CWmike writes "Microsoft will deliver a release candidate of Windows 7 in about two weeks, the company's Web site revealed Saturday. According to a page posted on Microsoft's partner program site, Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) may be available to paying subscribers to Microsoft's developer and IT services before May 5. Partners will be allowed to download the release candidate on that date, the first Tuesday of the month. 'Partners: If you have a subscription to MSDN or TechNet, you can download Windows 7 RC now,' the page read Saturday afternoon. 'Otherwise, you can download Windows 7 RC starting May 5, 2009.' The link to the download, however, shunted users to the TechNet download page, which did not list Windows 7 RC as one of the available files. This is the second time in just over three weeks that Microsoft's Web site has leaked information about Windows 7 RC. Accidental, or buzz-builder?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The MAD Generation" is an art show currently on view at East Atlanta Tattoo's gallery. It features nearly 50 pieces by artists inspired by the usual gang of idiots. Above, Oscar Medina's "Dia de los Locos," and Candy's "Spy Vs. Speed." Most of the show is also viewable online. The MAD Generation (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)

An anonymous reader writes "MIT has been monitoring student internet connections for the past decade without telling them. There is no official policy and no student input." The Tech article says, though, that the record keeping is fairly limited in its scope (connection information is collected, but not the data transferred) and duration (three days, for on-campus connections).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jamyang (Greg Walton) writes "I am editor of the Infowar Monitor and co-author of the recent report, Tracking Ghostnet. I have been asked by the Office of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama (OHHDL) and the Tibetan Government in Exile (TGIE) to offer some policy recommendations in light of the ongoing targeted malware attacks directed at the Tibetan community worldwide. Some of the recommendations are relatively straightforward. For example, I will suggest that OHHDL convene an international Board of Advisers, bringing together some of the brightest minds in computer and international security to advise the Tibetans, and that the new Tibetan university stands up a Certified Ethical Hacking course. However, one of the more controversial moves being actively debated by Tibetans on the Dharamsala IT Group [DITG] list, is a mass migration of the exile community (including the government) to Linux, particularly since all of the samples of targeted malware collected exploit vulnerabilities in Windows. I would be very interested to hear Slashdot readers opinions on this debate here." (More below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 writes "A report from The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research says that Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away. Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m. A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike writes "Starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will also collect DNA from detained immigrants. For example, This year, California began taking DNA upon arrest and expects to nearly double the growth rate of its database, to 390,000 profiles a year, up from 200,000. Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts, however law enforcement officials are expanding their collection of DNA to include millions of people who have only been arrested or detained, but not yet convicted. The move, intended to 'help solve more crimes,' is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Image from Iri5 on Flickr Via WebUrbanist

In this series I showcase a number of portraits of musicians made out of recycled cassette tape with original cassette. Also included are portraits made from old film and reels. The idea comes from a philosopher's (Ryle) description of how your spirit lives in your body. I imagine we are all, like cassettes, thoughts wrapped up in awkward packaging. : )

Still got all your old aircheck tapes? But don't artify your mix tapes until they're digitized.

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lpress writes "Symmetric, 100 Mbps service in Stockholm costs $11/month. Conditions in every city are different, but part of the explanation for the low cost is that the city owns a municipal fiber network reaching every block. They lease network access to anyone who would like to offer service. The ISPs, including incumbent telephone and cable companies, compete on an equal footing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

darkjohnson writes with this impressive excerpt from Rocketry Planet: "On April 25, 2009, history will be made. At Higgs Farm in Price, Maryland, Steve Eves will enter the history books as the person who flew the largest model rocket in history. The rocket will weigh over 1,600 pounds, it will stand over 36 fe

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

I remember reading Walden in high school. I had this very specific mental image of the whole thing: Thoreau out there in the woods, building his little shack. Nothing but silence and the beauty of nature. "A mile from any neighbor," the man wrote.

I have to admit, it's probably on my own head that I took Thoreau's narration there to be an example of poetic understatement. I'd assumed he really meant "miles". Turns out, he was being quite literal, almost down to the foot. But Earth Day is coming up and if you're feeling burned out on modern society, there's definitely a couple of things you can learn from Thoreau. I've summarized them here (and in Be Amazing) for your benefit.

