The Little Hacker's Room

Twelve Welsh Assembly Government civil servants are warned for accessing inappropriate or pornographic websites at work over the last three years.

Police investigating the death of MI6 worker Gareth Williams have released the most recent CCTV footage of the victim.

Germany's government agrees to extend the life span of the country's nuclear power plants by an average of 12 years, officials say.

A man who killed his wife after five months of marriage enjoyed "gymnastic" sex sessions with another woman, a court hears.

Customers of Orange and T-Mobile will soon be able to hop between the two mobile networks as the firms merge their networks.

Bruce Forsyth quits Strictly Come Dancing's Sunday results show and is replaced by Claudia Winkleman.

The 2.4 kernel lives - for a little while longer, at least. Willy Tarreau has just released the a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/403650/2.4.37.10/a update, with a small set of important fixes. This might just be the last update in this series, unless some sort of important fix comes in. spanIf nothing happens before September 2011, it's possible that there won't be any 2.4.37.11 at all. By that time, the 2.6 kernel will have been available for almost 8 years, this should have been enough for anyone to have a look at it. Users now have one year to migrate or to report critical bugs. I think that's an honest deal./span See the announcement for the full description of his planned policy.

The Bad Astronomy blog posted this blink-and-you'll-miss it video of the International Space Station zipping across the face of the sun back in 2007. Let's put that speed in perspective:

It orbits the Earth a mere 350 or so kilometers (220 miles) up; I like to say that if you live in DC and see it pass overhead, it's about the same distance from you as New York City. So it's actually pretty close to the Earth's surface, and screaming around at 8 km/sec (5 miles/sec). That's a good clip! From the point of view of someone watching from the ground, it only takes a couple of minutes for the station to go clear across the sky, horizon to horizon.

EDIT: Sadly, the video was taken down sometime last night. Not sure why. I'm going to go ahead and leave this post up, though, because the Bad Astronomy quote (and link!) still have interesting info. Sorry about the video, folks.

• Evolution of the International Space Station
• New picture window for the space station
• Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Gravity Is For Suckers Boing ...
• No sex on the space station
• Paper airplane to be launched from International Space Station ...

A scheme offering up to 400,000 new firms a chance to trim their tax bill has come into effect.

Jackie Selebi, the former South African police chief convicted of taking bribes from a drug dealer, is allowed to appeal against his 15-year jail sentence.

Police investigating the death of MI6 worker Gareth Williams appeal for help in tracing two people seen entering his central London flat.

Barence writes "This week's IFA show has seen a flurry of Android-based alternatives to the iPad emerge from leading manufacturers. The Samsung Galaxy Tab made a strong first impression on PC Pro's reviewer. The 7-inch tablet's TFT screen 'beams forth with rich, saturated colours and wide, wide viewing angles,' the device is capable of Full HD playback and the TouchWiz UI is 'clearly intended to draw customers away from the iFamily.' Elsewhere, ViewSonic has launched a pair of 7-inch and 10-inch tablets, the larger of which dual boots into either Android or Windows 7. 'Our first moments with Windows 7 were surprisingly painless, too: we expected the Atom processor and 1GB of memory to be horrendously sluggish, but it wasn't the case,' PC Pro reports. Finally, Toshiba's 10.1in Folio 100 marries Android 2.2 with Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform to deliver 'mighty graphics crunching power.' The build quality left a little to desire, though. 'The 14mm thick chassis feels lightweight, and even relatively gentle twisting motions left the Folio's plastic body creaking under the stress.'"pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fhardware.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F06%2F1239232%2FHands-on-With-the-iPad-Alternatives-On-Display-at-IFA" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Hands-on+With+the+iPad+Alternatives+On+Display+at+IFA%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F94I6Y1" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/09/06/1239232/Hands-on-With-the-iPad-Alternatives-On-Display-at-IFA?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1778480amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d79c59a/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HJEaLOZi_1WfzVEkS354uFK5Nwo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HJEaLOZi_1WfzVEkS354uFK5Nwo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HJEaLOZi_1WfzVEkS354uFK5Nwo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HJEaLOZi_1WfzVEkS354uFK5Nwo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/QrQcB2Uvmlk" height="1" width="1"/

Tandis que l'évaluation des dommages et l'inspection des édifices se poursuivent à Christchurch, les autorités y prolongent l'état d'urgence jusqu'à mercredi, et l'armée surveille le centre-ville.

A Sussex vicar found guilty of carrying out hundreds of sham marriages is jailed for four years.

US Muslims are free but that's not enough, argues Michael Goldfarb

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman vows his party will block any attempt to extend the partial freeze on settlements in the West Bank.

They put their right foots in, they put their right foots out and broke the world hokey cokey record.

The ornamental duck island which sank the career of a Tory MP at the height of the expenses scandal is sold for charity.

Kilrah_il writes "The fine-structure constant, a coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, has been measured lately by scientists from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and has been found to change slightly in light sent from quasars in galaxies as far back as 12 billion years ago. Although the results look promising, caution is advised: 'This would be sensational if it were real, but I'm still not completely convinced that it's not simply systematic errors' in the data, comments cosmologist Max Tegmark of MIT. Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., acknowledges that 'it's a competent team and a thorough analysis.' But because the work has such profound implications for physics and requires such a high level of precision measurements, 'it needs more proof before we'll believe it.'"pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F05%2F212252%2FFine-Structure-Constant-Maybe-Not-So-Constant" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Fine-Structure+Constant+Maybe+Not+So+Constant%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F9rLTRs" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/09/05/212252/Fine-Structure-Constant-Maybe-Not-So-Constant?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1777892amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d741503/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ziu2GyweAso19wYJY18aNtFr0eQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ziu2GyweAso19wYJY18aNtFr0eQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ziu2GyweAso19wYJY18aNtFr0eQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ziu2GyweAso19wYJY18aNtFr0eQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/7Um7CTrM4SQ" height="1" width="1"/