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Biotech

Submission + - Next 8 days crucial for Stem Cell Research

Submitted by Lordplatypus
Lordplatypus writes: Author Neil Gaiman has an interesting post on his blog:
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is requesting public comment on draft guidelines entitled "National Institutes of Health Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research" (Guidelines). Here
". ..of the 6000 plus comments that NIH has received concerning the draft guidelines, 99% were from people who opposed embryonic stem cell research."
Apparently some religious believe that stem cell research is a bad thing and have encouraged members to flood NIH's site.
Patents

Submission + - New Material for Lithium Battery discovered 2

Submitted by
canadian_right
canadian_right writes: "Canadian scientists create new material with the potential to triple the power output of Lithium batteries. The new material uses sulphur formed into nano-scale ribbons for the cathode instead of traditional transition metals. The break through could lead to better batteries for everything from latops to cars."
The Military

Submission + - US Military Inspects Student Laptops for P2P Use (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by bfire
bfire writes: Recruits at the United States Military Academy in New York have to line up in the corridors outside their rooms in the barracks every Saturday morning for a notebook computer inspection or "IT SAMI" to check for attached shares and illicit or unauthorised content and use, according to a Colonel stationed there. "They're college students and they do what all college students do ... they share music," said Col Adams, who is assistant professor and senior research scientist at West Point's IT operations centre. He said management of the academy that trained US President Dwight Eisenhower and General David Petraeus wants to make sure no honour codes are broken that could lead to a cadet's expulsion from the school and return to the ranks.
Transportation

Submission + - US to Require New Cars Get 42 mpg 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "New cars and trucks will have to get 30 percent better mileage starting in 2016 under an Obama administration move to curb emissions tied to smog and global warming. While the 30 percent increase would be an average for both cars and light trucks, the percentage increase in cars would be much greater rising from the current 27.5 mpg standard to 42 mpg. Environmentalists praised the move. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, called it "one of the most significant efforts undertaken by any president, ever, to end our addiction to oil and seriously slash our global warming emissions." Obama's plan also would effectively end litigation between states and automakers who had opposed state-specific rules, arguing that having to meet several state standards would be much more expensive for them than just one federal rule. The Detroit News reported that automakers were on board with the new rule and had worked with the administration on creating a timeline for the transition. Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, described the new rule as "a triple play: It will help move America off foreign oil, save families money and spur American businesses to take the lead in developing the job-creating, clean-energy technologies of the future.""
Government

Submission + - Intel Penalty Says More Tech Blood On The Street (bnet.com)

Submitted by
eweekhickins
eweekhickins writes: "The public wants heads to roll on both sides of the Atlantic, and the EU's record $1.45 billion fine of Intel is the signal that this is exactly what's going to happen. It's not like they're not warning us — statements by the DOJ, SEC, FTC and good old Neelie Kroes herself are unambiguous: if you're not clean, we're coming at you hard."
Security

Submission + - Answers to "Secret Questions" Too Easily G (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
Al
Al writes: "Researchers at Microsoft conducted an extensive study of the "secret questions" used to recover passwords on many sites. There conclusion is that they are just about worthless. The researchers found that 28 percent of people could guess the correct answers to a participant's secret questions if they already knew them. Even people who didn't know the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answers. The least-secure questions, such as "What is your favorite town?" or "What is your favorite sports team?" were alarmingly easy for participants to guess. 30 percent and 57 percent of the correct answers, respectively, appeared in the top-five list of guesses. So, is it time to come up with another solution? Or should we all follow Bruce Schneier's example and just call a company up if we forget our password?"
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Major AV vendor secretly release Klingon version

Submitted by
Bantu1
Bantu1 writes: "The following was brought to my attention yesterday by someone-keen-to-keep-his-job-and-therefore-not-to-be-named:

A Klingon translation of a well-known anti-virus program!
Link: http://www.sophos.com/klingon-anti-virus

We all know you can study Klingon nowadays at university, but is it really becoming so mainstream that geeks in technology companies can while away the time between biscuits translating their product into a language for the masses?

Hardly, methinks. As far as I can make out (and am assured by he-who-must-not-be-named), it has all the virus-busting capabilities of the standard, english version — so why do it? A sugar-fuelled mind-expanding exercise? To communicate messages to other business-Klingons?

Being only a conversational Klingon speaker myself, I was surprised to find I could download it without difficulty — it came with an English user manual (I guess Mr. Translator got bored). It didn't appear to Vulcan-mind-grip my hard drive, and it even handily cleaned up a particularly nasty bit of loitering spyware.

But surely whoever did this is just inviting trouble. Not least from criticisms of his translation from other would-be Klingon software developers, but for being the forefather of a deluge of mainstream programs aimed at the wrinkly-headed ones.

