The Flatlanders' Community

Yeah, we only just realized that paid accounts can make polls anywhere. Whoops!

Edit: derp, can't use strike tags inside a poll! sorry about that!

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Megaupload sharing site shut down

Megaupload, one of the internet's largest file-sharing sites, has been shut down by officials in the US.

The site's founder and others have been charged with violating piracy laws.

Federal prosecutors have accused it of costing copyright holders more than $500m (£320m) in lost revenue. The firm says it was diligent in responding to complaints about pirated material.

Investigators denied a link to recent protests against proposed piracy laws, according to the Wall Street Journal.

On Wednesday, thousands of websites took part in a "blackout" to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa).

Indictment Charges Megaupload Site With Piracy
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 19, 2012

McLEAN, Va. — Federal prosecutors in Virginia say they have shut down one of the world’s largest Internet file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, and charged its founder and others with violating piracy laws.

An indictment accuses the company of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. The indictment was unsealed Thursday, one day after Web sites shut down in protest of two Congressional proposals intended to thwart the online piracy of copyrighted movies and TV programs.

Megaupload.com has claimed it is diligent in responding to complaints about pirated material.

The indictment says that at one point, Megaupload was the 13th most popular Web site in the world.

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We're very behind on the news lately, sorry. Let's have another mishmash post, starting with a tragedy:

• Oxford University professor Steven Rawlings found dead BBC 12 January 2012 - A man who was found dead in a bungalow was an Oxford University professor, police have revealed.

This is a very serious matter, the murder of an accomplished astrophysicist is not to be joked about, but we do have to admit that a headline of OXFORD PROFESSOR MURDERED immediately led us to wonder if Lewis and Hathaway were going to investigate.

No disrespect meant to Prof. Rawlings or his wife, Linda. It's just a headline seen far more often in fiction than in reality.

Graphene is still going strong these days:

• Hydrogen Enhances Graphene Use ScienceDaily (Jan. 12, 2012) — Physicists at Linköping University have shown that a dose of hydrogen or helium can render the "super material" graphene even more useful.
• Graphene Quantum Dots: The Next Big Small Thing ScienceDaily (Jan. 12, 2012) — A Rice University laboratory has found a way to turn common carbon fiber into graphene quantum dots, tiny specks of matter with properties expected to prove useful in electronic, optical and biomedical applications.

And quantum computers are always awesome.

• Ten-Second Dance of Electrons Is Step Toward Exotic New Computers ScienceDaily (Jan. 17, 2012) — "Standard computers have come to their limit and cannot do some of the things we want," said Tyryshkin, a research scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering. "We are trying to find a different way of doing computing, using additional degrees of freedom involving quantum computing and things like spins."

Meanwhile, AUTISM:

• No Link Found Between Prenatal Exposure to Tobacco Smoke and Autism, Swedish Study Finds ScienceDaily (Jan. 12, 2012) — A large population-based study in Sweden indicates that there is no link between smoking during pregnancy and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in children. The study, led by Dr. Brian Lee, an assistant professor at Drexel University and a team of international collaborators, will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and was published online in December.

(It's always "MEANWHILE, AUTISM".)

Our favorite "who knows who's at front" icon is in danger:

• Quantum Uncertainty: Are You Certain, Mr. Heisenberg? ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2012) — Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle is arguably one of the most famous foundations of quantum physics. It says that not all properties of a quantum particle can be measured with unlimited accuracy. Until now, this has often been justified by the notion that every measurement necessarily has to disturb the quantum particle, which distorts the results of any further measurements. This, however, turns out to be an oversimplification, new research suggests.

And in other recent news, Israeli scientists are making cyborg rats, there are terrifying reports of completely antibiotic-resistant strains of TB in India, and the BBC discovers asexuality as an orientation.

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Graphene's been pretty big in the news the past few days:

• ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2012) — A University of California, Riverside engineering professor and a team of researchers have made a breakthrough discovery with graphene, a material that could play a major role in keeping laptops and other electronic devices from overheating.

• ScienceDaily (Jan. 8, 2012) — Can organic matter behave like a fridge magnet? Scientists from The University of Manchester have now shown that it can.

  In a report published in Nature Physics, they used graphene, the world's thinnest and strongest material, and made it magnetic.

Between this and and the tiniest silicon nanowire ever, and a random shout-out to RPI researchers, this should be a good year for nanotech.

Meanwhile, AUTISM:

• ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2012) — The underlying reason autism is often associated with gastrointestinal problems is an unknown, but new results to be published in the online journal mBio® on January 10 reveal that the guts of autistic children differ from other children in at least one important way: many children with autism harbor a type of bacteria in their guts that non-autistic children do not.

• ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2012) — These days, we hear a lot about the disorder of autism, but researchers at the University of Utah have created a program that helps kids with autism focus on building their skills and utilizing an aptitude for visual-spatial thinking, computers and other electronic media.

Intestinal flora have really been making the news lately. A good week to be a gut microbe.

And then let's finish this off with a short list of headlines from the BBC:

• Scientists discover soldier bees
• Orange juice prices hit record
• Websites pay users who meet New Year's resolutions
• Vatican used Wikipedia for new cardinals' biographies

Regarding the last bit there, oh dear.

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As you might have seen in dw_news just now, Community Imports are a go! There's currently a 100,000 limit on comment imports, but since it only received 1,454 comments in four years, that means we can finally import fratrandas with everything in it!

Once the import's done, we're deleting fratrandas, which only had backups of the posts. (LJ-Sec couldn't do comments.) Also, most of the stuff from years ago was under a lock, and all that will remain members only. Right now, of course, only tags are imported and everything else is waiting in the queue.

See, this is why Dreamwidth is AWESOME.

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Ever have one of those moments where you could have sworn you did something and then you actually check to see if you did and it turns out that you didn't?

Yeah, just had one of those!

Wolfmoon Tarot & Rune Readings

ulfhedinn's girlfriend was receiving disability, but now the government has spontaneously decided She Doesn't Need It Anymore. Problem: she definitely does! Solution: getting training and certification for a job she can effectively work in with her still-very-existing disability.

Of course, the process of going from loss of income to gaining a new source of income costs money. So through the 31st,ulfhedinn is offering free one Tarot card pulls or one rune pulls in wolfmoon, with a Paypal donate button as a tip jar, as well as three card or three rune readings for $5 each.

It's a little late for Christmas (sorry!), but you can still go and get a reading for the New Year!

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Total Icon Count: 20

Categories:
Damn You Auto Christmas! + Other Christmas Icons - 9
Cinemagraphs - 4
Misc. Icons - 5
Alts - 2

Teasers:

The cinemagraphs come from From Me To You. Some of the Christmas icons are adapted from Damn You Autocorrect submissions, and some are from the Guardian's 24 Hours in Pictures series.

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Total Icon Count: 16

Teasers:

We're a bit overdue for another Text Icons From DYAC Favorites post, but these are so much fun to make!

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Matthew Perpetua's put up the Fluxblog 2011 Survey Mix. Ten discs! 183 songs! Something for everyone, because, well, it's Fluxblog.

tl;dr free musics over here

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Total Icon Count: 16

Categories:
Icons from the Guardian
alts

Teasers:

These are all from The Guardian's 24 hour in Pictures series, all from the past month.

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