TJ_Phazerhacki writes "A new high tech weapon system demonstrated one of the prime concerns circling smarter and smarter methods of defense last week — an Oerlikon GDF-005 cannon went wildly out of control during live fire test exercises in South Africa, killing 9. Scarily enough, this is far from the first instance of a smart weapon 'turning' on its handlers. 'Electronics engineer and defence company CEO Richard Young says he can't believe the incident was purely a mechanical fault. He says his company, C2I2, in the mid 1990s, was involved in two air defence artillery upgrade programmes, dubbed Projects Catchy and Dart. During the shooting trials at Armscor's Alkantpan shooting range, "I personally saw a gun go out of control several times," Young says. "They made a temporary rig consisting of two steel poles on each side of the weapon, with a rope in between to keep the weapon from swinging. The weapon eventually knocked the pol[e]s down."' The biggest concern seems to be finding the glitches in the system instead of reconsidering automated arms altogether."

An anonymous reader writes "Sunday night in the UK, the BBC broadcast an alarmist Panorama news programme that suggested wireless networking might be damaging our health. Their evidence? Well, they admitted there wasn't any, but they made liberal use of the word 'radiation', along with scary graphics of pulsating wifi base stations. They rounded-up a handful of worried scientists, but ignored the majority of those who believe wifi is perfectly harmless. Some quotes from the BBC News website companion piece: 'The radiation Wi-Fi emits is similar to that from mobile phone masts ... children's skulls are thinner and still forming and tests have shown they absorb more radiation than adults'. What's the science here? Can skulls really 'absorb' EM radiation? The wifi signal is in the same part of the EM spectrum as cellphones but it's not 'similar' to mobile phone masts, is it? Isn't a phone mast several hundred/thousand times stronger? Wasn't safety considered when they drew up the 802.11 specs?"

Slithe writes "Last week at the National Conference for Media Reform, Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich (a long-shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination) stated that the Fairness Doctrine may be reinstated. Kucinich will be heading up a new House subcommittee that will focus on issues around the FCC. The Fairness Doctrine was an FCC regulation that required broadcast media to present controversial issues in an honest, equal, and balanced manner. The FCC repealed it in 1987 — Democrats at the time tried to forestall this move but were ultimately thwarted by a veto by President Ronald Reagan. Critics of the Fairness Doctrine have stated that it was only used to intimidate and silence political opposition. At the convention, Kucinich said, 'We know the media has become the servant of a very narrow corporate agenda. We are now in a position to move a progressive agenda to where it is visible.'" In the interest of fairness, here is a Republican, free-market perspective on the return of the Fairness Doctrine.

Ars Technica reports that the first HD DVD movie has made its way onto BitTorrent, showing that current DRM efforts to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted content are still futile and fighting an uphill battle. From the article: "The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB."

WeeBit asks: "I saw a news article on why you should buy Plasma instead of LCD TV's. It just sparked my interest. Flat panel TV's have the market now, and our analog TV's are on their way out. I am sure many will be thinking of purchasing their new flat panel within the next couple years. Have you given this any thought? Panasonic, has been pushing ads that sell the consumer on the plasma TV's over the LCD's. Is this a good argument, or is it just hype? Which do you prefer Plasma or LCD? Why?"

Earlier this month we ran an article linking Christopher Monckton's attempt to discredit global warming. The submitter asked plaintively, "Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?" George Monbiot has now done so. From the article: "This is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong... In keeping with most of the articles about climate change in [the Sunday Telegraph], it is a mixture of cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation, and pseudo-scientific gibberish. But it has the virtue of being incomprehensible to anyone who is not an atmospheric physicist... As for James Hansen, he did not tell the US Congress that temperatures would rise by 0.3C by the end of the past century. He presented three possible scenarios to the US Senate — high, medium, and low. Both the high and low scenarios, he explained, were unlikely to materialise. The middle one was 'the most plausible.' As it happens, the middle scenario was almost exactly right. He did not claim, under any scenario, that sea levels would rise by several feet by 2000." And on the political front, the only major ally for Pres. Bush's stand on global warming, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, is now willing to look at carbon trading.

Cam Turner writes "In late August, Slashdot reported that a lost Robert A. Heinlein novel was mere months away from being released. True enough, it was completed and released on October 18th, 2006 by Spider Robinson, himself a distinguished speculative fiction writer. On the back cover, John Varley is quoted as saying "Completing a book from notes by a dead author is almost always a mistake. But apparently Robert A. Heinlein isn't really dead. He was at the side of Spider Robinson as he wrote this book." I'd have to agree. This story is a valuable addition to any speculative fiction collection, even that of a purist Heinlein fan." Read the rest of Cam's review.

aitikin writes "Apple recently changed their license for the OS X kernel. According to semthex's post, Apple has reworded the APSL to prevent him and others from open sourcing the kernel hacking under the APSL: 'This file contains Original Code and/or Modifications of Original Code as defined in and that are subject to the Apple Public Source License Version 2.0 (the 'License'). You may not use this file except in compliance with the License. The rights granted to you under the License may not be used to create, or enable the creation or redistribution of, unlawful or unlicensed copies of an Apple operating system, or to circumvent, violate, or enable the circumvention or violation of, any terms of an Apple operating system software license agreement.'"

