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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 71 declined, 36 accepted (107 total, 33.64% accepted)

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Earth

Submission + - Why Does Hurricane Size Not Get As Much Attention? 1

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "Hurricanes can vary greatly in size. As of Thursday Evening, Ike is a Category 2-3 Storm. But it is extremely large. Therefore, in terms of raw destructive energy, it is stronger and more dangerous than even Hurrican Katrina. A good comparison of raw strength, ironically on an experimental NOAA scale called IKE (integrated kinetic energy), quantifies this comparison. Anyone with a passing familiarity with physics understands a wind going 100 mph and 30 miles wide packs more energy than a wind going 200 mph but only 10 miles wide. But there are people who choose to wait things out in Houston and Galveston, for many foolish reasons, but not least of which because they hear that Ike is only Category 2. So why doesn't the NOAA and the media convey more information, use a different scale that takes into account storm size as well as wind speed, or at least quote the numbers together? Such as 'Hurricane Ike is a Category 2x550 storm' (550 miles across)."
United States

Submission + - Shutting Down The Carders (circletimessquare.com)

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "The New York Times has an engrossing story of how the Secret Service went after and caught a gang of carders: Aleksandr Suvorov, 24, an Estonian hacker, Maksym Yastremskiy, 25, from the Ukraine, and Albert Gonzalez, 27, of Miami. Collectively they traded in millions of stolen credit card numbers. Most notable is the story of Gonzalez and how the Feds figured out he was still playing both sides after turning informant in 2003. They reversed engineered a sniffer program the Estonian had dropped on a Dave & Buster's server and noticed it was the same code from a war-driving intrusion into TJ Maxx by Gonzalez. Interestingly, Maksym was arrested outside a disco in Turkey and Suvorov was nabbed at an airport in Frankfurt. The take home lesson being: if you are going to trade in stolen credit card information from the USA, avoid countries with friendly extradition policies with the USA."
Communications

Submission + - Comcast Will Be Reading Your Comments

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "The New York Times fills us in on Comcast's new customer service push. Don't worry about calling them, just complain online. Frank Eliason monitors blogs, social networking sites, message boards, Twitter, etc., and proactively reaches out to the posters. 'The company was ranked at the very bottom of the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index, which tracks consumer opinions of more than 200 companies. Hundreds of customers have filed grievances on a site called ComcastMustDie.com. Comcast says the online outreach is part of a larger effort to revamp its customer service. In just about five months, Mr. Eliason, whose job redefines customer service, has reached out to well over 1,000 customers online.' Make sure to say 'Hi Frank!' if you comment on this story."
Censorship

Submission + - Google Trends v Community Standards On Obscenity

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "Google Trends is being used in a novel way in a pornography trial in Florida. Under a 1973 Supreme Court ruling, "contemporary community standards" may be used as a yardstick for judging material as unprotected obscenity. This is a very subjective judgment, and so Lawrence Walters, a defense lawyer for Clinton Raymond McCowen, is using Google Trends to show that in the privacy of their own homes, more people in Pensacola (the only city in the court's jurisdiction that is large enough to be singled out in the service's data) are interested in "orgy" than "apple pie". With this new tactic, questions of privacy, as well as hypocrisy, are being raised. '"Time and time again you'll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private," said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, "we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed," he added.' For the Slashdot user base, the question is: is an invasion of privacy acceptable if it is being used to reveal hypocrisy?"
Censorship

Submission + - The Rarity That Is The First Amendment

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "The New York Times has an examination of how out of step the USA is with its allies in regard to freedom of speech. Various forms of hate speech in the USA that is protected under the First Amendment enjoys no such protections most everywhere else in the world. The article specifically examines current proceedings in The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal over complaints against a leading Canadian newsweekly, Macleans, by the Canadian Islamic Congress. The article cites 'Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States eventually formed the basis for modern First Amendment law. "The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market," Justice Holmes wrote. "I think that we should be eternally vigilant," he added, "against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death."' While this is a notable instinct, it is distressing that so little of the world currently shares this sentiment with the USA."
Enlightenment

Submission + - Relics Of Science History For Sale

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "Dennis Overbye at the New York Times has some ruminations on some of the historical totems of science going up for auction at Christie's next week. There is the 1543 copy of "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" by Copernicus, which you can have for $900,000 to $1.2 million. If you have some cash left over, maybe you can pick up an original work by Galileo, Darwin, Descartes, Newton, Freud, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, or Malthus. And then there is the 1878 copy of the world's first phone book: "a shock of recognition — that people were already talking on the phone a year before Einstein was born. In fact, just two years later Einstein's father went into the nascent business himself. Einstein grew up among the rudiments of phones and other electrical devices like magnets and coils, from which he drew part of the inspiration for relativity. It would not be until 1897, after people had already made fortunes exploiting electricity, that the English scientist J. J. Thomson discovered what it actually was...""
NES (Games)

