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Comment Re:Life fills a space defined by its environment (Score 4, Insightful) 238

Despite the BBC article's title and the slashdot summary, this story is not about whether *life* evolved twice---it's about whether *animals* evolved twice. The issue here is that they have discovered relatively complex sponge-like organisms before a catastrophic event (snowball earth). This means either that 1) snowball earth wasn't that bad, didn't kill them off, and more complex animals (including us) might have evolved from them or 2) it killed them off, and animals evolved a second time once it was over.
Censorship

Submission + - Bush takes over federal science (pressesc.com)

amigoro writes: "Through an Executive Order that gives political appointees final say regarding science-based federal agency regulations and the appointment of an anti-educationist to head the Office of Management and Budget, US President George W. Bush is attempting to insulate his administration from congressional accountability while effectively turning federal scientists into White House puppets, a group of scientists warned today."
Media

Submission + - UK rejects lengthening of copyright (yahoo.com)

timrichardson writes: The British Government has rejected extending copyright for sound recordings. This is an important development in the face of trends to extend copyright duration, although it leaves British copyright protection for music recordings at a shorter duration than for written works. The decision was despite fierce lobbying from the large British music industry. The music industry will now lobby direct to the European Commission, but without the support of the national government, its position is significantly weakened. British copyright for music recordings therefore remains at 50 years after the death of the artist, in contrast to 95 years in the US and 70 years in Australia.
The Courts

Submission + - Court convicts Skype for breaching GPL

terber writes: In Munich a German court once again upheld the GPL2 and convicted Skype (based in Luxembourg) of violating GPL by selling the Linux-based VoIP phone "SMCWSKP 100" without proper source code access. Skype later on added a flyer to the phones with an URL where to obtain the sources, but the court found this insufficient as this was in breach of GPL section 3. Plaintiff was once again Netfilter developer Harald Welte, who runs http://gpl-violations.org/. The decision is currently only available in German at http://www.ifross.de./ News source (German): www.golem.de/0707/53684.html
Security

Submission + - Attackers Gain Full Control of iPhone

i_like_spam writes: The NYTimes is running a story about an iPhone flaw that has been found and documented by researchers from Independent Security Evaluators. Attackers were able to gain full control of the iPhone either through WiFi or by visiting a website with malicious code. The exploit will be demostrated at BlackHat on Aug. 2nd at 4:45pm. Until then,

Details on the vulnerability, but not a step-by-step guide to hacking the phone, can be found at www.exploitingiphone.com, which the researchers said would be unveiled today.
United States

Submission + - Robot aircraft crush worldwide enemies - from Nev. (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: "The first unmanned attack squadron in aviation history will arrive in Iraq today looking to deliver 500-pound bombs and Hellfire missiles to the enemy — all from the comfort of a US Air Force base in Nevada. The General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper can be controlled via satellite link thousands of miles away from operational areas. The planes are launched locally, in this case Iraq and Afghanistan, but can be controlled by a pilot and sensor operator sitting at computer consoles in a ground station, or they can be "handed off" via satellite signals to pilots and sensor operators in Nevada's Creech Air Force Base or elsewhere. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1756 0"
User Journal

Journal Journal: "Extinct" Coelacanth caught in Zanzibar

From Reuters: Fishermen in Zanzibar have caught a coelacanth, an ancient fish once thought to have become extinct when it disappeared from fossil records 80 million years ago, an official said on Sunday.

Researcher Nariman Jidawi of Zanzibar's Institute of Marine Science said the fish was caught off the tropical island's northern tip.
Bug

Apple Safari On Windows Broken On First Day 595

An anonymous reader writes "David Maynor, infamous for the Apple Wi-Fi hack, has discovered bugs in the Windows version of Safari mere hours after it was released. He notes in the blog that his company does not report vulnerabilities to Apple. His claimed catch for 'an afternoon of idle futzing': 4 DoS bugs and 2 remote execution vulnerabilities." Separately, within 2 hours Thor Larholm found a URL protocol handler command injection vulnerability that allows remote command execution.
Wireless Networking

How Bad Can Wi-fi Be? 434

An anonymous reader writes "Sunday night in the UK, the BBC broadcast an alarmist Panorama news programme that suggested wireless networking might be damaging our health. Their evidence? Well, they admitted there wasn't any, but they made liberal use of the word 'radiation', along with scary graphics of pulsating wifi base stations. They rounded-up a handful of worried scientists, but ignored the majority of those who believe wifi is perfectly harmless. Some quotes from the BBC News website companion piece: 'The radiation Wi-Fi emits is similar to that from mobile phone masts ... children's skulls are thinner and still forming and tests have shown they absorb more radiation than adults'. What's the science here? Can skulls really 'absorb' EM radiation? The wifi signal is in the same part of the EM spectrum as cellphones but it's not 'similar' to mobile phone masts, is it? Isn't a phone mast several hundred/thousand times stronger? Wasn't safety considered when they drew up the 802.11 specs?"
User Journal

Journal Journal: Is Microsoft actively astroturfing slashdot? 3

Could Microsoft be actively astroturfing slashdot? When a discussion starts with an offhand comment laughing at an MS Products' supposed security and ends with attacks on Apache and Linux you really start to wonder.

Businesses

Journal Journal: High Court Puts Limits on Patents

The Most Frequently emaied article from the NYT : The Supreme Court, in its most important patent ruling in years, on Monday raised the bar for obtaining patents on new products that combine elements of pre-existing inventions. If the combination results from nothing more than "ordinary innovation" and "does no more than yield predictable results," the court said in a unanimous opinion, it is not entitled to the exclusive rights that patent protection conveys. "Were it otherwise," Justice Anth

Feed The Growth Of The Pirate Bay As A Political Movement (techdirt.com)

Tim Lee points us to an LA Times article on the growing success of The Pirate Bay's political movement, noting that its membership is growing in Sweden and is nearly equal to that of the country's Green Party. This is ironic for a few reasons -- most of all being that the entertainment industry was so proud over the raids on the Pirate Bay's servers last year, insisting that it had killed off the site. Instead, the site was back up in days, and the attention propelled what had been a fairly minor search engine for BitTorrent trackers into the limelight -- helping to get it many more users and to get the political movement some traction. In fact, we've now seen other political parties take on some of the Pirate Bay's platform. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. I don't support the Pirate Bay's position that unauthorized downloads are defensible. Instead, I think that copyright holders need to come to the realization that they're actually better off by letting people download content -- not that it needs to be forced upon them by users taking matters into their own hands. That said, by taking such an extreme position (and having it get some attention), perhaps it's more likely that content holders will come to this realization. They'll simply be forced to adapt and will start coming up with more successful business models that actually benefit from free downloads rather than trying to block them and sue their best customers.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft announces CLR will be cross-platform

axlrosen writes: "The biggest Mix '07 announcement made on opening day of this week's show was one that Microsoft didn't call out in any of its own press releases: Microsoft is making a version of its Common Language Runtime (CLR) available cross-platform. The CLR is the heart of Microsoft's .Net Framework programming model. So, by association, the .Net Framework isn't just for Windows any more.

More here."

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