All Things News

Straight from NASA: “After six weeks of hunkering down during raging dust storms that limited solar power, both of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have resumed driving.

Opportunity advanced 13.38 meters (44 feet) toward the edge of Victoria Crater on Aug. 21. Mission controllers were taking advantage of gradual clearing of dust from the sky while also taking precautions against buildup of dust settling onto the rover.

“Weather and power conditions continue to improve, although very slowly for both rovers,” said John Callas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif, project manager for the rovers. With the improved energy supplies, both rovers are back on schedule to communicate daily. Opportunity had previously been conserving energy by going three or four days between communications. “

Straight from Fox News: “A patrol of U.S. soldiers was so close to stumbling on Usama bin Laden’s mountain hideout along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border during the winter of 2004-05 that his bodyguards considered killing the terror architect and then themselves, according to a report published in the Sept. 3 issue of Newsweek.

A sentry spotted the patrol and radioed an alert to bin Laden’s 40-man shield who were prepared to move “the Sheik” — as bin Laden is known to his followers — to another location, Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Al Qaeda operative, told the magazine.

But the patrol was so close to the hideout that bodyguards were close to using the code word to kill bin Laden and then commit suicide, Newsweek reported.

According to Said, bin Laden had decreed that he would never be captured.

“If there’s a 99 percent risk of the Sheik’s being captured, he told his men that they should all die and martyr him as well,” Said told Omar Farooqi, described by Newsweek as a Taliban liaison officer to Al Qaeda.

The secret word was never uttered, and the U.S. troops eventually moved in a different direction, the magazine reported.”

Straight from Fox News: “The University of Vermont’s big new student center doesn’t just have women’s bathrooms and men’s bathrooms.

It also has gender-neutral bathrooms, a feature added to accommodate transgendered people, as well as those with some disabilities. The four single bathrooms in the new Dudley H. Davis Center — each with a toilet, sink, shower and lockable door — cost about $2,500 a piece to build. Their wall signs identify each as “gender neutral restroom.”

“It’s about inclusivity and accessibility and the importance of meeting all people’s needs, not just a few,” said Annie Stevens, assistant vice president for student and campus life.

UVM isn’t the only school trying to make its accommodations more accommodating.

At least 17 colleges and universities have included gender-neutral bathrooms in their new construction or in retrofitting residence halls, said Stephanie Gordon, director of educational programs at the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators.”

Straight from Fox News: “After killing off its Mickey Mouse-lookalike, Hamas has turned to another Disneyesque character — televising a cartoon with a “Lion King” wannabe to portray the Islamic group’s victory in the Gaza Strip over the Fatah movement.

The cartoon depicts Fatah members as sneaky rats, brandishing guns and being showered with U.S. dollars, while Hamas is portrayed as a confident, calm lion that resembles Simba in the 1994 Walt Disney Co. movie “The Lion King.”

The five-minute video, titled “A message to the criminal gangs in the occupied West Bank,” is the second production of the Hamas-run Al Aqsa TV enlisting a famous Disney character.”

Straight from Yahoo News: “Venezuela’s National Assembly, dominated by allies of President Hugo Chavez, gave unanimous initial approval Tuesday to constitutional reforms that would allow him to run for re-election and possibly govern for decades to come.

Assembly President Cilia Flores said Chavez’s proposed changes to the constitution, including the lifting of presidential term limits, were approved by all 167 lawmakers after about six hours of debate.

Final approval is expected within two or three months, and voters will then decide whether to approve the changes in a referendum.

The assembly has been solidly pro-Chavez since the opposition boycotted a 2005 vote and had been expected to sign off on the changes proposed by Chavez in Tuesday’s first reading. The reforms, if approved, would extend presidential terms from six to seven years and allow Chavez to run again in 2013.”

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Straight from ESPN: “You can question the wisdom of building a franchise around a guy who had never grown into a star passer. You can question the wisdom of building a franchise around a guy who had never grown into a fully responsible adult. But Vick’s immense talent made him worth the gamble.

So the Falcons went and got a fourth head coach to try to make him into the millennial superstar he seemed destined to be. They paid quarterback savant Bobby Petrino (who follows Dan Reeves, interim Wade Phillips and Jim Mora) a jillion bucks to come in and tailor an offense around Vick. They committed so strongly to Vick, they sent their talented backup, Matt Schaub, to Houston.

