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Submission + - Watson is 16% Black (independent.co.uk) 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: James Watson, a Nobel-prize winning scientist who has been in hot water lately over racist remarks and one of the few people whose genome has been sequenced, has just found out that his own DNA is 16% African. Dr. Watson said he was "inherently gloomy about the prospects for Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really".
Operating Systems

Submission + - SCALE 6X Announces Registration and Speakers (socallinuxexpo.org)

Submitted by
irabinovitch
irabinovitch writes: "Registration for SCALE 6X, the 2008 Southern California Linux Expo, opened on Monday night. The community run linux and open-source conference will hold its 6th annual event on Feb 8 — 10, 2008 in Los Angeles, CA. In addition to registration, the first set of speakers and exhibitors was announced. Exhibits will include demos from groups such as IBM, Novell, Plain Black, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Gentoo, and others. Those interested in speaking still have time to submit an abstract to the call for papers which will close on November 30th. With a strong speaker and exhibitor line up as well as an expanded selection of mini-conferences, SCALE 6X should be the best year yet!"
Biotech

Submission + - Gel changing color in a second

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "MIT researchers have developed gels which can change colors almost instantaneously when they're exposed to a variety of stimuli, such as temperature, pressure or humidity. These gels could be used to design inexpensive sensors. For example, these gel-based sensors could be useful in a food processing plant to 'indicate whether food that must remain dry has been overly exposed to humidity.' Now the researchers are working on a gel which would change color in response of electricity. Read more for additional references and a picture of these colorful polymers."
User Journal

Journal SPAM: SoCal Burned for Iraq 3

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

U.S. needs to keep fire tanker funding
Oakland Tribune, Nov 27, 2005

WHILE trying to slash billions of dollars from the federal budget to help cover the costs of the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration wants to cut funding, a move that would ground much of the federal fire-fighting tanker fleet.

This would be a bad idea.
Music

Submission + - Slashdot Reverses Facts about Radiohead 1

Submitted by Apro+im
Apro+im writes: The popular news aggregation website, Slashdot today reported that the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows was pirated more than it was procured via legitimate means, setting off a flurry of speculation on their online discussion board as to the implications of this "fact". Strangely overlooked in much of the discussion, however, was the fact that the article they linked contained the exact opposite information, stating:

"The file was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day — adding up to more than 500,000 total illegal downloads. That's less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported by the British Web site Gigwise.com"
Questions about what this implies about Slashdot's editorial practices and readership remain unanswered.
Music

Submission + - RIAA loses counterclaim lawsuit (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This is the case in which the Court had sustained 5 of the 6 counterclaims interposed by Ms. Del Cid.

The court sustained defendant's counterclaims for

-trespass to defendant's personal property based on the RIAA's having accessed files on Ms. Del Cid's computer without her permission,
-violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act based on the RIAA's unauthorized intrusion into defendant's computer,
-violation of Florida's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act,
-a declaratory judgment of non-infringement, and
-conspiracy to commit extortion, since defendant sufficiently alleged "a peculiar power of coercion possessed by Plaintiffs [by] virtue of their combination, which an individual alone would not possess".
The Internet

Submission + - FBI orders ca.gov domain deleted

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: FBI orders ca.gov domain deleted

Today the FBI had the ca.gov domain removed from the root servers. Why? A DNS server for a subdomain was hacked and was delegating to other subdomains which were hosting porn. That problem was fixed in mid-September. The federal reaction shows significant latency.

As the caches around the internet age out, email etc. are going to stop. Phone calls and email to get the problem fixed at dotgov.gov were answered by a secretary type answering the phone and she was reading from a script. The root server entries went away approx. 2:15 PDT, and Washington D.C. has gone home. There are over 640 California domains that will not be reachable once the DNS caches time out.

At 6:00 PDT someone at GSA was reportedly pushing out a correction, although the typical BIND cache interval of 3 hours.
The Internet

Submission + - Feds delete ca.gov domains by SNAFU

Submitted by gnulinux4me
gnulinux4me writes: The GSA General Services Administration (GSA) website for domain name registration for the U.S. government deleted the ca.gov domain. How are the Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger fans going to get updates on his latest escapades if they can't access www.gov.ca.gov? A WHOIS search earlier today reported the status of ca.gov as denied\deleted which has recently changed to a status of active. This is the only info I can find on the Internet: http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/hacked-gov-sites.html.
The Internet

Submission + - Domain Registry of America Scam

Submitted by
eefsee
eefsee writes: "In 2003 the Domain Registry of America was cited by the FTC for its deceptive practices. They got into similar hot water for a renewal scam in Canada. This company is still at it today, though. They send out deceptive "Domain Name Expiration Notice" up to six months before most domains expire, making it seem that the domain needs to be renewed within the month and charging four times the typical market price for this renewal. I usually just toss these "notices," but my mom almost signed her domains over to these clowns. I just got another "Domain Name Expiration Notice" from DROA today and I'm getting fed up. Who do you think I should tell? My state attorney general? The FTC? They've been down that road before and seem none the worse for wear. Any ideas of how to get these folks shut down?"
United States

Submission + - Driving 'privalege' unconstitutional?

Submitted by JoeSilva
JoeSilva writes: If one accepts that the US Constitution affirms Government only has the powers that it's citizens grant it, then what is this claim by the states that driving is a privalage granted by them? There is certainly good cause to grant the government regulatory powers over the use of motor vehicles and over our rights of way, for the common welfare, but government claiming driving is a privalage it grants to it's citizens seems to me counter to our constitutional ideals. What say you?
Linux Business

Submission + - InformationWeek Invents Torvalds Quote (fsdaily.com)

Submitted by
Morosoph
Morosoph writes: "Last week, Slashdot reported upon an article in InformationWeek, attributing a slur on the authors of the GPL version 3 to Linus Torvalds, which was generated by taking out of context some comments from an email that Linus wrote before the GPL version 3 was even released.

Penguin Pete goes as far as to say that Information Week told a "BIG FAT LIE" in his own blog."

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Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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