Although I'm not sure the corporate overlords will let me retroactively expense a movie ticket, I wanted to take a few minutes to write my review of Hellboy II. It's been a pretty good summer for movies already: but Wall-E and Iron Man were pretty much perfect A movies. I was a big fan of the original Hellboy comic, the first movie, and of Pan's Labyrinth- my fear was that it could only go downhill. And I was wrong. VERY wrong. Read on for my review which will be mostly spoiler free.

An anonymous reader writes "Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there's no need to rely on a single third party. What's more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop."

diegocgteleline.es writes "After three months, Linux 2.6.26 has been released. It adds support for read-only bind mounts, x86 PAT (Page Attribute Tables), PCI Express ASPM (Active State Power Management), ports of KVM to IA64, S390 and PPC, other KVM improvements including basic paravirtualization support, preliminary support of the future 802.11s wireless mesh standard, much improved webcam support thanks to a driver for UVC devices, a built-in memory tester, a kernel debugger, BDI statistics and parameters exposure in /sys/class/bdi, a new /proc/PID/mountinfo file for more accurate information about mounts, per-process securebits, device white-list for containers users, support for the OLPC, some new drivers and many small improvements. Here is the full list of changes."

In 2004 we discussed the Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon, when a study appeared characterizing their language as a "one, two, many" language. Now reader mu22le informs us of a new study of the Piraha pointing to the possibility that they use no number words at all. Instead they seem to use the word formerly thought to mean "two" to represent a quantity of 5 or 6, and the "one" word for anything from 1 to 4. The language has about 300 native speakers. "The study... offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, Gibson said."

jamie found the news that Tesla Motors is delivering roadsters in California. (We've been following developments on the Tesla front for a couple of years now.) According to a letter from the CEO, "9 production Roadsters have arrived in California, another 3 arrive this weekend, and they will keep arriving at the rate of 4 per week... In fact, currently there are 27 Roadsters in various stages of assembly." The early owners must be proud, but there could be complications.

The NYTimes reports from Washington on two separate actions on Friday that, between them, have halted Bush administration clean-air initiatives in their tracks. The current administration is no favorite of environmental groups, but these groups sided with the administration in a court case brought by the utility companies. On Friday an appeals court threw out the EPA's Clean Air Interstate Rule, established in 2005. The court ruled that the EPA had exceeded its authority when it established that rule, which set new requirements for major pollutants. According to the article, even the utilities were appalled to see the rule completely gutted; their objections had been narrower. Here is a podcast with the reporter (MP3) giving some background on the ruling. The second major blow to clean-air efforts came later in the day on Friday. Quoting: "...the EPA chief rejected any obligation to regulate heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide under existing law, saying that to do so would involve an 'unprecedented expansion' of the agency's authority that would have 'a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy,' touching 'every household in the land.'... In effect, Mr. Johnson was simultaneously publishing the policy analysis of his scientific and legal experts and repudiating its conclusions."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Japanese researchers have found a way to build long threads of DNA using miniaturized hooks and bobbins. In fact, they've demonstrated how to manipulate delicate DNA chains without breaking them. They've designed these laser-directed microdevices to pick up and manipulate individual molecules of DNA. The scientists have used optical tweezers to catch and move these microdevices, which could be used in the future to detect genetic disorders such as Down syndrome." Here's a link to the journal article.