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Google

Submission + - Gmail may hand over IP addresses of journalists (wikileaks.org) 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A California court has issued a subpoena demanding Google reveal the IP addresses of journalists writing for a corruption busting journal from the Caribbean.

The August 28 subpoena, issued by the Superior Court, County of Santa Clara, as part of a "libel tourism" action taken by non-US property developers, demands detailed information about the operators of "tcijournal@gmail.com". The account is the main email address of the TCI Journal, the most influential journal covering the Turks & Caicos Islands. The Islands are a tourist mecca and tax haven in the Caribbean sea, and until August 14 were an independent British protectorate.
Media

Submission + - Disney Buys Marvel

Submitted by whisper_jeff
whisper_jeff writes: Disney has announced they will be purchasing Marvel.

"Building on its strategy of delivering quality branded content to people around the world, The Walt Disney Company /quotes/comstock/13*!dis/quotes/nls/dis (DIS 26.52, -0.32, -1.19%) has agreed to acquire Marvel Entertainment, Inc. in a stock and cash transaction, the companies announced today."
The Internet

Submission + - RadioShack relaunches with vulgar talk radio

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Celebrating its name change to The Shack, RadioShack chose a strange way to promote its new image. Streaming live from New York and San Francisco, the three-day "Summer Netogether" began with a crude radio talk show that would put Howard Stern to shame. The majority of the "Sarah and Vinnie" show featured such broad topics as breasts (in every shape and size), sex with celebrities and coffee enemas. Interesting way to promote the new brand.
Windows

Submission + - Current Freely Available Applications for Windows (wade82.com)

Submitted by
hollywoodb
hollywoodb writes: "I've put together what I feel to be the best and brightest free software for Windows. Included are sections to accommodate most users' needs; notably omitted is a Games section. In putting together this list I found that some of my favorite Linux applications are available on Windows, and I discovered some new apps as well. Not all these apps are open source, but many are. It's exciting to find out how many more open source applications are available for Windows today compared to the last time I used the Windows platform eight years ago. What are some of your favorite free and/or open source Windows applications?"
Announcements

Submission + - Netflix Announces Second Data Mining Contest (netflixprize.com)

Submitted by
John Snodgrass
John Snodgrass writes: "Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix, has announced on the Netflix Prize Forums that they are planning to hold a new data mining competition. The second competition will have some twists and is expected to be shorter in duration. It will feature two grand prizes, to be awarded in a 6 and 18 month time frame. A previous competitor still active on the board has already dubbed it: The Sparse Matrix: Reordered" and "The Sparse Matrix: Factorizations"."
Software

Submission + - Google Chrome 3.0 beta: Tested & benchmarked (cnet.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A recent feature on CNet proves Google partially correct: Chrome 3.0 is significantly faster than the current version according to benchmarks against other browsers, making it the world's fastest Web browser, with an 11% lead over the competition (Google claimed a 30% improvement over the current stable build of Chrome 2.0). Actually, Chrome 2.0 jointly takes second place with Safari 4.0.2 for Windows, which was pushed out earlier this week.
Medicine

Submission + - Prehistoric Gene Reawakens to Battle HIV (dailygalaxy.com) 3

Submitted by Linuss
Linuss writes: About 95% of the human genome has once been designated as "junk" DNA. While much of this sequence may be an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose, some junk DNA may function in ways that are not currently understood. The conservation of some junk DNA over many millions of years of evolution may imply an essential function that has been "turned off." Now scientists say there's a junk gene that fights HIV. And they've discovered how to turn it back on.