First: Choose Your "Wilderness" Carefully
You'd hate to end up communing with the Earth someplace...rural. Shudder. That certainly wasn't a problem for Thoreau. Despite what impressions he might have given you, Thoreau's Walden Pond had more in common with Central Park than with Yellowstone. Damn near exactly a mile away from bestie Ralph Waldo Emerson's house, Thoreau was often called to meal times by Mrs. Emerson's dinner bell. From his hand-built cabin, Thoreau could see a major highway and hear the train that ran along the opposite side of the pond. In fact, Concord Village was close enough that he walked down there nearly every day. In a lot of ways, Walden is really similar to that time you "ran away from home" to live in the garage. Of course, you were 5.

Second: Don't Let Yourself Get Bored
Turns out, there's plenty of room in the vast wilds of nature for all your friends and acquaintances to come over. Besides regular weekly visits with his mother and sisters (who brought baked goods and pre-made meals, lest Thoreau be forced to do something drastic, like hunt and gather) and frequent (and also frequently food-related, see a pattern here?) sojourns to the Emersons', Thoreau's idyllic, natural lifestyle also included numerous house parties. He hosted galas for political groups, dinners for luminaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Bronson Alcott, and once managed to pack 25 people into his one-room cabin.

Accurate illustrative wood-cut print provided by Mr. Michael Rogalski, esq.

Death Metal sends this excerpt from an AP report: "General Dynamics Information Technology put out an ad last month on behalf of the Homeland Security Department seeking someone who could 'think like the bad guy.' Applicants, it said, must understand hackers' tools and tactics and be able to analyze Internet traffic and identify vulnerabilities in the federal systems. In the Pentagon's budget request submitted last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Pentagon will increase the number of cyberexperts it can train each year from 80 to 250 by 2011. With warnings that the US is ill-prepared for a cyberattack, the White House conducted a 60-day study of how the government can better manage and use technology (PDF) to protect everything from the electrical grid and stock markets to tax data, airline flight systems, and nuclear launch codes. ... Nadia Short, vice president at General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, said the job posting for ethical hackers fills a critical need for the government."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Image from NOVA on PBS

Looking for some great resources for your classroom? You may want to check out some of the fantastic tools provided by NOVA on PBS. You can check out their offerings by subject also.

They have a weekly feature, which right now is showing Car of the Future.

Activity Summary Student teams research and develop a proposal to decrease the carbon footprint of their city's public transportation system through the use of various new technologies and/or alternative fuels. Students prepare a report that explains why their transportation plan is the best one for their community.

Learning Objectives
Students will be able to:

• understand the pros and cons of adopting new technologies or alternative fuels to replace existing gasoline-powered vehicles.
• describe the environmental impact of alternative fuels.

Suggested Time
Four class periods

It looks like there is quite a bit of depth to these classroom resources. Links, videos, background information, and more should help you to undertake some interesting and complex studies of contemporary science and technology.

These projects are mapped to the National Science Education Standards, but I still can't find a good online resource for state by state curriculum frameworks. The Massachusetts frameworks are something of a hodgepodge of formats, and it is difficult to link directly to each individual item. Generally, they are huge documents of dozens or hundreds of pages in pdf or doc format covering many subjects and grades K-12. With no web-friendly indexing ability, it is kind of difficult to map a project directly to the subject and level.

Have you used the NOVA teachers' resources? Where do you turn for curriculum materials? Do you keep online resources for your classroom? Let us know in the comments.

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Image from STEP

Looking to teach sustainability in to the young'uns in your life? Try the Sustainability Technology Education Project, or STEP.

There are 35 case studies on the STEP site, primarily aimed at key stage 4 students. These provide a range of examples of sustainable solutions to technology issues from around the world.

Each case study includes background information, a design story, product analysis and an introduction to values issues. There are also suggestions for practical activities and class discussions. Teachers have found the case studies useful both for whole class work and for independent projects.

Teachers' notes, case studies, activities,links and more will get you started and keep you going.

Where do you find great classroom resources? Where do you showcase your students' work? Tell us in the comments.

