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Earth

40 Million Year Old Primate Fossils Found In Asia 91

sosaited writes "It has been widely believed that our ancestors originated out of Africa, but a paper published in Nature by Carnegie Museum of Natural History scientists puts this in doubt. The paper is based on the fossils of four primate species found in Asia which are 40 million years old, during which period Africa was thought to not have these species. The diversity and timing of the new anthropoids raises two scenarios. Anthropoids might simply have emerged in Africa much earlier than thought, and gone undiscovered by modern paleontologists. Or they could have crossed over from Asia, where evidence suggests that anthropoids lived 55 million years ago, flourishing and diversifying in the wide-open ecological niches of an anthropoid-free Africa."
Image

Which Way to the Nudity? 3

If you're the kind of person who drives across the country a lot and needs to know exactly how far away you are from some naked breasts, tatas, melons, hooters, jugs, funbags, lady lumps, knockers, boobies, gazangas, mamma-jammas, coconuts or Honk Hogans at any given time. The NUDAR GPS system might just be the perfect thing for you. Boobs.
Censorship

Submission + - MediaDefender and the Streisand Effect (arstechnica.com)

Foldarn writes: It looks like MediaDefender, in an effort to quell the explosion of negative publicity, has instead done the opposite (also known as the Streisand Effect) and made it even more widespread. The folks over at Ars Technica have an article about a few popular BitTorrent sites MegaNova and IsoHunt that are being demanded to remove the ever incriminating emails. What's more, Ars is reporting that it appears that MediaDefender, in response to IsoHunt's decline to remove, may be behind a massive denial of service attack against IsoHunt.
Communications

Submission + - FBI's Unknown Eavesdropping Network (wired.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Building off the design mandates of CALEA, the FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act, Wired News reports. The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.
Software

Submission + - India decides to vote "No" for OOXML. (indiatimes.com)

Indian writes: India on Thursday gave Microsoft a thumbs-down in the war of standards for office documents. In a tense meeting at Delhi's Manak Bhawan, the 21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a 'no' against Microsoft's Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2.
Censorship

Submission + - Nuclear Info Kept Secret From Public and Congress

Thermite writes: On March 6, 2006 an accident occured at Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin, Tennessee. According to reports almost 9 gallons of highly enriched uranium in solution spilled and almost went into a chain reaction. Before the accident in 2004 the NRC and The Office of Naval Reactors had changed the terms of Nuclear Fuels license so that any correspondence with Nuclear Fuel Services would be marked "official use only". From the article: 'While reviewing the commission's public Web page in 2004, the Department of Energy's Office of Naval Reactors found what it considered protected information about Nuclear Fuel Service's work for the Navy.' The result was that the public and Congress were both left in the dark for 13 months regarding this and other issues at the facility.
Biotech

Journal Journal: So Long, Baiji 175

After 20 million years, Baiji (Yangtze River Dolphin) are now officially extinct http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,292932,00.html.

"It's a relic species, more than 20 million years old, that persisted through the most amazing kinds of changes in the planet," said marine biologist Barbara Taylor at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service. "It's been here longer than the Andes Mountains have been on Earth."

Feed Techdirt: Was Burning The House Down Was Part Of The Free Installation Offer? (techdirt.com)

A Verizon installer apparently started a fire at a home in a Boston suburb earlier this week, when he was drilling on the outside of the house and hit an electrical main. Perhaps this story wouldn't be so notable if this sort of thing didn't happen with some frequency -- as it's not the first time this sort of thing has happened. Meanwhile, over at Broadband Reports, one of their users says a shoddy installation by Time Warner resulted in a chunk of their fence burning down. All things considered, though, perhaps these folks should just feel lucky that the techs didn't blow up their house and kill them.
Windows

Submission + - High-quality HD content can't be played by Vista (hdtvinfo.eu) 2

DaMan1970 writes: "Content protection features in Windows Vista from Microsoft are preventing customers from playing high-quality HD audio/video & harming system performance.

Vista requires premium content like HD movies to be degraded in quality when it is sent to high-quality outputs, like DVI. Users will see status codes that say "graphics OPM resolution too high"

http://www.hdtvinfo.eu/news/hd-video-formats/high- quality-hd-content-cant-be-played-by-windows-vista .html

There are ways to bypass the Windows Vista protection by encoding the movies using alternative codecs like X264, or DiVX, which are in fact more effective sometimes then Windows own WMV codec. These codecs are quite common on HD video Bittorrent sites, or Newsgroups."

Comment Why?? (Score 1) 451

I really don't understand why Microsoft would want to release this cut-down version of XP. Do they really think that an OS that limits you to running 3 programs at the same time is going to be a viable alternative to Linux, or any other OS for that matter?

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