Groonk's Newsmine 2.0

Ozzy’s 1970s group was first nominated in 1996. But until Monday, the panel of musicians, industry professionals and journalists who vote on inductees kept the door barred. Except for Led Zeppelin, the hall has largely ignored metal since the organization was founded in 1987.

In 1999, Osbourne requested that Black Sabbath be taken off the list of nominees.

“The nomination is meaningless, because it’s not voted on by the fans,” the soon-to-be reality TV star said at the time. “It’s voted on by the supposed elite of the industry and the media, who’ve never bought an album or concert ticket in their lives, so their vote is totally irrelevant to me.”

[...]

Davis, the late trumpeter, is the first jazz musician accepted as a full inductee. Louis Armstrong (1990), Dinah Washington (1993) and Billie Holiday (2000) were previously honored as being early influences on rock ’n’ roll.

Davis’ hard glare and restless innovation gave him a style that rockers appreciated, and he embraced rock and hip-hop sounds in his later recordings.

WIZARD:Other than the influence of your dad, what else kept you interested in comics?
AMANO: Aside from growing up reading and hearing about comics, I grew up on fairy tales, too. I was instilled with a deep appreciation and love for fantasy. And my dad is such a storyteller and a romantic person in the way he looks at the world. And that whole alternate reality of it where everything's heightened and stakes are so high and it's colorful. I think, too, the thing that's really appealing about comic books is that just like Chekhov and Shakespeare, it's telling really human stories, but it's telling it in such a timeless way because it's not preaching to you. It's coming in a package that's fun. And it's interesting in the sense that there are such moral, human issues being addressed in these stories, but most of these characters aren't human, so it's a parable of sorts. So I always felt like it was interesting to learn about the human condition, but in a kickass, fun way.

[...]

“The basic physics have been around for 80 years,” he said. “I think things opened up when the Navy decided their next generation ship would be electric.”

[...]

Another benefit of EM guns is that they do not require explosive warheads, reducing shipboard hazards.

“The projectile is basically going into space,” Caskey said. “It could really change the way you look at ballistics.”

Nov 17: Sony still advising public to install rootkits
18 days after the revelation that Sony's CDs contain dangerous rootkits, Sony still has live web-pages advising its customers to go ahead and install their software (This is still the case as of Nov 22!).

Nov 17: Schneier: Why didn't anti-virus apps defend us against Sony's rootkit?
Security researcher Bruce Schneier accuses anti-spyware companies of being soft on Sony because it was released by a giant, sleazy company instead of a small, sleazy company.

Nov 17: Uninstaller for Sony's other malware screws up your PC
Some of Sony's music CDs carry a second form of malicious software, a spyware program called Suncomm Mediamax. Princeton researchers Ed Felten and Alex Halderman discover that the uninstaller provided by Suncomm leaves your computer open to complete takeover through simply looking at web-pages with malicious code in them.

Nov 17: Amazon offers refunds for all Sony rootkit CDs
Amazon sends an email to everyone who bought a rootkit-infected Sony CD from them and offers a full refund -- now that's how it's done. (On November 21, the US Army/Airforce Exchange Service followed suit).

[...]

But they found was that after the trainer they provided for two months left the schools, the computers in the labs remained largely untouched, especially by the teachers themselves.

"It is no use giving computers away to schools if no one is going to use them," Ebben Haotuikulipi from SchoolNet Namibia explained to the BBC News website.

So in April, they came up with the paper-based Hai TI comic, which means Listen Up in the local language, Oshiwambo.

"It is printed every Tuesday in the local youth newspaper, so it goes across the country. What is in the comic is also all online," said Ms Haotuikulipi.

The art deco poster is one of only four known copies in existence. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and Berlin's Film Museum have one each while another is in a private collection.

Starting Dec. 26, Nielsen Media Research will begin incorporating DVR data into its ratings. That means it won't just measure how many people watch "Desperate Housewives" on a Sunday night, but also how many people record it and watch up to a week later.

Preliminary data shows that homes with DVRs average 12 percent more television viewing than those that don't have them, the researchers said.

The ability to watch without being tied to a schedule can significantly increase the visibility of programs that might not be appointment viewing. For example, people with DVRs are watching the WB shows "Supernatural" and "Smallville" at more than twice the rate of people without the machines.

* Sony lied about its rootkit. They said it didn't phone home with information about your deeds. It does. When they were caught in the lie, they said that they didn't pay attention to the information it sent back, so it's OK
* Microsoft is building a Sony rootkit-remover into its anti-spyware product
* Lawsuits against Sony are already underway in Italy and the US
* At least one piece of malicious software that exploits Sony's rootkit has been discovered in the wild

Although the research is still at an early stage, they hope it could eventually lead to a practical and cost effective new way to combat the virus.