And then it all blew up.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “At the time, nobody had ever designed a personal computer this way. Most personal computers, such as the IBM PC and the Apple ][, had no custom chips inside them. All they consisted of was a simple motherboard that defined the connections between the CPU, the memory chips, the input/output bus, and the display. Such motherboards could be designed on paper and printed directly to a circuit board, ready to be filled with off-the-shelf chips. Some, like the prototypes for the Apple ][, were designed by a single person (in this case, Steve Wozniak) and manufactured by hand. The Amiga was nothing like this. Its closest comparison would be to the minicomputers of the day—giant, refrigerator-sized machines like the DEC PDP-11 and VAX or the Data General Eagle. These machines were designed and prototyped on giant breadboards by a team of skilled engineers. Each one was different and had to be designed from scratch—although to be fair, the minicomputer engineers had to design the CPU as well, a considerable effort all by itself! These minicomputers sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars each, which paid for the salaries of all the engineers required to construct them. The Amiga team had to do the same thing, but for a computer that would ultimately be sold for under $2,000."

Straight from Ars Technica: “Former AllOfMP3 exec Denis Kvasov was found not guilty of copyright infringement in a Russian court today. The trial, which has run for the last several months, was the first time that an AllOfMP3 employee had been charged in court, and the verdict might make it more difficult to charge others associated with the company in the future. Or it might not. The Associated Press coverage of the event is derived largely from Igor Pozhitkov, the IFPI’s Russian representative. He told the wire service that the issue in this case was that Kvasov stepped down from Mediaservices, the company behind AllOfMP3, in late 2005. Russia did not update its copyright laws regarding digital downloads until 2006, and until that happened, the site was apparently legal in Russia.

If true, it suggests that current Mediaservices employees could still be prosecuted under the revised law.

Whatever its implications for legal action against the company and its officers, the not-guilty ruling certainly comes as a public relations blow to IFPI’s high-profile campaign to shutter AllOfMP3.

The American branch of the recording industry, the RIAA, is still pursuing a case against the company in a New York federal court. The record companies initially requested a default judgment after no lawyer representing Mediaservices responded to the case, but Zuckerman Gore & Brandeis of New York have now stepped in and the case is moving (slowly) forward as the parties argue about whether Mediaservices was properly served with court papers under the Hague conventions.

Meanwhile, AllOfMP3 appears to have simply swapped its domain (which is now down) for MP3sparks.com. The new site no longer mentions Mediaservices and actually provides a street address (#28 unit 1), but functionality is identical. As of this writing, the site remains accessible.”

Straight from the Guardian Unlimited: “News agency Reuters has been forced to admit that footage it released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually came from the movie Titanic.The images were reproduced around the world – including by the Guardian and Guardian Unlimited – alongside the story of Russia planting its flag below the North Pole on Thursday last week.

But it has now emerged that the footage actually showed two Finnish-made Mir submersibles that were employed on location filming at the scene of the wreck of the RMS Titanic ship in the north Atlantic some 10 years ago.

This footage was used in sequences in James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster about the 1912 disaster.

The mistake was only revealed after a 13-year-old Finnish schoolboy contacted a local newspaper to tell them the images looked identical to those used in the movie.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Why do humans need to explore and colonize space? To save the planet and our species, argues an opinion piece in Cosmos, an Aussie science magazine. It makes some good points from an angle you may not have previously considered; for example, it’s in the universe’s best interest to keep us around. We make things fun. ‘So what if humans pass into history? It’s not just a tragedy for us, but also one for nature. Without us, there is no one to witness its infinite beauty; no one to marvel at a sunset, revel in a view, or thrill to the breaking of a wave on a beach. As the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan once said, “we are a way for the universe to know itself”. But we also deserve to continue because we have created things greater than ourselves. Not only scientific and engineering knowledge, valuable as this is — we have also created new and beautiful ways to see the world through art, music, literature and performance.’”

Straight from Ars Technica: “The scene at RIAA headquarters this week must have been fascinating. The group yesterday announced that it has finished sending out a new batch of 503 “pre-litigation letters” to 58 different universities around the US, generously offering to let students settle copyright infringement claims “at a discounted rate” before those claims go to trial. The letters blanketed the country, going everywhere from the University of Hawaii to Swarthmore, from Boston College to Tulane, from Emory to Chico State. And then the RIAA learned that its aggressive litigation tactics have placed it on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit. Single mom Tanya Andersen, a defendant in a previous lawsuit brought by the RIAA, was one of the first to have her case dismissed with prejudice (it cannot be refiled at a later date). Throughout the court battle, she maintained her total innocence, a claim given even more plausibility by the fact that she was charged with downloading numerous gangsta rap tracks.

After the case was dismissed, Andersen then sued the RIAA for malicious prosecution, and her attorney filed court documents in an Oregon federal court on Wednesday that seek to elevate the case to class action status.

