German Killers Sue Wikipedia To Remove Their Names 859
Jason Levine writes "Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber killed a German actor in 1990. Now that they are out of prison, German law states that they can't be referred to by name in relation to the killings. Therefore, they have sued to get Wikipedia to remove their names from the Wikipedia article about the killings. The German edition of Wikipedia has already complied, but the English edition is citing US freedom of speech and a lack of presence in Germany as reasons why they don't need to remove the name. In a bit of irony, their lawyer e-mailed the NY Times: 'In the spirit of this discussion, I trust that you will not mention my clients' names in your article.'"
Submission + - Bullet-proof sheets of carbon nanotubes (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader writes: FTA: "Lashmore's company, Nanocomp Technologies, is the first in the world to make sheets of carbon nanotubes — microscopic tubes stronger than steel but lighter than plastic.(...) In April, Lashmore had a mechanical multicaliber gun shoot bullets at different versions of his sheet, each less than a fifth of an inch thick, at a speed of 1,400 feet per second. Four sheets were breached, but three showed no damage."
Other possible uses: Shark suit? Bullet-proof Faraday cage?
Other possible uses: Shark suit? Bullet-proof Faraday cage?
Need a Favor? Talk To My Right Ear 288
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that scientists have found that if you want to get someone to do something, ask them in their right ear. Known as the 'right ear advantage,' scientists believe it is because information received through the right ear is processed by the left hand side of the brain which is more logical and better at deciphering verbal information than the right side of the brain. 'Talk into the right ear you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain,' say researchers. The team, led by Dr. Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University of Chieti in central Italy, observed the behavior of hundreds of people in three nightclubs across the city where they intentionally addressed 176 people in either their right or their left ear when asking for a cigarette. They obtained significantly more cigarettes when they made their request in a person's right ear compared with their left. 'These results seem to be consistent with the hypothesized specialization of right and left hemispheres,' say researchers. 'We can also see this tendency when people use the phone, most will naturally hold it to their right ear.'"
Wind Could Provide 100% of World Energy Needs 867
Damien1972 sends in a report on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which finds that wind power could provide for the entire world's current and future energy needs. "To estimate the earth's capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding 'areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,' according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters. Using [these] criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world's energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world's current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs."
Comment For more information (Score 3, Informative) 114
Submission + - Judge in Pirate Bay trial biased 1
maglo writes: "The judge who handed down the harsh sentence to the four accused in the The Pirate Bay trial was biased, writes Sveriges Radio (Sweden Public Radio): sr.se (swedish). Google translation. The judge is member of two copyright lobby organizations, something he shares with several of the prosecutor attorneys (Monique Wadsted, Henrik Pontén and Peter Danowsky). The organizations in question are Svenska Föreningen för Upphovsrätt (SFU) and Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (SFIR)."
Submission + - Will the real MySQL please stand up? (livejournal.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Patrick Galbraith, an X core MySQL Server Engineer raises the question in "What is the official branch of MySQL?".. With Monty Widenius having left Sun and forked off MySQL for MariaDB, and Brian Aker running the Drizzle fork inside of Sun, where is the official MySQL tree? Sun may own the trademark, but it looks like there is doubt that they are still the maintainers of the actual codebase after their Billion dollar acquisition of the code a year ago.
Smugmug's Don MacAskhill, who is the keynote at the upcoming MySQL Conference, has commented that he is now using the Percona version of fork of MySQL, and is no longer making use of the Sun version.
Submission + - Richard Stallman Warns About Non-Free Web Apps (gnu.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Richard Stallman has published an article which warns about the "Javascript trap" posed by non-free AJAX-based applications. The article calls for a mechanism which would enable browsers to identify freely-licensed Javascript applications and run modified version thereof. "It is possible to release a Javascript program as free software"--Stallman writes.--"But even if the program's source is available, there is no easy way to run your modified version instead of the original ... The effect is comparable to tivoization, although not quite so hard to overcome."
Comment The end of the human race (Score 1) 852
There's one thing I don't get.
The "end of the human race" was predicted many times along the way:
Head Six: I'm an angel of god sent here to protect you. To guide you, to love you.
Baltar: To what end?
Head Six: To the end of the human race.
And in the finale she tells him his role is over, when the future of the human race looks brighter than ever.
What gives?
The "end of the human race" was predicted many times along the way:
Head Six: I'm an angel of god sent here to protect you. To guide you, to love you.
Baltar: To what end?
Head Six: To the end of the human race.
And in the finale she tells him his role is over, when the future of the human race looks brighter than ever.
What gives?
Comment Lyx supports subversion! (Score 2) 328
Yeah, it does.
Packing Algorithms May Save the Planet 195
An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist reports on how competitions to devise better packing algorithms could help cut the environmental impact of deliveries and shipping. A new record setter at packing differently-sized discs into the smallest space without overlapping them has potential to be applied to real world 3D problems, researchers claim." Ok the title might be a little ridiculous, but the ridiculous packaging used to ship a few tiny objects by some shippers is pretty shameful.
Comment Slashdot editors, learn to read, please! (Score 1) 493
From TFA:
"The beta Firefox 3.1 will still have a few bugs to work out, but Mozilla officials have promised that eight of the security flaws found in the current browser, six of which have been rated critical, will be fixed in the updated version. The most serious of these vulnerabilities are already being repaired, and can be downloaded as patches from the Mozilla website."
Only six critical flaws, not eight.
Anyway, I couldn't find any information about those flaws. Could you?
"The beta Firefox 3.1 will still have a few bugs to work out, but Mozilla officials have promised that eight of the security flaws found in the current browser, six of which have been rated critical, will be fixed in the updated version. The most serious of these vulnerabilities are already being repaired, and can be downloaded as patches from the Mozilla website."
Only six critical flaws, not eight.
Anyway, I couldn't find any information about those flaws. Could you?
Steve Jobs Takes Leave of Absence From Apple 429
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Network World: "A number of sites are reporting that Apple's CEO Steve Jobs is taking a leave of absence till June at least. Speculation over Jobs' possibly failing health has run rampant in the past few weeks. Prior to the recent MacWorld show, Jobs said he had a hormone deficiency that had caused him to dramatically lose weight. In a memo today Jobs told workers his health issues are more complex than he thought." Reader Bastian227 adds a link to this letter from Steve Jobs on Apple's website, which also says that Tim Cook will be responsible for daily operations, though Jobs will remain involved with major strategic decisions.
What Carriers Don't Want You To Know About Texting 570
An anonymous reader writes "Randall Stross has just published a sobering article in The New York Times about how the four major US wireless carriers don't want anyone to know the actual cost structure of text message services to avoid public outrage over the doubling of a-la-carte per-message fees over the last three years. The truth is that text messages are 'stowaways' inside the control channel — bandwidth that is there whether it is used for texting or not — and 160 bytes per message is a tiny amount of data to store-and-forward over tower-to-tower landlines. In essence it costs carriers practically nothing to transmit even trillions of text messages. When text usage goes up, the carriers don't even have to install new infrastructure as long as it is proportional to voice usage. This makes me dream of the day when there is real competition in the wireless industry, not this gang-of-four oligopoly."
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