Is Klingon destined for great things? Not wanting to sport a Mars bar on my head just to blend in, I hope not."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Ten Dying IT Skills (globalknowledge.com) 1

Submitted by
Julie188
Julie188 writes: "If you are looking for a job, here's 10 IT skills that you should not be bragging about on your resume, according to a scan of current job listings done by Global Knowledge. ATM, NetWare, Visual J++, WAP, ColdFusion, RAD/Extreme Programming, Siebel, SNA, HTML and COBOL. While there are no real surprises on this list some of the explanations of why these skills are dead are interesting. For instance, why not brag about HTML skills? "With the proliferation of easy to use WYSIWYG HTML editors enabling non-techies to set up blogs and Web pages, Web site development is no longer a black art. Sure, there's still a need for professional Web developers (see the ColdFusion entry above for a discussion about Java and PHP skills) but a good grasp of HTML isn't the only skill required of a Web developer. Professional developers often have expertise in Java, AJAX, C++ and .Net, among other programming languages. HTML as a skill lost more than 40% of its value between 2001 and 2003, according to Foote Partners.""
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Degrades Their Users (For A Good Cause!) (oreilly.com) 1

Submitted by
blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: "We all know that slow web pages drive users crazy, but where is the boundary between too slow and too simple? As Microsoft's Eric Schurman points out, the fastest loading page of all is a blank one, but it's also the most useless. In an interview with O'Reilly Radar leading up to his appearance at the Velocity Conference, Schurman talks about his experiences designing some of Microsoft's highest-volume sites, including the Microsoft home page and Live Search.

In particular, he discusses how Microsoft will selectively degrade the performance of pages to small sets of users so that they can see how various amounts of delay at different times affects user behavior. "In cases where we were giving what was a significantly degraded experience, the data moved to significance extremely quickly. We were able to tell when we delayed people's pages by more than half a second, and it was very obvious that this had a significant impact on users very quickly. We were able to turn off that experiment. The reasoning that we did it was it helps us make a strong argument for how we can prioritize work on performance against work on other aspects of the site." He also talks about what it's like to be one of the most often-targeted DDOS sites on the planet."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Another Bernie Madoff Scam? (chron.com)

Submitted by irishdaze
irishdaze writes: Curiously high returns on certificates of deposit at a Caribbean island bank operated by Houston-based Stanford International Group raised red flags that prompted some analysts to warn investors to beware. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service are investigating, according to a person familiar with the probes. While the scope of the probes is unclear, investigators are at least in part looking into the sale of the CDs issued by the bank in the island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. The bank has drawn federal scrutiny before. In 1999 Stanford handed U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officers a $3.1 million cashier's check from the bank after investigators found that a major drug trafficking ring in Mexico had used the bank to stash or launder money. At the time Stanford told the Los Angeles Times that the payment "was the right thing to do morally, and it's the legal thing to do."
Science

First Evidence Of Under-Ice Volcanoes In Antarctica 186

Posted by Zonk from the a-touch-extreme dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The first evidence of a volcanic eruption from beneath Antarctica's ice sheet has been discovered by members of the British Antarctic Survey. The volcano on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet began erupting some 2,000 years ago and remains active to this day. Using airborne ice-sounding radar, scientists discovered a layer of ash produced by a 'subglacial' volcano. It extends across an area larger than Wales."
Quickies

Submission + - "Hot or Not" for Website Design (commandshift3.com)

Submitted by irishdaze
irishdaze writes: "CommandShift3 is like Hot or Not. Except, instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot websites." ~ from the site

This site gives you a seeming never ending stream of head-to-head website screen-shot matchups, and you pick the one you like best by clicking on it. Two more screen-shots are presented, click, repeat. A 10-click history on the bottom of the page lets you know how your opinion on each comparison stacks up against those of other visitors. Your vote on each match-up is all but instantaneous because it's based only on aesthetics, so this thing is a bit of idle fun to keep your hands busy while waiting on or doing something else.

An added bonus: You can add websites anonymously, and, if you provide an e-mail address, can get the weekly match-up status of any site you submit. I've already added slashdot.org.
Networking

Submission + - Cisco shareholders hate human rights

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: A shareholder resolution calling on Cisco Systems to actively ensure that its technology sold overseas is not used to censor Internet content from citizens was rejected, although support for the motion increased sharply. The resolution called for Cisco to publish a report to shareholders detailing "concrete steps the company could reasonably take to reduce the likelihood that its business practices might enable or encourage the violation of human rights, including freedom of expression and privacy." Just over half of the Cisco shareholders voted against the proposal. Cisco has repeatedly denied any responsibility for how its networking equipment is used by governments of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam, which have been cited for spying on their citizens and restricting access to information via the Internet.

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