Slashdot Mirror

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including the demystification of Australia's "Mystery Cat", the US Government backs Microsoft in their battle against Korea, RedHat joins the fun and decides to invest in India's economy, the ICANN community slams the VeriSign deal, and Clinical results from the cancer-killing virus trials - read on for details.

Australia's mystery cat demystified. Bitsy Boffin writes "Back in October Slashdot ran a story from the Herald Sun about the shooting of a mystery "Big Cat" in Australia. At the time the tail (the only part the hunter brought back) of said cat had been sent off for DNA testing. The Herald Sun reports the findings of those DNA tests which show that the mystery cat wasn't a leopard or jaguar, just a really, really big feral cat."

US backs Microsoft in Korean antitrust case. CODiNE writes "Stating that 'Korea's remedy goes beyond what is necessary or appropriate to protect consumers' the Justice Department's antitrust division rejects the recent Korean FTC ruling. 'Sound antitrust policy should protect competition, not competitors, and must avoid chilling innovation and competition even by "dominant" companies.'"

RedHat follows Indian investment trend. An anonymous reader writes "After several other companies have decided to invest in the Indian economy it looks like RedHat will be following suit. According to the article, RedHat plans on hiring about 300 people for an investment of about $20M."

ICANN community slams VeriSign deal. Rob writes to tell us that an overwhelming amount of the ICANN community recently took a stand against a proposed deal that would allow VeriSign to raise the price of .com domain names by up to 50%. VeriSign accused ICANN of illegally "regulating" its business. ICANN had previously blocked services VeriSign wanted to launch on the grounds that they would harm the stability of the internet.

Clinical results from cancer-killing virus. just___giver writes "Results from human clinical trials show that terminally ill patients with aggressive metastasized cancer are receiving benefit from the recently covered virus that kills cancer when it is administered intravenously. They still have higher doses to test in this ongoing study. This safe, naturally occurring, unmodified virus has a remarkable ability to infect and kill cancer cells, without affecting normal, healthy cells. Numerous other third party studies show that the Reovirus should be an important discovery in the treatment of 2/3 of all human cancers. It is patented, easy to manufacture in large quantities, and even increases the effectiveness of conventional chemo and radiation therapy. Numerous phase 2 studies are being planned for 2006." OncolyticsBiotech also has a short video describing the process.

caffeine_monkey writes "AP is reporting that Hewlett Packard is recalling 135,000 notebook batteries because they occasionally overheat and melt. Affected models are HP Pavilion, Compaq Presario, HP Compaq and Compaq Evo. More details are on the HP support site. From their FAQ: Is it safe to buy HP notebooks? Absolutely. HP fully stands behind the products it makes."

TomClancy_Jack writes "A Canadian man claims to have invented a hydrogen electrolysis box that can be fit onto any existing internal combustion engine. He claims that engines using his "H2N-Gen" box 'produce a more complete burn, greatly increasing efficiency and reducing fuel consumption by 10 to 40 per cent - and pollutants by up to 100 per cent.' If this doesn't turn out to be vapor-ware or just a regular scam, it could turn out to be one of the biggest recent innovations in transportation history. He claims it will be on the market in 6 - 12 months, so time will tell."

pin_gween writes "Prions are thought to be responsible for mad cow disease and its human variant, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. Until now, the only way to positively ID those infected was to dissect the brain. Canada.com has an AP wire reporting that researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have 'developed a method of multiplying the number prions in a blood sample so a blood test then can detect them.' If perfected, it would make the blood supply safer; transfusions can spread the disease between people. It could also open up more blood donations for the Red Cross: in the U.S., people who have spent more than 3 months total (since 1980) in the UK or 6 months total (since 1980) in Europe are banned from donating."

Duuk2k2 writes "The Canadian federal cabinet will review new legislation this fall that would give police and security agencies vast powers to begin surveillance of the Internet without court authority. The new measures would allow law-enforcement agents to intercept personal e-mails, text messages and possibly even password-secure websites used for purchasing and financial transactions."