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Kelson writes "The Wall Street Journal profiles Vincent Connare, designer of the web's most-hated font, Comic Sans. Not surprisingly, the font's origins go back to Microsoft Bob, where he saw a talking dog speaking in Times New Roman. Connare pulled out Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns for reference, and created the comic book-style font over the next week. 'Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer. ... The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jamie points out an update in the case of Jason Fortuny, the Craigslist prankster who was sued last year for publicly posting responses to a fake personal ad. The Citizen Media Law Project's summary of his case now includes a recently entered default judgment (PDF), fining Fortuny "... in the amount of $35,001.00 in statutory damages for Count I, violation of the Copyright Act; $5,000 in compensatory damages for Count II, Public Disclosure of Private Facts, and Count III, Intrusion Upon Seclusion." He has also been ordered to pay more than $34,000 in attorney and court fees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Why It's Hard to Find Good Gator Wrestling Help These Days
In 2000, members of the Seminole tribe near Hollywood, Florida put an ad in the local paper. They were looking for a new alligator wrestler. Mano-y-gator conflict is nothing new to the Seminole. Hand-caught gators were a traditional food source. But it was only in the 21st century that the tribe had hard luck finding people willing to jump in there (i.e., the swamp) and go for it (i.e., pin several-hundred-pound, sharp-toothed creatures to the ground with only their soft and presumably tasty bodies). This wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Wrestling alligators for the benefit of white tourists used to be one of the few Seminole-friendly job markets in Florida. Improved access to higher education--and the fact that, today, Seminole are more likely to actually own the tourist trap, rather than just work there--meant fewer tribe members willing to risk life and limb for a poorly paying job. And thus, the newspaper ad.

Did I Mention it Doesn't Pay Well?
Answering the ad, and ultimately winning the gig, was 32-year-old Greg Long. By November 10, 2000, Long was wrestling alligators for $8 an hour, the going rate for gator-wrestlers.Tips are recommended.

And That You're Gonna Get Bit?
The "wrestling" in alligator wrestling is something of a misnomer. Neither Greco-Roman, nor WWF, alligator wrestlers are actually trying to do something more akin to calf-roping: Catch an alligator from a pool or pit and bind its jaws shut with rope. Easy! Along the way, they perform tricks and explain interesting tidbits about about the animal's behavior and biology. Look at that guy in the photo. Doesn't he look like he loves educating the public?

Despite not being nearly as violent as it sounds, all alligator wrestlers will most likely be bitten at some point. The job requires strength and timing. One wrong move and your arm or leg could end up in the Old Alligator Wrestler's Retirement Villa*. Needless to say, it is not a sport for amateurs. In 2006, an alligator took down real-estate baron Ronald Bergeron after the land developer tried to wrestle a gator during a party. Bergeron was dragged underwater briefly before the other well-heeled (and more sober?) guests could free him. He survived, with a few shattered finger bones.

Again, there's more where this came from.

Image courtesy the delightfully named turtlemom4bacon.

*the alligator's stomach

A look back on Episode 6 of Make: television. Individual segments after the jump.

Enter the plugged-in world of Tim Kaiser, a maker who fashions experimental musical instruments from scavenged objects. In the Workshop John Park assembles a portable trebuchet from plastic plumbing pipe, and circuit bender Bianca Pettis demystifies the art of soldering. The Maker Channel presents a Smash Bat that snaps moment-of-impact photos, a drum synthesizer played with Skittles, a pedal-powered tennis ball launcher, and an evil mouse that causes the cursor to misbehave when moved. Watch in HD at blip.

Get the m4v or subscribe in iTunes

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "President Barack Obama has named his chief technology officer, and the appointee is not a Silicon Valley name like so many predicted. He is Aneesh Chopra. As the Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, his job has been to 'leverage technology in government reform, promote Virginia's innovation agenda, and foster technology-related economic development with a special emphasis on entrepreneurship.' But Chopra's not a tech guy. Before he got his secretary job in 2005, he was a managing director at the Advisory Board Company, a public-market health care think tank, as well as an angel investor." O'Reilly Radar is running an article discussing why Chopra is a good choice for federal CTO.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FirstSecond, one of the great literary comics presses of the modern world, has topped itself with The Photographer: Into war-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders, a collaboration between photographer Didier Lefevre, graphic novelist Emmanuel Guibert, and designer Frederic Lemercier.

The book is the memoir of Didier, a photographer who accompanied a caravan of Medecins Sans Frontiers doctors into war-torn Afghanistan to staff a clinic in the middle of the Soviet-Mujahideen war. Didier dictated the memoir to Guibert (the graphic novelist who also produced Alan's War, a stunning memoir of post-war France) before he died of a heart-attack, and Guibert and Lemercier worked to turn this into The Photographer.

