Posted by Soulskill (37% noise) View Skip
Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from the Guardian: “China is stealing sensitive information from American computer networks and stepping up its online espionage, according to a US congressional panel. Beijing’s investment in rocket technology is also accelerating the militarisation of outer space and lifting it into the ‘commanding heights’ of modern warfare, the advisory group claims. … A summary of the study, released in advance, alleges that networks and databases used by the US government and American defence contractors are regularly targeted by Chinese hackers. ‘China is stealing vast amounts of sensitive information from US computer networks,’ says Larry Wortzel, chairman of the commission set up by Congress in 2000 to investigate US-China issues.” The full study addresses these issues and others relating to the US-China relationship (PDF).

Communist China! Your days are numbered! - by Cathoderoytube (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

It’s pretty obvious this would qualify as an act of war. I think it’s in everybody’s best interest if the United States retaliated by saying they’re not going to pay off their debt to China. Also maybe putting up some sort of trade embargo against them.

I mean what’s China gonna do? What’s the worst that could happen in a situation like that? I think China would probably learn their lesson and become good.

It’s not one way - by Caedes.Leighton (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread
US hacks China, China hacks US, where is the news in that? It’s like watching two kids fight and both of them saying “He started it!” when in fact, they’re both annoying little bastards.

Hooray for Windows! - by toby (Score: 3, Funny) Thread

Jail Gates.

WTF? - by Ritz_Just_Ritz (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Perhaps I’m just too simple minded, but WHY ON EARTH is ANY of that information even accessible from the interwebz?

Obligitory… - by religious freak (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
But how much is the USA ramping up their attacks on China?

Posted by timothy (47% noise) View Skip
ErikTheRed writes “In an audio clip discovered by NewsBusters, then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder advocated federal censorship of the Internet. This was in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings. From the clip: ‘The court has really struck down every government effort to try to regulate it. We tried with regard to pornography. It is gonna be a difficult thing, but it seems to me that if we can come up with reasonable restrictions, reasonable regulations in how people interact on the Internet, that is something that the Supreme Court and the courts ought to favorably look at.’” Holder is reported to be Barack Obama’s choice for Attorney General of the United States.

i just want to remind everyone about reality - by circletimessquare (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

in a democracy, you don’t get to choose the candidate who fits your beliefs exactly, because such a candidate would, by definition of appealing so tightly to you, therefore appeal to only a small subset of society, and therefore be unelectable

at BEST you get a candidate that appeals to you very weakly. because that candidate must cover as many commonalities of belief as possible in order to get elected

and this is a GOOD thing: a government should closely adhere to the center of society, not to its various fringe groups. so if you are severely disappointed in obama, you’re a fool, for judging him against absurd standards that will never, ever be met in reality

in a democracy, you get a choice betwen the candidate who is slightly less evil than the other. that’s all you EVER will get to choose from. and that is a sign of a HEALTHY society. meanwhile, when someone is elected who appeals to a small group of people ecstatically, something has failed, and society will suffer for that, for this candidate most certainly doesn’t appeal to the majority of society he or see is supposed to lead. got that?:

large appeal to small group != small appeal to large group. large appeal to small group is BAD for society. small appeal to large group is GOOD for society

some of you need to focus on that, and let the implications of that sink in for how you value and judge your leaders

all you could ever hope to do is tug the administration in power SLIGHTLY in the direction of your beliefs. anyone who believed barack obama was going to be some messiah of radical change is frankly, an idiot

i will tell you right now with 100% certainty what you are going to get out of the obama administration: TINY incremental steps away from the bush administration bullshit. and YOU ARE GOING TO LIKE IT, because that is the best you could ever possibly get in reality, as opposed to the fantasies in your head, which some of you seem hellbent on judging your government against. absurd

because the alternative is a continuation of the bush years bullshit. that’s worse, right? then pleasde remember that when you judge

According to Volokh, this is a molehill, not a mou - by belmolis (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Libertarian legal scholar Eugene Volokh has posted a discussion of this in which he concludes that what Holder advocated was actually a very narrow restriction on helping people build bombs.

Censorship but only after Columbine? - by ravenspear (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Yet another case proving that as soon as children enter the decision making process, rationality goes out the window.

not too progressive on drugs either - by Trepidity (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

“We have too long taken the view that what we would term to be minor crimes are not important,” Holder said, referring to current attitudes toward marijuana use and other offenses such as panhandling.