Slashback tonight brings you a larger-than-usual assortment of updates, clarifications and followups to previous and ongoing Slashdot stories. Read on below for more details on the Canadian Harry Potter injunction, CardSystem's customer data mishap, the popularity of Beethoven vs. the Beatles, and what the recent MySpace acquisition might mean.

Beethoven rules the downloads charts! jd writes "At 1.4 million downloads, Beethoven has beaten the Beatles in online downloads, according to The Guardian. iTunes sales of 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' comes in at a mere 20,000. The BBC, who put the symphonies on their download site, are delighted. The music industry, which thought classical music was all but dead, is in shock. About the only question remaining is how much did the Slashdot Effect contribute?"

And if the Beatles are "more popular than Jesus," this Beethoven guy must be really popular!

Now you can think of it as Rupert'sSpace. applextrent writes with a few thoughts on the recent acquisition of MySpace by Fox: "MySpace's privacy policy and company filings including all users' information lists, databases, text, files and documents are explicitly documented as an asset of MySpace. The agreement also states MySpace can sell the site and all user information to a third party that might not necessarily follow the same privacy policy as MySpace. To put it simply, MySpace owns everything a user provides them with. This is not entirely an uncommon thing for many free services such as AOL's Instant Messenger have similar privacy policies. Now all of this user information is in the hands of News Corp. and they can pretty much do whatever they want with it.

Not to say anything bad will come of this, in fact this could mean better protection for users privacy, or it may not. This is possible reason for concern especially considering MySpace's blog population for a MySpace run blog is technically owned by the same people who bring you Fox News."

This is much worse than losing the car keys, son. An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of the large-scale credit card compromise of Card Systems, the NYTimes is reporting that Visa has decided to stop allowing transactions from the processor. Visa says 'CardSystems has not corrected, and cannot at this point correct, the failure to provide proper data security for those accounts.' Visa has informed member banks that they have until Oct. 31 to switch from using CardSystems to process card transactions. The decision sends a strong message to the industry about Visa's stance on cardholder security with respect to enforcing the PCI Data Security Standard. We'll see how MasterCard and American Express react. Also the long term viability of CardSystems itself is now in question."

Another visit to the Abandonware Orphanage. chill writes "Aladdin 4D, the venerable Amiga 3D design and rendering program, is yearning to be free. If the owners, Nova Designs, can raise $37,579.83 to pay off old debts they will release the trademarks, source code, tutorials, rights, and all as LGPL. So, if having this tool available to the FOSS pool of code is something that interests you, donate!"

This approach worked for Blender; it would be great to see it happen more.

Google keeps stealing my best ideas before I have them. Chmarr writes "Right on the heels of Google Moon, Google Maps now includes very detailed maps of our favorite animation source Japan. Here's hoping you can read Japanese."

But you only need to read Alien for this one: Oreo 51 writes "It was only a matter of time before someone did this. Barry Snyder used Google Maps to take shots of the infamous high-security Area 51 in the Nevada desert. I can't wait to see what /.ers think of all the craters and interesting sand geometry there."

Now taking donations of one nickel per cool use of Google Maps, to go toward the James Ellroy Crime Scene Map Project Fund.

Now with more nutritious Darkness! Simian Farmer writes "For the tens of thousands of Star Wars fans who visited The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster on a daily basis just before the release of Sith, the same author has begun penning his own blog-novel called Simon of Space.

The style of writing that lured so many to read Darth Side so avidly this past April/May is present in spades in his new fiction, updated almost daily. According to the author, it has, '...romance, action, humour and all the whiz-bang special effects you can get without actually making a movie.'"

Blue Frog Claims to be Legit justy writes "I noticed that Blue Security, the company behind the Blue Frog anti-spam initiative, have issued a statement on their blog as a result of "feedback we have received from the community". They say that "the total number of complaints posted by the community is exactly equal to the number of spam messages received", which seems more fair in my opinion. Perhaps this development is a result of the heated discussion here on Slashdot."

