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Police Secretly Planting GPS Devices On Cars 609

Posted by samzenpus from the spiderman-does-it-all-the-time dept.
bfwebster writes "The Washington Post has a long investigative article on how more and more police departments are secretly planting GPS tracking devices on the cars of people they are investigating — usually without a warrant. After-the-fact court challenges on this technique have largely upheld such use of a GPS device, though the Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that a warrant is required."
The Military

Stolen US Military Equipment Being Sold On eBay 173

Posted by Soulskill from the i'm-only-borrowing-your-hum-vee dept.
I Buy These From eBay points out a Washington Post story about how stolen military equipment has ended up on eBay and Craigslist. Undercover investigators reported being able to purchase defense-related items with "no questions asked." Let's hope the sellers don't get their hands on any retired rebellious robots. From the Post: "Among the items purchased include two components from F-14 fighter jets, bought from separate buyers on eBay. The warplanes, now retired by the military, could easily be purchased and transferred to the Iranian military, which is seeking its components, the report said. Investigators couldn't determine where the sellers had obtained the F-14 parts. They also purchased from a Craigslist seller a used Nuclear Biological Chemical protective suit, other protective accessories as well as an unused chemical-biological canister, which contained the mask filter used to guard against warfare agents. The property was likely stolen from the Defense Department, the report said."
It's funny. Laugh.

Nuclear Scanning Catches a Radioactive Cat On I-5 594

Posted by kdawson from the paging-dr.-schrodinger-line-4-please dept.
Jeff recommends Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat's story from a community meeting with Northwest border control agents. Seems their monitoring for dirty bombs from the median of Interstate 5 caught a car transporting a radioactive cat. "It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear 'dirty bombs.' They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident. 'Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour... Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]. The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot.' Did he find a nuke? 'Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier.'"

Comment I have an idea (Score 1) 686

by Sterling2p (#22565356) Attached to: Tetris Creator Claims FOSS Destroys the Market
I look at open source as the market correcting itself. Pressure had been building for years for bugs out there to be able to be fixed. Now, if you want to try to fix a bug in a product that you use, if it is open source, you can. Are you tired of being charged an arm and a leg for regular software that everyone needs or being forced to pay for upgrades that don't really have any new features that you can use (and be legal)? Well, the companies didn't do a good job of it in the past according to a lot of users, so open source is the answer that they are using. It may be always be a little behind proprietary software, but at least you won't fall all the way back into the stone ages if you don't want to be forced to pay for the latest thing.

One advantage of open source for programmers in my view is that they don't have to deal with the pressure and deadlines of releasing a few of these products as their lively hood. Tired of that manager who tries to squeeze you for productivity at the cost of clean code? Do you feel good about the quality of software your company produces at the end of the day? Without open source I think that companies would have been trying to reduce programmer salaries anyway, and you would be forced to give away your good code almost for free.

Just because we have open source, it does not mean that all programmers will be out of a job. People still have ideas for software every day and not everyone has the ability to build that software. I do think we need to make sure that open source developers continue to get paid.
Idle

The Pizza Tracker 2

Posted by samzenpus
If you are one of those people who just has to know the status of your pizza, accurate to within 40 seconds, Domino's has a solution for you. Pizza Tracker. Yes, Pizza Tracker is the cure for all of your slice anxiety. Chris McGlothlin, technology chief at Domino's actually says, "It's an emotional roller coaster when you order. Customers wonder: Did they get my order? Are they taking care of me? Will it show up?"
Games

McDonald's UK CEO Blames Video Games for Childhood Obesity 321

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the fat-and-mean dept.
BoingBoing is reporting that Steve Eaterbrook, McDonald's UK CEO, says that video games are leading the charge in obesity. He does have the decency to at least admit fatty foods are a part of the problem, but points the finger at interactive games for keeping kids indoors and not out burning off energy. "According to The Times, McDonalds UK is 'on the brink of its best year for two decades'. The firm has enjoyed six per cent like-for-like sales growth in the last year. More than 88 million visits were made to McDonald's restaurants last month, up 10 million on the previous year." Don't forget, we have known for ages that video games make us fat and mean.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Low-energy bulbs full of mercury 1

Journal by Marcion

So the Beeb reports that Low-energy light-bulbs are full of toxic mercury dust that can get lodged into my brain (as if it wasn't full enough of chemicals as it is).

Typical, I recently changed all the bulbs in my house from cheap normal bulbs to these expensive ones, saving the planet and all that. So what now? Go back to the old ones? LCDs? Candles? Sit in the dark?
Space

500-fold Increase in Data Flow from SETI Telescope 346

Posted by Soulskill from the et-in-crystal-clear-high-defintion dept.
coondoggie brings us an article from Networkworld about a flood of new data for the SETI@home project. We discussed something similar a few months ago when a new telescope array went live. The vast amount of processing power required to handle the new data is prompting the SETI@home team to make a plea for more volunteers. Quoting the press release: "What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now let the telescope record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources."
Biotech

A Giant Step in Cloning 239

Posted by samzenpus from the a-barrel-full-of-clones dept.
mernil writes "The Independent reports: "A technical breakthrough has enabled scientists to create for the first time dozens of cloned embryos from adult monkeys, raising the prospect of the same procedure being used to make cloned human embryos."
Software

OpenDocument Foundation Closes 177

Posted by kdawson from the to-bed-without-your-supper dept.
Munchkinguy writes "First, they dropped support for their namesake OpenDocument Format and declared a switch to the W3C's 'Compound Document Format.' Then, W3C's Chris Lilley clarified that CDF 'was not created to be, and isn't suitable for use as, an office format.' Now, the Foundation has mysteriously closed up shop, leaving the following message: 'The OpenDocument Foundation, Inc. is closed. We sincerely wish our friends and associates in the OpenDocument Community all the best and much success going forward. Good-bye and good luck.'"
Businesses

System Admin's Unit of Production? 556

Posted by kdawson from the counting-lines-of-shell-script dept.
RailGunSally writes "I am a (strictly technical) member of a large *nix systems admin team at a Fortune 150. Our new IT Management Overlord is a hardcore bean-counter from hell. We in the trenches have been tasked with providing 'metrics' on absolutely everything from system utilization to paper clip recycling. Of course, measuring productivity is right up there at the top of the list. We're stumped as to a definition of the basic unit of productivity for a *nix admin. There is a school of thought in our group that holds that if the PHBs are simple enough to want to operate purely from pie charts and spreadsheets, then we should just graph some output from /dev/random and have done with it. I personally love the idea, but I feel the need for due diligence, so I put the question to the Slashdot community: How does one reasonably quantify admin productivity?"
Google

Google News Allowing Story Participants To Comment 100

Posted by kdawson from the starting-at-web-1.0 dept.
Jamie found this analysis of Google News's foray into community commentary. They are starting it off by only allowing people involved with the story to comment — and participants must first be authenticated by email. The article rounds up other bloggers' views on the game-changing nature, and the possible dangers to Google, of this new feature. Here is a sample of comments to a Google News story.
Printer

Is Your Printer Ripping You Off? 362

Posted by CowboyNeal from the or-only-its-maker dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Are original inkjet cartridges really worth the high cost? Do third party refill inks do as good a job? This article looks at printers from Epson, HP, Canon and Lexmark, with a combination of original inks and the top selling third-party options, using a whole host of different papers. A panel of printer users judged the output in a blind test — the printer manufacturers may not be happy with the results!"

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