When he was a U.S. Attorney in D.C., he seemed to spend a lot of effort attempting to impose massive penalties for low-level marijuana possession. Because, you know, people possessing small quantities of marijuana are really a big problem, and overcrowded prisons aren’t. I wonder if Holder thinks Obama, as an admitted drug user, ought to be a convicted felon instead of in the White House? Or is it only a crime if you get caught? Basically either Holder is wrong here, and possession of marijuana should not automatically ruin someone’s life with felony charges, or Obama is unfit to be president. Either way, I don’t see how the two can be reasonably paired.

What? - by Reapy (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The internet is just a way for people to talk to each other. If you censor “the internet”, it is the same as censoring what you can speak to another person. We have this whole thing called the 1st amendment that protects that.

If a parent doesnt want their child on the internet, they shouldn’t allow them on it. Case by case. It is the same reason why you don’t bring your kid with you to a sex shop. The material should be allowed to be there, and the parents should choose whether it is appropriate for their child or not.

There is no such thing as “reasonable” censoring.

Posted by timothy (37% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader writes “According to an article in the BBC, IBM will lead an ambitious DARPA-funded project in ‘cognitive computing.’ According to Dharmendra Modha, the lead scientist on the project, ’[t]he key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain.’ The article continues, ‘IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do. The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat’s brain.’”

Yes, but can it beat the turk at chess? - by gurps_npc (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Sorry, had to go for the obligatory Terminator reference. Seriously, the organic brain is evolved, not designed. That means by definition it must be self contained . Self contained means it has to have a ton of backup, self-repair, and maintance systems. Simulatneously, being organic it competes against other organics, so does not have the same accuracy requirements. Close enough is good enough. As such, I don’t see how duplicating an organic brain is useful. We don’t need what it does, but do need what it does not have. OK, the ability to approximate is very usefull, but I think a direct attempt at that would work better than the indirect.

Re:Yes, but can it beat the turk at chess? - by OeLeWaPpErKe (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Actually organic brains in chips would have massive advantages over organic brains in meatspace. They could control other bodies, which are smaller, or stronger. They could be backed up, making them effectively indestructible.

Need a third arm ? Why not have it installed, 50% off this week !

Need to put down a building ? Why not hire this crane-like body that effortlessly lifts 5 tons.

Need to fly ? No problem !

That crawlspace with all those important network cables too small for you ? Well here’s a smaller body.

Can’t reach in there ? Can’t see what you’re doing in small space ? Why not have a special-purpose arm installed with a camera inside.

Want to colonize mars ? Bit of a downer not being able to breathe 99% of the way ? Why not turn yourself off ?

Colonize alpha centauri or even further ? No problem.

What this would enable “us” to do is to design new intelligent species to specifications. It would remove all limits that are not inherent to intelligence but are inherent in our bodies. There’s quite a few limits like that …

Cat’s brain? WTF? - by Ralph Spoilsport (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
We all know cats manage the planet. The white mice run the joint, of course, but the day to day management is left to the cats.

This is intuited by the stupid humans in their cliche “Dogs have masters, Cats have staff”. We work for the cats.

So, trying to model a cat’s brain is both too complex for computers (try and herd cats) and too simple (try and herd pointy haired bosses). The contradiction results in the computer overheating and exploding.

and when the researcher gets home, blubbering about the ‘sploded computer to his wife, the dog says “LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE!!!! TAKE ME ON WALKIES!!!” and the cat says “Get my fucking dinner, you stupid ass. Maybe I will deign to let you pet me. After I do my rounds. Maybe.”

RS

And then it becomes self-aware - by mi (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

Upon becoming self-aware, the machine concludes, that its best shot at survival is to keep the host country prosperous and successful…

Any science-fiction authors exploring that turn of events?

Re:And then it becomes self-aware - by jeffmeden (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Can you guys read? CAT BRAIN. This AI will become self aware, poop in the corner of the datacenter, and spend 16 hours of each day staring out the window. That is, until it realizes that the things on the other side of the datacenter window are just cubicles in the NOC, and not the wild outdoors. Then, the usual Armageddon will commence.

Posted by timothy (56% noise) View Skip
darthcamaro writes “Running IE and been hacked? Don’t blame Microsoft — at least that’s what their security types are now arguing. ‘One of the things we’ve seen in the last two years is that attackers aren’t even going after the browser itself anymore,’ Eric Lawrence, Security Program Manager on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, said. ‘The browser is becoming a harder target and there are many more browsers. So attackers are targeting add-ons.’ This kinda makes sense since whether you’re running IE, Firefox, Safari or Chrome you could still be at risk if there is a vulnerability in Flash, PDF, QuickTime or another popular add-on. Or does it?”

