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Earth

Airplanes Unexpectedly Modify Weather 223

Posted by timothy from the send-me-some-snow-planes dept.
reillymj writes "Commercial airliners have a strange ability to create rain and snow when they fly through certain clouds. Scientists have known for some time that planes can make outlandish 'hole-punch' and 'canal' features in clouds. A new study has found that these odd formations are in fact evidence that planes are seeding clouds and changing local weather patterns as they fly through. In one case, researchers noted that a plane triggered several inches of snowfall directly beneath its flight path."
Crime

Police Officers Seek Right Not To Be Recorded 1123

Posted by kdawson from the ain't-nobody's-bidness-if-we-do dept.
linzeal writes "When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop. Judges, juries, and legislatures support the police overwhelmingly on this issue, with only a few cases where those accused of 'shooting' the cops being vindicated through the courts."
Biotech

First Superbugs, Now Superweeds 435

Posted by Soulskill from the as-long-as-there-are-no-supersharks-we're-ok dept.
Finxray writes "Years of heavy use of the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup has led to the rapid growth of superweeds. They are spreading throughout North America, creating headaches for farmers and posing 'the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,' according to Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts. From the article: 'The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn. The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds."
Government

Mandatory Use of Open Standards In Hungary 163

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the you'll-be-open-and-like-it dept.
qpeter writes "Hungarian Parliament has made the use of open standards mandatory by law in the intercommunication between public administration offices, public utility companies, citizens and voluntarily joining private companies, conducted via the central governmental system. The Open Standards Alliance initiating the amendment aims to promote the spread of monopoly-free markets that foster the development of interchangeable and interoperable products generated by open standards, and, consequently, broad competition markets, regardless of whether the IT systems of interconnecting organizations and individuals use open or closed source software. In the near future, in spite of EU tendencies the Alliance seeks to make its approach – interoperability based on publicly defined open standards – the EU norm under the Hungarian presidency of the European Union in 2011. To that end, it will promote public collaboration – possibly between every interested party, civil and political organization in the European Union. What do you think: what would be the best way to cooperate?"
Technology

Not Enough Women In Computing, Or Too Many Men? 686

Posted by timothy from the rational-choices dept.
itwbennett writes "Do geeks really 'drive girls out of computer science,' as the headline of a LiveScience article contends? Blogger Cameron Laird doesn't think so. In fact, 'I don't think "gender issues in computing" is important enough to merit the attention it gets,' says Laird in a recent post. And maybe the problem isn't that there are too few women in computing, but that there are too many men. 'I'm waiting to read the headline: "Women too smart for careers with computers,"' says Laird, 'where another researcher concludes that only "boys" are stupid enough to go into a field that's globally-fungible, where entry-level salaries are declining, and it's common to think that staying up all night for a company-paid pizza is a good deal.'"

Comment Re:Data thrown away (Score 1) 736

by Dude McDude (#30334824) Attached to: Scientific Journal <em>Nature</em> Finds Nothing Notable In CRU Leak

You realize that them throwing the data away was done for the same reasons the BBC tossed out all those videos and films of old shows -- to save space. "

There's a bit of a difference between throwing out old episodes of Dad's Army and throwing away data that's supposedly helping to prove that man is causing global warming.
The Internet

Contributors Leaving Wikipedia In Record Numbers 632

Posted by CmdrTaco from the three-phases-of-web-sites dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "CNET reports that the volunteers who create Wikipedia's pages, check facts and adapt the site are abandoning Wikipedia in unprecedented numbers, with tens of thousands of editors going 'dead' — no longer actively contributing and updating the site — a trend many experts believe could threaten Wikipedia's future. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language version of Wikipedia suffered a net loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period in 2008. 'If you don't have enough people to take care of the project it could vanish quickly,' says Felipe Ortega at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, who created a computer system to analyze the editing history of more than three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages. 'We're not in that situation yet. But eventually, if the negative trends follow, we could be in that situation.' Contributors are becoming disenchanted with the process of adding to the site, which is becoming increasingly difficult says Andrew Dalby, author of The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality and a regular editor of the site. 'There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules. Wikipedia grew because of the lack of rules. That has been forgotten. The rules are regarded as irritating and useless by many contributors.' Arguments over various articles have also taken their toll. 'Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again,' adds Ortega."
Cellphones

Wikileaks Publishes 500,000 9/11 Pager Messages 309

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hindsight-and-voyeurism dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks is preparing to release 500,000 intercepted pager messages from a 24-hour period encompassing the September 11 terrorist attacks. The messages show emergency services springing into action and computer systems sending automated messages as buildings collapse. Wikileaks implies this data came from an organised collection effort."

Comment Re:Whichever moron tagged this as "irrelevant"... (Score 2, Funny) 267

by Dude McDude (#29993798) Attached to: Mandriva Linux 2010 Is Finally Out

I'm fed up with Ubuntu users. If it was just your obscenity of a distribution that was a problem, I could cope with simply not using it. That isn't my biggest issue, however. You insist on lying and engaging in denial about everything that is wrong with it, and suppressing complaint about said problems in any way you can. I know how this post is immediately headed for -1, and the reason given doesn't matter at all, does it?

Well fucking said! *applauds* Ubuntu users are the Scientologists of the OSS world.
Biotech

Evolution's Path May Lead To Shorter, Heavier Women 411

Posted by kdawson from the short-but-neither-brutish-nor-nasty dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Yale University researchers believe that if evolutionary pressures of sexual selection and reproductive fitness continue for another 10 generations, the trends detected in their study may mean that the average woman in 2409 AD will be 2 cm shorter, 1 kg heavier, will bear her first child five months earlier, and enter menopause 10 months later. 'There is this idea that because medicine has been so good at reducing mortality rates, that means that natural selection is no longer operating in humans,' says Stephen Stearns of Yale University. 'That's just plain false.' Stearns and his team studied the medical histories of 14,000 residents of the Massachusetts town of Framingham, using medical data from a study going back to 1948 spanning three generations, and found that shorter, heavier women had more children than lighter, taller ones. Women with lower blood pressure and cholesterol were also more likely to have large families as were women who gave birth early or had a late menopause. More importantly, these traits are then passed on to their daughters, who also, on average, had more children. The study has not determined why these factors are linked to reproductive success, but it is likely that they indicate genetic, rather than environmental, effects. 'The evolution that's going on in the Framingham women is like average rates of evolution measured in other plants and animals,' says Stearns. 'These results place humans in the medium-to-slow end of the range of rates observed for other living things.'"
Software

Sneak Preview of New OpenOffice 3.2 377

Posted by timothy from the an-org-y-of-improvements dept.
omlx writes 'The last developer milestone (DEV300m60) of OpenOffice.org has been released. The next version of OpenOffice.org 3.2 has more than 42 features and 167 enhancements . The final version is expected to be available at the end of November 2009. Many companies have contributed to this version, like RedHat, RedFlag and IBM, making OpenOffice more stable and useful. I couldn't stop myself from seeing new features and enjoying them. So I downloaded the DEV300m60 version. After playing with it for many days I could say that OpenOffice developers have done very good work in it. Well done!"

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