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Submission + - Man crushed by server (theaustralian.com.au)

Submitted by bcraigen
bcraigen writes: The The Australian Newspaper has a story about a man who died after computer equipment fell on him while it was being unloaded.

Ambulance Victoria said the 60-year-old man died at the scene, just after 3pm (AEDT) on Tuesday.

"It appears the man was helping others unload a large computer server from the back of a truck," an ambulance officer.

"The equipment has started to slip from a forklift and it appears that the man has tried to stop it.

"It has then fallen on him and he has suffered critical head and chest injuries."

Workmates applied CPR before fire crews and paramedics arrived but the man died a short time later.

A WorkSafe spokesman said the equipment weighed 200kg and fell from a height of two metres.

Submission + - Mashup artist calls for changes in copyright law (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Some participants in the first World's Fair Use Day argued U.S. copyright law should be updated to better reflect the changing ways that mashup artists and other new content creators use existing works. Artists shouldn't face threats of huge fines and prison time for sampling from copyright works, said filmmaker Nina Paley, creator of the film "Sita Sings the Blues." Paley has called for a wholesale rewrite of copyright law to allow mashup artists to create new works without threat of lawsuits or prison time. Her 2008 film used several songs from 1920s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, and copyright holders demanded she pay US$220,000 for use of the works. Paley eventually settled for $50,000. But she could've been charged with criminal copyright infringement, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison and large fines."

Submission + - Programmers Need To Learn Statistics (zedshaw.com) 2

Submitted by
David Gerard
David Gerard writes: "Zed Shaw writes an impassioned plea to programmers: Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All. "I go insane when I hear programmers talking about statistics like they know shit when it’s clearly obvious they do not. I’ve been studying it for years and years and still don’t think I know anything. This article is my call for all programmers to finally learn enough about statistics to at least know they don’t know shit. I have no idea why, but their confidence in their lacking knowledge is only surpassed by their lack of confidence in their personal appearance.""
Earth

Submission + - Scientists Postulate Extinct Hominid with 150 IQ 6

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger have an interesting article in Discover Magazine about the Boskops, an extinct hominid that had big eyes, child-like faces, and forebrains roughly 50% larger than modern man indicating they may have had an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens. The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies. "Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa," wrote naturalist Loren Eiseley. "His brain was bigger than your brain” The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the almost irresistible idea that evolution leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessor, yet the existence of the Boskops argues otherwise — that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves. "With 30 percent larger brains than ours now, we can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149," write Lynch and Granger. But why did they go extinct? "Maybe all that thoughtfulness was of no particular survival value in 10,000 BC. Lacking the external hard drive of a literate society, the Boskops were unable to exploit the vast potential locked up in their expanded cortex," write Lynch and Granger. "They were born just a few millennia too soon.""

Submission + - Creative Commons: 59 hours to reach $500k

Submitted by Saint Aardvark
Saint Aardvark writes: CreativeCommons.org is appealing for donations to help support them in 2010. Lawrence Lessig, a familiar name to Slashdot readers and the founder of Creative Commons, writes: "[T]he White House, Al Jazeera, and Wikipedia all adopted CC licenses. That happened this year. And now that it has happened, we all have an even stronger obligation to make sure this thing that thousands helped build over the past 7 years continues to grow and succeed and inspire." Their goal is to raise $500,000 by December 31st to ensure funding for the coming year. They've got just $80,000 left to go. You can donate here.
Image

Escaped Convict Continues To Update Facebook 125

Posted by samzenpus from the hiding-in-farmville dept.
Craig "Lazie" Lynch has been on the run from a U.K. prison since September. However, he continues to taunt police by updating his Facebook status. Now he is threatening to quit. From the article: "It seems, though, that late Sunday, Lynch began experiencing a little emotional pain. In what must have been an almost teary update, he posted: 'right I'm coming off this page as I have better things to do.' Who might have imagined that, in his mysterious hideaway, Lynch had something better to do than continue his run as a Facebook attraction?"
Security

Submission + - Man Challenges 250,000 Strong Botnet and Succeeds

Submitted by nandemoari
nandemoari writes: When security officials decide to "go after" computer malware, most conduct their actions from a defensive standpoint. For most of us, finding a way to rid a computer of the malware suffices — but for one computer researcher, however, the change from a defensive to an offensive mentality is what ended the two year chase of a sinister botnet once and for all. For two years, Atif Mushtaq had been keeping the notorious Mega-D bot malware from infecting computer networks. As of this past November, he suddenly switched from de½Âfense to offense. Mega-D had forced more than 250,000 PCs to do its bidding via botnet control.
Science

