thelordx writes "I've got a much younger brother who I'd like to teach how to program. When I was younger, you'd often start off with something like BASIC or Apple BASIC, maybe move on to Pascal, and eventually get to C and Java. Is something like Pascal still a dominant teaching language? I'd love to get low-level with him, and I firmly believe that C is the best language to eventually learn, but I'm not sure how to get him there. Can anyone recommend a language I can start to teach him that is simple enough to learn quickly, but powerful enough to do interesting things and lead him down a path towards C/C++?"

After three years of research, including examining 503 pieces of fluff from his own belly button, Georg Steinhauser has discovered a type of body hair that traps stray pieces of lint and draws them into the navel. Dr Steinhauser's observations showed that "small pieces of fluff first form in the hair and then end up in the navel at the end of the day." Chemical analysis revealed the pieces of fluff were not just made up of cotton from clothing. Wrapped up in the lint were also flecks of dead skin, fat, sweat and dust. Unfortunately, further study has failed to yield a hair or fiber that would give Dr. Steinhauser the last three years of his life back.

passionfingers writes "My business users regularly have to tweak large (>32MB text) data files manually. Overlords charged with verifying the aforementioned changes have requested that the little people be provided with a new file editor that will track changes made to a file (as a word processor does). I have scouted around online for such an animal, but to no avail — even commercial offerings like UltraEdit32 don't offer such a feature. Likewise on the OSS side of the fence, where I expected a Notepad++ plugin or the like, it appears that the requirements to a) open a file containing a large volume of text data and b) track changes to the data, are mutually exclusive. Does anyone in the Slashdot community already have such a beast in their menagerie? Perhaps there is there a commercial offering I've missed, or could someone possibly point me to their favorite (stable) OSS project that might measure up?"

Rudd-O writes "Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" How long before the magic 16-hex-pairs number shows up in a comment here?

mjeppsen writes, "Filmmaking experiment A Swarm Of Angels aims to create and distribute the first collaborative film released under a Creative Commons license. The project is using community participation and funding to make a film that would traditionally cost $3–4 million for a mere $1.75 million. The entire filmmaking process will be collaborative, from Wiki-based script creation to community voting on creative and marketing decisions. Is this just a scheme by the filmmakers to get funding for a pet project, or is it Hollywood's worst nightmare? More importantly, can 'open-source films' develop into a sustainable financial model?"

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia, it's now possible to detect skin cancer cells present in blood samples by listening to the sound of melanoma cells. The scientists have used a method named photoacoustic detection, which uses a laser to make cells vibrate and ultrasound techniques to pick the sound of cancerous cells. This technique is so precise that it's possible to identify the spread of cancer even if there are only ten melanoma cells in a blood sample. Still, large clinical tests must be done before this method can be widely used."

VSquared56 writes, "Novell announced a shift in the default filesystem from ReiserFS to ext3 for users of its SuSE Enterprise Linux. This news comes shortly after Hans Reiser's arrest, though Novell says the decision was being considered long before. Though Novell will continue supporting ReiserFS 3, it claims ext3 is more stable and will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4. What implications will this have for SuSE users, and ReiserFS's future as a whole?"

BuzzSkyline writes, "The heaviest element yet, Element 118, has been created in Dubna, Russia by a collaboration of researchers from Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US. They created the new element by fusing together Californium (element 98) and Calcium atoms. The achievement comes five years after the scandal-plagued retraction of an earlier claim, which was based on fabricated data, that three atoms of element 118 had been produced at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The achievement was reported on October 9 in the journal Physical Review C (subscription needed to read more than the abstract)."

Several readers wrote to alert us to the inclusion of real-time features in the mainline Linux kernel starting with version 2.6.18. (Linus Torvalds had announced 2.6.18 on September 19.) Basic real-time support is now mainline. This will ease the job of developers of embedded Linux applications, who for years have been maintaining real-time patch sets outside of the mainline kernel. The announcement was made by TimeSys Corp., a provider of developer services. Much of the work was done by Thomas Gleixner at TimeSys and Ingo Molnar at Red Hat.

Donkey Konga writes "In the latest round of the ongoing debate on the effect of video games and TV on academics, a new study in Pediatrics says that any amount of gaming is too much if if happens on a school night. '"On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did," said study coauthor Dr. Sharif. Weekends were another matter, with gaming and TV watching habits showing little or no effect on academic performance, as long as the kids spent no more than four hours per day in front of the console or TV." Of course we all know that correlation does not equal causation, but the study is sure to get many parents thinking about how much time in front of the Xbox and idiot box is too much."

Lauren Weinstein writes to tell us about CIFIP, the California Initiative For Internet Privacy — his attempt to get search engines off the dime on questions such as how long they retain search data. The initiative aims to explore "cooperative and/or legislative approaches to dealing with search engine and other Internet privacy issues, including a possible California initiative for the 2008 ballot." There is a public discussion list.

An anonymous reader writes "18-year-old David Banh of Annandale, VA recently graduated from the University of Virginia with a double major in Physics and Mathematics, and an education paid for almost entirely by scholarships. What's truly amazing is that he did it in one year, bringing in 72 Advanced Placement credits, then taking 23 credits his fall semester, 37 credits his spring semester and 3 credits in the summer. His brief undergraduate career didn't leave him much time to explore college, so he's now working on his master's degree. He says he may eventually pursue law school as a part-time student in hopes of becoming a patent lawyer."

Ars Technica has a good wrap of Napster hanging out a "For Sale or Partner" sign. With half a million subscribers (down from the previous quarter) and $100M in annual revenue, the company is still bleeding cash. El Reg pinpoints the trouble: "The subscription crowd – and Apple via iTunes – must fight over a few pennies per song in profit. More from the Vulture: "You have to wonder if Napster's customer base is really worth the effort for a company such as Microsoft or even Real. The Napster brand has all the gravitas of a Che Guevara t-shirt."