Top Stories

  • Fans must register for Jackson memorial tickets
    Fans wishing to attend singer Michael Jackson's memorial service next week will have to register for the 11,000 free tickets, organizers said Thursday. The 20,000-seat Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, will host the memorial service on Tuesday.
  • Lone survivor of 1971 crash fell 2 miles
    A Lockheed Electra turboprop flying over the Amazon rainforest on Christmas Eve in 1971 broke into pieces in midair, thrusting 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke into a free fall. She dropped 2 miles into the jungle canopy but survived with only minor injuries; the 91 other people on board died. With search crews unable to locate the site, her ordeal was far from over.
  • Attacks, arrests slowing online news from Iran
    Bloody attacks and midnight arrests, combined with a regime growing more tech savvy, have begun to stem the online information flow from dissidents in Iran, activists and human rights officials say. Once emboldened by an ability to dodge the government and spread news, many in the youth-driven protest movement, they say, now fear the consequences.
  • Ex-VP accuses insurer of 'purging' customers
    Wendell Potter says he is finished defending the insurance industry, which he says is "beholden to Wall Street."
  • MySpace suicide case 'tentatively' overturned
    A federal judge tentatively overturned the conviction of a Missouri woman accused of using MySpace to deceive a teenage girl who eventually committed suicide, a U.S. attorney's spokesman told CNN.
  • Judge admonished for explicit items on Web site
    A judicial council on Thursday admonished the chief judge of the nation's largest federal appeals court for having "sexually explicit photos and videos" on his personal Web site, but decided against any further punishment.
  • Air France jet 'went straight down,' report says
    The Air France plane that crashed last month with 228 people aboard "did not break up or become destroyed in flight," the French air investigation agency announced today. "The plane went straight down," investigator Alain Bouillard said.
  • Captured U.S. soldier reportedly sold to clan
    A U.S. soldier has been captured by militants in Afghanistan, the U.S. military and the Taliban said Thursday.
  • FBI talks detail Saddam's Iran fear, WMD bluff
    In 2004, even after being captured by U.S. forces, Saddam Hussein told an FBI interrogator he believed Iran was a greater threat to Iraq than the United States, according to newly released FBI documents.
  • Commentary: Obama meets match in Russia?
    Barack Obama often seems to have much of the planet at his feet in rapt attention to his every word.

 


Slashdot!

  • HTML Tags For Academic Printing?
    meketrefi writes "It's been quite a while since I got interested in the idea of using html (instead of .doc. or .odf) as a standard for saving documents — including the more official ones like academic papers. The problem is using HTML to create pages with a stable size that would deal with bibliographical references, page breaks, different printers, etc. Does anyone think it is possible to develop a decent tag like 'div,' but called 'page,' specially for this? Something that would make no use of CSS? Maybe something with attributes as follows: {page size="A4" borders="2.5cm,2.5cm,2cm,2cm" page_numbering="bottomleft,startfrom0"} — You get the idea... { /page} I guess you would not be able to tell when the page would be full, so the browser would have to be in charge of breaking the content into multiple pages when needed. Bibliographical references would probably need a special tag as well, positioned inside the tag ..." Is this such a crazy idea? What would you advise?

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  • Microsoft Changing Users' Default Search Engine
    BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."

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  • DOJ Confirms Google Antitrust Investigation
    An anonymous reader points to Digital Daily, writing "Looks like the fireworks have begun early in Mountain View. On Thursday afternoon, the Department of Justice officially notified Google that it is investigating its book deal for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act."

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  • Enthusiasts Convene To Say No To SQL, Hash Out New DB Breed
    ericatcw writes "The inaugural NoSQL meet-up in San Francisco during last month's Yahoo! Apache Hadoop Summit had a whiff of revolution about it, like a latter-day techie version of the American Patriots planning the Boston Tea Party. Like the Patriots, who rebelled against Britain's heavy taxes, NoSQLers came to share how they had overthrown the tyranny of burdensome, expensive relational databases in favor of more efficient and cheaper ways of managing data, reports Computerworld."

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  • First Fully Programmable Gesture-Recognition Glove, Cheap
    Al writes "The AcceleGlove from AnthroTronix, is the first fully programmable glove that records hand and finger movements. Other gloves — like 5DT's Data Glove, which is used primarily in virtual reality — normally cost $1,000 to $5,000, but the AcceleGlove costs just $499. The AcceleGlove comes with software that lets developers use Java to program it for any application they wish. AnthroTronix initially developed the glove with the US Department of Defense for robotic control but it could also be used in video games, sports training, or physical rehabilitation."

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  • Judge Tentatively Dismisses Case Against Lori Drew
    An anonymous reader writes "According to Wired, 'A federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, and issued a directed acquittal on the three misdemeanor charges.'" A similar story in the L.A. Times notes that "The decision by US District Judge George H. Wu will not become final until his written ruling is filed, probably next week." Update: 07/02 21:15 GMT by T : For those not following, Lori Drew's three convictions sprang from charges of online harassment of Megan Meier, a Missouri teenager whose suicide was linked to Drew's actions.

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  • 200-Year-Old Cipher Finally Cracked
    Attila Dimedici writes "A code expert just cracked a code used by a friend of Thomas Jefferson in a letter written to Jefferson some 200 years ago. This code is fairly easy to crack using a computer, but extremely difficult without one. I think it would have been much harder if the author had not included an indication as to what code algorithm he used in the letter accompanying the coded message."

    Read more of this story at Slashdot.


  • HIV/AIDS Vaccine To Begin Phase I Human Trials
    An anonymous reader writes "An HIV/AIDS vaccine developed in Ontario has applied for Phase 1 human trials. Safety and immunogenicity studies of the vaccine, dubbed SAV001-H, have already been completed on animals. Phase 1 human trials will check the safety of the vaccine on HIV positive volunteers. Phase 2 will then test immunogenicity."

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  • Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs
    snydeq writes "Major browser vendors have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, forcing the W3C to drop audio and video codecs from HTML 5, the forthcoming W3C spec that has been viewed as a threat to Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions on the situation, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' HTML 5 editor Ian Hickson wrote to the whatwg mailing list. Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>."

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  • The Essentials of RPG Design
    simoniker writes "As the latest in his Game Design Essentials series for Gamasutra, writer John Harris examines 10 games from the Western computer RPG (CRPG) tradition and 10 from the Japanese console RPG (JRPG) tradition, to figure out what exactly makes them tick. From the entry on Nethack: 'Gaining experience is supposed to carry the risk of harm and failure. Without that risk, gaining power becomes a foregone conclusion. It has reached the point where the mere act of spending time playing [most RPGs] appears to give players the right to have their characters become more powerful. The obstacles that provide experience become simply an arbitrary wall to scale before more power is granted; this, in a nutshell, is the type of play that has brought us grind, where the journey is simple and boring and the destination is something to be raced to. Nethack and many other roguelikes do feature experience gain, but it doesn't feel like grind. It doesn't because much of the time the player is gaining experience, he is in danger of sudden, catastrophic failure. When you're frequently a heartbeat away from death, it's difficult to become bored.' Harris' Game Design series has previously spanned subjects from mysterious games to open world games, unusual control schemes and difficult games."

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