All Things News

Straight from Fox News: “WASHINGTON — Traces of enriched uranium have been found on smelted aluminum tubing provided to the United States by North Korea in its effort to prove it was not operating a secret nuclear program, The Washington Post reported.

Citing U.S. and diplomatic officials, the Post said the discovery by U.S. scientists apparently contradicts North Korea’s claim that its acquisition of thousands of aluminum tubes were for conventional purposes rather than a nuclear program. Such tubes could be used in the process of converting hot uranium gas into fuel for nuclear weapons, according to U.S. officials.

The U.S. did not want to reveal the discovery of the uranium traces because it could expose intelligence methods and complicate diplomatic efforts aimed at North Korea, the Post said in a story posted on its Web site late Thursday. The office of the director of national intelligence and the State Department declined to comment on the discovery, the newspaper said.

The tubing could have been contaminated by exposure to other equipment rather than by an active enrichment program, the Post said, citing unidentified officials.

North Korea is expected to issue a declaration by the end of the month in which it outlines all its nuclear programs. Under an agreement with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States, North Korea has begun disabling its main nuclear facilities.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told The Associated Press last week that the Bush administration was not ready to “engage broadly” with North Korea until its leadership ended all aspects of its nuclear weapons program.

North Korea and Iran “are clearly still states about which there are significant proliferation concerns,” Rice said.”

Straight from Tux Deluxe: “December 20th 2007. Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba.Microsoft was required to make this information available to competitors as part of the European Commission March 24th 2004 Decision in the antitrust lawsuit, after losing their appeal against that decision on September 17th 2007.”

Straight from Slashdot: “The Arecibo Observatory funding was slashed. Cut to $8 million from $10.5 million, which will decrease the amount of time that the telescope is operational. “A quarter of its staff was laid off last year,” and Arecibo, which is located in Puerto Rico, could possibly be completely closed in four years, according to the “National Science Foundation (NSF), which pays for the operation of the telescope.” This comes after “a review panel for the foundation’s astronomy division two years ago” suggested cutting Arecibo’s financing by 25 percent as a way to pay for new facilities. There has been “[a]n outcry” in response to the “decision, particularly from planetary scientists” who argued that the panel “overlooked Arecibo’s role in cataloging potential dangers from asteroids.” The Times notes that in Arecibo’s favor is the fact that it “may be much cheaper to keep…open” than dismantle, which “could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.”"

I personally have been to the Arecibo Observatory, and it’s sheer scale cannot be appreciated with a photo. It would be ashamed to lose such an impressive facility that is capable of so much due to budget cuts…

Straight from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works: “Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called “consensus” on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.

The new report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s office of the GOP Ranking Member details the views of the scientists, the overwhelming majority of whom spoke out in 2007.

Even some in the establishment media now appear to be taking notice of the growing number of skeptical scientists. In October, the Washington Post Staff Writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that climate skeptics “appear to be expanding rather than shrinking.” Many scientists from around the world have dubbed 2007 as the year man-made global warming fears “bite the dust.” (LINK) In addition, many scientists who are also progressive environmentalists believe climate fear promotion has “co-opted” the green movement. (LINK)”

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Straight from Fox News: “WASHINGTON — The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States.

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means said.

A delegation of Lakota leaders has delivered a message to the State Department, and said they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the U.S., some of them more than 150 years old.

The group also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and would continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free – provided residents renounce their U.S. citizenship, Mr Means said.

The treaties signed with the U.S. were merely “worthless words on worthless paper,” the Lakota freedom activists said.”

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Straight from Wikipedia: “He was born in the municipality of Rautjärvi near the present-day border with Russia, and started his military service in 1925. During the Winter War (1939–1940) between Finland and the Soviet Union, he began his duty as a sniper against the Red Army. Working in temperatures between −20 and −40 degrees Celsius (−4 and −40 degrees Fahrenheit), and dressed completely in a white camouflage suit, Häyhä was credited with 505 confirmed kills against Soviet soldiers.The unofficial Finnish frontline figure from the battlefield of Kollaa places the number of Häyhä’s sniper kills at 542. A daily account of the kills at Kollaa was conducted for the Finnish snipers. Häyhä used a Finnish variant, M28, of the Soviet Mosin-Nagant rifle (known as “Pystykorva” rifle), because it suited his small frame (5 ft/1.52 m). He preferred to use iron sights rather than telescopic sights to present a smaller target (the sniper must raise his head higher when using a telescopic sight) and aid concealment (sunlight reflecting off telescopic sight lenses can reveal a sniper’s position).

Besides his sniper kills, Simo Häyhä was also credited with as many as two hundred kills with a Suomi M-31 SMG submachine gun, thus bringing his credited kills to at least 705. However, the latter claim has never been substantiated. All of Häyhä’s kills were accomplished within 100 days prior to injuries caused by an enemy bullet. Häyhä’s record of an average of 5 kills a day, almost one kill per daylight hour of the short winter day, is unique.