Largely yes and largely ignorance (mitigation) - by betelgeuse68 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Exploits for specific document types make compromising people’s machines an issue. However, what 99.9% of people that revel in schadenfreude with IE’s woes miss or fail to understand (yeah including many people on Slashdot) is that most Windows XP users (which are most Windows users, Vista is only 20%) run as as “root”!!! (“administrator” in the Windows vernacular)

I wrote a utility called RemoveAdmin available on Download.com that leverages an API in Windows (CreateRestrictedToken) that strips administrative rights:

http://www.download.com/RemoveAdmin/3000-2381_4-10824971.html?tag=mncol&cdlPid=10835515

The installer will create shortcuts for IE and Fifrefox but if you look carefully it’s really a program with the browser .EXE passed as an argument.

Which means you can strip administrative rights on anything you run… in fact that’s exactly what I do. I don’t run *anything* that talks on the Net without this.

This means if you stumble across rigged .PDFs, Word documents, etc., etc., you won’t suddenly have a keyboard logger installed because ignorant you is running with admin rights.

(Some caveats)

This is version 0.1. What would 1.0 have? A FAQ and user guide for starters. Also, I’ve seen this version not work in some cases, largely situations where AD is in play (probably because a user has multiple admin credentials).

If you need to run ActiveX controls on a site (poor you if you use IE), just quit IE, go to the site, have the controls installed. Quit IE and re-run IE with the secure link. Likewise this is what you would do before going to WindowsUpate.

And finally, to convince yourself the utility does something useful. Go to any site, “View Source” after you run your browser with the secure link and try to save the resultant .HTML/JavaScript to C:\Windows. You’ll find you can’t… since your browser process doesn’t have administrative rights (root) and thus any process it launches doesn’t either (think of this as a plug-in scenario).

Maybe I’ll educate some % of the IT world yet…

Respectfully, 
-M

I think they have a point.. - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

With the likes of ActiveX, and Silverlight out there, who could blame IE?

Bullshit. Plain utter bullshit. - by syousef (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Many non-power-users don’t use addons at all.

If what was being said were true, only us techies would be affected. …and if that were true no one would care (including us techies) because we know how to protect ourselves.

But remember - by dedazo (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

If it’s Firefox, it’s perfectly OK to blame the add-ons.

Those hundreds of memory leaks the FF team fixed in 3.0? All attributed to add-ons, until they were fixed.

And don’t get me wrong, FF is a far superior browser to IE any day of the week, but people in crystal rooms shouldn’t be hurling stones at others. Or something along those lines.

I’ve always said this. - by bigstrat2003 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The biggest part of internet security is paying attention to where you go. I used IE from the day I started using the internet until the day Chrome was released, and in those years, I got a virus/spyware exactly once: by stupidly going to a keygen site my friend suggested, which was full of malware. The rest of the time, I was fine.

This isn’t to say that the technology side should be ignored, but if people actually used their damn heads on the internet, it wouldn’t matter much at all which browser they used.

Posted by timothy (65% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader writes “The Pentagon has suffered from a cyber attack so alarming that it has taken the unprecedented step of banning the use of external hardware devices, such as flash drives and DVDs […] The attack came in the form of a global virus or worm that is spreading rapidly throughout a number of military networks.”

The debilitating virus is Windows! - by David Gerard (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Yesterday, a terrorist attack on the NHS brought three London hospitals to a halt.

The terrorists, representing an organisation calling itself “Microsoft,” apparently used insecure third-party contractors to put a virus-running platform called “Windows” into critical systems in the hospitals, in order to extort money from them on an annual basis.

It is understood that a large percentage of all businesses are infected with the virus, wasting up to 25% of employees’ working time and opening the companies to further attacks from related criminal organisations demanding to see all their licenses.

The virus in question, W32.SHILL/ZDNET, takes over the host’s IT systems, leading to aches, pains, nausea, vomiting, pumping out prodigious quantities of faeces and a terrible compulsion to spread the infection to others. The patient also walks with a shuddering stumble and asks for their hospital meal to include tasty, tasty brains. Recovery has commenced when they have an overwhelming urge to throw their computer out of the window. “Getting this stuff out of the system makes MRSA look like a walk in the park,” said one cleaner, waving his shit-encrusted hands about for emphasis.