Roland Piquepaille writes "Major power outages like the ones which affected the New York state last month or Western Europe ten days ago are becoming more frequent — even if their causes were different. In some cases, the utility companies have to dispatch electricians all over the place to discover the cause of the power failure or simply to restore power. Engineers at the University of Buffalo think they have a better solution: deploy wireless 'nanotech' sensors to monitor the networks and to find the exact location of a failure. They also say that even if the technology is almost available, several years of research are necessary before such a solution can be used by electrical companies. Read more for additional details about this attractive solution."

gollum123 writes, "NASA's Swift satellite has seen a giant flare explode from a nearby star. Our sun also flares when twisted magnetic field lines in the solar atmosphere suddenly snap — but this was on a far larger scale, perhaps 100 million times as strong. The energy released by the explosion on II Pegasi was equivalent to about 50 quintillion atomic bombs. If the Sun were ever to produce such an outburst, it would almost certainly cause a mass extinction on Earth. II Pegasi is a binary system 135 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. Its two stars are close, only a few stellar radii apart; as a result, tidal forces cause both stars to spin quickly, rotating in lockstep once in seven days compared to the Sun's 28-day rotation period. Fast rotation is thought to be conducive to strong stellar flares."

ChelleChelle writes, "In an interview in ACM Queue, Douglas W. Jones and Peter G. Neumann attempt to answer the question: Does technology help or hinder election integrity?" From the article: "Work in this area is as politically loaded as work on evolution or stem cells. Merely claiming that research into election integrity is needed is seen by many politicians as challenging the legitimacy of their elections... One of the problems in public discussions of voting-system integrity is that the different participants tend to point to different threats. Election-system vendors and election officials generally focus on effective defense against outside attackers, usually characterized as hackers. Meanwhile, many public interest groups have focused on the possibility of election officials corrupting the results."

Neovanglist writes "CNN, FOX, and MSNBC are reporting that voting machines in three states (Ohio, Indiana, and Florida) have already been showing issues, both in the machines themselves and in the training of poll attendants, causing many districts to switch to paper ballots." From the article: "Voters put the Republican congressional majority and a multitude of new voting equipment to the test Tuesday in an election that defined the balance of power for the rest of George W. Bush's presidency. Both parties hustled to get their supporters out in high-stakes contests across the country, Democrats appealing one more time for change, and appearing confident the mood was on their side. Republicans conceded nothing as their vaunted get-out-the-vote machine swung into motion." If you're in the U.S., and you haven't voted already, go do it!

Thomas LaSusa writes "In this year's reader survey, Network Computing Magazine editors invited IT managers to vent about the tech challenges they face every day and how they wish vendors would address these problems. Read the unvarnished truth about what your peers are thinking." From the article: "This isn't the Top 10 worst vendor list, though. The largest tech companies tend to get the blame because they're the easy targets. Individual experiences with a particular company will vary widely; for every person who blasted Dell or Symantec for poor equipment or lousy service, someone else sang their praises. Instead, we find it more worthwhile to identify key areas where technology vendors as a whole aren't living up to their own boilerplate marketing. Some of the vendors contacted for their reactions to this story explained that today's enterprise networks are bewilderingly complex and run a vast number of OSs, applications and protocols. They all defined customer support as a top priority, but recognized that problems can't be solved by first-level support. Whether you consume or sell technology products, read on for an unvarnished look at what 755 IT decision-makers want — and don't want. You might just come away with new strategies for dealing with your vendors or serving your customers."

lewiz writes "The BBC is reporting that music purchased at MSN Music will not play on the new Zune music player." From the article: "The problem has arisen because tracks from the MSN Music site are compatible with the specifications of the Plays For Sure initiative. This was intended to re-assure consumers as it guaranteed that music bought from services backing it would work with players that supported it. MSN Music, Napster, AOL Music Now and Urge all backed Plays For Sure as did many players from hardware makers such as Archos, Creative, Dell and Iriver. In a statement a Microsoft spokesperson said: 'Since Zune is a separate offering that is not part of the Plays For Sure ecosystem, Zune content is not supported on Plays For Sure devices.'"

Blahbooboo3 writes "Men concerned about contraception may soon be able to use the male equivalent of the Pill, without the potential side-effects of a drug based on altering the balance of sex hormones. The drug, called Adjudin, works by disrupting the interaction that takes place in the testicles between immature sperm cells and the nurse cells responsible for nurturing sperm to maturity. The germ cells need to adhere to the nurse cells for sperm to properly develop, and the drug prevents this bond from forming. It looks like it will be a gel patch type of applicator."