Before his injury, the Russians tried several plans to get rid of him, including counter snipers and artillery strikes. Their best result was tearing the back of his coat away with shrapnel, but leaving Häyhä himself unscratched.

On March 6, 1940, Häyhä was shot in the jaw during close combat. The bullet tumbled upon impact and left his head. He was picked up by fellow soldiers who said “half his head was missing”. He regained consciousness on March 13, the day peace was declared. Shortly after the war, Häyhä was promoted straight from corporal to second lieutenant by Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. No one else has ever gained rank in such a dramatic fashion in Finland’s military history.”

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Straight from Slashdot: “There is an interesting story in Seed Magazine on active SETI — sending out signals to try to contact other civilizations in nearby star systems. Alexander Zaitsev, Chief Scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, has access to one of the most powerful radio transmitters on Earth and has already sent several messages to nearby, sun-like stars. But some scientists think that Zaitsev is not only acting out of turn by independently speaking for everyone on the entire planet but believe there are possible dangers we may unleash by announcing ourselves to the unknown darkness. This ground has been explored before in countless works of science fiction most notably “The Killing Star,” a 1995 novel that paints a frightening picture of interstellar civilizations exterminating their neighbors with relativistic bombardments, not from malice, but simply because it is the most logical action.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Analysis of data from the Cassini probe suggests that Saturn’s rings may be billions of years old, rather than the previously surmised millions. Previous research suggested that the rings were young, because of the lack of dark dust accumulation on their surfaces. However, the latest data suggests that the ring surfaces are even younger than previously thought, meaning, ironically, that the rings themselves are much older: they are not static enough to collect dust, but rather are continuously recycling material, with clumps continuously forming and disintegrating.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema, and MGM have agreed to work on two new movies: a film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’, and a further sequel. From the article: ‘The two Hobbit films … are scheduled to be shot simultaneously, with pre-production beginning as soon as possible. Principal photography is tentatively set for a 2009 start, with the intention of ‘The Hobbit’ release slated for 2010 and its sequel the following year, in 2011.’”

Straight from Gizmodo: “Here’s an idea that’s not going to go over well with the Department of Homeland Security: Toshiba has reportedly developed a nuclear reactor that will fit in your basement. Measuring 20 feet wide by 6 feet long, it cranks out 200kW and doesn’t even require Homer Simpson to operate, since it’s supposedly totally automatic and can’t overheat. According to Next Energy News, this is not some pie-in-the-sky tech, either.

They’re saying that Toshiba will be installing the first one in Japan next year, with working reactors coming to Europe and America by 2009. While we’d really like to go off-grid, something’s fishy about all this. This must be a hoax. Next: personal nuclear weapons?”

Straight from LGF: “British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran.

The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely.

The security services in London want concrete evidence to allay concerns that the Islamic state has fed disinformation to the CIA.

The report used new evidence – including human sources, wireless intercepts and evidence from an Iranian defector – to conclude that Teheran suspended the bomb-making side of its nuclear programme in 2003. But British intelligence is concerned that US spy chiefs were so determined to avoid giving President Bush a reason to go to war – as their reports on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes did in Iraq – that they got it wrong this time.

A senior British official delivered a withering assessment of US intelligence-gathering abilities in the Middle East and revealed that British spies shared the concerns of Israeli defence chiefs that Iran was still pursuing nuclear weapons.

The source said British analysts believed that Iranian nuclear staff, knowing their phones were tapped, deliberately gave misinformation. “We are sceptical. We want to know what the basis of it is, where did it come from? Was it on the basis of the defector? Was it on the basis of the intercept material? They say things on the phone because they know we are up on the phones. They say black is white. They will say anything to throw us off.

”It’s not as if the American intelligence agencies are regarded as brilliant performers in that region. They got badly burned over Iraq.”

The Brett Favre Career Interception Record Watch page has been updated!

“On December 176th, 2007 versus the Saint Louis Rams, Lorenzo completed not one, but two passes to Rams safety O.J. Atogwe keeping the streak alive and getting to an impressive 286 career interceptions! Nobody does it better Favre!”

To think that all these years I believed Andy Dufresne to have already escaped from prison!

Straight from Fox News: “ELIZABETH, N.J. — Two inmates escaped from a county jail, hiding the holes they made in the walls by putting up photos of bikini-clad women, officials said.

Authorities searched over the weekend for Jose Espinosa, who was awaiting sentencing for manslaughter, and Otis Blunt, who was facing robbery and other charges. They also launched a review of jail security.

The two got out of the Union County jail Saturday evening. The county prosecutor’s office said the two apparently removed cement blocks from two walls, squeezed through the openings, jumped to a rooftop below and then made it over a 25-foot-high fence. The section they escaped from was supposed to be the most secure area of the facility.