[...]

Most HIV transmission occurs on the surfaces of the gut and reproductive areas which are normally coated with a layer of bacteria.

The researchers modified one of these bacteria - a form of E.coli - so that it began to secrete proteins that block HIV from infecting its target cells.

When the modified bacteria were introduced in mice, they successfully colonised parts of the lower gut, and were also found in lower concentrations in the vagina.

Fortunately for the early humans, the huge primate's diet consisted mainly of bamboo.

Scientists have known about Gigantopithecus blackii since the accidental discovery of some of its teeth on sale in a Hong Kong pharmacy about 80 years ago. While the idea of a giant ape piqued the interest of scientists – and bigfoot hunters – around the world, it was unclear how long ago this beast went extinct.

Now Jack Rink, a geochronologist at McMaster University in Ontario, has used a high-precision absolute-dating method to determine that this ape – the largest primate ever – roamed Southeast Asia for nearly a million years before the species died out 100,000 years ago during the Pleistocene period. By this time, humans had existed for a million years.

Last summer, he hit the headlines by calling for the assassination of leftist Venezuelan Present Hugo Chavez, one of President George W. Bush's most vocal international critics.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, "The 700 Club."

"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.

"There's been a dramatic increase in the dearuki-zoku. They don't eat meals at home with family members and you can clearly see with your own eyes the large increase in young people who hang about on the streets together with the same old friends," Masataka tells Sapio. "They make places like Shibuya their territory and rarely head even to places like (nearby entertainment and shopping districts) Shinjuku or Harajuku. They get tired going to new places or meeting new people. If they get hungry while they're strolling around, they simply get food by going into a convenience store, buying something and sitting down outside on the curb to eat it. If not that, then they just hang around for hours in fast food joints."

The primate specialist says the actions of the dearuki-zoku closely resemble behavior patterns in chimpanzees, which tend to travel in groups, walking around for a long time without going to any specific place, then eating and disposing of their wastes in the same place before bedding down on piles of grass whenever and wherever the inclination takes them.

But the synthetic tree would do the job of a real tree, he said. It would draw carbon dioxide out of the air, as plants do during photosynthesis, but retain the carbon and not release oxygen.

If built to scale, according to Dr Lackner, synthetic trees could help clean up an atmosphere grown heavy with carbon dioxide, the most abundant gas produced by humans and implicated in climate warming.

He predicts that one synthetic tree could remove 90,000 tonnes of CO2 in a year - the emissions equivalent of 15,000 cars.

"You can be a thousand times better than a living tree," he said.

[...]

"Horror very much depends on the context of the 'good life,' the status quo," explained Ellis. "So you start slower, you show life as it should be lived. And then someone starts bleeding. And something is moving behind the door that's ajar. You know what I mean? The bad stuff leaks in. A little at first. And then a lot. And then when you think it couldn't get any worse lots of little men run in with buckets and fling some more on."

[...]

"Zombies tend to enjoy a resurgence when Western society feels it's up against a faceless, silent threat -- whether it's conservative culture threatened by Communists or radical Islam, or liberal culture terrified by all-enveloping capitalism and the world turning into a mall full of drones."

# Don't use fancy words if you don't know how to use them
# Know what points you want to make before you need to articulate them
# Keep It Simple Stupid
# If you're misunderstood, take responsibility for how it was interpreted
# Repeat message until understood

Researchers at the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in La Jolla, California have developed ‘Darwin VII’, a trashcan-shaped robot that has 20,000 brain cells.

The infant crawls across a floor strewn with blocks, grabbing and tasting as it goes, its malleable mind, impressionable and hungry to learn, reports ‘New Scientist’.

It is already adapting, discovering that the striped blocks are yummy and the spotted ones taste bad, the report said. Its exploration is driven by instincts: an interest in bright objects, a predilection for tasting things, and an innate notion of what tastes good.

Darwin VII consists of a mobile base equipped with a CCD camera for vision, microphones for hearing, conductivity sensors for taste, and effectors for movement of its base, of its head, and of a gripping manipulator, university researchers Jeffrey Krichmar Gerald and M Edelman said in the report.

Ka-BOOM!

This scenario -- from a National Cancer Institute video -- is just one possibility offered by the burgeoning field of cancer nanotechnology, where miniscule molecules are designed with literally atomic precision to combat a disease that kills half a million Americans every year.

