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Slashback

Submission + - What's your favorite Slashdot story tag (beta)

Submitted by indros13
indros13 writes: Now that story tagging beta has been live for a while, what is your favorite tag?
  • goodluckwiththat
  • suddenoutbreakofcommonsense
  • haha
  • badsummary
  • correlationisnotcausation
  • thatsnomoon
Government

Senator Questions Rise In US Texting Prices 592

Posted by kdawson from the competition-what-competition dept.
vimm writes "Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) has started an inquiry on the rising prices of text messaging (up 100% since 2005) that has occurred almost in sync with the consolidation of 6 major carriers down to 4. In a letter sent to Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile, Kohl said the increase 'does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages.'"
Education

Submission + - Women studying science, but not computer science (minnpost.com)

Submitted by
indros13
indros13 writes: "Despite a significant increase in the number of women graduation from college and studying the sciences, the portion of female computer science graduates has fallen steadily since the 1980s.

percentages of female bachelor degrees earned in computer science are falling-down to 25 percent in 2004, the latest available figures, from a high of 37 percent in 1984. And all this is occurring at a time when National Science Foundation (NSF) funding to encourage women in the computer sciences — about $20 million annually — has never been higher.
Is it the Revenge of the Nerd stereotype? The prevalence of home computers? What's changed about computer science in the past twenty years to discourage more women from participating?"
Google

Google StreetView Is In Your Driveway 439

Posted by Zonk from the friendly-google-car dept.
hermit_crab writes "Janet and George McKee are the neighbors of the Borings, who we discussed yesterday as the couple suing Google over StreetView. The McKees own a house that is featured in a much more intrusive set of Google StreetView images. 'The Google car continued past the steps leading to the McKees's front door and came to a stop outside the house's three-car garage (and next to the family's trampoline and portable basketball rim). Taking photos all the time, the Google vehicle was squarely on private property, a fact that presumably should have been apparent when the gravel path became paved.' Unlike the Borings, the McKees have not announced intentions to sue Google, nor have they requested to have the images removed."
Mozilla

Mozilla Celebrates Its 10th Birthday 116

Posted by Zonk from the i-heart-the-fox dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Mozilla has turned 10 today. It's been a long, strange trip from being the once-dominant browser, going down to almost nothing, and returning to something like 25% of the browser market. 'With a sliding market share, Netscape decided to focus on its enterprise oriented products and gave away the browser but most importantly allow volunteers to work on the product. Mozilla was nothing but Netscape's user agent (the name a browser uses to contact the web server), a reminder of the first Netscape code name. Over time, Mozilla would become the name of the open source project, AOL would buy Netscape and Internet Explorer would get up to 90%+ of market share leading to the worst period in web browsers' history where innovation was a niche for Opera and IE remixes users.'"
Microsoft

Saving in OOXML Format Now Probably A Bad Idea 150

Posted by Zonk from the good-idea-bad-idea dept.
orlando writes "Much drama is unfolding prior to the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, currently schedule for the end of February. After that there's a subsequent 30 day period while countries can still change their vote. As a result, Bob Sutor is recommending that saving your documents in OOXML format right now is probably about the riskiest thing you can do, if you are concerned with long term interoperability. At this point nobody has the vaguest idea what OOXML will look like in February, or even whether it will be in any sort of stable condition by the end of March. 'While we are talking about interoperability, who else do you think is going to provide long term complete support for this already-dead OOXML format that Microsoft Office 2007 uses today? Interoperability means that other applications can process the files fully and not just products from Microsoft. I would even go so far as to go back to those few OOXML files you have already created and create .doc, .ppt, and .xls versions of them for future use, if you want to make sure you can read them and you don't want to commit yourself to Microsoft's products for the rest of their lives.'"
United States

Submission + - Study dismisses NH vote technology concerns (umich.edu)

Submitted by
indros13
indros13 writes: "The results of the NH primary sparked vote fraud rumors and well-meaning investigations based on differences in vote tallies between hand-counted and machine-counted wards. Three academics gave the issue a full statistical analysis and find that the differing tallies had nothing to do with systematic hacking or machine bias. Instead, the un-sexy conclusion is that underlying differences in demographics explain the results."
Mars