“I’m extremely disturbed that a jail with the capability of security it has would foster a breach of this nature,” County Prosecutor Theodore Romankow told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Monday’s editions.

Espinosa, 20, an alleged gang member, was awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to manslaughter in a 2005 drive-by shooting in Elizabeth. Blunt, 32, was awaiting trial on charges of robbery and weapons offenses.

The men helped cover up the break by placing dummies under their bed blankets, and hiding the wall holes with magazine photos of women in bikinis, authorities said.

Authorities launched a review of security measures, and barred inmates from pinning up pictures from magazines on their cell walls.”

Straight from Fox News: “KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Afghan soldiers backed by NATO air power killed more than 50 Taliban fighters during a two-day battle with militants who tried to attack a southern Afghan town near the one they were routed from this week, Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday.

Afghan soldiers fought the insurgents in Sangin, a town in Helmand province that neighbors Musa Qala, which Taliban fighters had controlled since February before abandoning it this week in the face of an offensive by Afghan, British and U.S. forces.

“When the terrorists were defeated in Musa Qala, they escaped to Sangin and started firing in and around Sangin,” the Defense Ministry said.

Among the 50 militants killed were three foreigners and three commanders, the ministry said. It said no civilians were hurt or killed in the operation.”

Straight from Gizmodo: “This is so mind-blowingly ridiculous I’ll leave all of the smarminess to you guys to wipe up in the comments. In the case Atlantic vs. Howell—the couple’s being sued for sharing songs over KaZaA—the RIAA filed a supplemental brief. On page 15, they repeatedly call ripped MP3s “unauthorized copies,” basically arguing that ripping songs from a CD to your computer for personal use is making an “unauthorized” copy. And the money quote so you don’t have to pore over the whole document:

It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings on his computer … Virtually all of the sound recordings on Exhibit B are in the “.mp3″ format. … Defendant admitted that he converted these sound recordings from their original format to the .mp3 format for his and his wife’s use.

I wanna give them the benefit of the doubt that they just poorly worded this part of the brief, but they tend to try to hang you with any slack you give them. But at least they’re consistent.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “By July 1985, Commodore had everything going for it. The Amiga computer had been demonstrated in public to rave reviews, and everyone was excited at the potential of this great technology. That’s when the problems started.

Commodore’s primary woes were always about money, and 1985 was no exception. Sales of the Commodore 64 were still going strong, but the price wars had slashed the profits on the little computer. The company had invested millions of dollars creating new and bizarre 8-bit computers that competed directly against the venerable C-64, such as the wholly incompatible Plus/4, that had no chance in the marketplace. To make things worse, the company had to deal with lawsuits from its ousted founder, Jack Tramiel. Finally, Commodore had invested $24 million to purchase Amiga outright, but as the computer had not gone on sale yet, there was no return on this investment.

All these financial problems put a strain on the company’s ability to get the Amiga ready to sell to the public. Without a lot of spare cash, it was difficult to rush the production of the computer. Further software delays pushed back the launch as well. The end result was that the Amiga did not go on sale until August of 1985…”

You can find the other parts to this story here:

A history of the Amiga, part 1: Genesis

A history of the Amiga, part 2: The birth of Amiga

A history of the Amiga, part 3: The first prototype

A history of the Amiga, part 4: Enter Commodore

(click for high-res)

Straight from Astronomy Picture of the Day: “Explanation: In December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours on the Moon in the Taurus-Littrow valley, while colleague Ronald Evans orbited overhead. This sharp panorama is digitally stitched together from pictures taken by Cernan as he and Schmitt roamed the valley floor. Starting with a view of the imposing South Massif, scrolling the panorama to the right will reveal Schmitt and the lunar rover at the edge of Shorty Crater, near the spot where geologist Schmitt discovered orange lunar soil. The Apollo 17 crew returned with 110 kilograms of rock and soil samples, more than was returned from any of the other lunar landing sites. Now thirty five years later, Cernan and Schmitt are still the last to walk on the Moon.”

Straight from Alpha Galileo: “In April, a European team of astronomers announced in Astronomy & Astrophysics the discovery of two possibly habitable Earth-like planets. A&A is now publishing two independent, detailed studies of this system, which confirm that one of the planets might indeed be located within the habitable zone around the star Gliese 581.

More than 10 years after the discovery of the first extrasolar planet, astronomers have now discovered more than 250 of these planets. Until a few years ago, most of the newly discovered exoplanets were Jupiter-mass, probably gaseous, planets. Recently, astronomers have announced the discovery of several planets that are potentially much smaller, with a minimum mass lower than 10 Earth masses: the now so-called super-Earths [1].