Well that's not Orwellian or anything, Nooo .... An anonymous reader writes "The fallout from the recent Canadian Harry Potter court order continues [Harry Potter and the Right to Read] as a national newspaper was threatened with a lawsuit if they published a book review based on an 'unlawful reading.' The case, along with similar copyright abuses, has Canadians wondering what became of a kinder, gentler legal approach."

Well, keep looking then. According to this NY Times story, the recently described spotting of an ivory-billed woodpecker may be based on evidence too weak to rely on; this is the same bird that Cornell researches have been looking for with automated means to detect its distinctive voice.

An anonymous reader submits "The Earth's roaming magnetic pole has moved out of Canada and into international waters as it heads towards Siberia. The magnetic pole has been within Canada's current boundaries for at least the past 400 years and left sometime in the past year after rapidly picking up speed in 2001. If it keeps to its current course and expected speed, it should reach Siberia by the middle of the century. There's speculation that December's tsunami causing earthquake may have been one of the factors causing the pole to move more quickly than predicted."

Petersko writes "A team from the University of Alberta has proven for the first time that a single molecule can switch electrical currents off and on, a puzzle that scientists worldwide have been trying to crack for decades. The finding could revolutionize the field of electronics, providing a leap ahead for everything from computers to batteries to medical equipment."

Blanchek writes "Few Internet quotes have had a longer shelf life than John Gilmore's 'the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.' An Ottawa Citizen article from Professor Michael Geist notes that the maxim may be dead. The article reflects on a recent experience with Chinese Internet censorship and the blocking of news, email, and Google searches, while providing a caution that it would be mistake to think that the Internet in Canada, the U.S. and Europe will always remain as free as China's is censored."

Jack Action writes "Up in Canada, the Privacy Commissioner of the province of British Columbia is recommending an immediate freeze on all outsourcing of public data to US-connected firms, Reuters and the CBC are reporting. After extensive consultations, the Privacy Commissioner has found that the USA Patriot Act threatens the private data of citizens even if they don't live in the USA (repeat: non-Americans are at risk). You can visit the Commissioners website, and download a summary or the full report." And reader digity writes "The long-standing Canadian battle on grey-market satellite dishes took a surprising turn in a Quebec courtroom yesterday. The grounds: freedom of expression. Yet another reason to come to the Great White North!"

An Anonymous Reader writes "The new Canadian television series ReGenesis premiered on the Movie Network and Movie Central last Sunday night, but surprised viewers with a cryptic message at the end: 'Only you know the whole story. Be a part of it. www.regenesistv.com' Players who registered on the website quickly discovered an Extended Reality of websites, telephone numbers and clues which reached out to them from the fiction of the series." More below. Reviews from the Alternate Reality Gaming community have been good, complimenting both the series and the online experience as realistic and gripping. So far users have unearthed links to the North American Biotechnology Advisory Commission, the anarchistic scientific forum ScienceSucks.com and a mysterious weblog which seems to be written by a mole within NorBAC itself.

Project partners Xenophile Media and Shaftesbury Films have been guarded in describing how far the Extended Reality will go, but a recent anonymous interview goes much further to explain what viewers/players should expect.

Baldrson writes "CanWest is reporting that 'The federal government is preparing to introduce a sweeping round of legislation that would combat the "explosion" of hate sites on the Internet.' A priority of this legislation is more international enforcement under the Council of Europe's protocol on hate speech. The hate-speech legislation is tied to a bill to reduce trafficing in women and children."

mnewton32 writes "An article in the Vancouver Sun briefly detailed the first satellite-based distribution of a major Hollywood movie. It will be shown on 115 screens at AMC theaters in 27 markets. How long before we can download it on eMule?"

RawCode writes "News about a recent report released by the RCMP suggests that flash mobs could pose a future threat to security. 'Some are aimed at celebrities. Tech-savvy teenaged girls in Britain can quickly spread the word on the whereabouts of Prince William, surrounding him with hundreds of screaming fans. Some are political, organizing protests. Text-messaging was instrumental to organizing public demonstrations in the Phillippines that forced President Joseph Estrada from office'."

