RTFA: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071008/ap_on_re_us/wr…

The amount of testosterone prescribed to pro wrestler Chris Benoit far exceeded the normal amount for a hormone disorder he was purportedly being treated for, federal prosecutors said in new court papers.

The papers were filed in a criminal case against Dr. Phil Astin, Benoit’s personal physician, who is charged with overprescribing medication to two other patients.

RTFA: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070523-rese…

“Last time, it took nine years for us to generalize from a special to
a nonspecial, hard-to-factor number,” Lenstra said in a statement, referring
to a 155-digit number that his team had broken previously. More recently,
a 200-digit non-special number was factored in 18 months and roughly 50 years
of computer time. This 307-digit crack took even less (human) time, which
Lenstra credits to more powerful computers and improved code. “I will
not make predictions [about the future of 1024-bit encryption], but let us
just say that it might be a good idea to stay tuned.”

Why does anyone care? While your average Joe or Jane on the street will not
be able to crack a 1024-bit RSA key anytime soon, experienced attackers might
not have such a hard time. Getting the computing power to crack a 1024-bit
key could be as easy as employing a decent-sized botnet
or two.

Someone clicked to RTFA after searching for “rsa bot net crack.” I saw that and realized it’s an insanely cool concept. Lo, the idea has been floated before.

RTFA: http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/warners-robi…

This comes to me from three different producers, so I know it’s real: Warner Bros president of production Jeff Robinov has made a new decree that “We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead”. This Neanderthal thinking comes after both Jodie Foster’s The Brave One (even though she’s had big recent hits with Flightplan and Panic Room) and Nicole Kidman’s The Invasion (as if three different directors didn’t have something to do with the awfulness of the gross receipts) under-performed at the box office recently.

RTFA: http://nouseforadave.wordpress.com/2007/09/21/is-s…

There are many facets of Scientific Journalism, but I am only concerned with one here. First, I am not focusing on the coverage scientific work in the development government policy, biographical coverage on individual scientists, or other “newsy” work. I am strictly concerned with the communication and education of the general public of primary scientific information (i.e. what scientists know and publish in their respective academic forums).
I recently attended an interesting seminar, titlted, “The Informed Science Journalist: How Much Science Do You Need to Know?” led by UBC journalism Professor and Director of the School of Journalism, Stephen Ward. During the discussion, one theme in particular caught my attention: you don’t have to have a strong background in science to write about science. Anyone with a keen interest for a field and sharp mind can write about anything, from philosophy to advanced string theory to climate modeling.

Yes.

RTFA: http://uclue.com/index.php?xq=724

I have read through the comments, and references, including those provided
by Koomey (and Slashdot!), and I am happy to say that David Sarokin’s
original answer still comes out on top. Here is how I would phrase the
results;

The best estimate of how much electricity the global internet uses (in
2007) is 868 billion kwhs, or 5.3% of world electricity usage. Given the
many unmeasured variables in this calculation, the actual answer might be
less, more, or exactly the same. Until a more current estimate is compiled,
this estimate remains the best estimate. If you have a more current or
differently calculated estimate, I will be most happy to seriously
entertain it. Simply suggesting that this estimate is incorrect won’t
displace it as the best estimate we have.

RTFA: http://www.slate.com/id/2174392/nav/tap3/

Will these companies need special permission to put something on the moon?Not exactly. You don’t need anyone to sign off on a lunar landing, but you do need a permit to launch anything into space from Earth. Governments oversee private space activity through the framework provided by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which has been signed by 91 nations, including all the major space-faring countries. The treaty restricts the exploration of outer space to peaceful purposes and says it should be performed for the benefit of all nations. Article VI specifically addresses nongovernmental entities in space; it declares nations should “require authorization” and “continuing supervision” of citizens’ actions, but it does not stipulate how this might be accomplished.

I love the caption: “the moon.”

RTFA: http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/09/26/1015…

Moscow: An experiment that envisaged sending a parcel from space to Earth on a 30-kilometre tether fell short of its goal yesterday when the long fibre rope did not fully unwind, Russian Mission Control said.
The YES2 experiment was prepared by almost 500 students from all over Europe and put on board the Russian Foton-M3 unmanned spacecraft, which also carried other European Space Agency experiments.
It was intended to deliver a spherical capsule, called Fotino, attached to the end of the tether back to Earth - a relatively simple and cheap technology that could be used in the future to retrieve bulkier cargoes from space.
The tether was to be deployed from the spacecraft and gradually unwound, putting the capsule into a lower orbit and swinging to provide momentum, before the re-entry capsule was released.
The capsule was to glide through the atmosphere for some 20 minutes and then a parachute was to be deployed.

