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MikeChino writes A new paper by a group of researchers from Montana State University confirms that life can survive under antarctic ice. Researchers led by John Priscu drilled down into the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and pulled up organisms called Archaea. These organisms survive by converting methane into energy, enabling them to survive where there is no wind or sunlight, buried deep under the ice.

esocid writes "The sun has been laying low for the past couple of years, producing no sunspots and giving a break to satellites. Periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, but this period has gone on longer than usual. The sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, with the next cycle just beginning and expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. Today's sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago, and scientists aren't sure why. In the past, solar physicists observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots, coinciding with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700." (More below.) esocid continues: "The Hinode, a Japanese satellite mission with the US and UK as partners, has three telescopes that together show how changes on the sun's surface spread through the solar atmosphere. It orbits 431 miles (694 km) above the Earth, crossing both poles and making one lap every 95 minutes, giving Hinode an uninterrupted view of the sun for several months out of the year. Scientists are not extremely worried, but have added extra ground stations in case of interference from extra solar activity, and are ready for the Sun to resume its activity." (The Little Ice Age is fascinating, full stop.)

Neal Richter sent us this story and says "Netscape may be cutting off Mozilla.org to insulate them from legal accountability for a rouge open source programmer using patented code. "

James Renken wrote in to tell us about a humorous ZD articles revolving around the destruction of those annoying office assistants. Death to Clippy! Brett Taylor wrote in to say that the October issue of Daemon News, a BSD based ezine, is now out. Bill Kilgallon sent in a link to what is unquestionably the Ultimate PalmPilot Case. And lastly, several folks wrote in to tell us that ZD now has something they call "the ultimate linux resource". Hit the link to read some notes about moderation as well as comments about future direction of Slashdot content) Ok lately, a huge number of purely Linux news items have been popping up. Slashdot can't run them all, but many of them deserve reporting. Is it worth creating another section on Slashdot which is purely Linux news? It wouldn't have any real effect on Slashdot, but it would provide a forum for the Linux news that doesn't make it on Slashdot. It also would be nice for those folks who don't care about geek humor, or the latest web CGI that slangifies a URL...

We can actually create a few of these systems, and many have been suggested lately. Several people asked for a section simply on Open Source Advocacy. We're already running Ask Slashdot in a seperate section now, is it worth doing a few more of these?

The way I see it, Slashdot will still feature the same content, but it can select it from these other sections as appropriate. Then I can make the BSD crowd happy as well as the Linux crowd. Eventually filters will be available for you to select your own mix of content. That'll be pretty excellent.

As for moderation, well, I wrote most of the moderation code yesterday. I'll start testing it with a small group of moderators some time next week. Don't email and ask for the job! The system is pretty cool. I think it's an excellent compromise of ideas that will prevent Moderator Abuse, won't take anyone a lot of time, and will allow everyone to determine how much they want to read. So if you don't want moderation, you'll just set your threshold really low, and you'll see everything just as you do now. I've got a general description of the system if you're interested in abit more details. Hopefully in the next week or 2 it'll be fully live.

I still haven't released Slash v0.3. I had some technical difficulties, so I wrote the moderation code while waiting for a test server to be usable. Still hasn't happened, so maybe I'll write some more Slash customization stuff next week :) Or maybe start planning for ALS.

Random Personal Aside #1:I installed and went through Gnome 0.3 lately. I find the panel stuff combined with Window Maker to be a quite nice combo. I just wish the .deb's for balsa, eeyes and the help stuff weren't randomly crashing. I also wish I had infinite bandwidth so I could just download the source. Oh, and infinite CPU and diskspace so I could compile and run these beasts. Gnome needs a better looking battery monitor, and my ePlus days are calling out to me.

Random Personal Aside #2: I saw Antz & Pi today. If people want a review of Antz, email and if there is some demand I'll write it. I also have to shoot a lot of film, finish a project for my design class, as well as write some code for an epoc32 this weekend for a class though, so it may fall off the bottom of the TODO.