Health: USDA orders silence on mad cow in Texas: ‘The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued an order instructing its inspectors in Texas, where federal mad cow disease testing policies recently were violated, not to talk about the cattle disorder with outside parties … The order … was issued in the wake of the April 27 case at Lone Star Beef in San Angelo, in which a cow displaying signs of a brain disorder was not tested for mad cow disease despite a federal policy to screen all such animals.’
Great idea — if you want to avoid finding mad cow cases, just don’t bother looking for them! The beef rendering plant in question supplies beef to MacDonalds, reportedly.
Press: LWN: A look at SpamAssassin 3.0 (article is subscriber-only until next week).
OSes: Kernelthread.com: Making an Operating System Faster. Great article on some OS-level optimisations Apple used in MacOS X — including a nifty boot-time read-ahead system which reportedly more than doubles the speed of OS X reboots. nice!
Wildlife: here’s another critter we encountered last weekend — a baby Western Diamondback rattlesnake, hiding in a crevice.
