A chunky (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/25/visual_studio_2010_rc_review/) Visual Studio 2010 releases soon, packing more features and representing perhaps more hours of development than any other single-vendor’s development tool. How could you resist? And yet many do resist such highly automated and powerful productivity tools and continue to favor Emacs or other text editors and command lines for their development. [...]

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President Obama has signed a one-year extension of several provisions in the main U.S. counterterrorism law, the Patriot Act. Provisions in the measure would have expired on Sunday without Obama’s signature Saturday. The act, which was adopted in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, expands the government’s ability to monitor Americans in [...]

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The city of Najaf in Iraq is thriving as a religious tourist destination for Shia Muslims, with thousands of Iranians making a weekly pilgrimage to the sacred Imam Ali shrine. Could it be challenging the Iranian city of Qom as the centre of Shia religious authority? As we entered the courtyard of the shrine, the [...]

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Blue Peter presenter Helen Skelton has completed a 2,000-mile kayak trip along the Amazon for Sport Relief. The 26-year-old was greeted by cheers and celebratory gunfire as she crossed the finish line in Almerim, Brazil. Skelton has clocked up 2,010 miles since she set off on her solo journey from Natua in Peru on 20 [...]

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One of the top leaders of the Basque separatist group Eta has been arrested in north-western France, the Spanish interior ministry has said. Ibon Gogeascotxea was arrested with two other suspected Eta members in a French and Spanish operation in Normandy. Madrid said the arrests had foiled a planned “commando” operation in Spain. A militant [...]

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But It’s A Dry Heat Character Counts Hannibal the Cannibal <Insert something here>

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Apple has found children were hired to help build some of its products, with one employer in its Mac, iPod and iPhone supply chain falsifying records. Three facilities were found to have hired 11 workers aged 15 in countries where the minimum work age is 16, as part of the annual audit of companies adhering [...]

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Backed by Yahoo!, HP, and Intel, the computer science mavens at Carnegie Mellon University have added a new compute cluster to the worldwide Open Cirrus test bed, a collection of clusters designed to explorer the frontiers of interwebs-scale distributed computing. The test bed now spans ten clusters at locations across the globe. Open Cirrus was [...]

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Fedora Project developers said they will push back the first alpha release for Fedora 13 by one week. In a Thursday mailing list post by Jesse Keating, Red Hat release engineer for Fedora Core, said the first alpha will be delayed to “verify blocker bug fixes and validate new builds of software necessary to fix [...]

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A man serving three life terms conned his way out of a Baltimore prison with help from his cellmate, an extraordinary escape that raised questions about Maryland’s procedures for releasing inmates. Raymond T. Taylor, 26, of New York, successfully posed as a cellmate he never should have been paired with in the first place — [...]

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