Peter writes "The Human-powered helicopter didn't even get off the ground. A team of University of British Columbia engineering students tried to win the $20,000 US prize offered by the American Helicopter Society. Three metres off the ground and hover for a minute was the challenge. But before the rotors were able to produce enough buoyant force they hit each other. More details: Vancouver Sun."

marcopo writes "In response to a 24 year old prize challenge from the American Helicopter Society, a number of engineering students at the University of British Columbia have designed a human powered helicopter. The prize requirements are 3 minutes flight at 3 meters, with only human power, and the team, led by UBC's Mike Georgallis, plans a test flight next Tuesday. The Vancouver Sun also has the story."

canwaf writes "According to the CBC, and the other guys: In a 9-0 decision, Canada's highest court ruled, despite the fact that ISPs provide the means for piracy, they are not liable for what people download. They continue in their decision that Internet access providers are not bound by federal copyright legislation. Coupled with an earlier story on Slashdot, this is a very good thing." Edward Scissorhands was one of many readers to link to the Globe and Mail's article, too.

Reader mks113 writes "Many Canadians living payday to payday have been in for a shock this week. Canada.com along with many other sources is reporting how thousands of customers have been inconvenienced following an unsuccessful software upgrade at the Royal Bank of Canada on Monday. All government employees (including me) in several provinces had their direct deposits delayed by a day or more." RBC has a comment on the mess.

derrickoswald writes "Today's Ottawa Citizen is running a report in the TechWeekly section on the recent open source conference in Toronto organized by U of T's interdisciplinary Knowledge Media Design Institute and last month's Real World Linux trade show. It highlights the extremely poor Extremadura region of Spain's success story using open source to bootstrap themselves technologically. Quotes from FOSS luminaries include: 'Who controls the software, controls life. Well, it had better us. That's the real political meaning of the free software movement,' said Eben Moglen. Open source 'was the default way you built Internet Infrastructure. You wrote code and released it without trying to commercialize and monetize it,' said Brian Behldendorf." Newsforge (also part of OSDN) has a series of reports on the conference: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.

marcot writes "The Canadian National Post has a story on the life of a videogame guidebook writer. I can't work out if it's a dream job or torture." Michael Lummis, the writer in question, "has done about a dozen books for [BradyGames] in the last 18 months", but says that contact with the game's developers "...is finite. They're working 18-hour [days] just like we are." We've previously discussed the pluses and minuses of paper-based 'official' game guides.

myzor writes "This article from the Montreal Gazette reports that a driver got 18 months in jail for speeding that killed a man, after the black box in his car revealed he was going 157 km/h (98 mph) in a 50 km/h zone in downtown Montreal. The recording device, which stores data on how a car is driven in the last five seconds before a collision, showed that four seconds before impact, the driver had the gas pedal to the floor and didn't brake before impact." Reader ergo98 writes "Setting a precedent for the Canadian legal system, a Quebec man was convicted based upon the incriminating evidence found in his own car's black box." The Star also has another article looking at the issues surrounding the data recorder.

TigerNut writes "The Calgary Herald this morning reported on a meteor that was seen over three provinces last night, and is assumed to have impacted in Saskatchewan. It is estimated to have been "the size of a kitchen sink", as reported here"

boochy writes "Are we close to losing our anonymity online in Canada? As Angela Pacienza writes in a National Post article; "The record industry's attempts to sue people who share music online threaten to change the widely held expectation that everyone's anonymous when surfing the Internet, lawyers representing the public interest argued Monday." This is a very interesting article that shows how much the lawyers representing the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic are trying their best to protect our privacy online."