Submission + - Shigeru Miyamoto, The Walt Disney Of Our Time (bangamovie.com) 1

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "The New York Times has a gushing portrait of Shigeru Miyamoto, a man whose creative successes have spanned almost 30 years. From Donkey Kong, to Mario (as well known as Mickey Mouse around the world the story notes), to Zelda, to the Wii, and now to Wii Fit, which according to some initial rumors is selling out across the globe in its debut. The article has some gems of insight into the man's thinking, including that his iconic characters are an afterthought. Gameplay comes first, and the characters are designed around that. Additionally, his fame and finances and ego are refreshingly modest for someone of his high regard and creative stature: 'despite being royalty at Nintendo and a cult figure, he almost comes across as just another salaryman (though a particularly creative and happy one) with a wife and two school-age children at home near Kyoto. He is not tabloid fodder, and he seems to maintain a relatively nondescript lifestyle.'"
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Federal Lawsuit attempts to shut down the LHC

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "I suppose you could cry just as well as laugh. The New York Times is reporting that two men in Hawaii are suing CERN in federal court to have it cease and desist with the construction of the Large Hadron Collider. The reason for the lawsuit should be familiar to some: the fear that the LHC will create a black hole which will swallow the planet. One of the two crackpots, I mean, er, gentlemen, Walter L. Wagner, has made a habit of this: he attempted to shut down the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1999. His lawsuit was dismissed in 2001. The article notes that 'Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.'"
Censorship

Submission + - The Cuban Memory Stick Underground 2

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "The New York Times describes how hard it is in Cuba to get news that is not censored. Apparently students have taken to passing media around on memory sticks, as this is the only way they can get around state-controlled media. Also driving this phenomenon is the fact that there are so few places to get on the Internet: in Havana there is only one Internet cafe, down from three a few years ago. Ricardo, a 28 year old philosophy student, gets the memory sticks from European friends, since they are scarce to find in Cuba through normal channels. 'Like many young Cubans, Ricardo plays a game of cat and mouse with the authorities. He doubts that the government will ever let ordinary citizens have access to the Internet in their homes. "That's far too dangerous," he said. "Daddy State doesn't want you to get informed, so it preventively keeps you from surfing."'"
Privacy

Submission + - Google Earth Tracking Van Might Have Seen Murder

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "Normally, the sad story of the murder of a woman in Australia is not a subject matter for Slashdot. Except for the fact that the Google Earth van was driving around the area where and when her body was being dumped. The police are interested in reviewing the data. Not mentioned in the story is the deeper implication, touched on by Slashdot before, about the general public finding interesting things on Google Street View/ Microsoft Virtual Earth. But seeing details of a murder on one of these apps would definitely take the cake."
Security

Submission + - Canadian Passport Data Breach Due To Bad Coding

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "Hot on the heels of the large government data breach in the UK comes news of a serious security hole in the Canadian passport application process. Jamie Laning, a Canadian IT worker, discovered that just by tweaking a single character in the query string of the URL of his Passport application session, he was able to bring up other people's applications. He was able to view personal information such as social insurance numbers, driver's licence numbers, a federal ID card number and even a firearms licence number. Mr. Laning informed Passport Canada, who now says the error is already fixed. According to the article, Canadian law does not require organizations to disclose when they've suffered security breaches. Ouch."
ePlus

Submission + - Chefs as Chemists

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "Using ingredients usually relegated to the lower half of the list of ingredients on a Twinkies wrapper, some professional chefs are turning themselves into magicians with food. Ferran Adrià in Spain and Heston Blumenthal in England have been doing this for years, but the New York Times updates us on the ongoing experiments at WD-50 in New York City. Xanthan Gum, agar-agar, and other hydrocolloids are being used to bring strange effects to your food. Think butter that doesn't melt in the oven, foie gras you can tie into knots, and fried mayonaise. Time for a snack."
Censorship

Submission + - China hijacks Google, Yahoo, Microsoft searches

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "There is resentment in the West at the exploits of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in China in the last few years. Namely, the cooperation of these businesses with censorship and with snooping on Chinese citzens. But critics of a hardline approach to Chinese Internet limitations dismiss pandering to the Chinese government as simply the price a large company must pay for doing business in China. Well one wonders then if the ultimate price to pay for doing business in China is to have your business taken by China. The redirection of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft searches to Baidu happens swiftly on the heels of the American President meeting with the Dalai Lama. To China's credit then it is apparently ideologically uniform in its hostility towards freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press. When you dance with the devil..."
United States

Submission + - All laws limiting violent videogames failing

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "Good news for common sense: the New York Times examines the track record of state laws attempting to limit children's access to violent videogames, and finds that the courts have struck them all down as unconstitutional. Especially notable is this gem of a quote, from a First Amendment conservative- not liberal, Judge Richard A. Posner: 'Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low... It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.' Are you listening Jack Thompson?"

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