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Comment Gravitational Waves (Score 1) 86

by Duckz (#59447434) Attached to: Hungarian Scientists May Have Found a Fifth Force of Nature
Gravitational Waves entangle the soul with the Universe. Seems like they may have discovered the force that binds information entanglement. Neat. I and a few others discovered this phenomenon, but I'm uneducated so it hasn't got much traction. The result of observation of many coincidences results in peak weird or just weird to those that don't experience synchronicity. the Dictator (of free speech)
Science

Testing for Many Designer Drugs At Once 281

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the collision-induced-disassociation dept.
LilaG writes "Drug tests spot banned substances based on their chemical structures, but a new breed of narcotics is designed to evade such tests. These synthetic marijuana drugs, found in 'herbal incense,' are mere chemical tweaks of each other, allowing them to escape detection each time researchers develop a new test for one of the compounds. Now chemists have developed a method that can screen for multiple designer drugs at once, without knowing their structures. The test may help law enforcement crack down on the substances. The researchers used a technique called 'mass defect filtering,' which can detect related compounds all at once. That's because related compounds have almost equal numbers to the right of the decimal point in their molecular masses. The researchers tested their technique on 32 herbal products ... They found that every product contained one or more synthetic cannabinoid; all told, they identified nine different compounds in them — two illegal ones and seven that are not regulated. The original paper appears (behind a paywall) in Analytical Chemistry." From the article: "The research is timely, too. 'Many drugs of abuse in the Olympics are designer drugs,' he [Gary Siuzdak] says, in the steroid family. Grabenauer plans to extend her method to other designer drug families."

Comment Re:USA becomes UK in... (Score 1) 906

by Duckz (#26587329) Attached to: Obama Sides With Bush In Spy Case
He's right on for gun control. http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/urban_policy/ Go down to "crime and law enforcement"

Address Gun Violence in Cities: Obama and Biden would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent.
The Internet

Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu 215

Posted by kdawson from the all-eggs-one-basket dept.
David Gerard writes "Wikimedia, the organization that runs Wikipedia and associated sites, has moved its server infrastructure entirely to Ubuntu 8.04 from a hodge-podge of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and various Fedora versions. 400 servers were involved and the project has been going on for 2 years. (There's also a small amount of OpenSolaris on the backend. All open source!)"
Privacy

House Votes For Telco Immunity; Obama Will Support? 436

Posted by kdawson from the now-we-will-never-know dept.
We discussed telecom immunity yesterday ahead of the House vote. It passed by 293 votes to 129. Only one Republican voted against the bill; Democrats were evenly split. It now goes to the Senate. Reader Verteiron points out that Glenn Greenwald has up a post titled "Statement of Barack Obama supporting Hoyer FISA bill." It says that Obama will try to get the immunity provision removed, but failing that will vote for the overhauled wiretapping bill anyway. I couldn't find this on Obama's official site. Anyone seen a position from the McCain camp?
Handhelds

RIM Releases Reason for Blackberry Outage 106

Posted by Zonk from the isn't-testing-a-requirement dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to BBC News, RIM has announced that the cause of this week's network failure for the Blackberry wireless e-mail device was an insufficiently tested software upgrade. Blackberry said in a statement that the failure was trigged by 'the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine' designed to increase the system's e-mail holding space. The network disruption comes as RIM faces a formal probe by the US financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, over its stock options."
Science

Scientists Attempt To Calm Volcano 244

Posted by samzenpus from the you-can-plug-anything dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Since May 2006, a mud volcano in Indonesia has spewed out up to 126,000 cubic metres of mud a day, flooding an area of more than 4 square kilometres. This unprecedented natural disaster has become so bad that geophysicists now plan to enact an untested scheme to try and slow the flow: dropping concrete balls into the volcano."

OSX To Feature Portable User Accounts? 245

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the home-you-can-take-with-you dept.
eldavojohn writes "A new patent filed by Apple is causing speculation that OSX is soon to receive a new feature. From the article: '[the patent states] that the user account may be stored alongside general data storage or "other functionality". All of which seems to suggest that at some time soon we may be able to load our user accounts onto an iPod, hard drive or USB keydrive and take them wherever we go.'"

Wiretapping Lawsuit Against AT&T Dismissed 597

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hollow-sound-of-justice dept.
BalanceOfJudgement writes "A major victory by the federal government was won today when a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit against AT&T for providing phone records to the federal government. From the article: 'The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities'" Not to be confused with the EFF case, this case was filed by the ACLU on behalf of author Studs Terkel and other activists who argued that their constitutional rights had been violated by the actions of AT&T and the NSA.

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