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Woman Sues Google Over Street View Shots of Her Underwear 417

Posted by samzenpus from the airing-your-clean-laundry dept.
Kittenman writes "The Telegraph (and several US locals) are covering a story about a Japanese woman who had her underwear on the line while the Google car went past. She is now suing Google: 'I was overwhelmed with anxiety that I might be the target of a sex crime,' the woman told a district court. 'It caused me to lose my job and I had to change my residence.'"
Republicans

Republicans Create Rider To Stop Net Neutrality 528

Posted by Soulskill from the congress-shall-make-no-law-respecting-the-tubes dept.
99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) submitted a rider yesterday to a bill on military and veterans' construction projects. The rider would, 'prohibit the FCC from using any appropriated funds to adopt, implement or otherwise litigate any network neutrality based rules, protocols or standards.' It is co-signed by six other Republican senators. We all knew this was coming after the last election removed most of the vocal supporters of net neutrality and supplanted them with pro-corporate Republicans."
Earth

Drilling Hits an Active Magma Chamber In Hawaii 251

Posted by timothy from the time-for-a-lava-luau dept.
Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that drillers looking for geothermal energy in Hawaii have inadvertently put a well right into a magma chamber. Molten rock pushed back up the borehole several meters before solidifying, making it perfectly safe to study. Magma specialist Bruce Marsh says it will allow scientists to observe directly how granites are made. 'This is unprecedented; this is the first time a magma has been found in its natural habitat,' the Johns Hopkins University professor told BBC News. 'Before, all we had to deal with were lava flows; but they are the end of a magma's life. They're lying there on the surface, they've de-gassed. It's not the natural habitat.' It is hoped the site can now become a laboratory, with a series of cores drilled around the chamber to better characterise the crystallisation changes occurring in the rock as it loses temperature."
United States

Barack Obama Is One Step Closer To Being President 601

Posted by kdawson from the donkey-faithful-one-hundred-percent dept.
At 3:00 Eastern time on Monday Dec. 15, 538 electors in state capitols across the US cast the votes that actually elected Barack Obama the 44th President. Obama received, unofficially, 365 electoral votes (with 270 needed to win). The exact total will not be official — or Obama officially elected — until Congress certifies the count of electoral votes in a joint session on Jan. 6, 2009. The Electoral College was established in its present form in 1804 by the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution. Electors are not required to vote for the candidate who won their state — in fact, 24 states make it a criminal offense to vote otherwise, but no "faithless elector" has ever been charged with a crime. "On 158 occasions, electors have cast their votes for President or Vice President in a manner different from that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represented. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest, or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was in 1836 when 23 Virginia electors changed their vote together. ... To date, faithless electors have never changed the otherwise expected outcome of the election."

Comment Titer Tests (Score 2, Interesting) 737

by sd790 (#26022687) Attached to: What the Papers Don't Say About Vaccines
What most parents fail to understand is that the vaccine schedule is designed to make it easy for people to follow. Parents have the right to ask for a titer test for each antibody that determines whether or not your child needs each vaccine. We've done this annually with our children to be able to make informed decisions about which vaccines to administer.

My seven-year-old hasn't had any vaccines or boosters since she was three because she hasn't needed anything - NOTHING - she had all of the antibodies that she was tested for. Armed with this kind of knowledge, how can you NOT be skeptical of just following rest of the herd to shoot up our kids with unnecessary chemicals?
Music

At Atlantic Records, Digital Sales Surpass CDs 273

Posted by kdawson from the trading-analog-dollars-for-digital-pennies dept.
The NYTimes reports that Atlantic is the first major label to report getting a majority of its revenue from digital sales, not CDs. Analysts say that Atlantic is out in front — the industry as a whole isn't expected to hit the 50% mark until 2011. By 2013, music industry revenues will be 37% down from their 1999 levels (when Napster arrived on the scene), according to Forrester. "'It's not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,' said John Rose, a former executive at EMI ... Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours. ... In virtually all... corners of the media world, executives are fighting to hold onto as much of their old business as possible while transitioning to digital — a difficult process that NBC Universal's chief executive ... has described as 'trading analog dollars for digital pennies.'"
The Media

Malaysian Blogger On Trial For Sedition 183

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the because-creating-martyrs-is-good-for-civil-obedience dept.
neonsignal writes "Raja Petra Kamarudin, a Malaysian blogger, is in court under the Internal Security Act, under which he can be detained indefinitely. He is well known for his commentary on the Malaysian government, and was arrested after a piece on the murder of a Mongolian woman, who was allegedly killed by two policeman and an associate of the deputy prime minister."
Space

Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit 126

Posted by Zonk from the hooray-for-earth dept.
Raver32 writes with a link to the Space.com site, and an article discussing an extra-solar planet that looks a lot like ours from a distance. At least, its orbit does. The planet is located about 300 light years away, in the constellation Perseus. It circles its giant red star every 360 days and was discovered by 'looking for wobble', the shift in a star's movement that hints at orbiting planets. "The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun's brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth. But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away."
Science

Arctic Ice May Melt By 2040 474

Posted by kdawson from the what-about-Santa? dept.
Dekortage writes in with a new study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research suggesting that the North Pole may be clear of ice in summer as soon as 2040, decades earlier than previously thought. From the article: "'As the ice retreats, the ocean transports more heat to the Arctic and the open water absorbs more sunlight, further accelerating the rate of warming and leading to the loss of more ice,' Holland said in the statement. 'This is a positive feedback loop with dramatic implications for the entire Arctic.'"

Should Companies Delay Products for More Features? 136

Posted by Zonk from the more-features-means-more-flavour dept.
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece looking at if it makes sense for companies such as Sony to delay the release of products to ensure that when they do come out they are absolutely top of the line. From the article: 'In the tech world, where consumer trends can rise and fall and product cycles are short, that's more often the exception than the rule. The penalty for a delay can be severe -- even catastrophic. One of the biggest risks in postponing a product launch is being out-hustled to market by rivals.'"

Global Warming Dissenters Suppressed? 928

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the come-see-the-violence-inherent-in-the-system dept.
sycodon writes "Global Warming has become more than just a scientific issue and has been portrayed as nothing less than the End of the World by some. However, despite all the hoopla from Hollywood, Politicians and Science Bureaucrats, there is another side, but it's being suppressed according to Richard Lindzen, an Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. From the article: 'Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.'"

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