulted in a fatality. Her record also included convictions for passing bad checks, theft, petty larceny, additional DUIs, and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gun shot to the chest."

Windows

Submission + - Antivirus: A waste of 50% of your HD throughput? (codinghorror.com)

dwalsh writes: Are we wasting our (Windows) computers performance on a placebo? Jeff Atwood seems to think so:

"The performance cost of virus scanning (lose 50% of disk performance, plus some percent of CPU speed) does not justify the benefit of a 33% detection rate and marginal protection."

"Ask yourself this: why don't Mac users run anti-virus software? Why don't UNIX users run anti-virus software? Because they don't need to. They don't run as administrators."

The article is a criticism of AV as a blacklist approach, that mostly protects against last months viruses. How many Slashdot Windows users rely solely on a firewall, a decent web browser, and good common sense (like Momma used to make it) when it comes to attachments?

It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - Slashdot Gems 1

Anonymous Coward writes: "In the years I have read Slashdot, I have often enjoyed the cleverness and humor of some of the readers replies to the various stories. Take for instance one of the stories posted today about Iran building a supercomputer with 216 AMD processors, one wit quipped that 'Not only can they never be allowed to have nukes but it will be a cold day in hell before they are allowed to get the processing power to run Windows Vista!!!!!'

For the benefit of posterity, I recommend that these 'gems' should be collected and published in a book entitled 'Slashdot Gems.' However, if you feel this task would be quite an undertaking, a simplier way of sharing the mirth would be ask your readers for a list of their memorable Slashdot moments, and then post them in a story thread entitled 'The Best of Slashdot Humor'."
Programming

Submission + - Granny Hackers make History (go.com)

Catbus writes: "During World War II the Army ran out of male mathematicians and turned to six women to program the world's first computer — ENIAC. Historian Kathy Kleiman has recorded oral histories of these women — now in their 80s — in her upcoming documentary film, "Invisible Computers.""
Security

Submission + - YouTube Vulnerability might be exploited for weeks (xssed.com)

nickn4med writes: Security site xssed claims a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability affecting YouTube has been in the wild for weeks. "It is a query string XSS that appears in the video viewing page. Works only with IE and probably Konqueror. Malicious people can use it to spread malware, steal cookie based authentication credentials and redirect unaware users to phishing scam pages."

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