SlashdotNews for nerds, stuff that mattersRoyal Society "Creationist" Resigns- September 16, 2008 Chris_Keene writes in to let us know that the Prof. Michael Reiss, who recently caused a storm with comments about teaching creationism in schools, has resigned from his post as director of education at the Royal Society in the UK. This news coincides with word out of the Anglican church that it is ready to apologize to Charles Darwin, 150 years after it poured scorn on his theory of evolution by natural selection. "The Church of England will concede in a statement that it was over-defensive...http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/xj9KqPMrXew/article.pl Copyright Board Lawyer Responds On Pandora's End- September 16, 2008 mattnyc99 writes "A month ago we talked about the impending death of streaming music site Pandora thanks to a very backwards fight over royalties. PopMech follows up with an article that, besides noting how insane it is that Pandora has to pay record labels for the bad songs that users skip, also gets the (three-member) Copyright Royalty Board to try and defend itself about why the government is determining royalty rates for the music industry. Quoting: 'It was uninvited,' says Richard...http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/PDL2S2jZMeA/article.pl Congress May Kill NIH Open Access Research Rules- September 16, 2008 Savuka writes "A policy that mandates public, open access to all National Institutes of Health research is in danger. The House of Representatives is considering legislation that would change the open access policy to make it more publisher-friendly, under the false pretense of protecting copyrights. The Ars author paints the new legislation as somewhat reflective of a turf battle in Congress: 'The Intellectual Property Subcommittee clearly felt that it had been ignored during the original...http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/cqKEAZ3fWC4/article.pl Spolsky's Software Q-and-A Site- September 16, 2008 guzzibill writes "Joel Spolsky has announced the beta release of Stack Overflow, intended to be a high-quality source of answers to software questions. Post a software question and watch the answers flow in. Popularity voting is very much woven into the site, where both questions and answers can be edited for clarity and voted up or down for correctness. Correctly posed questions and insightful answers float to the top. This site has reached critical mass." From Joel's description, he was...http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/X_13Wrv3R8w/article.pl IPv6 and the Business-Case Skeptics- September 16, 2008 Julie188 writes "Experts keep screaming that the IPv4 sky is falling. Three such experts were recently asked point-blank to state an irrefutable business case for moving to IPv6 now, and their answer was more plausible than the old refrain (the lack of addresses and a yet-to-be-seen killer IPv6 app). They said that there isn't a business case. No company that is satisfied with all of its Internet services will need to move, even in the next few years. They also pointed out that Microsoft is a...http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/IMDnSK2hvrU/article.pl |