The BBC is reporting on a serendipitous discovery that swallowtails living in Africa of the Princeps nireus species use biological structures to signal each other with an uncanny resemblance to the recently (2001) invented high-emission LEDs. From the article: "Unlike the diodes, the butterfly's system clearly doesn't have semiconductor in it and it doesn't produce its own radiative energy," Dr Vukusic told the BBC News website "That makes it doubly efficient in a way.... But the way light is extracted from the butterfly's system is more than an analogy - it's all but identical in design to the LED." The article also includes a nice short description of what makes a high-emission LED tick with a comparison to the biological structures.

According to this article at Information Week, Microsoft has decided to fight zombie-launched spam in their own way. In conjunction with the FTC and consumer rights groups, Microsoft set up a clean computer and then infected it. They monitored the 'zombie' over the course of 20 days - "In those 20 days, this one computer received 5 million connection requests from spammers, and sent 18 million spam messages". This whole operation has lead to the (partial) identification of 13 different spamming groups, some of which reside in the US and may be prosecuted under the CAN-SPAM act. All this leaves me thinking that, for the recipients of those 18 million spam messages, they really could blame M'soft for all their spam! Is becoming part of the problem an appropriate approach to becoming part of the solution?

Lately I've run into several sigs that made me stifle a giggle at work. I'd love to see some sort of way to moderate sigs, or have a sig contest, or something.

I've decided to embark on a new source of amusement, by creating a drop box email JUST FOR SLASHDOT :) I've pushed it out there with no obfuscation, in an experiment to see just how much spam I get hit with. I'll post updates periodically, if anyone is interested.

And of course, now you can email me at slashmorg@gmail.com, if you so chose.

I keep forgetting that /. is mostly full of guys. Guys who don't seem to believe that women read/post here. I mean, every time I identify myself as female, 1) someone flips out and 2) at least one person friends me. Huh.

Apparently /. is entering the blogosphere. Yippydoodee, I liked it better when the only user-contributed text was moronic comments :)