Visually, The Photographer resembles nothing so much as a Tin Tin adventure, except that it is liberally sprinkled with Didier's photos and contact sheets, dropped in among the drawn panels, incorporated seamlessly into the action. Didier was a powerful, naturalistic photographer, unflinching and unpretentious, and between the finished drawings and the annotated contact sheets, you get a sense of a real artist at work.

The story is in three parts: first, there is the journey to the clinic, which begins in Pakistan where Didier meets all manner of intelligence operatives, pathological liars, adventurers and NGO workers, and then follows the MSF crew as they meet up with escort of Mujahideen guerrillas and arms-smugglers, buy their horses and donkeys, and are smuggled over the border into Afghanistan. After this, the caravan proceeds through the towns and mountains of Afghanistan, dodging Soviet helicopters, losing pack animals over sheer cliffs, and watching in horror as the discipline in their escort is brutally enforced. The caravan is led by an unlikely and charismatic woman doctor who commands the Muj's respect through sheer competence and force of will.

The second part of the story tells of Didier's time at the clinic, as all manner of war-wounded, ill and orphaned victims are processed and treated by the doctors, tales of horrific woundings and incredible bravery and sacrifice and nobility. After a while, it becomes too much for Didier, who decides -- unwisely -- to return to Pakistan alone, with just an escort of Afghani farmers with whom he does not share a common language.

Finally, Didier tells the story of his voyage home, a gruelling trip that gets worse after he is abandoned by his escort. After coming close to death, he is rescued by grifters who rob him -- but get him to safety. After more misadventures, he arrives home, finally, in Paris.

The story is very well told, a gripping adventure that sheds light on subjects as diverse as faith, photography, art, love, nobility, Soviet-Afghani relations, pride, masculinity, racism, and bravery. As I said, the photos are magnificent -- worth the cover-price alone -- but the story makes them so much better. This isn't just a great photography book, it's a great novel, a great comic, a great memoir, and a great history text.

The Photographer: Into war-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders

The Photographer sampler (PDF)

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Responding to a request in the naked chimpanzee comments, reader Felix was kind enough to put together this charming photoshop job, which I've been told by the powers that be that I can't not share.

Good morning!

Apologies to RedEyedRex, the Flickr user who took the original picture.

explosivejared writes "Forbes is running a story discussing the verdict in the Pirate Bay case and its implications on file sharing, specifically with regard to Google. The article points out what most people on Slashdot already realize: Google provides essentially the same service that the Pirate Bay does. The Pirate Bay case may be far from over, accounting for appeals, but the Pirate Bay's assumption of being unchallengeable was shattered. The article raises the question of whether or not Google is untouchable in the matter. The story is quick to point out how the situation resembles a futile game of cat-and-mouse, but given how the Pirate Bay's confidence was ultimately broken, is Google beyond reproach?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interesting piece in the NY Times magazine about Twitter and how connectivity is for poor people. I learned a lot about this, the hard way, when I made enough money in the late 80s to learn what wealth buys -- distance. It took me a few years to learn that distance is not what I wanted, in fact I don't think it's human to crave distance. People are built to want to be among others.

I bought a house with a 750 foot driveway in the middle of the woods. My neighbors built houses the size of high schools. You couldn't walk anywhere.

Now I live among humanity, much more modestly and I'm happier.

So it may be true that connectivity is for the poor, if so, the rich aren't happy.

Hefernan is right to bring this question to Twitter, because it is the struggle it's going through, as classes emerge. It won't be like other class struggles though, as the rich and powerful strive to make sense of Twitter, they will encounter the contradictions of 21st century decentral communications. Oprah hasn't really come to Twitter yet, it'll be interesting to see if she ever really does.

An interesting experiment for her, if she ever has alone-time, create an account that isn't attached to her media persona and mingle with the common folk, be one. It'sngot to be the rarest experience for someone so instantly recognizable. A way to collapse all the distance of fame and fortune. Then when she sells the Twitter experience, if that's what she's doing, she'll have some idea what she's selling.

I have a feeling Oprah could be a good rep for Twitter, but not if she does it from inside her bubble. Then she'll miss the whole point. Its value is not only as a promotion machine, I think -- there's value elsewhere.

Credulous wine-sellers in the UK are encouraging their customers to avoid drinking wine on certain days of the month on the grounds that the lunar cycle will alter the taste of the wine. Horoscopes for wine -- now that's a whole new kind of dumb.

