GoatEnigma - Slashdot User

Submission + - MIT sues architect of $300 million tech building (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by

bednarz

on Tuesday November 06, 2007 @05:17PM

bednarz writes: "Architect Frank Gehry's celebrated design for the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is making headlines again — this time because of a lawsuit claiming deficient design work is the cause of leaks, cracks and mold in the 730,000-square-foot building. MIT dedicated the $300 million Stata Center building, home to its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), in May 2004. Soon after its completion, the center's outdoor amphitheater began to crack, leaks sprang up throughout the building and mold grew on parts of the exterior, the lawsuit alleges."

Submission + - Is it ok to talk about Global Warming, now? (whitehouser.com)

Submitted by

policy

on Friday October 12, 2007 @12:33PM

policy writes: "We've been told the issue of Global Warming is phony, "doom and gloom" propaganda from tree hugging liberals with an agenda. Al Gore earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on this issue, is it OK to talk about Global Warming, now? "

Submission + - Flouride Follies (trustedhealthproducts.com) 1

Submitted by

gerelyn22

on Friday October 12, 2007 @11:43AM

gerelyn22 writes: "http://www.trustedhealthproducts.com/articles/flouride-follies.htm"

Submission + - Global Warming Can't Be Stopped (foreignpolicy.com)

Submitted by

tcd004

on Thursday October 04, 2007 @03:42PM

tcd004 writes: "An article in Foriegn Policy argues that it is already to late to stop major climate change.

The mounting scientific evidence, coupled along with economic and political realities, increasingly suggests that humanity's opportunity to prevent, stop, or reverse the long-term impacts of climate change has slipped away....it would be irresponsible for us to count on an energy technology miracle to save the day.
The authors suggest that world governments begin taking drastic actions to prepare their populations for "a new world." What do you think?"

Submission + - Arctic Pole Lost 23% of ice in the last 2 years. (bitbistro.com)

Submitted by

joao.r.silva

on Wednesday October 03, 2007 @03:22PM

joao.r.silva writes: "NASA is examining data that shows a reduction of 23% of Arctic Pole Ice in the last two years (from 2005 to 2007).
This total Ice lost has the size of California and Texas combined.
This summer temperatures of 22 degrees Celsius where observed by explorers in the Canadian Icy regions, far above the normal for the region.
Scientists aren't optimists about this situation, it's the biggest melt ever recorded and more important the trend is there to continue.

Related Links:
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/quikscat-20071001.html
http://www.zeeburgnieuws.nl/nieuws/kv_arctic_antarctic_melt.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN0134058320071002"

Firefox Working to Fix Memory Leaks 555

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday September 24, 2007 @12:29PM from the important-but-boring-work dept.

Christopher Blanc writes "Many Mozilla community members, including both volunteers and Mozilla Corporation employees, have been helping to reduce Firefox's memory usage and fix memory leak bugs lately. Hopefully, the result of this effort will be that Firefox 3 uses less memory than Firefox 2 did, especially after it has been used for several hours." Here's hoping. Frequent restarts of things on my computer make me furious. I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.

Submission + - The Pirate Bay Files Suit Against Big Media 1

Submitted by

Join the Pirate Party

on Friday September 21, 2007 @05:29PM

Join the Pirate Party writes: "Having found the necessary proof via the leaked MediaDefenders documents, the Pirate Bay is filing suit against the big record and movie labels operating in Sweden who have allegedly been paying professional hackers, saboteurs and DDoSers to destroy their trackers. They also claim to have filed a police report."

Submission + - Boston Mistakes Blinking LEDs for a Bomb... Again.

Submitted by

iamdrscience

on Friday September 21, 2007 @03:44PM

iamdrscience writes: ""In a story bearing a striking similarity to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force "hoax device" story from a few months ago, Star Simpson, a 19 year old MIT student, was arrested this morning at Logan airport by Boston police for allegedly carrying a fake bomb. She has already been charged with "disturbing the peace and possessing a hoax device" to which she plead not guilty and was released on $750 bail. The device in question consisted of a black sweatshirt with prototyping breadboard attached to the front which had been wired up a few blinking LEDs. In a press conference, State Police Major Scott Pare, the commanding officer at the airport was quoted as "She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands and not to make any movement, so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device, had she not followed the protocol, we might have used deadly force.""

