Here's the details as far as I can tell: - The author of this blog wrote a post on 3/23 about some website which claims to sell "Petite Lap Giraffes" - Among other things he pointed out: - The domain was registered by "Grey Global Group", which is a marketing firm in New York - One image in particular on that site was clearly photoshopped. - He guesses it's somehow a secret DirecTV marketing campaign - On March 28th, some newspaper published a story about the same website, including all three of the above mentioned details. - He commented, asking that they credit him - They edited the story to argue that they did original research - His comment is "awaiting moderation" From my perspective, it seems like he has a pretty strong case, although technically there isn't enough evidence to assume they plagiarized. It's possible they could have just happened to make all of his observations (as the edited version of the article points out, the domain lookup aspect is trivial. That coupled with the other two things is pretty suspicious though...)

I kind of want to see the story develop further. A few questions I'd like to see answered. - The summary uses the pronoun "himself", but TFA says it was a girl. What was the gender of this child and does "CmdrTaco" know more than he or she is letting on? - How does anyone actually know the motivation of the kid? Perhaps she played with a controller that looked like a gun, and then mistook a real gun for it, but we don't know that's actually what went through her mind. And there's still the question of why she pointed this gun at herself. Also, apparently the mom was three feet away when it happened. Did she not notice the kid playing with the gun? - Forget leaving a loaded gun out, what kind of a parent lets their 3 year old play a shooting game with a realistic gun??? This level of negligence is staggering to me. I hope the police aren't just investigating manslaughter, but also a possible homicide. I hate to accuse parents who have just lost a child of murder, but all we have to go on from what I see is their testimony of what happened, and everything just seems a bit too convenient. Either both parents are criminally incompetent, or this was less of an accident than we are led to believe, based on what we know now.

Let's build a big science lab there and fill it with people!

Glancing at a few of the websites shows the the focus is clearly on dispelling myths about hiring international students. This is the most biased summary I've ever read on slashdot. As a US citizen in a US university, I have no problem with pages such as that being up to help my friends who are international students get jobs.

The article says that Wolves aren't as smart and theorizes that living alongside humans has made dogs outperform wolves. It could also be that living alongside humans make dogs better at intelligence tests performed by humans. Perhaps we should get dolphins to design some intelligence tests to compare wolves and dogs and see who performs better on those.

The "not explore" gene is NOT anti-Darwinian. The species on our planet seem to have taken a path that benefits exploration. But look at plants. They seem to be doing pretty well, and I've never seen a plant go exploring. Exploring can be a dangerous business. Perhaps the dominant species evolved to seek safety in the familiar. We only have one planet one which Darwinian evolution is taking place to observe. How can we claim to understand how it would work on other planets?

Every article I see about extraterrestrial life seems to assume that the ETs are like us in some way or another. A desire to colonize the universe, or a desire to contact other life. Maybe they just want to be left alone in their solar system. Maybe they have evolved an "exploring is dangerous" gene and sat on their own planet for millions of years without every looking at the sky and wondering if there was anything else there. We have no idea what aliens are like because we've never seen one, and speculating about them without any evidence is totally unscientific. Please show me a repeatable experiment in accordance with the scientific method to demonstrate anything whatsoever about alien life, then maybe I'll start reading these articles.

Does anyone know if they have a deal with a hardware manufacturer? Which companies' laptops will they sell?

Well, perhaps this is just personal preference, but while you can use pretty much any computer for anything, you might have more success with other computers. Just as you could browse the web by downloading pages with telnet, you could do whatever you want on your netbook, but if you're doing anything where performance becomes an issue, it makes more sense to me to just get a better computer and run XP or Linux on it.

I've ran XP for years and never had a security issue. Standard practices such as not opening attachments from people you don't know and keeping everything updated do wonderfully. Yes, not everyone follows them, but maybe after a few security problems, they'll learn.

I thought the point of netbooks was to have a computer for accessing the internet and that's about it. Last I checked, XP could access the internet. I don't see the point in putting Windows 7 on your netbook at all.

If you ban guns, then only criminals have guns. If you ban jailbreaking, the people who would be likely to hack a cell tower would jailbreak their iPhones anyways. I suspect that it's a rare class of person who would be deterred by a law against jailbreaking and not a law against hacking a cell tower. As others have mentioned, the solution here is to secure the tower, because people are going to attempt to hack it, with or without jailbroken iPhones.

Wasn't there an article posted a while back about trying to get windows viruses to infect a linux box with wine, and it didn't work too well?

No, if in order to get to that point, we have to do what those who oppose stem cell research would call killing humans. If we can take steps closer to this point without using embryonic stem cells, such as this experiment, then lets continue the science and the debate. But you can't just assume that we can do research on embryonic stem cells, since embryonic stem cell research is precisely what is being debated.

The summary seems to imply that the tree is still evolving new defenses against the moa. (ie that the barbed leaves evolved after 1500 AD). But the article just says that an evolutionary defense that was there in the days of the moa is still there. The surprising thing would be if it wasn't.