alexj33 writes "Will humans ever really go to Mars? Let's face it, the obstacles are quite daunting. Not only are there numerous, difficult, technical issues to overcome, but the political will and perseverance of any one nation to undertake such an arduous task is huge. However, one former NASA engineer believes a human mission to Mars is quite possible, and such an event would unify the world as never before. But Jim McLane's proposal includes a couple of major caveats: the trip to Mars should be one-way, and have a crew of only one person."

An anonymous reader writes "French scientists have developed a new rubber that can heal itself after being cut or broken. If two broken ends of the material are pushed together, and left for an hour, they join to become just as stretchy as before. There is even a video of the supposed creation in action. 'Regular rubber gets its strength from the fact that long chains of polymer molecules are coupled, or "crosslinked," in three different ways: through covalent, ionic, and hydrogen bonding between molecules. Of these three bond types, only the hydrogen bonds can be remade once a material is fractured, although normally there are not enough hydrogen bonds for the rubber to re-couple in this way. The solution devised by Leibler and colleagues is to simply get rid of the ionic and covalent bonds. They developed a transparent, yellowy-brown rubber in which crosslinking is performed only by hydrogen bonds.'"

mrneutron2003 writes to tell us that StupidFilter, a new Open Source project started by Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr, plans to provide an intellectual prophylactic for memetically transmitted diseases. "Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point. It's time to fight back."

os2man writes "Qmail is one of the most widely used MTAs on the Net and has a solid reputation for its level of security. In 'Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0' (PDF), Daniel J. Bernstein, reviews the history and security-relevant architecture of qmail; articulates partitioning standards that qmail fails to meet; analyzes the engineering that has allowed qmail to survive this failure; and draws various conclusions regarding the future of secure programming. A good read for anyone involved in secure development."

FixYourThinking writes "After nearly one and a half years of harassment from a relentless attorney, it seems that quietly a blogger in South Carolina has won a monumental ruling in favor of bloggers. In a summary judgement requested by the Defendant, Philip Smith was able to obtain a special sanction after the Plaintiff attorney put a 'notice of lien' (called lis pendens) on Smith's residence. The judge also reprimanded the Plaintiff attorney for abusive deposition and court procedure. The case set forth the following; 'It's not the format; it's the content and intention that make text journalism / reporting.'"

Last week hundreds of you posted questions for Slashdot's CmdrTaco, AKA Rob Malda. Today we present his answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions. CT: You can continue to sign up for 10 year anniversary parties but we're already working on shipping shirts so you won't be able to get a care package... but you can still try to run for the big grand prize by just taking videos of pictures or just doing something cool at your parties to prove that we should have been there.

rokkaku writes "When the gadfly blogger Claremont Insider went searching for information about employee compensation on the city of Claremont web site, they never expected to find scans of pay stubs for all the employees. Nor did they expect the city attorney to demand that they remove copies of those pay stubs from their web site. They found it especially odd since, according to California law, the compensation of public employees is public information."

a_nonamiss writes "A Georgia couple, apparently tired of people speeding past their house, installed a camera and radar gun on their property. After it was installed, they caught a police office going 17MPH over the posted limit. They brought this to the attention of the local police department, and are now being forced to appear in front of a judge to answer to charges of stalking."

AlanS2002 writes "FreeBSD 6.2 has been released to mirrors. The release notes for your specific platform are also available. FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon64, and EM64T), ARM, IA-64, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development."

thesolo asks: "Despite past efforts of the 1970s and 1980s, the United States remains one of only three countries (others are Liberia and Myanmar) that does not use the metric system. Staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy. Attempts to get Americans using the Celsius scale, or putting up speed limits in kilometers per hour have been squashed dead. Not only that, but some Americans actually see metrication efforts as an assault on 'our way' of measuring. I personally deal with European scientists on a daily basis, and find our lack of common measurement to be extremely frustrating. Are we so entrenched with imperial units that we cannot get our fellow citizens to simply learn something new? What are those of us who wish to finally see America catch up to the rest of the world supposed to do? Are there any organizations that we may back, or any pro-metric legislators who we can support?"

kpw10 writes "Dr. Jeff Masters from Wunderground has a great summary of this year's rather abnormal weather (his blog is the best source on the net for in-depth weather analysis). The post discusses some of the cyclical climate forces at work this year and compares this year's record temperatures to records from the past. There are some interesting differences, particularly in the extent of the northern hemisphere seeing record highs this year." From the article: "December's weather in the Northeast U.S. may have been a case of the weather dice coming up thirteen — weather not seen on the planet since before the Ice Age began, 118,000 years ago. The weather dice will start rolling an increasing number of thirteens in coming years, and an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summertime by 2040 is a very real possibility..." Here is the The National Climatic Data Center's report announcing the entry of 2006 into the record books.

digihome writes "CRN.com chooses the ten best new products of 2006, including the best development tools, server, notebook and storage device. Some of the choices may surprise you ... such as their choice for operating system of the year." From the article: "With Windows Vista, Microsoft has refreshed the user desktop experience. While debate rages over whether the five-year wait was worth it, the truth is Vista is pretty much the only game in town. One may question whether Vista should be bestowed with Product of the Year recognition in the operating system category. But the product unquestionably brings new features and capabilities to solution providers that in turn promise new revenue generation dialogues with end users."

An anonymous reader writes "A pair of security researchers has picked January 2007 as the Month of Apple Bugs, a project in which each passing day will feature a previously undocumented security hole in Apple's OS X operating system or in Apple applications that run on top of it. According to a post over at The Washington Post's Security Fix blog, the project is being put together by researchers Kevin Finisterre and the guy who ran November's Month of Kernel Bugs project." From the post: "It should be interesting to see whether Apple does anything to try and scuttle this pending project. In November, a researcher who focuses most of his attention on bugs in database giant Oracle's software announced his intention to launch a "Week of Oracle Database Bugs" project during the first week of December. The researcher abruptly canceled the project shortly after the initial announcement, without offering any explanation."