inkslinger77 notes a Computerworld interview with Martin Odersky on the Scala language, which is getting a lot of attention from its use on high-profile sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn. The strongly typed language is intended to be a usable melding of functional and object-oriented programming techniques. "My co-workers and I spend a lot of time writing code so we wanted to have something that was a joy to program in. That was a very definite goal. We wanted to remove as many of the incantations of traditional high-protocol languages as possible and give Scala great expressiveness so that developers can model things in the ways they want to. ... You can express Scala programs in several ways. You can make them look very much like Java programs which is nice for programmers who start out coming from Java. ... But you can also express Scala programs in a purely functional way and those programs can end up looking quite different from typical Java programs. Often they are much more concise. ... Twitter has been able to sustain phenomenal growth, and it seems with more stability than what they had before the switch, so I think that's a good testament to Scala. ... [W]e are looking at new ways to program multicore processors and other parallel systems. We already have a head start here because Scala has a popular actor system which gives you a high-level way to express concurrency. ... The interesting thing is that actors in Scala are not a language feature, they have been done purely as a Scala library. So they are a good witness to Scala's flexibility..."

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times has an interesting story on the logistical problems involved in transporting disassembled towers that will reach more than 250 feet in height from ports or factories to the remote, windy destinations where the turbines are erected. In Idaho trucks laden with tall turbine parts have slammed into interstate overpasses requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs. In Texas the constant truck traffic is tearing up small roads in the western part of the state where the turbines are being rapidly erected. And in Maine a truck carrying a big piece of turbine got stuck for hours while trying to round a corner near Searsport."

Scientists from the University of East Anglia are studying the potential health benefits of dark chocolate, and need 40 female volunteers who would like to eat chocolate every day for a year. The chocolate loving 40 must be post-menopausal and have type 2 diabetes so it can be determined if the flavonoid compounds in chocolate can reduce the risk of heart disease. Dr Peter Curtis, of the UEA's School of Medicine, said, "Our first volunteers are about to return for their final visit to see if the markers of heart health - such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels — have changed. A successful outcome could be the first step in developing new ways to improve the lives of people at increased risk of heart disease."

It turns out a passed out person and a yoga master possess a comparable amount of flexibility. Here's a gallery of the unintentional yoga masters alongside the forms in a more traditional manner.

61-year-old Li Shuqi is only raising one of the ten plagues of Egypt but from the fuss his neighbors are raising you'd think he was working on all ten. Li has spent the last three years raising locusts. He has about two millions locusts living in five locust houses and sells them to Beijing restaurants where they are considered a delicacy. Li says, "My neighbours are constantly keeping an eye on my locust fields and checking the security of the meshes that prevent them from escaping."

Officials say that a pair of New York state employees used taxpayer money to creating a "man cave" at the Capitol Building. The pair transformed a maintenance area in a Capitol garage facility into the mother of all break rooms equipped with a TV, board games, DVDs, couches, rolling papers and marijuana scales. The two are suspended without pay and one is charged with marijuana possession and criminal use of drug paraphernalia.

angry tapir writes "If you're the kind of person who walks down the street worrying about the depletion of IPv4 addresses, the iPhone can now tell you how long you have until that happens. IPv6 network backbone and collocation provider Hurricane Electric has introduced an iPhone application that counts down the number of days until that moment of reckoning."

The CTO at Dudley H.'s company sat everyone down and said that "there should never, ever be a need for technical support." All customer issues are a result of a poorly implemented or designed product. The helpdesk staff countered that many users are lazy and/or stupid, but the CTO set a new policy that all client issues were to have a "problem/improvement" report written about them, and that all reports were to be reviewed at the highest level. Hilarity ensues.

roelbj writes "Automotive stories are few and far between on Slashdot, but today's news from Chevrolet might just make a few readers' mouths water at the chance to own their own Bumblebee. Today at Comic-Con, General Motors officially announced the 2010 Chevy Camaro Transformers Special Edition. The $995 appearance package can be applied to LT (V6) and SS-trim Camaros in Rally Yellow with or without the optional RS package."

Find out what it's like to be matched based on 29 dimensions of arbitrary compatibility.

BotScout writes "An Ohio man, fed up with deceptive junk mail, made the mistake of losing his temper while on the phone with a St. Louis company pitching an extended auto-service contract. Now he finds himself behind bars, where he is charged with making a terrorist threat and is being held on $45,000 bond. According to court documents, Charles W. Papenfus, 43, allegedly told a sales representative during a May 18 telephone call that he would burn down the building and kill the employees and their families. He was indicted for making a terrorist threat, a Class D felony; and he could be sentenced to up to four years in prison if convicted. I get a lot of this kind of junk mail too, but I usually just call their 800 number and waste as much of their time as possible."

JimLynch writes "Back in 2006, when I was writing for ExtremeTech, I reviewed a version of Ubuntu with a religious theme: Ubuntu Christian Edition. At one point it seemed as though Ubuntu CE had been discontinued but I was pleased to note today that it has apparently been brought to life again and so I decided to do a full review Ubuntu CE 5.0 for DLR."