Cody Taylor

As Flight 1549 hit the Hudson River yesterday, Captain Sullenburger managed to hold the aircraft steady. In the ensuing panic, he was then last to get off the plane after searching it twice for any remaining passengers.

The latest national food safety investigation took on new urgency Friday as federal officials confirmed salmonella contamination at a Georgia facility that ships peanut products to 85 food companies. On Capitol Hill, the House Energy and Commerce Committee requested records as it opened its own inquiry.

I vividly remember my first video game system, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and the games that came with it: Super Mario Brother and Duck Hunt. Now I can recapture my youth on my iPhone because some developers have made a port of Duck Hunt for the device.

dj writes in with a reminder that forty years ago, on January 16, 1969, the two Russian spacecraft Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 carried out the first docking between two manned spacecraft and transfer of crew between the craft. Wired’s piece gives a gripping account of “one of the roughest re-entries in the history of space flight”: “Soyuz 5’s service module failed to detach at retrofire, causing the vehicle to assume an aerodynamic position that left the heat shield pointed the wrong way as it re-entered the atmosphere. The only thing standing between Volynov and a fiery death was the command module’s thin hatch cover. The interior of Volynov’s capsule filled with noxious fumes as the gaskets sealing the hatch started to burn, and it got very hot in there (which, a short time later was something he probably missed). … But wait. There’s more.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ilgaz writes in to let us know that we will have to install MS Silverlight 2 to watch the US President’s inauguration online. Everyone running Mac PPC, Linux, and FreeBSD has been left out, as there are no working Silverlight 2-capable alternatives on these systems. Here is Microsoft’s press release announcing the selection of Silverlight yesterday. Streaming of various events around the inauguration begins today at the Presidential Inaugural Committee site, which touts its “inclusive and accessible” coverage.

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mytrip points out news that an anti-piracy firm called Nexicon has been offering financial incentives to ISPs in exchange for having the ISPs police their own networks for copyright infringement. Nexicon would offer their services (for a fee) to help the ISPs pinpoint users who are illegally sharing files, and then give the users an option to “settle” through their “Get Amnesty” website. The revenue generated by such settlements would then be shared with the ISPs. Jerry Scroggin, owner of a smaller ISP in Louisiana, is still skeptical, saying, “I would still wind up losing customers. I would also have to pay Nexicon for this … I have to survive in this economy but I don’t have the big marketing dollars that bigger ISPs have. I have to fund 401(K)s and find ways not to lay off people. Giving free rein to the RIAA is not part of my business model.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To help you get ready, we’ve recapped out favorite “What The Frak” moments from Battlestar Galactica past. Remember, these are just our favorite WTF moments, because if you listed them all out, you’d pretty much be reciting everything Baltar did in season 4 with his crazy cult ladies and all that in and out of the head craziness.

The Cape Wind project in Massachusetts cleared its biggest hurdle to date on Friday when the U.S. Minerals Management Service gave final environmental approval to the 450 megawatt offshore wind farm.