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Comment Very popular (Score 1) 136

by etherlad (#32056666) Attached to: Russian Company Buys ICQ

Also widely popular among spammers.

I still have my ICQ account (seven-digit UIN starting with 1, woo) but pretty much the only traffic it gets anymore is spammers trying to add me and trying to send me IMs. Trillian fortunately blocks the latter for me.
Canada

The Pirate Party of Canada Is Official 430

Posted by kdawson from the arrrr-eh dept.
wasme writes "The Pirate Party of Canada has become the first Pirate Party outside of Europe to become an official political party. Elections Canada confirmed with the party that the PPCA has gained 'eligible for registration' status, and can run in elections starting June 14. From the PPCA's official announcement: 'We are pleased to announce that as of April 12, 2010, the Pirate Party of Canada is officially eligible for Party Status. After 10 months of dedication and hard work, we have reached eligible status, which only leaves a 60-day "purgatory" period. After that, we will field candidates in subsequent federal elections, and begin the real work of a political party.'"
Biotech

MIT Researchers Harness Viruses To Split Water 347

Posted by Soulskill from the but-it's-harmless-trust-us dept.
ByronScott writes "A team of researchers at MIT has just announced that they have successfully modified a virus to split apart molecules of water, paving the way for an efficient and non-energy-intensive method of producing hydrogen fuel. 'The team, led by Angela Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering, engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus called M13 so that it would attract and bind with molecules of a catalyst (the team used iridium oxide) and a biological pigment (zinc porphyrins). The viruses became wire-like devices that could very efficiently split the oxygen from water molecules. Over time, however, the virus-wires would clump together and lose their effectiveness, so the researchers added an extra step: encapsulating them in a microgel matrix, so they maintained their uniform arrangement and kept their stability and efficiency.'"
The Military

Scientists Turn T-Shirts Into Body Armor 213

Posted by timothy from the will-stick-with-the-regular-kind-for-now dept.
separsons writes "Scientists at the University of South Carolina recently transformed ordinary T-shirts into bulletproof armor. By splicing cotton with boron, the third hardest material on the planet, scientists created a shirt that was super elastic but also strong enough to deflect bullets. Xiaodong Li, lead researcher on the project, says the same tech may eventually be used to create lightweight, fuel-efficient cars and aircrafts."
Ubuntu

Ubuntu Will Switch To Base-10 File Size Units In Future Release 984

Posted by Soulskill from the stay-above-the-belt dept.
CyberDragon777 writes "Ubuntu's future 10.10 operating system is going to make a small, but contentious change to how file sizes are represented. Like most other operating systems using binary prefixes, Ubuntu currently represents 1 kB (kilobyte) as 1024 bytes (base-2). But starting with 10.10, a switch to SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on."
Communications

Mississippi Makes Caller ID Spoofing Illegal 258

Posted by timothy from the so-be-sure-to-stop-in-late-june dept.
marklyon writes "HB 872, recently signed into law by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, makes Caller ID spoofing illegal. The law covers alterations to the caller's name, telephone number, or name and telephone number that is shown to a recipient of a call or otherwise presented to the network. The law applies to PSTN, wireless and VoIP calls. Penalties for each violation can be up to $1,000 and one year in jail. Blocking of caller identification information is still permitted."
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.
ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

Comment Re:Pity (Score 1) 148

by etherlad (#31280714) Attached to: Is Mozilla Ubiquity Dead?

Huh. At one point they made 1.9 (I believe) as a transitional release to 0.5, which had a different, mostly incompatible, command structure.

So they've updated 1.9 to be compatible with FF 3.6, but the latest release I have, 0.5.4, remains incompatible.

Odd decision, but if it works, it works. Thanks for the heads-up.

Comment Pity (Score 2, Interesting) 148

by etherlad (#31279846) Attached to: Is Mozilla Ubiquity Dead?

Damn shame. I used it all the time to create tinyurls, to translate text on the fly, and so on. It was a handy little utility, and I was excited with the direction they wanted to go it.

It'd be nice if they could even just do a version update so I could use it with Firefox 3.6.
Earth

Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic 807

Posted by kdawson from the so-many-notes-mister-mozart dept.
DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."

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