eldavojohn writes "A rare glimpse from Shell Oil of a giant squid brings to light the strange relationships some deep sea marine biologists have with drilling companies. The video of the squid (Magnapinna) is very rare as this creature remains largely a mystery to science. While some are concerned of a conflict of interest, biologists and big oil sure make for strange bedfellows. The video is from 200 miles off the coast of Houston, TX and about 4,000 feet down." Looking at this creature gives me the willies, frankly.

Being in a relationship is not easy, more than half of all first marriages fail in this country. That statistic doesn't improve if you spend most of your time reading your favorite website and not tending to the needs of your family. Instead of asking me to help fix your relationship maybe you should try playing with your kids, talking to your wife, and not staring at a computer screen all day. You should realize that the help link doesn't provide help with your life. It's mostly for getting passwords and stuff. Below you'll find a collection of people that should have reached out to Dr. Phil and not Dr. Sam.

darthcamaro writes "Everyone asks who runs Linux — to which the normal answer is either Linus Torvalds or 'the community.' But (as Master Yoda once said) — There is another. His name is Jim Zemlin and he is the Executive Director of The Linux Foundation." From the interview linked above: "'I want to be a thousand percent confident that this organization will be around for the next 30 to 50 years because Linux isn't going away,' Zemlin said. 'It's everywhere, and there is no doubt that Linux will be an important platform in the future and we're only at the beginning on the embedded and mobile side. It will be my screwup if we don't have an organization that can help coordinate and grow the development of the Linux platform.'"

An anonymous reader tips a story about Denis O'Brien, a mobile phone entrepreneur whose goal is to spread cell phones throughout third-world countries. Quoting: "...O'Brien keeps pouring money into the world's poorest, most violent countries. His bet: Give phones to the masses and they'll fight your enemies for you. ...In Trinidad & Tobago, where the state mobile phone firm was dragging its feet on connecting Digicel calls to its own customers, O'Brien harangued government officials to speed things up, even phoning one Christmas night to complain. After the launch the state firm started dropping Digicel calls anyway, making its new competitor look bad. O'Brien took his case to the people, taking out ads in T&T's papers listing life 'Before Digicel' and 'After Digicel' and held a press conference. The state firm eventually relented. In its first four months Digicel bagged 600,000 customers and is narrowing the gap now with the state in market share."

ruphus13 writes "Now that Gates has 'retired' from Microsoft, ZDNet is speculating that Microsoft will become much more Open Source friendly. From the article, 'We already see quite a different approach to dealing with OSS and OSS companies from Sam Ramji's group [which is] doing a great job in establishing dialog,' said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange and a former marketing exec at SUSE Linux. 'With Gates' departure, the only mammoth remaining is Ballmer. With him away in a near future, Microsoft will definitely open up. They have to.'" Microsoft could become the world's largest open source company; they've certainly made some concessions to it lately.

MojoKid writes "Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title: 'Inventor of the Internet' in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the father of networking through data packets. And he's turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer file sharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices can sort out which file transfers on the tubes are P2P, and — you guessed it — can throttle them in favor of other, more 'high-priority' traffic."

An anonymous reader writes "A new study suggests RFID systems can cause 'potentially hazardous incidents in medical devices.' (Here is the JAMA study's abstract.) Among other things, electrical interference changed breathing machines' ventilation rates and caused syringe pumps to stop. Some hospitals have already begun using RFID tags to track a wide variety of medical devices, but the new finding suggests the systems may have unintended consequences."

whencanistop writes "Despite good job prospects, graduates think that a job in IT would be boring. Is this because of the fact that Bill Gates has made the whole industry look nerdy? Surely with so many (especially young) people being 'web first' with not just their buying habits, but now in terms of what they do in their spare time, we'd expect more of them to want to get a career in it?"

An anonymous reader writes "Most people are aware of the recent articles contending that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN might destroy the world. While most scientists have no such concerns, a recent preprint released to arxiv systematically dismantles the notion. The gist of the argument is this: Everything that will be created at the LHC is already being created by cosmic rays. If a black hole created by the LHC is interactive enough to destroy the world within the lifetime of the sun, similar black holes are already being created by cosmic rays. Such black holes would be stopped by dense cosmic objects (neutron stars and white dwarfs). A black hole stopped in one of these objects would eventually absorb it. We see sufficiently old neutron stars in the sky, thus any black hole that could be created at the LHC, even if it is stable, would have no effect on the earth on any meaningful timescale."

Khalid Baheyeldin writes in with a CBC interview with the CEO of Sandvine, Dave Caputo (bio here). Sandvine is the Waterloo, Ontario-based company that provides the technology that Comcast and other ISPs use to overrule Net neutrality by, for example, injecting RST packets to disrupt Bittorrent traffic. Caputo says, among other things, that Internet monitoring is a necessity. Some of the comments to the interview are more tech-savvy than the interviewee comes across.

Assar Bruno Boveri writes "Swedish lawmakers came down in favour of a fiercely debated surveillance bill in a vote at the Riksdag on Wednesday evening. Despite some cosmetic changes, Sweden's proposed surveillance law is still a monster, writes Pär Ström from the independent New Welfare Foundation." The Swedish newspaper DN (in Swedish; translations welcome) compares the implications of the proposed law with activities carried out by East Germany's Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (STASI).

superglaze writes in to note that according to Nokia's software chief, its plans for open source include getting developers to accept things like DRM, commercial IP rights, and SIM locks. "Jaaksi admitted that concepts like these 'go against the open-source philosophy,' but said they were necessary components of the current mobile industry. 'Why do we need closed vehicles? We do,' he said. 'Some of these things harm the industry but they're here [as things stand]. These are touchy, emotional issues, but this dialogue is very much needed. As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too.'"

Stony Stevenson writes "Microsoft has filed 21 lawsuits in US Federal courts as part of an effort to stop those who continually pirate its software. The suits span 14 states and target people and businesses that have allegedly sold pirated copies of Microsoft software. Eight of the suits target companies that Microsoft refers to as 'repeat offender software pirates.' The eight firms had already been sued by Microsoft for selling counterfeit software."

litui writes "Michael Geist assesses the problems with new copyright legislation presented today. In short, it looks like unless it's heavily contested, Canadians are in for a worse piece of law than the DMCA." CBC News' story quotes one critic, Scott Brison, who warns that enforcing the anti-circumvention clauses of this legislation would turn Canada into a police state — which, considering the pervasive eavesdropping it would take to make sure that people aren't enjoying their rights to fair use (or "fair dealing") of hardware or media, seems like a fair prediction.

SirLurksAlot writes "Ars Technica reports that Microsoft has recently applied for a patent for a technology which would attempt to enforce manners in the use of cell phones, digital cameras, DVRs and other digital devices. According to the article, the technology could be used to bring common social conventions such as 'No flash photography' and 'No talking out loud' to these devices by disabling features or disabling the device entirely. The article also points out that the technology could be implemented in situations involving sensitive equipment, such as in airplanes or hospitals. The patent application itself is also an interesting read, as it describes a number of possible uses for the technology, including 'in particular zones to limit the speed and/or acceleration of vehicles, to require the use of lights, to verify an indication of insurance coverage and/or current registration, or the like.' While this technology could certainly be of interest to any number of organizations one has to wonder how the individuals who own devices which obey so-called 'Digital Manners Policies' would feel about it."