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Teacher Suspended Over Blog About Students 634

English teacher Natalie Munroe is in a bit of hot water after she described the precious snowflakes in her class as: “Frightfully dim,” “Rat-like,” “Am concerned your kid is going to open fire on the school,” “I hate your kid,” and “Seems smarter than she actually is,” on her blog. The Central Bucks School District has suspended Natalie after parents complained to administrators. “It’s hard to know that you sat in her class for an hour and a half a day and for her to feel that way it is like, it is an awful feeling,” student Alli Woloshyn said.
Image

Vatican Bans IOS Confession App 323

An anonymous reader writes "Despite all the hype that a lowly priest had approved the new confessional app hitting the app store, the truth has now revealed itself. According to today's Daily Mail, a spokesman for the Vatican, Federico Lombardi said: 'It is essential to understand that the rites of penance require a personal dialogue between penitents and their confessor. It cannot be replaced by a computer application. I must stress to avoid all ambiguity, under no circumstance is it possible to confess by iPhone."
Iphone

iPhone Attack Reveals Passwords In Six Minutes 186

angry tapir writes "Researchers in Germany say they've been able to reveal passwords stored in a locked iPhone in just six minutes and they did it without cracking the phone's passcode. The attack, which requires possession of the phone, targets keychain, Apple's password management system. Passwords for networks and corporate information systems can be revealed if an iPhone or iPad is lost or stolen."
Book Reviews

Book Review: OSGi and Apache Felix 3.0 52

RickJWagner writes "OSGi is a Java framework that's designed to simplify application deployments in shared environments. It allows applications with differing dependencies to run side-by-side in the same container without any deployment time contortions. The end result is that your application that needs FooLib v2.2.2 can run right beside my application that needs FooLib v1.0, something not often possible in today's application servers." Keep reading for the rest of Rick's review.

Comment Why is everyone freaking out? (Score 1) 726

Um... all this new rule would seem to be saying is that teachers won't be able to be prosecuted for speaking out against a theory. I'm totally NOT in favor of someone trying to pump kids' heads full of the false-cause and illicit appeal to authority fallacy-based arguments so common to science's skeptics, but isn't this basically reinforcing the first amendment as it applies to educators? If the science is truly sound, it should be able to weather ANY attack from ANYONE, and oh by the way, isn't that the heart and soul (if you'll pardon the expression) of science, people questioning and challenging things? Or are teachers not allowed to deviate from whatever the book they're using to teach says at all... in which case, why do we need teachers at all? (A rhetorical question, before you all jump me...) Why not just use teachers to teach kids to read, and then hand them books? Teachers ARE needed, and they need to have the latitude to explain things and answer kids' questions. That's their job. This new rule sounds like it's just going to protect them from the consequences of doing THEIR JOBS. Wish Iowa had extended its judiciary the same courtesy, before it let the voters oust a group of them for DOING NOTHING MORE, OR LESS, THAN THEIR JOBS. Bravo NM. I may not agree with what your teachers are going to say, but I'm glad you're giving them room to breathe, and not gagging them and hanging a sword a-la Damocles over their heads.
Medicine

Research Finds That Electric Fields Help Neurons Fire 287

An anonymous reader writes "'[T]he brain is enveloped in countless overlapping electric fields, generated by the neural circuits of scores of communicating neurons. ... New work ... suggests that the fields do much more—and that they may, in fact, represent an additional form of neural communication. "In other words," says Anastassiou, the lead author of a paper about the work appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience (abstract), "while active neurons give rise to extracellular fields, the same fields feed back to the neurons and alter their behavior," even though the neurons are not physically connected—a phenomenon known as ephaptic (or field) coupling. "So far, neural communication has been thought to occur almost entirely via traffic involving synapses, the junctions where one neuron connects to the next one. Our work suggests an additional means of neural communication through the extracellular space independent of synapses."' If this work is replicated, it could reveal that the brain is even more complicated and sophisticated than we thought — and raise new concerns about whether our cellphones and other electronic gizmos are affecting brain activity and memory. This is truly paradigm-busting work."
Unix

UnXis Group To Acquire SCO 131

Evil-G writes "In an email on Friday, SCO informed its partners that UnXis Inc. was chosen as the successful bidder for SCO's Unix software business on 26 January. The slightly convoluted phrasing is probably due to SCO's current reorganization under Chapter 11. On 16 February, the transaction is to be submitted for approval to the bankruptcy court where SCO's case is pending."
United States

Sarah Palin Seeks To Trademark Her Name 329

Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has filed paperwork with the US Patent and Trademark Office in November to trademark her name. On her initial application, Palin listed usage of the trademark for a website featuring information about political issues; and educational and entertainment services, including motivational speaking in the fields of politics, culture, business and values. Legal experts say it is relatively unusual for politicians to formally trademark their names because they are generally not associated with commercially valuable products or services and that trademarking a name is more common for celebrities in the fields of entertainment, fashion or sports. 'Sarah is somebody who is now out of government and pursuing other activities, in particular, speaking engagements ... and it looks like she's looking to protect her name with those activities,' says attorney Claudia Ray."