Submission + - Treasure Trove of Color Mars Pictures Released (arizona.edu)

Submitted by
Riding with Robots
Riding with Robots writes: "Today the high-res imaging team for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released hundreds of recent color images showing the surface of Mars in splendid detail. These particular pictures were available previously in black-and-white format only. The color versions are the products of camera filters sensitive to wavelengths beyond human vision, so while the hues are not what you would see with your own eyes, the wild diversity of color is real nonetheless."
Censorship

Submission + - Military blocks YouTube for the troops

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday you reported on how the military is putting up their own YouTube channel for reasons heavily speculated. Now CNN reports on how the military puts those websites like YouTube and even blogs (MySpace and 11 other sites) off limits for the troops.

Where the article talks about how its being made harder for the troops to use the computer equipment for socializing by sending video's home I also can't help wonder if something isn't stinking here. At one part they try to start a populair trend by opening up a YouTube channel, aledgidly to "open up" and on the other handd they're making it near to impossible for the troops to get the real word out. In my opinion this puts the earlier post in a whole different perspective.
Wii

Submission + - Hudson Filter: Excessive Blurring of TG16 Titles

Submitted by
Mugenmidget
Mugenmidget writes: "Many users of the Virtual Console have noticed that Turbo Grafx games undergo excessive bilinear filtering that makes these titles the blurriest and easily the most misrepresented on Nintendo's Virtual Console service. Hudson has made some slight comments about this occurrence on their official forums, but since January we have heard nothing more on the blurring that plagues the TG16 titles available on the Virtual Console. http://www.hudsonentertainment.com/viewtopic.php?t =343 There's a thread started that addresses fan concerns, and we'd appreciate it if you could spread the word to your reader base so they can voice their opinion on this emulation issue and be heard by the Hudson staff."
United States

Submission + - Web searches at US border

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From IHT: "Andrew Feldmar, a Vancouver psychotherapist, was on his way to pick up a friend at the Seattle airport last summer when he ran into a little trouble at the border.

"A guard typed Feldmar's name into an Internet search engine, which revealed that he had written about using LSD in the 1960s in an interdisciplinary journal. Feldmar was turned back and is no longer welcome in the United States, where he has been active professionally and where both of his children live."

"Mike Milne, a spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection agency in Seattle, said he could not discuss individual cases for reasons of privacy. But the law is clear, Milne said. People who have used drugs are not welcome here.

""If you are or have been a drug user," he said, "that's one of the many things that can make you inadmissible to the United States."

"He added that the government was constantly on the hunt for new sources of information. "Any new technology that we have available to us, we use to do searches on," Milne said."
Censorship

Submission + - Gov't requests sex offender data from MySpace

Submitted by
athloi
athloi writes: "Attorney generals from seven states sent a letter to MySpace.com on Monday, asking the social networking site to provide the names of registered sex offenders who use the site.

While no one wants to defend sex offenders, this could lead to account signups that require real identification so the provider is not subjected to subpoenas for sex offenders on a regular basis."
Biotech

Submission + - Cancer therapy without side-effects?

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "Most of you know at least one person who has been affected by cancer and treated by chemotherapy, suffering from side-effects such as hair loss or nausea. This is because chemotherapy attacks both healthy and unhealthy cells in the whole body. Now, Australian researchers are using nanotechnology to offer chemotherapy relief. They've created 'nano-cells' from 'inert' bacteria — meaning they can't reproduce — which can deliver potent drugs exactly where they're needed. As this new therapy allows to target very precisely the tumors, the amounts of drugs are much smaller and the harmful side-effects of chemotherapy will be avoided in the future. This method could be used for a wide variety of cancers and human clinical trials should start by the end of this year. Read more for many additional references about this future harmless cancer therapy."
Security

Submission + - Identity theft battle moves to the states

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "If you are looking to fight identity theft problems help is on the way. According to a story in the Washington Post today 33 states and the District of Columbia let consumers place a "security freeze" on their credit files and many more states are considering similar legislation. The explosion of identity thefts is top of mind among U.S. consumers according to data released recently by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). More than a quarter of a million ID theft complaints were lodged with the agency in 2006, accounting for 36% of the 674,000 complaints the FTC received. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1498 5"

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