The development, first reported by p2pnet, hopes to make a class out of those “who were sued or were threatened with sued by Defendants for file-sharing, downloading or other similar activities, who have not actually engaged in actual copyright infringement.” In other words, a class of the innocent. In the complaint, Andersen alleges that the RIAA “has engaged in a coordinated enterprise to pursue a scheme of threatening and intimidating litigation in an attempt to maintain its music distribution monopoly.”"

Straight from Ars Technica: “Yet another dustup is brewing between the RIAA and exonerated former defendant Debbie Foster over the issue of attorneys’ fees. Foster had been awarded over $68,000 in attorney’s fees after the RIAA’s case against her was dismissed. So far, she’s having a hard time getting the record labels to pay up, and she’s now seeking an order forcing the RIAA to post a $210,000 security bond according to the Recording Industry vs. The People blog. Earlier this week, Foster filed a motion for entry of judgment, noting that the RIAA had failed to pay up during the 30 days that had elapsed since the award. The RIAA filed a reply saying that it has no objection to the official entry of judgment, but also noted that it would not relinquish its right to appeal the attorneys’ fees awards.

Debbie Foster was originally sued by the RIAA for file-sharing in 2004. She denied ever engaging in uploading and downloading music, and the RIAA eventually targeted her daughter. Unfortunately for Debbie Foster, the RIAA also tried to hang charges of secondary infringement on her, arguing that she was also culpable for any copyright infringement because the ISP account allegedly used for the infringement was in her name.

The judge didn’t buy the RIAA’s argument, and the case was dismissed with prejudice. That made Foster the prevailing party and eligible to be reimbursed for attorneys’ fees.”

Straight from Slashdot: “NASA astronomers held a press conference announcing that a new ultraviolet mosaic from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows a speeding star named Mira that’s leaving an enormous trail of “seeds” for new solar systems. Mira is traveling faster than a speeding bullet, and has a tail that’s 13 light-years long and over 30,000 years old. The website has images and a replay of the teleconference.”

Straight from Science Daily: “Life on earth is organic. It is composed of organic molecules, which are simply the compounds of carbon, excluding carbonates and carbon dioxide. The idea that particles of inorganic dust may take on a life of their own is nothing short of alien, going beyond the silicon-based life forms favoured by some science fiction stories.

Now, an international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organised into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.

…

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbors and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve.”"

Straight from Ars Technica: “Game consoles and personal computers are not all that different on the inside. Both use a central processing unit as their main engine (the Apple ][, Commodore 64, and the Atari 400/800 all used the same 6502 CPU that powered the original Nintendo and Sega consoles). Both allow user input (keyboards and mice on computers, joysticks and game pads on consoles) and both output to a graphical display device (either a monitor or a TV). The main difference is in user interaction. Gaming consoles do one thing only—play games—whereas personal computers also allow users to write letters, balance finances and even enter their own customized programs. Computers cost more, but they also do more. It was not too much of a stretch to imagine the new Hi-Toro console being optionally expandable to a full computer. However, the investors weren’t likely to see things that way. They wanted to make money, and at the time the money in video games dwarfed the money in personal computers. Jay and his colleagues agreed that they would design the new piece of hardware to look like a games unit, with the option of expansion into a full computer cleverly hidden.

This was one of those decisions that, in retrospect, seems incredibly prescient. At the time, it was merely practical—the investors wanted a game console, the new company needed Jay Miner, and Jay wanted to design a new computer. This compromise allowed everyone to get what they wanted. But events were transpiring that would make this decision not only beneficial, but necessary for the survival of the company.”

Straight from Slashdot: “The theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid impact, the K-T extinction, is well known and supported by fossil and geological evidence. Asteroid impact theory does not apply to the other fluctuations in biodiversity, however, which follow an approximate 62 million-year cycle. As reported in Science news, a new theory seems to explain periodic mass extinctions. The new theory found that oscillations in the Sun relative to the plane of the Milky Way correlate with changes in biodiversity on Earth. The researchers suggest that an increase in the exposure of Earth to extragalactic cosmic rays causes mass extinctions. The original paper describing the findings is available online.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, Federal Custom’s Agents have raided over 30 homes and businesses looking to confiscate so-called ‘mod chips’, or other devices that allow the playback of pirated video games. This raises an important question: Are legitimate backup copies of a piece of software you own illegal under the DMCA?”

Straight from Slashdot: “Elton John says that the internet is destroying good music and “stopping people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff.” He laments the way that the internet and the emerging industry of digital music has created a cold and impersonal world for artists to create new music in.”