Wild space launch.

RTFA: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa025&ref=…

The two reactors at the South Texas nuclear power plant, an hour southwest of Houston, last year churned out 21.37 billion kilowatt-hours. By 2015, its majority owner, New Jersey-based NRG Energy, hopes to at least double that capacity if it gets permission to build two more reactors on the site. The company filed the first application on Monday for a new nuclear power plant - two advanced boiling-water reactors - in more than 30 years.
“It is a new day for energy in America,” David Crane, NRG president and chief executive officer, said after making the application. “Advanced nuclear technology is the only currently viable large-scale alternative to traditional coal-fueled generation to produce none of the traditional air emissions,” including the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.

Texas.

RTFA: http://www.engcom.net/index.php?option=com_slideru…

Before electronic hand held calculators, the slide rule was widely used in Engineering, Science and Commerce for rapidly performing calculations involving multiplication and division which have to be accurate to not more than three or four decimal places.
It can also be used for such operations as involution (raising to a power) and evolution (extraction of a root) and for calculations with trigonometric functions (sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent).
In addition to those for general use there where many different types of special purpose slide rules. What they all have in common is logarithmic scales.

A standard slide rule consists of the actual rule, the slide and the transparent cursor with a hair line. Various logarithmic scales are engraved on the rule and the slide. When the rule is “closed”, the pairs of scales A & B and C&D respectively, coincide.

Very neat simulation!

RTFA: http://www.physorg.com/news110194718.html

This burst appears to have originated from the distant Universe and may have been produced by an exotic event such as the collision of two neutron stars or the death throes of an evaporating black hole,” said Duncan Lorimer, Assistant Professor of Physics at West Virginia University (WVU) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). The research team led by Lorimer consists of Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University in Australia, Maura McLaughlin of WVU and NRAO, David Narkevic of WVU, and Fronefield Crawford of Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The astronomers announced their findings in the September 27 issue of the online journal Science Express.

Huh? Blast of energy in the middle of the Pacific - that sounds familiar, but I thought there were treaties against it.

RTFA: http://www.truecrypt.org/

ree open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP/2000 and Linux

Main Features:

Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.

Encrypts an entire google_ad_section_end google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) hard disk partition or a storage device such as USB flash drive.

Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.

Provides two levels of plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password:

1) Hidden volume (steganography – more information may be found here).

2) No TrueCrypt volume can be identified (volumes cannot be distinguished from random data).

Encryption algorithms: AES-256, Serpent, and Twofish. Mode of operation: LRW.

I don’t use this, but it looks interesting.

RTFA: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20061

Researchers said today that technological and security issues will stall maximum transmission rates at levels comparable to that of a single broadband connection, such as a cable modem, unless researchers reduce “dead times” in the detectors that receive quantum-encrypted messages. 
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), technological and security issues will stall maximum transmission rates at levels comparable to that of a single broadband connection, such as a cable modem, unless researchers reduce “dead times” in the detectors that receive quantum-encrypted messages. The JQI is a research partnership that includes NIST and the University of Maryland. 

Basically, this is the time between an event and the time when the event is measured.

RTFA: http://www.tdt3d.be/articles_viewer.php?art_id=99

If you ever wanted starting in 3D creation today, you probably need to know with which 3D applications package with you will feel better and which is the most suitable for you and business ?Many new CG artists try many softwares before really starting their 3D business, that’s of courses the best solution to try out and know if you feel comfortable with one than other, so after you can’t know all specs of all 3D softwares when starting in 3D…Here is a comparison table with cons. and pro. for the most know today top industries 3D applications. This table isn’t intended to be complete with all softwares features available but try to surround the common today 3D cg artist tasks.All softwares listed in this table was deeply tested during a total of about 12 months, during this 12 months,� I installed all releases and Service pack (EDU, PLE, full softwares,…) and try to use all of listed softwares to do the same work with when I created my students classroom projects like (Motion,� Realtime, Mag.Print, Architecture, Lowpoly, texturing,…)

Interesting comparison. Blender is the free one.

