Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

Internet Could Act As Ecological Early Warning System 63

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the keep-your-crowd-source-off-of-mine dept.
Wired is reporting that ecologists think the internet could act as an early ecological warning system based on data mining human interactions. While much of this work has been based on systems like Google Flu Trends, the system will remain largely theoretical for the near future. "The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can't keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It's more crowd mining than crowd sourcing."

Comment DLL launched trojan?? (Score 1) 1127

by hostguy2004 (#26883875) Attached to: Draconian DRM Revealed In Windows 7
What about the possibility that the DLL launched a trojan, which restricted explorer.exe functionality? I've noticed some cracks do restrict access to certain files and folders. CS4 is new.. if the DLL "hack" was written for Vista and kept working in Windows 7, and so created the problems reported.

Comment Re:Too many ads (Score 5, Informative) 197

by hostguy2004 (#26246617) Attached to: RIAA's Request For Appeal Denied In Thomas Case

The "Recording Industry vs. the People" site has become incredibly ad-heavy. It now has layer ads that won't dismiss, a link farm, and regular Google ads. This thing has advertising from services I've never even heard of, like "shareasale.com". Amusingly, it has ads for RIAA-controlled music, and even for the iTunes store.

Block "st.blogads.com" to make it at least tolerable.

Before you get modded OT and NYCL will miss your post, I suggest that you politely email him.

I enjoy his many submissions to Slashdot, so perhaps people should consider donating to his website, instead of criticizing his advertising.
Communications

Submission + - SPAM: FAA mandates major aircraft "Black Box" up

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today mandated significant upgrades to aircraft cockpit voice and flight data recorders in an effort to help investigators retrieve more and better data from airplane accidents and mishaps. Today's mandate means manufacturers such as Honeywell and L-3 Communications as well as operators of airplanes and helicopters with 10 or more seats, must employ voice recorders, also known as black boxes, that capture the last two hours of cockpit audio instead of the current 15 to 30 minutes. The new rules also require an independent backup power source for the voice recorders to allow continued recording for nine to 11 minutes if all aircraft power sources are lost or interrupted. Voice recorders also must use solid state technology instead of magnetic tape, which is vulnerable to damage and loss of reliability, the FAA said. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Social Networks

Submission + - Scoble booted from Facebook for using Plaxo (news.com)

Submitted by hostguy2004
hostguy2004 writes: A data import feature being tested by contact management site Plaxo hasn't gone over too well with social network Facebook. The controversy hit the Web when popular blogger and former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble — who once gained notoriety when he publicly complained that Facebook wouldn't allow his friends list to surpass 5,000 people — posted a blog entry that revealed he'd been booted from the site. Scoble, who initially just said that he'd been "working with a company to move my social graph to other places...(which) isn't allowable under Facebook's terms of service," later revealed that he'd been testing out an alpha feature for Plaxo and its relatively new Pulse social network. Facebook later reversed their decision
United States

Submission + - Lifesaving hospital hygiene checklist banned (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: From the article:
Johns Hopkins University published a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections. It reminds doctors to make sure, for example, that before putting large intravenous lines into patients, they actually wash their hands and don a sterile gown and gloves.

The results were stunning. Within three months, the rate of bloodstream infections from these I.V. lines fell by two-thirds. The average I.C.U. cut its infection rate from 4 percent to zero. Over 18 months, the program saved more than 1,500 lives and nearly $200 million.

Yet this past month, the Office for Human Research Protections shut the program down.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft deprecating some OOXML functionality (fanaticattack.com)

Submitted by
christian.einfeldt
christian.einfeldt writes: "According to open standards advocate Russell Ossendryver, Microsoft will be deprecating certain functionality in its Microsoft Office Open XML specification. Ossendryver says the move is an attempt to quiet critics of the specification in the run up to the crucial February vote as to whether Microsoft OOXML will be included as a second standard for e-documents, along with the existing ODF ISO standard. ECMA, the Microsoft-led industry standards group formally offering OOXML to ISO, confirms in a 21 December 2007 announcement that issues related to the "leap year bug", VML, compatibility settings such as "AutoSpaceLikeWord95" and others will be "extracted from the main specification and relocated to an independent annex in DIS 29500 for deprecated functionality." Ossendryver is not convinced that deprecation will work, calling the deprecation proposal a 'smoke screen' and a 'bomb disguised as a standard' because 'every application will need to support the deprecated features in order to read files with the deprecated features.' Ossendryver also points out that legacy formatted Microsoft Office documents will still remain non-standard under the new proposal for deprecation."
Government

Journal SPAM: Tasers a form of torture, says UN 5

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

"The use of" Tasers "causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture," the UN's Committee against Torture said, "In certain cases, they can even cause death, as has been shown by reliable studies and recent real-life events." Three men - all in their early 20s - died from Tasers in the United States this week, days after a Polish ma
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft fires its CIO after investigation

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Microsoft has fired its chief information officer, Stuart Scott. "We can confirm that Stuart Scott was terminated after an investigation for violation of company policies," the company said. "We have no further information to share." But according to this article, Microsoft is already looking for a replacement. Microsoft General Manager Shahla Aly and Alain Crozier, a Microsoft VP in charge of the company's CFO, sales, marketing and services group will take over Scott's duties while Microsoft looks around.
Biotech

Submission + - Evidence found for Earliest Modern Humans

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Researchers at Arizona State University report that they have pushed back the date for the earliest modern humans to 164,000 years ago, far earlier than previously documented. Paleoanthropologists now say that genetic and fossil evidence suggests that modern human species — Homo sapiens — evolved in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago and in seeking the "perfect site" to explore for remains of the earliest populations, researchers analyzed ocean currents, climate data, geological formations and other data to pin down a location. "The world was in a glacial stage 125,000 to 195,000 years ago, and much of Africa was dry to mostly desert; in many areas food would have been difficult to acquire. The paleoenvironmental data indicate there are only five or six places in all of Africa where humans could have survived these harsh conditions," said Curtis Marean, a professor in ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Photos from the cave at Pinnacle Point in South Africa show where the team found ochre, bladelets and evidence of shellfish — findings that reveal the earliest dated evidence of modern humans."
Microsoft

Submission + - OSI approves Microsoft Ms-PL and Ms-RL

Submitted by
Russ Nelson
Russ Nelson writes: "In a board meeting held October 10th, and announced today, the Open Source Initiative approved two of Microsoft's software licenses: the Microsoft Reciprocal License and the Microsoft Public License. These licenses are refreshingly short and clean, compared to, say, the GPLv3 and the Sun CDDL. Like Larry Rosen's pair of licenses (the Academic Free License and Open Software License), they share a patent peace clause, a no-trademark-license clause, and they differ between each other only in the essential clause of reciprocation.

Of course, Microsoft is not widely trusted in the Open Source world, and their motives have been called into question during the approval discussions. How can they be attacking Open Source projects on one hand, and seeking not only to use open source methods, but use of the OSI Approved Open Source trademark? Nobody knows for sure except for Microsoft. But if you are confident that Open Source is the best way to develop software (as we at the Open Source Initiative are), then you can see why Microsoft would both attack Open Source and seek to use it at the same time. It is both their salvation and their enemy."

Slashdot Top Deals

"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe

Close