In April, a European team announced in Astronomy & Astrophysics the discovery of two new planets orbiting the M star Gliese 581 (a red dwarf), with masses of at least 5 and 8 Earth masses. Given their distance to their parent star, these new planets (now known as Gliese 581c and Gliese 581d) were the first ever possible candidates for habitable planets.

Contrary to Jupiter-like giant planets that are mainly gaseous, terrestrial planets are expected to be extremely diverse: some will be dry and airless, while others will have much more water and gases than the Earth. Only the next generation of telescopes will allow us to tell what these new worlds and their atmospheres are made of and to search for possible indications of life on these planets. However, theoretical investigations are possible today and can be a great help in identifying targets for these future observations.”

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Straight from NASA: “San Francisco, CA. – NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has followed its twin Voyager 1 into the solar system’s final frontier, a vast region at the edge of our solar system where the solar wind runs up against the thin gas between the stars.

However, Voyager 2 took a different path, entering this region, called the heliosheath, on August 30, 2007. Because Voyager 2 crossed the heliosheath boundary, called the solar wind termination shock, about 10 billion miles away from Voyager 1 and almost a billion miles closer to the sun, it confirmed that our solar system is “squashed” or “dented”– that the bubble carved into interstellar space by the solar wind is not perfectly round. Where Voyager 2 made its crossing, the bubble is pushed in closer to the sun by the local interstellar magnetic field.

“Voyager 2 continues its journey of discovery, crossing the termination shock multiple times as it entered the outermost layer of the giant heliospheric bubble surrounding the Sun and joined Voyager 1 in the last leg of the race to interstellar space.” said Voyager Project Scientist Dr. Edward Stone of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.

The solar wind is a thin gas of electrically charged particles (plasma) blown into space by the sun. The solar wind blows in all directions, carving a bubble into interstellar space that extends past the orbit of Pluto. This bubble is called the heliosphere, and Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to explore its outer layer, when it crossed into the heliosheath in December 2004. As Voyager 1 made this historic passage, it encountered the shock wave that surrounds our solar system called the solar wind termination shock, where the solar wind is abruptly slowed by pressure from the gas and magnetic field in interstellar space.

Even though Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to cross the shock, it is scientifically exciting for a couple of reasons. The Voyager 2 spacecraft has a working Plasma Science instrument that can directly measure the velocity, density and temperature of the solar wind. This instrument is no longer working on Voyager 1 and estimates of the solar wind speed had to be made indirectly. Secondly, Voyager 1 may have had only a single shock crossing and it happened during a data gap. But Voyager 2 had at least five shock crossings over a couple of days (the shock “sloshes” back and forth like surf on a beach, allowing multiple crossings) and three of them are clearly in the data. They show us an unusual shock.

In a normal shock wave, fast-moving material slows down and forms a denser, hotter region as it encounters an obstacle. However, Voyager 2 found a much lower temperature beyond the shock than was predicted. This probably indicates that the energy is being transferred to cosmic ray particles that were accelerated to high speeds at the shock.

“The important new data describing the termination shock are still being pondered, but it is clear that Voyager has once again surprised us,” said Dr. Eric Christian, Voyager Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters, Washington.

The two Voyager spacecraft will be the only source of local observations of this distant but highly interesting region for years to come. But in the summer of 2008, NASA will be launching a mission specifically designed to globally image the termination shock and heliosheath remotely from Earth orbit. The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), led by Dr. David McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, will use energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) to create all-sky maps at various energies of the interaction of the heliosphere with interstellar space. ENAs are formed when energetic electrically-charged particles “steal” an electron from another particle. Once neutral, they travel straight, unaffected by the solar magnetic field. IBEX will detect some of the particles that happen to be headed towards the Earth, and the number and energy of the particles coming from all different directions will tell us much more about the overall structure of the interaction between the heliosphere and interstellar space.

Results on the Voyager 2 shock crossing from the entire Voyager science team are being presented at the Fall 2007 meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The Voyagers were built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., which continues to operate both spacecraft.”

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Straight from CNN: “Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people’s hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.

“There was something magical about the C64,” says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden.

He remembers the day he first laid eyes on his machine back in 1984.

“My father brought it home together with a tape deck, a disk drive, a printer, and a couple of games…I used to sneak home during lunch to play [on it] with my friends.”

Wallstrom is the webmaster and designer for C64.com, a Web site dedicated to preserving the games, demos, pictures, magazines and memories of the Commodore 64.

C64.com visitors are mostly nostalgia seekers — men in their 30s looking to download their favorite childhood games. Emulators let them play the games without having a machine. Popular downloads include “Boulder Dash,” “Ghostbusters,” and “The Great Giana Sisters.”

“It may have not been the most sophisticated computer, but it did have a lot of personality and it was lovable and remains loveable,” said Harry McCracken, vice president and editor in chief of PC World.”

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