Let's mush a few things together into a nice pink rectangular solid: ipandithurts writes "The FTC Chair Timothy Muris doubts the ability of the "CAN SPAM" law to stop SPAM." ElementCDN writes "The Ottawa Citizen has a story on Bernard Balan the King of Spam. Bernard has closed up shop and moved to cottage country near Huntsville, Ontario." CactusMan writes "CTV (among others) is reporting that a Ontario trio has been named in a suit filed by Yahoo under the new CAN-SPAM legislation. Yahoo is claiming that the father and two sons were 'responsible for sending millions of unsolicited messages to users of the company's e-mail service.'" ilsa writes "According to this AP article, as much as 19% of e-mail sent by commercial entities never reaches its destination. 'Promotions and greeting cards were the types of messages most likely to disappear, the study found.' Although this study may have been intended to be alarming, forgive me for thinking this may not be a bad thing." Reader chrisbtoo responds to an earlier spam story: "In today's story about Spam solutions, monstroyer challenged people to crack the Spam Interceptor Captcha. Turns out it was pretty easy." Finally, we can't fail to mention an attempt at making the world's largest spam musubi.

torok writes "Three Engineering students from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, Canada have developed a laptop alarm complete with remote pager that detects if your laptop is being moved and sounds an alarm. The article is a bit sketchy on details, but it sounds like a cool idea."

scottie2shoes writes "The Edmonton Journal is reporting fascinating research on the role of arctic ice in absorbing carbon dioxide. It seems that (contrary to what was previously thought) arctic ice actually absorbs significant quantites of CO2 and is thus a key player in the 'greenhouse gas game'. So melting the ice caps won't just flood thousands of square miles of land and wipe out thousands of species, now it is is starting to sound serious..."

scottie2shoes writes "The Edmonton Journal is reporting fascinating research on the role of arctic ice in absorbing carbon dioxide. It seems that (contrary to what was previously thought) arctic ice actually absorbs significant quantites of CO2 and is thus a key player in the 'greenhouse gas game'. So melting the ice caps won't just flood thousands of square miles of land and wipe out thousands of species, now it is is starting to sound serious..."

MaximusTheGreat writes "While Hollywood tries to debate how to tackle P2P movie downloads, Bollywood the world's largest film industry has decided to embrace it. This could usher in a new era of legal movie downloads like iTunes for music, as Bollywood, the Indian film industry produces 1000 movies a year and outstrips hollywood by almost 3:1. Theaters worldwide sold some 3.6 billion tickets to Bollywood films last year, compared with Hollywood's 2.6 billion. In revenue terms Bollywood is already larger than the British, Hong Kong, Japanese and Italian movie industry and is growing at a very fast rate."

Lard writes "According to Canada.com, videogame maker Electronic Arts has posted a billboard using ASCII character codes in order to poach programmers away from rival Radical Entertainment's Vancouver offices - 'the billboard is only about 100 metres from [Radical's] head office' and reads 'now hiring' using ASCII, alongside an EA Canada logo. You can check out a better image of the billboard here ."

just___giver writes "The U.S. National Cancer Institute has just decided to fund multiple human clinical studies to test the reovirus. This naturally occuring virus has a remarkable ability to infect and kill cancer cells, without affecting normal, healthy cells. Here is a before and after picture of a terminal patient with an actively growing neck tumour that had failed to respond to conventional treatments. This tumour was eliminated with only a single injection of the Reovirus. Researchers at Oncolytics Biotech have shown that the Reovirus can kill many types of cancer, including breast, prostate, pancreatic and brain tumours. Human clinical trial results indicate that there are no safety concerns and that the reovirus shrinks and even eliminates tumours injected with this virus. Numerous other third party studies show that the reovirus should be an important discovery in the treatment of 2/3 of all human cancers."

Tim writes "Mobilerobotics.org has an editorial accompanying a copy of a letter to one of the teams entering the DARPA Grand Challenge 1 million dollar autonomous vehicle race, in which DARPA admits to underestimating the number of teams that can actually partipate in the actual race. They figure they've only got room for 20 teams, and more than 100 have applied. The writer of the editorial argues that if more than 20 teams can qualify safely and technically, DARPA should have to chose the 20 cheapest financed teams. What should DARPA do to sort out these problems?" CNET News has more on the high turn-out, while DARPA ponders its next step.