The idea that the taste of wine changes with the lunar calendar is gaining credibility among the UK's major retailers, who believe the day, and even hour, on which wine is drunk alters its taste. Tesco and its rival Marks & Spencer, which sell about a third of all wine drunk in Britain, now invite critics to taste their ranges only at times when the biodynamic calendar suggests they will show at their best.

Marks & Spencer has gone a step further and is advising customers to avoid disappointment from the best bottles by making sure not to open them on "root" days...

In other quarters, doubts remain. Waitrose's wine department has investigated the idea and cannot see a correlation. Many scientists have little time for biodynamic wine, pointing out that the movement's guru, Rudolf Steiner, claimed to have conceived the concept after consulting telepathically with spirits beyond the realm of the material world. Among his other works are claims that the human race is as old as the Earth and descended from creatures with jelly-like bodies, and a belief that men's passions seep into the Earth's interior, where they trigger earthquakes and volcanoes.

Tesco and supermarket rivals go for wine tasting by moonlight

AndreV writes "It's endlessly comforting to know a recently designed and implemented long-distance robotic signing arm can produce signatures legal in both the US and Canada. The aptly named LongPen replicates the handwriting from a person writing in a remote location — with the unique speed, cadence and pressure of a human pen-stroke. It started as an idea from author Margaret Atwood to help free her from grueling, multi-city, multi-country book tours, but the hard stuff was done by a bunch of Canadian haptic gurus, whose design took into consideration many factors of the human arm and how we write. How it works: from the author-end, data protocols are set up, and the pen pressure is measured on a special tablet. The data streams to the robot, while algorithms smooth out all the missed points. Complex math operations were used to help the mechatronic limb repeat the hand's motions without unnecessary jerking, and programmers had to 'scale time' or 'stretch time' by breaking down the movements, essentially tricking the eyes into thinking the robot is writing fast. It was recently adopted by the Ontario Government to sign official documents. It helps criminals sign books, too."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I had the priviledge of going to the new Mets ballpark in NY last night. The Mets won in an uncharacteristically elegant way. Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, Luis Castillo hits a bullet deep in the pocket betw short and third. The Brewers shortstop makes the play, but it's hit too fast and makes him turn too far. Castillo beats the throw at first and the runner scores from third. The team, excited at the thrilling finish, runs on the field and piles on the baserunners.

Everyone at the new stadium had a nice but uneasy feeling. Too many people greeted us at the entrance. Everyone smiled more than seems right for New Yorkers. Try as hard as they could, no chant of Lets Go Mets took hold in the crowd. At the beginning of the game I was enchanted, by the end -- it didn't gel. No suspension of disbelief.

I've traveled a lot in my life and I've seen the Mets play a lot of away games at foreign ballparks. That's what this felt like.

I felt like a child whose father has a new wife being asked to accept her as my mother. It just doesn't work. In the end I would have much rather gone to a game at the old Shea Stadium, warts and all.

Baseball is all about tradition. It's not an exciting game like basketball or football, it's a game where the past matters. I'm sure the people who run NYC had their reasons for wanting a new ballpark. Maybe it would have worked better if they had put it somewhere else, but with the ruins of Shea still visible from the new stadium, it feels like we haven't had the proper period of mourning, at least, for an old established shrine of our religion.

Would the Boston Red Sox tear down Fenway, could the Cubs exist without Wrigley? These questions have obvious answers to me, as obvious as whether the Catholic Church would tear down the Vatican just to get some skyboxes.

The new park is a beautiful stadium. I'm not saying it will never fill the place of Shea Stadium, but it doesn't now. I miss the old place.

It seems at least one member of Toronto's HackLab collective may have actually grown tired of laser-cutting. Jed wrote up some code turning those high-end onboard servos into sound synthesizers. I guess it's true - you really can make just about anything with a laser cutter, even the Super Mario theme =P

