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Submission + - Iranian cyber army strikes again -- hitting VoA (techworld.com.au)

angry tapir writes: "The pro-Iran hacktivist group that defaced the Baidu and Twitter Web sites a year ago has hit another target: the U.S. Government's Voice of America news site. Voice of America was knocked offline temporarily after hackers were able to change the organization's DNS (Domain Name System) settings, redirecting Web traffic hitting Voice of America sites to another site controlled by the hackers."
Cellphones

Submission + - Cell Phone Use Tied to Changes in Brain Activity (nytimes.com)

Takichi writes: The New York Times is reporting on research linking cell phone use and increased metabolism, with high statistical significance, in the areas of the brain close to the antenna. The study was led by Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The impact, good or bad, of the increased stimulation is speculative, but this research shows there is a direct relationship between cell phone signals and the brain that warrants further study.

Submission + - New Video Game Controlled by Kissing (time.com)

unassimilatible writes: Artist Hye Yeon Nam has put her video game where her mouth is -" literally — with the creation of a new bowling game that's controlled only by passionate (and awkward) French kissing. The Kiss Controller, as it's so called, has two components: a headset that functions as a sensor receiver and a magnet that provides the sensor input, Time reports. Could this be the first example of technology that Slashdotters will be unable to use, as they likely won't be able to get a controller?

Comment Interesting piece out of Canada (Score 1) 360

I find it interesting that the Yellow Pages aren't mentioned, which may as well have an even lower saturation rate. I really enjoyed this post on GOOD yesterday.

Video: Canadians Return Hundreds of Phone Books to Yellow Pages Office
http://www.good.is/post/video-canadians-return-hundreds-of-phone-books-to-yellow-pages-office/

Comment Great book (Score 1) 312

I met this guy at HOPE, and he was actually really interesting. I wish he would up some demos of some of his recipes online. He can make jello shots that you can nail to a wall!! What?!?! The book is actually quite interesting.

Comment Re:Sensitivity (Score 1) 47

No. You have some facts that are correct, individually, but you are drawing nonsensical conclusions. True, individual muscle fibers are either contracted or relaxed--on or off as you say, but surface electromyography records from far more than a single muscle fiber. So at the population level, measuring a graded response is not only possible, but typical. Furthermore, the signal recorded is roughly linear and proportional to the number of fibers and motor units recruited (let's ignore the differences between type I and type II skeletal muscle fibers for the moment). Your aside about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system appears completely off topic.

Comment Re:Daytime bulgrary? (Score 1) 337

It sounds a bit silly, but it makes sense when you know that burglary, as traditionally defined by common law, occurs at nighttime by definition. So felony daytime burglary was something that the state legislature specifically created, probably to increase the penalties of breaking and entering during the daytime.

Comment Re:"functional programming languages can beat C" (Score 1) 502

(*) Caveat: It must be a small challenge involving a relatively simple task. I don't have a lot of time to waste on this.

Nice caveat. Let me rephrase that another way for you: it is difficult to implement complicated functionality in C. Indeed, this is one reason to use higher level languages. You can achieve more in less time.

Comment Re:Please help with the port (Score 1) 239

Well, Chromium doesn't even compile and run on linux yet beyond some unit-tests passing (AFAIK). By the time it's actually a viable browser in linux, these issues will have worked themselves out. My point was not that every single user should be able to fix this for themselves but that this is a very solvable problem, and one that will be receiving a lot of attention in the coming months.

Google has done us all a great service by releasing the code-- many parts of Chromium will soon find use in other projects. Google-url, for example, looks pretty handy. It looks like Chromium uses a modular design with a lot libraries (both from google and third-party), so even if it is, in toto, an enormous codebase, it shouldn't be too hard to isolate any undesirable functionality. In conclusion: the sky is not falling. ;-)

Google

"Google Satellite" To Be Launched This Week 280

Lord Satri writes "Well, almost. Google signed an exclusivity deal with GeoEye regarding GeoEye-1, the most advanced high-resolution, civil, remote-sensing satellite to date. This must be annoying for other high-resolution, remote-sensing data users since Google already has an exclusivity deal in place with DigitalGlobe, the other major civil satellite imagery provider. From the CNet article: 'Under the deal, Google is the exclusive online mapping site that may use the imagery... in its Google Maps and Google Earth product. And as a little icing on the cake, Google's logo is on the side of the rocket set to launch the 4,300-pound satellite in six days from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. GeoEye-1 will orbit 423 miles above Earth, but it will be able to gather imagery with details the size of 41 centimeters... Google, though, is permitted to use data only with a resolution of 50 cm because of the terms of GeoEye's license with the US government.'"
GNU is Not Unix

Ask Harald Welte, "VIA's open source representative" 56

In this recent Slashdot post kernel hacker Harald Welte was characterized as "VIA's open source representative," but that is just one of many irons he has in the fire, as a glance at his Wikipedia bio will show. You can obviously ask Harald about many interesting things besides VIA's open source strategy — and before you ask about VIA, you ought to read the last few entries on his blog, at least one of which mentions VIA questions he can't answer. But VIA aside, there's plenty to ask Harald about. For example, he won an award from the FSF earlier this year for his work on gpl-violations.org. In any case, Harald is a powerful force for GNU/Linux and Free Software, and we appreciate him taking time out of his undoubtedly hectic schedule to answer your questions. (Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.)

Comment Anyone read CERT? (Score 2, Insightful) 602

I'm really surprised I haven't seen many comments relating to this.

http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA04-261A. ht ml

Two days ago, CERT accounced that there were multiple vulnerabilities in Mozilla products. The only unaffected version of Firefox is PR1.0. It is doubtless that this caused a number of downloads of existing installs who would have chosen to not run the Preview Release.

Them hitting their 1mil marker isn't neccesarily a good thing.

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