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to eWEEK, the National Security Agency (NSA) has picked a commercial solution for its encryption technology needs, instead on relying on its own proprietary code. "The National Security Agency has purchased a license for Certicom Corp.'s elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) system, and plans to make the technology a standard means of securing classified communications. In the case of the NSA deal, the agency wanted to use a 512-bit key for the ECC system. This is the equivalent of an RSA key of 15,360 bits." This summary includes the NIST guidelines for public key sizes and contains more details and links about the ECC technology. Since the announcement, Canadian Press reports that Certicom's shares more than doubled in Toronto."

Tortured Potato writes "The Vancouver Sun reports that bar owners in the area will soon start tracking patrons by photo and driver's license. 'John Teti, chairman of the coalition, said the vote is merely a formality. "We have full backing from our members," Teti said Monday....Once the system is in place, patrons will be asked to stand in front of a camera to have their picture taken and will then swipe their drivers' licence, or possibly show some other form of identification, that will automatically give the establishment the patron's name and age and show if he or she has caused trouble at any other bar on the network.' I'm glad to see that Big Brother is alive and well on the left coast." This is the next step past merely swiping licenses.

GamerBub writes "A chemical protein that appears to prevent Parkinson's Disease has been named Sonic the Hedgehog. According to the National Post."

FreezerJam writes "The Toronto Star is running an article on the 30th anniversary of the launch of the MCM/70, the first personal computer, complete with tape drive and APL programming environment. For those of you checking your timeline, this is over a year before the article on the Altair 8800 was published. Microcomputers? Blame Canada!" There's also a story in the Globe and Mail.

MrZeebo writes "According to this story at Canada.com, the FBI, along with other authorities, have traced the origin of the Sobig worm. The quick timeline: Apparently, an earlier version of the worm installed a backdoor on a home computer in British Columbia. The creator of the worm used this compromised computer to create a Usenet account with Easynews.com in Phoenix, using a stolen credit card. The worm spread from Usenet, and contained the IP addresses of 20 computers to contact on Friday, and to download an unknown program from those computers. Officials were able to take 19 of these computers offline before the mass-download. However, the 20th computer stayed online, and many copies of the worm were able to get the rogue program. Those that did were merely redirected to a porn site, no damage done. However, now infected computers will continue to try and connect to the other 19 every Friday and Sunday until the worm expires on Sept. 10th." Reader muldoonaz points out this brief Reuters story about the investigation, too.

An anonymous user writes, "Most Sun Microsystems employees use Apple when they're not at work. This leaves Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice-president of Sun's software group, hinting at a Sun/Apple partnership." This comes on the heels of Pat Gelsinger, senior VP and chief technology officer of Intel, claiming Apple makes the wrong decisions about CPUs. So it figures Sun, who Intel likely thinks wouldn't know a good processor if it came up and -- um, processed something, would like Macs.

seafortn writes "A Canadian man is claiming he has solved the mystery of the construction of the pyramids - the ancient Egyptians attached curved boards to the building blocks and rolled them into place."

Alex Schmidt writes "A group of Canadian 'amateur' rocketeers successfully launched a 16 1/2 foot rocket to a height of about 5500 feet. The rocket is based on the 'Dauphine' a meteorological rocket from the 1960's. The rocket weighed 300 pounds, stood 16.5 feet high and 21 inches in diameter. The motors generated 2400lbs of thrust. It successfully landed after 3 of 4 parachutes properly deployed."