RTFA: http://meta.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/01/1…

October marks 10 friggin years of Slashdot, and nobody is more surprised about any of this than me. Throughout the month we’ll be running a series of navel gazing meta news articles about our history, infrastructure and plans for the future. We’re also going to give away 500 t-shirts and ThinkGeek gift certificates to people willing to organize and attend their own local Slashdot parties. One lucky winner will get a cool grand to blow at ThinkGeek! I’m going to attend “official” gatherings in Ann Arbor, MI on Oct 20 and in Palo Alto, CA on Oct 25. But you can read on for details about party organization and how you can win the grand prize.

The idea is simple. Visit the Slashdot Anniversary Party Web Page. You can sign up to attend a party, or if there’s nobody hosting near you, you can create your own. The details of your local parties are up to you- each has a corresponding discussion so you can work it out amongst yourselves. The Ann Arbor gathering will be at a bar because dammit I’m old and don’t have time to go out for beers much these days. But you do whatever works for the folks in your area. Dorm Room. Bar. Gym. Wherever several Slashdot readers gather, we shall attempt to mail shirts until we run out.

To be eligible for schwag, you need to schedule your party by Oct 8 and sign up to attend a party by Oct 13- this will give us time to figure out where to send the shirts, and time to send them before you all start partying naked during the official party window of Oct 19-28.

As for the one thousand dollar ThinkGeek Gift Certificate grand prize, the winner will be the party attendee who submits the coolest thing for our “scrapbook”. Videos. Pictures. Songs. Anything you can email. Something that proves that your party was the one we all wish we were at. The deadline for submissions will be Oct 28. We’ll have an official submission email address posted later. This is all about creativity and coolness so good luck with that. The grand prize winner will be posted on Oct 31, the end of the month when we can all forget that any of this ever happened.

Oh, and happy birthday to us. Here’s to wasting another decade, same as the first.

Wild… 10 years. My mind is blown.

RTFA: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/ind…

EBay, the internet auction site, admitted yesterday that it had overpaid
hugely for Skype, the internet telephone company.

It also said that Niklas Zennstrom, Skype’s founder, would step down as chief
executive of Skype to become nonexecutive chairman.

He has resigned from the role before his permanent successor has been hired.
The online auctioneer has cut bonuses due to Mr Zennstrom and others by 60 per
cent because it was so disappointed by Skype’s performance.

EBay bought Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion. Yesterday it warned shareholders
that it would have to take an impairment charge of $900 million (£450
million) because it had valued the group too highly two years ago.

Damn… well, it sounded good at the time.

RTFA: http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/MoreInfo.html?PID=…

DOWNLOAD

THIS CONSISTS OF THE NEW ALBUM, IN RAINBOWS.

IT DOES NOT INCLUDE THE EXTRA MATERIAL CONTAINED IN THE DISCBOX.
YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE FILE DIGITALLY FROM THE 10th OCTOBER 2007.
YOUR PURCHASE MAY BE SUBJECT TO A TRANSACTION FEE.THIS WILL BE SHOWN AT THE CHECKOUT.

Radiohead album - name your price.

RTFA: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/032…

“A year and a half has passed since SubVirt, the first VMM (virtual machine monitor) based rootkit, was introduced (PDF), covered in the tech press, and discussed here. Later Joanna Rutkowska made news by claiming she had a VMM-based attack on Vista that was undetectable � a claim that was roundly challenged. Now in this year’s HotOS workshop, researchers from Stanford, CMU, VMware, and XenSource have published a paper titled Compatibility Is Not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities (PDF) showing that VMM-based rootkits are actually easily detectable.”

Followup.

RTFA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7023627.stm

Many websites use an automated test to tell computers and humans apart when signing up to an account or logging in.

The test consists of typing in a few random letters in an image and is designed to fight spammers.

Carnegie Mellon is using this test to help decipher words in books that machines cannot read by letting sites use them to authenticate log-ins.

The test, known as a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), was originally designed at Carnegie Mellon to help to keep out automated programs known as “bots.”

Can a million monkeys sitting at a million computers even READ Shakespeare?

RTFA: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071001-uk-c…

New laws going into effect today in the United Kingdom make
it a crime to refuse to decrypt almost any encrypted data requested by
authorities as part of a criminal or terror investigation. Individuals who are
believed to have the cryptographic keys necessary for such decryption will face
up to 5 years in prison for failing to comply with police or military orders to
hand over either the cryptographic keys, or the data in a decrypted form.

Part 3, Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers
Act (RIPA)
includes provisions for the decryption requirements, which are applied
differently based on the kind of investigation underway. As we reported last
year, the five-year imprisonment penalty is reserved for cases involving
anti-terrorism efforts. All other failures to comply can be met with a maximum two-year sentence.

Mitnick, made into law.