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Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed 1352

Posted by samzenpus from the fair-balanced-and-simple dept.
A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!
Social Networks

Buried By The Brigade At Digg 624

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton writes in with an essay on a subject we've dealt with internally at Slashdot for years: user abuses of social news... this time at Digg. He starts "Alternet uncovers evidence of a 'bury brigade' coordinating efforts to 'bury' left-leaning stories on Digg. Digg had previously announced that the 'bury' button will be removed from the next version of their site, to prevent these types of abuses, but that won't fix the real underlying issue — you can show mathematically that artificially promoting stories is just as harmful in the long run. Here's a simple fix that would address the real problem."
Government

GOP Senators Move To Block FCC On Net Neutrality 709

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who-regulates-the-regulators dept.
suraj.sun writes "Seven Republican senators have announced a plan to curb the Obama administration's push to impose controversial Net neutrality regulations on the Internet." "The FCC's rush to take over the Internet is just the latest example of the need for fundamental reform to protect consumers," says Sen. Jim DeMint, who I'm sure truly only has the consumer's needs at heart — since his campaign contributions list AT&T in his top five donating organizations.
Books

DRM and the Destruction of the Book 419

Posted by samzenpus from the reading-is-fundamental dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "EFF reports that Cory Doctorow spoke to a crowd of about a hundred librarians, educators, publishers, authors, and students at the National Reading Summit on How to Destroy the Book and said that 'anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself.' Doctorow says that for centuries, copyright has acknowledged that sacred connection between readers and their books and that when you own a book 'it’s yours to give away, yours to keep, yours to license or to borrow, to inherit or to be included in your safe for your children' and that 'the most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned.'"

Submission + - Obama Backs New Launcher and Bigger NASA Budget (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by coop0030
coop0030 writes: President Barack Obama will ask Congress next year to fund a new heavy-lift launcher to take humans to the Moon, asteroids, and the moons of Mars, ScienceInsider has learned. The president chose the new direction for the U.S. human space flight program Wednesday at a White House meeting with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, according to officials familiar with the discussion. NASA would receive an additional $1 billion in 2011 both to get the new launcher on track and to bolster the agency’s fleet of robotic Earth-monitoring spacecraft.
Programming

Submission + - Ten years of .NET - did Microsoft deliver? (theregister.co.uk) 2

Submitted by cyclocommuter
cyclocommuter writes: Interesting snippet from this article from The Register: "If the goal of .NET was to see off Java, it was at least partially successful. Java did not die, but enterprise Java became mired in complexity, making .NET an easy sell as a more productive alternative. C# has steadily grown in popularity, and is now the first choice for most Windows development. ASP.NET has been a popular business web framework. The common language runtime has proved robust and flexible."

The article also continues: "Job trend figures here show steadily increasing demand for C#, which is now mentioned in around 32 per cent of UK IT programming vacancies, ahead of Java at 26 per cent."
Security

Submission + - SPAM: Adobe Warns of Reader, Acrobat Attack

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Monday afternoon, Adobe 'received reports of a vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.2 and earlier versions being exploited in the wild,' the company said in a post to the company's Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) blog. According to malware tracking group Shadowserver, the vulnerability is due to a bug in the way Reader processes JavaScript code. Several 'tests have confirmed this is a 0-day vulnerability affecting several versions of Adobe Acrobat [Reader] to include the most recent versions of 8.x and 9.x. We have not tested on 7.x, but it may also be vulnerable,' Shadowserver said in a post on its Web site. The group recommends that concerned users disable JavaScript within Adobe's software as a work-around for this problem. (This can be done by un-checking the "Enable Acrobat JavaScript" in the Edit -> Preferences -> JavaScript window). 'This is legit and is very bad,' Shadowserver added.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - The perfect way to slice a pizza (newscientist.com)

Submitted by iamapizza
iamapizza writes: New Scientist reports on the quest of two math boffins for the perfect way to slice a pizza. It's an interesting and in-depth article;

"The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza — and if not, who will get more?"

This is useful, of course, if you're familiar with the concept of "sharing" a pizza.
Space

Submission + - Mars Express captures Phobos and Deimos (esa.int) 1

Submitted by westtxfun
westtxfun writes: The Mars Express Orbiter captured a very cool movie of Phobos and Deimos on Nov 5. Besides the "wow factor", the images will be used to refine the moons' orbits. The orbiter has also captured high resolution images of Phobos back in July.

"The images were acquired with the Super Resolution Channel (SRC) of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The camera took 130 images of the moons on 5 November at 9:14 CET in a span of 1.5 minutes at intervals of 1s, speeding up to 0.5-s intervals toward the end. The image resolution is 110 m/pixel for Phobos and 240 m/pixel for Deimos — Deimos was more than twice as far from the camera. "

Submission + - Science gifts for kids 3

Submitted by beernutmark
beernutmark writes: I have two science loving kids ages 7 and 9. My yougest knew Niel deGrass Tyson's name at age 4. With the holidays coming up (mine is Saturnalia you insensitive clod) I am looking to get them some quality science related tools. Two items on the list are a quality Microscope (National Optical) and/or a real rockhounding kit.

I am looking for any other gift suggestions for this year or future years (or even for younger kids for other readers) and hints on good sources.

A quirky thing about buying science gifts for kids is that most of the sources seem to be intelligent-design/biblical flood/anti-evolution home schooling sites. You can't really tell for some until you look through their "science" book lists.
Patents

Submission + - DVD-by-Mail Services Cleared in Patent Troll Case (homemediamagazine.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Media Queue holds the rights to patent 7389243 which is simply a patent on the notification system (like e-mail) to users of changes in the status of their DVD rental queues. Of course, they filed suit in a random place against Netflix, Blockbuster and everyone else sending e-mail updates about DVD-by-Mail services. It was later moved to California and was dismissed last week. In related news on the ailing patent system, the USPTO unveiled a new plan to reduce backlog in its system by offering pending patents special examiner status if the holder abandons another co-pending unexamined application.

Submission + - Wireless WPA Cracking As A Service

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Moxie Marlinspike, a security researcher well known for his SSL/TLS attacks, has published a WPA cracking service. The WPA Cracker website states: "WPA-PSK networks are vulnerable to dictionary attacks, but running a respectable-sized dictionary over a WPA network handshake can take days or weeks. WPA Cracker gives you access to a 400CPU cluster that will run your network capture against a 135 million word dictionary created specifically for WPA passwords. While this job would take over 5 days on a contemporary dual-core PC, on our cluster it takes an average of 20 minutes."

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