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Demigod is an RTS/RPG hybrid developed by Gas Powered Games and published by Stardock, a company notable for their progressive and lenient stance on DRM. The game was set to be released on April 14th, and shipped without any form of copy protection. Unfortunately, retailer Gamestop broke the street date and released it earlier in the week. A day after pointing this out, Gas Powered Games posted some numbers about the players hitting their servers. Roughly 18,000 connections were made from legitimately purchased copies; over 100,000 were made from pirated copies. Meanwhile, the servers, which were not yet ready for that level of traffic, buckled under the strain, resulting in poor experiences for people trying to participate in multiplayer. While some reviews were positive, others criticized the game for the connectivity issues. After another day, they were able to stabilize the servers to the point they'd planned on for the original launch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Bill C-61, the previous attempt at a Canadian DMCA, may have failed, but it is clear that the music, movie, and business software industries are engaged in putting massive pressure on the Canadian government to bring it back. Lobbying records show several meetings each week with Government Ministers for CRIA, CMPDA, and Microsoft over the past month. Meanwhile, the CRIA is preparing a grassroots campaign in support of new copyright laws, even claiming that the current rules are costing jobs to truck drivers delivering CDs and DVDs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The deadline for entering your awesome DIY project into the Instructables Epilog laser cutter contest is just two days away! Enter your project's how-to and you could be cutting and etching to your heart's content! Enter by the 19th, start voting on the 20th!

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GordonCopestake writes "An article from New Scientist proposes that all new spacecraft have sails attached to bring them back to earth — a measure that would reduce the amount of garbage in space. From the article: 'The risk to spacecraft from a collision with space debris could be reduced by equipping launchers with a gossamer-thin "sail." The idea is to deploy the sail after the rocket has released its payload to amplify the drag of the last vestiges of the atmosphere, and so force the rocket out of orbit.'" Wired has a related story about the risks faced by the space shuttles as they share orbits with tons of drifting space debris. "... in the 54 missions from STS-50 through STS-114, space junk and meteoroids hit shuttle windows 1,634 times necessitating 92 window replacements. In addition, the shuttle's radiator was hit 317 times, actually causing holes in the radiator's facesheet 53 times."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When we recently wrote about yet another journalist complaining about how Google exploits their content, someone in the comments made a really salient point that should get wider exposure. If you go by the journalist's own logic, then the truth is that they are exploiting the newsmakers they cover. After all, it's really the newsmakers who are "creating" the story, and all the journalists are doing is writing up an account of it, for commercial purposes, and not rewarding the newsmakers who make their jobs possible in the first place. Journalists have been freeriding on the backs of the people who actually make the news for too long! I think it's time that everyone who is in a news story start standing up for their rights, and demanding that journalists pay them to stop this free riding. Perhaps some newsmakers will band together and create a new consortium, where journalists can just pay a one time regular subscription fee, to be divided up among newsmakers, based on who makes the most news. Yeah... that's the ticket...

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We've seen that, thanks to the economy, states like Maryland and New York are ramping up programs for speed and red light cameras. However, that's not true of all places. Mississippi recently went the other direction and banned such traffic cameras, following a similar backlash in Arizona. A recent Wall Street Journal article takes a look at all of this (including the fact that some of the bigger traffic camera companies are based in Arizona) and raises the key question: why won't local governments just increase the length of yellow lights on traffic signals. That, alone, would save numerous accidents (and lives). Yet, many governments have been doing the exact opposite: putting lives at risk, just to bring in more revenue (often to pay off those private companies that installed the cameras). On top of that, there are still plenty of locations that don't leave any pause between switching lights between cross traffic. Here in California, for example, it's quite rare for there to be any pause between a light turning red in one direction, and the perpendicular traffic light turning green. Studies have shown that a slight pause -- where all directions are red -- decreases the number of accidents as well. And yet... governments focus on using traffic cameras solely to increase revenue.

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GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware's continuing series on computing security has an interview with Adam Barth and Collin Jackson, members of Stanford University's Web Security Group and members of the team that developed Chromium, the open-source core behind Google Chrome. The interview goes into detail regarding the sandboxing approach unique to Chromium, comparisons between the browser and its competition, and web security in general."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Image from Inhabitat

Looking to cash in your frequent flyer miles? Maybe you can crash here....

The airplane was transported piece by piece from the San Jose airport to its current resting place on a pedestal 50 feet above the beach. It looks a bit like a model airplane on a stand, and we can only imagine the spectacular views from the balcony and the airplane windows. Five big trucks were needed to get the plane out to the resort, and while the transportation certainly had a negative ecological impact, the finished project is a stunning example of adaptive reuse.

Or perhaps here...

Image from Inhabitat

The Jumbo Hostel is housed within a retrofitted 747-200 situated in the Stockholm-Arlanda airport. The jumbo jet has a long history of service - it was originally built for Singapore Airlines and even flew for Pan Am. It was last operated by Transjet, a now bankrupt Swedish airline. The Jumbo Hostel has 25 rooms with three bunk beds each. Each room is around 6 square meters, and naturally, a lucky visitor will get the chance to sleep in the cockpit.

