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Science

Submission + - Sun's 'quiet period' explained (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Arvisp
Arvisp writes: Solar physicists may have discovered why the Sun recently experienced a prolonged period of weak activity.
The most recent so-called "solar minimum" occurred in December 2008.
Its drawn-out nature extended the total length of the last solar cycle — the repeating cycle of the Sun's activity — to 12.6 years, making it the longest in almost 200 years. The new research suggests that the longer-than-expected period of weak activity may have been linked to changes in the way a hot soup of charged particles called plasma circulated in the Sun.
Australia

Australia Gets Its First Female Prime Minister 419

Posted by samzenpus from the sheila-in-chief dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Julia Gillard has been elected unopposed to the Labor leadership, seizing power in a bloodless Parliament House coup after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd decided not to contest this morning's leadership ballot. Ms. Gillard will now be sworn in as Australia's first female prime minister. Emerging from this morning's meeting, she said she felt 'very honored' and said she would be making a statement shortly. Treasurer Wayne Swan now steps up as deputy prime minister. He was also elected unopposed."
Classic Games (Games)

OpenTTD 1.0.0 Released 107

Posted by Soulskill from the and-so-soon dept.
Gmer writes "Eming.com reports that OpenTTD, the open source clone of the Microprose game Transport Tycoon Deluxe, has reached a milestone. OpenTTD 1.0.0 has been released 6 years after work started on the first version, with the help of hundreds of contributors and thousands of testers/players. Over 30 language translations are considered complete, and OpenTTD is available for *BSD, Linux, Solaris and Windows. OpenTTD is a business simulation game in which the player is in control of a transport company and can compete against rival companies to make as much profit as possible by transporting passengers and various goods by road, rail, sea or air."
Programming

Graph-View of Collaborative Development At GitHub 14

Posted by timothy from the better-art-than-most-coffee-shops dept.
VindictivePantz writes "In an interesting graphical view on collaborative development, FlowingData writes: 'GitHub is a large community where coders can collaborate on software development projects. People check code in and out, make edits, etc. Franck Cuny maps this community (with Gephi), based on information in thousands of user profiles.'"
Power

Submission + - Researchers Advance Heat Reclaimation Technologies

Submitted by Downchuck
Downchuck writes: Researchers at Ohio State University claim to have synthesized a new material capable of delivering electricity directly from heat, at an efficiency far better than existing thermoelectric materials. Scott at ArsTechnica has an interesting take: 'Merge this with the new MIT solar dish and you're in business!'
Data Storage

Submission + - Are There Any Smart E-mail Retention Policies?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: In an age of litigation and costly discovery obligations, many organizations are embracing policies which call for the forced purging of e-mail in an attempt to limit the organization's exposure to legal risk. I work for a large organization which is about to begin destroying all e-mail older than 180 days. Normally, I would just duck the house-cleaning by archiving my own e-mail to hard-drive or a network folder, but we are a Microsoft shop and the Exchange e-mail server is configured to deny all attempts to copy data to an off-line personal folder (.PST file). The organization's policy unhelpfully recommends that 'really important' e-mails be saved as Word documents. Is anybody doing this right? What do Slashdot readers suggest for a large company that needs to balance legal risks against the daily information and communication needs of its staff?
Biotech

Submission + - Plastic-Decomposing Bacteria Discovered By Teen (wired.com)

Submitted by
ganelo
ganelo writes: "Original article by the Record, summary by Wired.

Plastic takes thousands of years to decompose — but 16-year-old science fair contestant Daniel Burd made it happen in just three months. The Record reports that Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial family Pseudomonas, and the other from the family Sphingomonas.
"
The Courts

Submission + - First Guilty Verdict in Criminal Copyright Case (wired.com)

Submitted by
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "A Brooklyn man has been found guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement by a federal jury in Virginia. He now faces up five years in prison, a quarter million dollar fine, and three years of parole, not to mention the 'full restitution' he has to make to the RIAA. The charges against him stem from his role as 'Dextro', the administrator of one of the Apocalypse Production Crew's file servers; APC being one of the release groups that specialize in pre-release music. While he's the 15th member of APC to be charged under the US DOJ's Operation Fastlink, he's the first to be convicted. He will be sentenced on August 8th. For those wondering when infringement became a criminal matter, you can thank the NET Act, which was signed into law in 1997 by Bill Clinton."
The Courts

Submission + - $4M Judgment For Linking to Infringing Files (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "The MPAA won judgments worth $4M against two sites that merely link to infringing content. But they're not arguing that it's an infringement of their distribution right like the RIAA has been with their 'making available' argument. Instead, they got the sites for 'contributory copyright infringement', just like RIAA v. LimeWire. To translate all that Legalese to English, search engines that primarily index copyright-infringing material and the people who run them may not be safe in the USA. And that applies even if the sites in question do not host any infringing materials, participate in, or encourage the infringement done by their users. And even honoring DMCA notices in order to take advantage of the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions hasn't prevented the **AA from suing."
Announcements

Submission + - Gains In The World Of Plastic Lasers (imperial.ac.uk)

Submitted by esocid
esocid writes: Conventional electrically-powered laser diodes used in everyday consumer goods like DVD players are currently based on inorganic semiconductor materials such as gallium arsenide, gallium nitride and related alloys. Despite over a decade of worldwide research, plastic laser diodes remain the only major device type not yet demonstrated because there aren't any plastics that could sustain a large enough current whilst also supporting the efficient light emission needed to produce a laser beam. The plastic studied by researchers at the Imperial College London is related to PFO (polydioctylfluorene), a blue-light emitting material, and by making subtle changes in the plastic's chemical structure they produced a material that transports charges 200 times better than before, without compromising its ability to efficiently emit light.
The most beneficial aspect of plastic laser diodes is their potential ability to cover more of the light spectrum than their counterparts, from near ultraviolet to the near infrared.
Security

Submission + - Inside a Modern Malware Distribution System 1

Submitted by
Scrabblous
Scrabblous writes: "This eweek.com article provides a peek at the backend code and control server associated with Pushdo, a complex Trojan downloader that meticulously tracks its victims. From the article: For starters, the Pushdo controller uses the GeoIP geolocation database in conjunction with whitelists and blacklists of country codes to allow the malware distributor to limit one of the malware loads from infecting users located in a particular country. It also goes a step further, logging the victim's primary hard drive serial number, tracking whether the file system is NTFS, the number of times the victim system has launched a Pushdo variant, and the Windows OS version that executed the malware."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Chuck Norris sues, says his tears no cancer cure (reuters.com) 2

Submitted by Google85
Google85 writes: Chuck Norris sued publisher Penguin on Friday over a book he claims unfairly exploits his famous name, based on a satirical Internet list of "mythical facts" about him.
The book capitalizes on "mythical facts" that have been circulating on the Internet since 2005 that poke fun at Norris' tough-guy image and super-human abilities, the suit said.
Math

Submission + - MIT Student disproves Stephen Wolfram

Submitted by Richard Pritches
Richard Pritches writes: MIT errata expert, Evangelos Georgiadis, attains a milestone by actually disproving 44 conjectures set by Dr Wolfram (owner of the Makers of Mathematica and owner of the new kind of cult ANKS). Paper was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Cellular Automata and has also appeared free of charge at Prof Edwin Clark's Collection of Wolfram's NKS Reviews at the following link http://www.math.usf.edu/~eclark/jca_georgiadis.pdf I believe that this is a nice Xmas present for the ANKOS spirit. Richard

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