Submission + - Windows XP vs Vista Performance Update

Submitted by

Timmus

on Friday September 21, 2007 @03:24PM

Timmus writes: "On launch day Windows Vista was plagued with early graphics drivers that ran poorly in some apps compared to Windows XP: games ran slower and with numerous graphical artifacts, features were missing, while GeForce cards often crashed the OS when resuming from suspend mode. NVIDIA was even threatened with a class action lawsuit! In this article, FiringSquad takes a look at how things have progressed, comparing the performance of 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista against Windows XP. It looks like NVIDIA has made lots of strides, but AMD has problems with some newer games."

Submission + - Americans giving up sex, friends, for Internet (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Bocanegra on Thursday September 20, 2007 @05:51PM

Bocanegra writes: A survey conducted by ad agency JWT shows that 20% of the respondents willingly give up sex (with other people, no less) in order to spend more time on the Internet. Another 28 percent spend less time with their friends in favor of surfing the web. In fact, the majority of those in the survey just can't bear to go without the Internet for very long. '15 percent of the group admitted to being weak-willed and said that they would only be able to last a day or less without feeling isolated and disconnected from the world. Another 21 percent didn't do much better, saying they could only go a couple of days, with 19 percent saying they could go "a few days." Only about 18 percent of the group said that they could go a week or more without being connected.'

Submission + - MediaDefender Source Code Leaked (wired.com)

Submitted by Pride Goes Before a Fall on Thursday September 20, 2007 @05:48PM

Pride Goes Before a Fall writes: It hasn't been a good week for the anti-P2P company MediaDefender. Fresh after the devastating leaks of their internal emails, their Gnutella tracking database, and their phone call with the New York Attorney General over an anti-child pornography project, now Wired reports that MediaDefender's source code is on the Pirate Bay for anyone to download. Given that MediaDefender joked about their own inability to put a dent in online copyright infringement, one wonders why companies trust these folks to fight copyright infringement when they can't even stop the torrent with their own worst secrets in it?

Submission + - Science shows Hobbits were real (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Nitack on Thursday September 20, 2007 @04:42PM

Nitack writes: The tiny, human-like creature living and using tools in Indonesia just 18,000 years ago really was a distinct species, not just a malformed modern human.

That is the clear implication of a new study of the so-called "hobbit". It states that the creature had wrist bones almost identical to those found in early hominids and modern chimpanzees, and so must have diverged from the human lineage well before the origin of modern humans and Neanderthals.

Submission + - FCC: analog TV lives until 2012 (Ars Technica) (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by

walterbays

on Wednesday September 12, 2007 @06:22PM

walterbays writes: ""The FCC voted 5-0 to require that cable operators must continue to make all local broadcasts available to their users, even those with analog televisions."

I don't understand how AT&T manages to deliver U-verse without any analog channels. Did they get it classified as not-cable and exempt from existing rules? Or as a result of this vote, will they suddenly have to drop 50 SD channels to make room for 5 NTSC channels?"

Submission + - 20 YR OLD Captures Abusive Police Officer on Tape (wikinews.org)

Submitted by

teambpsi

on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @06:41PM

teambpsi writes: ""Brett Darrow, 20, had installed a hidden camera inside his car, much like the way some police officers do, and caught the entire incident on tape. Darrow then posted the video on the internet on places like YouTube.com."

Combine this with a GPS and a in-car monitoring system and we could kick off a "Bigger-Sister" project to counter Big Brother :)"

Submission + - New e-cycling Laws (stateline.org)

Submitted by

InternetVoting

on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @01:44PM

InternetVoting writes: "A trend is growing in the United States with state legislatures enacting new tougher electronic recycling laws to handle e-waste and the hazards of lead, mercury and fire-retardant plastics in electronic devices.
From the article:
Five state legislatures took steps this year to curb the threat of toxic waste created by the proliferation of discarded computer gear and other digital junk, making 2007 a banner year for passage of electronic recycling laws.
Leading the pack, Minnesota enacted the nation's strongest "e-cycling" law. It requires manufacturers of electronic goods to recycle 60 percent of the volume of their products sold in the state. Less stringent recycling laws were signed into law in Connecticut, Oregon and Texas this year, and North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley (D) also is expected to approve an e-waste law passed by his state's Legislature."

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