Submission + - Extinct Ibex Resurrected by Cloning (telegraph.co.uk) 1

Submitted by
ScuttleMonkey
" rel="nofollow">ScuttleMonkey writes: "The Telegraph is reporting that for the first time an extinct animal has been brought back via cloning. The Pyrenean ibex, a type of mountain goat, was declared officially extinct in 2000 but thanks to preserved skin samples scientists were able to insert that DNA into eggs from domestic goats to clone a female Pyrenean ibex. While the goat didn't survive long due to lung defects this gives scientists hopes that it will be possible to resurrect extinct species from frozen tissue. "Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females. Just seven of the embryos resulted in pregnancies and only one of the goats finally gave birth to a female bucardo, which died a seven minutes later due to breathing difficulties, perhaps due to flaws in the DNA used to create the clone.""
Security

Submission + - SPAM: Inmate gets 18 months for hacking prison computer

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A former Massachusetts prison inmate has been given an 18-month prison sentence for hacking prison computers while he was incarcerated. Francis "Frank" Janosko, 44, was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in Boston for abusing a computer provided by the Plymouth County Correctional Facility. The computer had been set up to help inmates with their legal research. In 2006, Janosko managed to circumvent computer controls and use the machine to send e-mail and cull data on more than 1,100 Plymouth County prison employees. He gained access to sensitive information such as their dates of birth, Social Security Numbers, telephone numbers, home addresses and employment records.
Link to Original Source
Science

Submission + - Stopping global warming with a hose (associatedcontent.com) 3

Submitted by FutureDomain
FutureDomain writes: Nathan Myhrvold from Intellectual Solutions has proposed a hose to pipe sulfur particles to the stratosphere as a temporary solution to stop global warming. Noting the recent Climategate emails and distrust of global warming science, he suggested that an open scientific study should be done of global warming, with everything above board and dissenters included. If the study concludes that global warming is occurring, then a temporary solution of pumping sulfur particles into the atmosphere should be started while the world moves to clean energy as a permanent solution. The sulfur particles will dim the sun's light just enough to counteract any warming, with the particles only making up an extra 1% of the sulfur particles already in the stratosphere from volcanoes. The scheme would only cost $250 million dollars, compared with a loss in GDP of $151 to $210 billion in 2020 and $631 to $639 billion in 2030 for the Lieberman-Warner bill currently in congress.
Idle

Submission + - D.C. detective pulls gun at snowball fight (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by langelgjm
langelgjm writes: The Washington Post reports that during Saturday's record-breaking snowfall, hundreds of twenty- and thirty-somethings gathered in a mostly-empty area of the city and proceeded to have an enormous snowball fight. Things were all fun and games until a D.C. detective in plainclothes stopped in the middle of the fight, leaving his Hummer and confronting the crowd with his gun drawn. At first, D.C. police denied the claims, but the incident was caught on tape. The detective is currently on desk duty pending an investigation. The tech angle to all of this? 25-year-old Yousef Ali, a one-time Apple Genius, said he was inspired to start the snowball fight by a friend's Facebook status and used a dormant personal blog and extensive Twitter promotion to expand the participant list: "Basically, I used a lot of my social media promotions techniques... to really push this thing pretty big."
The Internet

Submission + - This American Life Podcast Bandwidth Costs $130k (idealog.us)

Submitted by newscloud
newscloud writes: I was surprised to hear Ira Glass ask for donations to cover This American Life's $130,000 annual expenses in podcasting bandwidth. Firstly, I thought Apple paid for the bandwidth costs of iTunes podcasts. Then, I wondered why popular shows like this would shy from using BitTorrent for distributing its podcast. In less than two minutes, I installed Miro and began listening to This Life's latest, #1 Party School. Why doesn't the show create a custom version of Miro that auto-subscribes to the show on installation? Should donors pour good money after bad costly technical solutions — or am I missing something? Has telco propaganda successfully poisoned innovation on BitTorrent?

Submission + - Climategate spreads to Wikipedia (nationalpost.com) 14

Submitted by sparkydevil
sparkydevil writes: Some catnip to those who have long argued about administrator bias and groupthink in Wikipedia.

Canada's National Post reports here and here that one of the objectives of those promoting Climate alarm was to control Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003 U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley, one of nine Realclimate.org team members, rewrote Wikipedia'½Â½Â(TM)s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling as well as working to erase the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period and infamous hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the team.

According to the article Connolly created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles, removed more than 500 articles as an administrator and barred over 2000 Wikipedia contributors while rewarding those who supported his views. "In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement."
Google

Submission + - Mozilla Exec Urges Switch From Google to Bing (mozillazine.org) 1

Submitted by Andorin
Andorin writes: Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, has published a brief blog post in which he recommends that Firefox users move from using Google as their main search engine to Bing, citing privacy issues. Disregarding the existence of alternative search engines such as Ask and Yahoo, Dotzler asserts that Bing's privacy policy is better than Google's. Dotzler explains the recommendation with a quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time..." Ars Technica also covers the story.

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