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Canada.com interview with Xbox head honcho Robbie Bach, which shoots him some wide-ranging and perceptive questions about Microsoft's console strategy. Interesting answers include whether Microsoft wants to get into the handheld console market ("It's like starting a new business...we will focus on making the current Xbox successful."), and their views of Linux for Xbox ("..the numbers are not really that big. It's not a commercial as much as it is an intellectual property issue and we always pursue those.")

torok writes "According to an article at The Edmonton Journal, The University of Calgary is going to start teaching select computer science students to write software viruses in a special new disconnected lab. Will Canada be accused of training the world's next generation of cyber-terrorists... or peacekeepers?"

torok writes "According to an article at The Edmonton Journal, The University of Calgary is going to start teaching select computer science students to write software viruses in a special new disconnected lab. Will Canada be accused of training the world's next generation of cyber-terrorists... or peacekeepers?"

ccparrish writes "'In Calgary until May 20, they belong to an organization known as OpenBSD, a grassroots software movement with historical links to the University of California at Berkeley.'"

Lev13than writes "Canada.com is reporting that some 20,000 Canadians listed "Jedi" as their religion in the last national census (2001). Apparently this is the offshoot of an Internet joke which originated in Australia a few years back. The results are interesting on a couple of levels. While it show that some people may have too much time on their hands, it also raises questions of privacy rights, Internet activism and data integrity. Although it's not statistically significant given Canada's population of 31.5 million, 20,000 lightsabre-wielding census-takers is nothing to sneeze at. StatsCan's full report (with no mention of Jedis) can be found here."

A cheeky writer at Canada's Ottawa Citizen newspaper has written a story about the U.S. State Department's 2002 Patterns of Global Terrorism.

AndroidCat writes "In this story scientists who cracked SARS' genetic code credit the Internet as a key: 'The Internet has had a profound impact on how this data has been shared and how scientists have collaborated.' The Internet has also been useful in containing the outbreak by facilitating online discussion by ER doctors. Not mentioned in the stories is that Toronto researchers who were in quarantine were able to stay in touch. Slashdot has also covered Distributed Computing Attacking SARS. Go Internet!"

SoDaLaS writes "Athlon 3200+ Coming: According to CNET The Athlon 3200+ with a 400MHz FSB is on the way in the next two weeks. It'll be interesting to see how well the processor overclocks at that high of a bus speed...it didn't seem to hamper the new 800MHz FSB Pentium 4, which many people were worried about too."

king of birds writes "The New York Times has an interesting article on the present military use of GPS. While some units have rather modern system that can graphically display locations of other troops, others rely on 10-year-old 5 channel receivers. Kind of odd when I can 12 channels on my civilian model (with admittedly lower spatial accuracy)." aaronvegh writes "From the Canadian Press, a story about how a US infantry division uses a system of transponders and servers to track friendly and enemy units, from the headquarters to inside individual tanks. Talk about total information awareness! No friendlies were harmed in the making of this story."

gsfprez writes "Its been a while ... and strangely, the world almost seemed empty without the constant drumbeat of how Apple is on the verge of going out of business. If you're a fan like i am, then you're in luck, because this Canadian tech journalist didn't get the memo that Apple's been going out of business longer than most tech journalists have been in business. And besides, someone needs to let Robert Thomson know: when writing a story on how Apple is about to die, you have to call them "beleaguered". Come on, that's Tech Journalism 101, people. In any case, he brings up no new points to bolster his argument: he confuses his personal inability to use third-party software that works fine for most of us with legitimate bad third-party support, and uses this to draw his illogical conclusion. Illogical because it's the same reasons/unrealized conclusions that were the staple of tech journalism from 1985-1999."

Makarand writes "Extremely sensitive 'micro-barometers' that measure changes in air pressure caused by infra-sound waves generated by nuclear explosions are used worldwide in nuclear test-ban monitoring systems. Now this same technology is being tested in Colorado, Utah, California and Montana for detecting avalanches using infra-sound techniques and extending the coverage of forecasts. An avalanche slide in addition to being audible to people nearby also generates infra-sounds -- very low frequency sound waves far below the threshold of human hearing -- that can be detected from many kilometres away by micro-barometers. Since the speed of sound is 10 times faster than the speed of an avalanche these detectors might be able to give people enough warning in advance to take cover."