Link: Expectation of Privacy Extended to Email

An anonymous reader writes “In a 6th circuit court decision [PDF] today 4th amendment expectation of privacy rights were extended to email. ‘The ruling by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio upholds a lower court ruling that placed a temporary injunction on e-mail searches in a fraud investigation against Steven Warshak, who runs a supplements company best known for a male enhancement product called Enzyte. Warshak hawks Enzyte using “Smiling Bob” ads that have gained some notoriety.’”

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Link: DreamWorks Picks up Neil Gaiman’s Interworld

Lisandro writes to tell us Geeks of Doom is reporting that author Neil Gaiman recently announced DreamWorks has optioned the film rights for his upcoming novel, ‘Interworld’. “Gaiman said that in 1996 he began working with Michael Reaves on the idea for a story ‘about a boy who finds himself in the middle of a war between two equally powerful forces, who joins a super-team consisting of versions of himself from different alternate realities to try and maintain the cosmic balance.’ Soon after, the idea was pitched to DreamWorks and other studios, but was turned down.”

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Link: Samsung SyncMaster 940UX: First USB-Monitor Reviewed

“Although USB connectors in monitors appeared many years ago, they have performed only secondary functions all this time. However, now Samsung offers an LCD monitor that is connected to the PC via the USB bus and can work without a graphics card.”

Link: Venezuelan government to sell Linux-based computers

A new low-cost computing initiative implemented by the Venezuelan government aims to make inexpensive Linux-based computers available throughout Latin America.

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Link: Michael Moore’s New Film Leaked To BitTorrent

Jared writes “Michael Moore was afraid the Feds might sieze his new documentary Sicko, a scathing indictment of the US health-care system, because part of it was filmed in Cuba despite the US embargo. So he stashed a copy of the film in Canada just to be safe. He might as well not have bothered — the film has shown up on BitTorrent and P2P networks everywhere. So it’s safe now.”

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Link: The Fallacy of Hard Tests

Al Feldzamen writes in with a blog post on the fallacious math behind many specialist examinations. “‘The test was very hard,’ the medical specialist said. ‘Only 35 percent passed.’ ‘How did they grade it?’ I asked. ‘Multiple choice,’ he said. ‘They count the number right.’ As a former mathematician, I immediately knew the test results were meaningless. It was typical of the very hard test, like bar exams or medical license exams, where very often the well-qualified and knowledgeable fail the exam. But that’s because the exam itself is a fraud.”

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Link: Inability to meet “grand challenges” of physics likely to hurt US competitiveness

The National Academies of Science has produced a report that details the state of materials science and identified the grand challenges of the next decade. Rising costs, stagnant funding, and vanishing industrial research raise fears that these challenges will be met outside the US.

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Link: Search smarter with Apache Solr, Part 1: Essential features and the Solr schema

Looks interesting, and ready for prime time…

Link: Scientists Attempt to Replace Crude Oil With Sugars

amigoro writes with a link to the Press Esc blog, discussing a possible replacement for crude oil in plastics, fuels, and other industrial uses. The post outlines findings to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Science. Essentially, researchers at the Institute for Interfacial Catalysis are attempting to process the sugars in plant matter into an oil-like compound, a daunting challenge. “Glucose, in plant starch and cellulose, is nature’s most abundant sugar. ‘But getting a commercially viable yield of HMF from glucose has been very challenging,’ Zhang said. ‘In addition to low yield until now, we always generate many different byproducts,’ including levulinic acid, making product purification expensive and uncompetitive with petroleum-based chemicals. Zhang, lead author and former post doc Haibo Zhao, and colleagues John Holladay and Heather Brown, all from PNNL, were able to coax HMF yields upward of 70 percent from glucose and nearly 90 percent from fructose while leaving only traces of acid impurities.”

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Link: ZFS on a laptop? (14 Jun 2007)

Way cool feature of zfs.”One of the most important things a user needs to do on a laptop is to back his data up. Copying your data to DVD or an external drive is one way. ZFS snapshots with ‘zfs send’ and ‘zfs recv’ is a better way. Due to its architecture, snaphots in ZFS are very fast and only take up as much space as much data has changed. For a typical user, taking a snapshot every day, for example, will only take up a small amount of capacity.” ZFS on a laptop?