Back a few years ago, I broke away from a family vacation in Phoenix to go visit Biosphere 2. While I was the only one who wanted to venture to the huge desert greenhouse, I had a nice time and would encourage people to check out the facility and its story. Incidentally, Biosphere 2 did show up in one of my daughter's spelling homework assignments this week.

On my solo side trip adventure, I tried to find an airplane graveyard that I had heard of in the desert outside Tucson. Despite my pre-travel research efforts, I never did find the airplane storage facility back then, but heard an interesting story about how it is more cost effective to mothball your surplus airship than to deliver empty seats from city to city. Apparently, there is something ideal about the desert of the American Southwest for airplane storage.

Got any good stories of airplane storage, reuse or repair? Share them in the comments!

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Lots of folks have been submitting variations on the story about how Stardock's new game, Demigod, has been widely pirated, and that's resulted in server troubles for the company, as many of these unauthorized users try to connect to Stardock servers. Many are claiming that this shows that Stardock's customer friendly approach to video games fails. But, that's not true or accurate at all. It's just an issue of properly lining up the incentives and the infinite goods vs. the scarcities. In this case, one of the key scarcities was server access -- but Stardock set things up such that unauthorized copies could drag that down. The good thing, though, is that the company quickly got on top of the problem and has been implementing a technological fix rather than screaming and complaining about pirates. Meanwhile, some others have sent in links to the Demigod forums, where people recognize that many of the unauthorized users got the game to test it out, and are encouraging people to buy it to support Stardock and its fan-friendly attitude.

In the end, though, it does seem like Stardock has set this up a bit as a "give it away and pray" setup, which we tend not to agree with as a good business model. Since a big part of the game is the mutliplayer aspect, where you have to connect to a server and play against other players, why not give away the software itself (many people are getting it this way already) and charge a nominal fee for access to the server. That access is a scarcity -- and then you can scale based on users, since more users means more money. It seems like that's a reasonable business model that aligns everything much more nicely.

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Last month, Time Magazine made some news with its plan to experiment with custom print magazines called "Mine," where subscribers could pick and choose from a collection of magazines to create their own semi-custom magazine. Think of it as an extremely limited RSS aggregator on paper. Sorta. Except... apparently Time is still working out the glitches. The first editions were sent out this week, which is when people noticed that what they got often had nothing to do with what they asked for. In other words, "Mine" became "Yours" or "Some Guy's." Perhaps it's best to stick with the RSS aggregator.

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In the US, some legal and regulatory rulings effectively kneecapped most line sharing arrangements in broadband. Originally, the big telcos had been required to share their lines with third party service providers, effectively as a condition of being granted subsidies and valuable rights of way to build out their networks. But, they complained and were able to remove that requirement, leading us (in part) to the situation we're in today with a lot less competition. Up in Canada, at least, there have been regulatory requirements for line sharing, which has created some competition for broadband. A year ago, Bell Canada suddenly started traffic shaping all the broadband traffic over its network, without letting these retail ISPs know, and when they complained, Bell Canada told them to shut up and deal.

The latest (which a bunch of you submitted) is that Bell Canada is looking to change how it charges these other providers, moving from flat-rate wholesale pricing to usage-based billing, which will put a significant squeeze on these reseller ISPs. It seems pretty clearly designed to hurt these partners, and limit how they can differentiate themselves to customers. This is one of the many problems of handing control over a national network infrastructure to one private company. Doing so creates tremendous incentives to limit how others can use it.

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Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that legal and operational problems surrounding the NSA's surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees, and a secret national security court, and that the NSA had been engaged in 'overcollection' of domestic communications of Americans. The practice has been described as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional. The Justice Department has acknowledged that there had been problems with the NSA surveillance operation, but said they had been resolved. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the intelligence community, did not address specific aspects of the surveillance problems, but said in a statement that 'when inadvertent mistakes are made, we take it very seriously and work immediately to correct them.' The intelligence officials said the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July to the law that regulates the government's wiretapping powers, as well as the challenges posed by enacting a new framework for collecting intelligence on terrorism and spying suspects. Joe Klein at Time Magazine says the bad news is that 'the NSA apparently has been overstepping the law,' but the good news is that 'one of the safeguards in the [FISA Reform] law is a review procedure that seems to have the ability to catch the NSA when it's overstepping — and that the illegal activities have been exposed, and quickly.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.