A woman accused of groping Santa Claus at a Connecticut mall won't have to serve any jail time if she stays out of trouble.

Sandrama Lamy has been sentenced under an accelerated rehabilitation program that will wipe her record clean if she completes two years of probation.

Danbury Superior Court Judge Susan Reynolds on Wednesday also ordered the 33-year-old to stay away from the Danbury Fair Mall.

In December, Lamy was charged with fourth-degree sexual assault and breach of peace for allegedly touching Santa inappropriately while sitting on his lap at the mall.

Woman Accused Of Groping Santa On Probation For Two Christmases

Google Inc.'s long-anticipated acquisition of online ad service DoubleClick Inc. is expected to turn the Internet search leader into an even more powerful marketing vehicle that's fueled by better insights about consumers.

The $3.1 billion deal, completed Tuesday after nearly a year of regulatory wrangling, also may intensify the pressure on Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. to resolve their stormy courtship so they don't risk further distractions while Google tries to sprint further ahead in the race for Internet advertising.

Google took control of DoubleClick a few hours after Europe's antitrust regulators removed the final stumbling block by approving a deal that was first announced 11 months ago.nullnullnullnullnullnull

Google Completes $3.1 Billion Takeover Of DoubleClick

Working in IT isn't always pretty. After all, we can't all work on the cutting-edge technologies all the time. Some of us have to get dirty -- in some cases, literally.

Unfortunately, dirty jobs -- whether you're being chained to a help desk, hacking 30-year-old code, finding yourself wedged between warring factions in the conference room, or mucking about in human effluvia -- are necessary to make nearly every organization tick. (Well, maybe not the human effluvia part.)

The good news? Master at least one of them, and you're pretty much guaranteed a job with somebody. We don't guarantee you'll like it, though.

Here are seven of the dirtiest jobs in IT, and why your organization needs them.

The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT

As its leadership has changed, so, too, has Microsoft. But I am never going to stop being skeptical of Microsoft’s motives.

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie may profess that the company’s top priorities are transparency, standards and interoperability. But regardless of these kinds of pronouncements, the Softies seem to believe that insisting their actions are altruistic and customer-motivated — even when they are really motivated by lawsuit threats and other, less-palatable reasons — will fool its constituencies.

This is why I’ll always remain a Microsoft skeptic

Zenwalk, a Slackware-based slim-and-zippy distribution, released a major update last month. The release announcement listed some noticeable enhancements and promised the best support for Wi-Fi you can expect in any Linux distro. Excuse me for being skeptic, but one doesn't expect midget distros to be the best in any field. How well can a single-CD 469MB distro hold up against every other multi-GB DVD distro available today? As it turns out, Zenwalk manages to squeeze in a long list of open source wireless drivers, as well as the proprietary Intel wireless device firmware. Surprisingly Zenwalk 5.0 not only does things you don't expect from a single CD distro, it does them with ease and very little command-line sorcery.

Tiny Zenwalk 5.0 packs a big punch

Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.
If your group has moderate programming, web, sysadmin, and hardware resources, you can use BOINC to create a volunteer computing project. With a single Linux server you can get the computing power of thousands of CPUs. Organizations such as IBM World Community Grid may be able to host your project (please contact us for information).
Use BOINC to create a Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center.
Use BOINC for desktop Grid computing.

Like distributed.net but putting it to good use... Lets see if we could get a memestreams user grid going... Tom had some kinda of idea going around....

BOINC: For the love of Grids

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a classic combinatorial problem: given a set of cities, what is the path that visits each city once and only once, while covering the minimum distance?

For a small set of cities, the solution is trivial and can be discovered by simple inspection; however, the solution for even a moderate number of cities is out of reach for most home computers. For example, to exhaustively check all possible paths for a 48 city instance—assuming you could check one million paths a second—would take approximately 1047 years.

Despite all the research, there is still no known general solution to the TSP.

Traveling salesman meets distributed computing

Early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease relies on access to a distributed collection of treasured data. Now, a team of Italian scientists is creating a way for hospitals to share these data jewels.

“We had doctors with a real-world problem—they were not able to share data,” says Ivan Porro of the University of Genova, Italy. “With distributed data resources, this is intrinsically a grid problem.”

Forget me not: brain scans on a grid for Alzheimer's diagnosis

Taking science out of the lab and injecting it into schools, Interactions in Understanding the Universe—better known as I2U2—is transforming pre-college education.

An Open Science Grid virtual organization dedicated to providing teachers and students with the data and tools used by large scientific collaborations, I2U2 also introduces high school students to the power of grid-enabled e-research.

Real science, real data, real grids

I2U2: educational e-Labs for real pre-college e-science

Many studies on cocaine addiction - and attempts to block its addictiveness - have focused on dopamine transporters, proteins that reabsorb the brain's "reward" chemical once its signal is sent. Since cocaine blocks dopamine transporters from doing their recycling job, it leaves the feel-good chemical around to keep sending the pleasure signal. Now a new study conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory suggests that cocaine's effects go beyond the dopamine system. In the study, cocaine had significant effects on brain metabolism, even in mice that lack the gene for dopamine transporters.

Cocaine's Effects on Brain Metabolism May Contribute to Abuse