What these scientists have done could give us the first bulletproof HIV vaccine. They have re-awakened the human genome's latent potential to make us all into HIV-resistant creatures; they published their ground-breaking research in PLoS Biology.
A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman and Alexander Colewhether wanted to try a new approach to fighting HIV — one that worked with the body's own immune system. They knew Old World monkeys had a built-in immunity to HIV: a protein called retrocyclin, which can prevent HIV from entering cell walls and starting an infection. So they began poring over the human genome, looking to see if humans had a latent gene that could manufacture retrocyclin too. It turned out that we did, but a "nonsense mutation" in the gene had turned it off at some point in our evolutionary history.
Nonsense mutations are caused when random DNA code shows up in the middle of a gene, preventing it from beginning the process of manufacturing proteins in the cell. Venkataraman and her team decided to investigate this gene further, doing a series of tests to see if the retrocyclin it produced would keep HIV out of human cells. It did.
At last, they knew that if they could just figure out a way to reawaken the "junk" gene that creates retrocyclin in humans, they might be able to stop HIV infections. The researchers just needed to figure out a way to remove that nonsense mutation and get the target gene to start manufacturing retrocyclin again.
Here's where things really get interesting. The team found a way to use a compound called aminoglycosides, which itself can cause errors when RNA transcribes information from DNA to make proteins. But this time, the aminoglycoside error would work in their favor: It would cause that RNA to ignore the nonsense mutation in the junk gene, and therefore start making retrocyclin again. In preliminary tests, their scheme worked. The human cells made retrocyclin, fended off HIV, and effectively became AIDS-resistant. And it was done entirely using the latent potential in the so-called junk DNA of the human genome.
After more research is done, the researchers believe this might become a viable way to make humans immune to HIV infection.
What's especially intriguing, beyond the amazing idea of an AIDS vaccine, is that aminoglycosides have the potential to unlock the uses for other pieces of junk DNA. In Darwin's Radio, certain portions of these "non-sense" sequences, remnants of prehistoric retroviruses, have been activated by aminoglycosides.
In the novel, humans start rapidly evolving after their junk DNA re-awakens in response to stress. Could we induce instant mutations, or gain other new immunities by using aminoglycosides on our junk DNA?
Privacy

Submission + - Ubuntu's new Firefox is watching you (launchpad.net) 3

Submitted by sukotto
sukotto writes: Ubuntu recently released an unannounced and experimental "multisearch" extension to Firefox alpha3... apparently to improve the default behavior of new tabs and of search. In a response to one of the initial bug reports the maintainers mentioned that the extension's other purpose was for "collecting the usage data" and "Generating revenue" [citation] . Since this extension installs by itself and offers no warning about potential privacy violations, quite a few people (myself included) feel pretty unhappy.

There is no way to opt-out other than manually disabling the extension via Tools >> Add-ons.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Slackware 64 bits is alive

Submitted by
t0mg
t0mg writes: "from the Slackware64-current changelog:

http://slackware.com/

[tap tap tap]... Is this thing on? ;-)
Ready or not, Slackware has now gone 64-bit with an official x86_64 port being maintained in-sync with the regular x86 -current branch. DVDs will be available for purchase from the Slackware store when Slackware 13.0 is released. Many thanks go out to the Slackware team for their help with this branch and a special thank you to Eric Hameleers who did the real heavy lifting re-compiling everything for this architecture, testing, re-testing, and staying in-sync with -current.

We've been developing and testing Slackware64 for quite a while. Most of the team is already using Slackware64 on their personal machines, and things are working well enough that it is time to let the community check our work.

We'd like to thank the unofficial 64 bit projects for taking up the slack for us for so long so that we could take our time getting everything just right. Without those alternatives, we would have been pressured to get things out before they were really ready.

As always — have fun!

Pat and the Slackware crew"

Comment Re:Hmm, no... (Score 1) 776

by hollywoodb (#27664645) Attached to: Do We Need Running Shoes To Run?

It's been about ten years since I was a track & field athlete, but the cleats I wore for track running had a hard cleat plate under the ball of your foot and a soft, nearly weighless, heel.

I used to wear Adidas (fit my foot best), and the soles looked pretty much like this:
http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/962/75009410.JPG

I would imagine that somebody makes a non-cleat shoe with a simliar design.
GUI

Submission + - Xfce 4.6.0 Released

Submitted by hollywoodb
hollywoodb writes: After more than two years of development, Xfce 4.6.0 has just been released. Xfce 4.6 features a new configuration backend, a new settings manager, a brand new sound mixer, and several huge improvements to the session manager and the rest of Xfce's core components. The Xfce team has provided a tour of the new release, and the Xfce blog has links to some first impressions.

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