wiredog writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Microsoft is developing a program that classifies news stories according to whether liberal or conservative bloggers are linking to them and also measures the 'emotional intensity' based on the frequency of keywords in the blog posts." If you would like to jump right to the tool you can check out "Blews" on the Microsoft site.

Dr. Eggman writes "The Associated Press brings us news of a flood in the Grand Canyon. This flood is no ordinary flood, however. This is a man-made flood released from the Glen Canyon Dam. The Dam is releasing four to five times its normal amount of water over the course of a three day artificial flood. Scientists are conducting this massive experiment in order to document and better understand the complex relation of the aquatic habitats, natural floods, and the sediment they bring. Floods no longer bring sediment to these parts of the canyon as the Dam keeps it locked up and released in small, drawn out intervals. The Dam prevents the floods from bringing the sediments in to replenish the sandbars and allow the river to maintain its warm, murky habitat rather than a cool, clear one. It is thought that this cool clear environment brought on by the dam is responsible for helping to extinguish 4 species of fish and push 2 more towards the brink. It is hoped that this terra-reformation experiment will positively impact the habitat and fish populations, warranting further artificial floods at an increased rate of every one to two years rather than the time span between the two previous floods and this one of 8 and 4 years."

Game Set Watch is showcasing an interesting homebrew game called Trism from semi-pro developer Demiforce. The new game is designed to take advantage of the accelerometer in the iPhone and iPod Touch. While making use of this feature isn't new, this game certainly is pretty high on the simplicity and neat-factor scales. In addition to details about the game the site is also featuring a short interview with the developer.

An anonymous reader writes "Spam filtering solutions are a necessary evil in today's e-mail climate. There are many different tools and systems available for the filtering and removal of spam e-mail. Tools like SpamAssassin and more detailed agents, such as Amavis use a variety of different methods to identify and capture spam. An IBM article shows how you can extend SpamAssassin and Amavis, providing additional filtering facilities to lower the amount of spam hitting e-mail boxes."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "According to a report on p2pnet.net, the RIAA's latest anti-college round of "early settlement" letters targets 7 out of 8 Ivy League schools, but continues to give Harvard University a wide berth. This is perhaps the most astonishing display of cowardice exhibited to date by the multinational cartel of SONY BMG, Warner Bros. Records, EMI, and Vivendi/Universal (the "Big Four" record companies, which are rapidly becoming less "big"). The lesson to be drawn by other colleges and universities: "All bullies are cowards. Appeasement of bullies doesn't work. Standing up to bullies and fighting back has a much higher success rate.""

coondoggie writes "South Korea officials today said they hope to build two robot theme parks for $1.6 billion by 2013. The parks will feature a number of attractions that let visitors interact with robots and test new products. "The two cities will be developed as meccas for the country's robot industry, while having amusement park areas, exhibition halls and stadiums where robots can compete in various events," the ministry said. The theme parks are not a big surprise because South Korea loves its robots. Earlier this year the government of South Korea said it was drawing up a code of ethics to prevent human abuse of robots — and vice versa."

Jamie found a story about a new web tool that is trying to break ground into the semantic web. It's called twine, and it supposedly will intelligently aggregate your data, be it youtube videos, emails, or whatever you accumulate in your travels. Not the first, not the last, but here's hoping something comes out of the ideas someday.

cats-paw writes in with news of research that seems to confirm and support current theories of how cosmic rays are created. The prevailing thinking has been that cosmic rays are generated in the regions where supernovas' shock waves interact with the interstellar medium. The new research used the variability in X-ray emissions from a supernova remnant to estimate the strength of the magnetic fields present in that environment. The results lend support to the possibility of protons and nucleii being accelerated in supernova remnants to energies of 1 PeV (10^15 eV) and beyond. Here is the abstract from Nature.

Anonymous writes "A piece of video has emerged in which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says of Google, 'they read your mail and we don't.' Evidently, it was part of a lengthy discussion on the future of the software business model, and whether advertising could support free consumer software. Ballmer said it doesn't work, at least when it comes to email. '"That's just a factual statement, not even to be pejorative. The theory was if we read your mail, if somebody read your mail, they would know what to talk to you about. It's not working out as brilliantly as the concept was laid out." Ballmer isn't the first to fire salvos at Google's Gmail privacy policy. Privacy advocates have been critical over the policy almost since the beginning, but the popularity of the service has skyrocketed nonetheless.'"

00_NOP writes "According to a report on Softpedia, citing Net Applications, Linux usage on the desktop doubled in 2006 — 07: though from a miserable 0.37% to a still not brilliant 0.81%. Given that Linux is free, is based on peer reviewed source (and so inherently more secure in the longer term) and that hardware support is now pretty good, how long are we going to have to wait for the big breakthrough?" Of course the focus of the article is that Vista is kicking butt over Mac/Linux, which is not particularly surprising.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "When a Judge agreed with the RIAA's claim that 'making available' was actionable under the Copyright Act, in Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA was quick to bring this 'authority' to the attention of the judges in Elektra v. Barker and Warner v. Cassin. Those judges were considering the same issue. When the that decision was overturned successfully, however, they were not so quick to inform those same judges of this new development. When the defendants' lawyers found out — a week after the RIAA's lawyers learned of it — they had to notify the judges themselves . At this moment we can only speculate as to what legal authorities they cited to the judge in Duluth, Minnesota, to get him to instruct the jurors that just 'making available' was good enough."

jemtallon writes "The jury in the previously mentioned Captiol v Thomas story has reached a verdict. They have found in favor of the plaintiffs, Capitol, and ordered that she pay a $222,000 fine for 24 cases of copyright infringement."

eldavojohn notes an article up at Science Daily on research demonstrating that smaller animals with warmer blood evolve faster than larger, colder animals. From the article: "Across species from fish to mammals, they found that rates of protein evolution showed the same body size and temperature dependence as metabolic rate. Specifically, their mathematical model predicts that a 10-degree increase in temperature across species leads to about a 300 percent increase in the evolutionary rate of proteins, while a tenfold decrease in body size leads to about a 200 percent increase in evolutionary rates."

An anonymous reader writes "A Network World reader whose brother works for a California state agency forwarded me an e-mail alert that his brother received: "The Department of Technology Services (DTS) has notified us that the Federal Government inadvertently deleted the CA.GOV domain. As the evening progresses you may experience an impact in your ability to access some Web sites and exchange e-mail. DTS is working with their federal counterparts to restore service as quickly as possible but service may not be restored until tomorrow morning.""

MKaplan writes "Most spam is sent using spoofed domains. Email authentication schemes such as SPF attempt to foil spoofing by having domain administrators publish a list of their approved outgoing mail servers. SPF is sharply limited by incomplete domain participation and failure to authenticate forwarded email. A paper describes a novel method to rapidly generate a near-perfect global SPF database independent of the participation of domain administrators. A single email from an unauthenticated domain is bounced and then resent — this previously unauthenticated domain and the server listed in the return path of the resent bounce are entered into a globally accessible database. All future emails sent from this domain via this server will be authenticated after checking this new database. Mechanisms to authenticate forwarded email and to nullify subversion of this anti-spam system are also described."