"It's 21st-century medicine," said Vicki Colvin of Rice University's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. "It sits at the intersection of some of the greatest achievements in many different areas of science, from material science to cell biology to physics and advances in imaging."

Indeed, the National Cancer Institute, which recently announced two waves of funding for nanotech training and research, sees nanotechnology as vital to its stated goal of "eliminating suffering and death from cancer by 2015."

The violence - originally concentrated in neighborhoods northeast of Paris with large immigrant populations - is forcing France to confront anger long-simmering in its suburbs, where many Africans and their French-born children live on society's margins, struggling with unemployment, poor housing, racial discrimination, crime and a lack of opportunity.

Triggered by an outburst of fury over the deaths of two teenagers, the unrest has taken on unprecedented scope and intensity. The violence hit far-flung corners of France on Saturday, from Rouen in Normandy to Bordeaux in the southwest to Strasbourg near the German border, but the Paris region has borne the brunt.

Goodman, appearing Wednesday on the "Nevada Newsmakers" television show, said, "In the old days in France, they had beheading of people who commit heinous crimes.

"You know, we have a beautiful highway landscaping redevelopment in our downtown. We have desert tortoises and beautiful paintings of flora and fauna. These punks come along and deface it.

"I'm saying maybe you put them on TV and cut off a thumb," the mayor added. "That may be the right thing to do."

Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end the "mutual prejudice" between religion and science that has long bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate in the United States.

The Vatican project was inspired by Pope John Paul II's 1992 declaration that the church's 17th-century denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension." Galileo was condemned for supporting Nicolaus Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun; church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.

"The permanent lesson that the Galileo case represents pushes us to keep alive the dialogue between the various disciplines, and in particular between theology and the natural sciences, if we want to prevent similar episodes from repeating themselves in the future," Poupard said.

But he said science, too, should listen to religion.

On Batman Begins, he said "Well, this was a good one. It took 'em five tries." On Bewitched he simply said, "Hollywood has a file drawer 30 years deep." Later in the presentation, he added "I urge you not to support the same horsesh*t you're getting out of Hollywood." Then, tongue firmly in cheek, he added, "Except Sky High," which he appears in.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit also claims the restroom was locked and accessible to only a few white workers who had obtained keys. Tyson officials, in a statement issued Wednesday, deny the claims. They said that Tyson management did not authorize, condone or see the posting of any "whites only" sign and that discrimination is not tolerated at any of its plants.

Clinton once presented Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm called Parks a "heroic warrior for equality."

"Her greatness lay in doing what everybody could do but doesn't," Granholm said. "She was unexpected. She was untitled. ... (She was) an improbable warrior that was leading an unlikely army of waitresses and street sweepers and shopkeepers and auto mechanics."

-------------------------------------------------
Rosa Parks resided in Detroit until she died at the age of 92 on October 24, 2005, at about 19:00 hours EDT, at her apartment in a nursing home on the east side. She was diagnosed with progressive dementia in 2004.

The United States Senate passed a resolution on October 27 to honor Parks by allowing her remains to lie in honor (also known as "lying in state") in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. The House of Representatives approved the resolution on October 28. Parks became the 31st person so honored since the practice began in 1852, the first woman to ever lie in state in the Rotunda, the first American who was not previously a government official, and the second non-government official after the remains of Frenchman Pierre L'Enfant were brought to the capitol in 1909. She was also the second black person, after Jacob J. Chestnut, one of the two United States Capitol Police officers who were fatally shot in 1998. Prior to Parks, the most recent person to lie in state was former President Ronald Reagan in 2004.

The research helps explain the particular difficulty of maintaining relationships over long periods. But it also has positive implications for careers. Roberts presents an optimistic picture of people's employment prospects as they move into middle age and traits such as reliability and conscientiousness begin to improve.

Roberts will next year publish the results of an exhaustive "metanalysis" of more than 90 studies tracking personality changes in 50,000 people for up to 45 years.

Psychologists break down personality traits into five key areas: "extroversion", which is chattiness, assertiveness and energy; "agreeableness", which encompasses kindness, affection and sympathy; "conscientiousness", which covers organisational skills, thoroughness and attention to detail; neuroticism or emotional instability; and openness to new experiences, which includes imagination, insight and general intellect.

[...]

The age of 30 had previously been identified by the American Government's laboratory of personality at the National Institutes of Ageing as defining the onset of maturity, when personality traits become fixed.

Recent studies of personality had begun to challenge this, but the work of Roberts will further demolish the notion.

"We have found that people quite definitely change after the age of 30," Roberts said. "While the change is gradual it continues throughout life and goes on even into old age."