Comment Misro$oft (Score 1) 596

When has M$ ***EVER*** admitted to doing anything wrong? They could have been (metaphorically) standing over a dead body, weapon in hand, covered in blood, had 50 credible witnesses, a half-dozen video cameras, and a high-speed holographic image recorder ALL trained on them, after screaming "I, Misro$oft, am going to kill you, [victim's name] with this [weapon] right now!" and when someone said "OMG, you KILLED him!" they'd say, "Nope. Wasn't us. That was someone else."

Comment Burning with... sun? (Score 1) 317

You can if you know the enemy must pass through a specific area, like when they sail into a harbor. Then you just aim at where they have to pass through... I don't care what Adam & Jamie said, the sun's putting out lotsa power, and it can be focused. The question is whether they, in ancient times, had smooth enough, clear (efficient) enough mirrors, or enough of them to overcome the lack of efficiency. If you had reflectors that only operated at 50% efficiency, on a bright sunny day, and you could aim them reliably at a point, and had say, a square mile of them, you could melt ROCK with it, I would think. I don't know the amount of power the sun puts out on the Earth in Greece, or what time of year... but I'm sure it could be figured out by trial and error, if you had to. OTOH... as soon as word got out, the enemy would simply attack only on cloudy days, or at night. HOWEVER, what if they could re-aim them at a big bon-fire? Maybe history has it wrong, and the point of the mirrors was to BLIND, not burn. In such a case, even a big bonfire could work. If the sailors on the enemy boats were unable to see, they could then blast the boats with flaming pitch from catapults, or whatever, or just hose them down with something flammable using high-pressure monitors, or maybe just flood the area through which they had to sail with oil, and set THAT on fire with the sun. Maybe they did that. OTO, OH, maybe they didn't use the sun at all. What if they used a bonfire, and the mirrors were for focusing not visible light, (although they doubtless used that for aiming) but instead was for directing IR? They didn't have to know what IR was to know fire was HOT!!!
Crime

Prison Cell Phone Smuggling Out of Control 428

Hugh Pickens writes writes "KCRA reports that the number of contraband cell phones discovered in California state prisons has exploded as prison guards, staff and vendors are cashing in on smuggled phones that can fetch between $200 and $800. Although the large majority of inmates are using the phones to stay in contact with loved ones, there have been documented cases of escape attempts, drug deals and conference calls coordinated via smuggled cell phones. 'The potential is there for the worst kind of activity,' says Folsom Prison Warden Rick Hill. Even Charles Manson has been caught with a cellphone smuggled to him. 'We know the problem is out of control,' says State Senator Alex Padilla, who has proposed making such smuggling illegal in hopes of stopping the continued rise of contraband cell phones in prison."
Cellphones

Playstation Phone "Zeus" Revealed 154

tekgoblin writes with this excerpt from Tekgoblin: "A video has surfaced on YouTube which shows the new Playstation Phone now called the Zeus. Rumors had surfaced that the phone would be announced on December 9th but with this leak the rumors have now been made fact. The phone is called the Sony Ericsson ZEUS (Playstation Phone). The demo video shows the phone running Android 2.3 codename Gingerbread. The video also shows the phone with the standard Playstation buttons along with a touch pad in the center. The controller for the phone is placed normally where a physical keyboard would be."
Security

Ransomware Making a Comeback 202

snydeq writes "Ransomware is back. After a hiatus of more than two years, a variant of the GpCode program has again been released, kidnapping victims' data and demanding $120 for its return, InfoWorld reports. 'Like the ransomware programs before it, GpCode encrypts a victim's files and then demands payment for the decryption key. The new version of GpCode — labeled GpCode.AX by security firm Kaspersky — comes with a bit more nastiness than previous attempts. The program overwrites files with the encrypted data, causing total loss of the original data, and uses stronger crypto algorithms — RSA-1024 and AES-256 — to scramble the information.'"

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