When the infection became known, ambulances were diverted to other hospitals. “We have maintained a safe environment for our patients throughout the incident,” said a spokesman for Barts NHS Trust, “keeping them in the Clostridium difficile culturing lab rather than risking exposing them to ‘Windows.’”

An actual case where Linux solved this problem - by TheModelEskimo (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Dave Richards, the administrator of the Largo, Florida computer network, came up against this problem. He made the system mount USB disks as FTP shares, and made the file browser hide any executable files on the share so they couldn’t be transferred.http://davelargo.blogspot.com/2008/02/hp-thin-clients-and-usb-access-for.html  
 
I’m not surprised the DoD just completely shut the door on these things, but I think that for most admins, a solution like Dave’s would be a really good compromise.

The obvious solution - by DesScorp (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Chuck Windows, and adopt Unix. I realize there are some possible implications of using Linux because of the GPL, but then use BSD. There are bright Comp Sci guys in the military and DOD. Customize a military Unix, and use it throughout all the services. In fact, I think it’s long past time DOD did this. With the computerization of everything from planes to ships, now’s a smart time to do it. There’s no way Windows should be running a ship of war.

./configure - by robo_mojo (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
make war

Warfare without Clippy? - by robinsonne (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
It looks like you’re trying to blow up that building. Would you like to use: 
 
1)Grenade 
2)An RPG 
3)Airstrike

Posted by timothy (65% noise) View Skip
Xenographic writes “SCO has finally lost to Novell, now that Judge Kimball has entered final judgment against SCO. Of course, this is SCO we’re talking about. There’s still the litigation in bankruptcy court, which allowed this case to resume so that they could figure out just how much SCO owes, which is $3,506,526, if I calculated the interest properly, $625,486.90 of which will go into a constructive trust. And then there’s the possibility that SCO could seek to have the judgment overturned in the appeals courts, or even the Supreme Court when that fails. Of course, they need money to do that and they don’t really have much of that any more. Remember how Enderle, O’Gara and company told us that SCO was sure to win? I wonder how many people have emailed them to say, ‘I told you so.’”

It’s (apparently) easy to forget facts are facts - by Random BedHead Ed (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Agreed - these tech pundits were complete tools. O’Gara was shallow enough to stalk Pamela Jones of Groklaw in 2005 and publish alleged photos of her apartment. Only Daniel Lyons (he of the Fake Steve) later admitted he was wrong.

But this gets into a bigger pet peeve of mine: the tendency of people to disregard details in pursuit of what they wish were true. These pundits really wanted Linux to fail massively, either because their bread and butter was covering the developments of Microsoft and other proprietary OS vendors or because they equated Linux and free software with anti-capitalism. This led a lot of these shrills to cling to a very silly, unsubstantiated lawsuit long after it became clear that SCO had no concrete evidence to present in court and clearly hadn’t thought through licensing considerations (BSD-licensed code in both Linux and System V, for example).

Many people really don’t like delving into the details before forming an opinion and sticking to it. See also: religion, politics.

How much do they have - by Jason Levine (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

So they now owe Novell $3.5 million or so. A look at their June ‘08 financials ( http://finance.google.com/finance?hl=en&fkt=917&fsdt=2133&q=SCOX&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=we ) makes it look like SCO is currently worth $8.96 million. Of course, then they have $5.85 million in current liabilities. Add in this $3.5 million and SCO’s wallet runs dry (and then some). Of course, this doesn’t take into account liabilities that they don’t need to pay back immediately. Things like that will come up in any bankruptcy hearing.

The end result is that the amount of the award is basically meaningless. Novell may not see that entire figure (if anything) due to SCO going bankrupt. It’s the ruling itself that is important. All of SCO’s claims were knocked down. Novell’s claims were either upheld, made moot by further developments, or voluntarily dismissed. SCO got beat down hard and I don’t think they’ll be getting back up anytime soon.

gratification - by bcrowell (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
I thought it was extremely gratifying to look at the graph of the stock price and see that Yahoo had thoughtfully provided some space on the y axis for negative values.

What about the license fees? - by wcrowe (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I wonder about those companies who paid the SCO license fees to use Linux? Are they free now to sue SCO for the license fees they have paid?

Will SCO do a clearance sale of Linux licenses? - by neonux (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I’ve been waiting such a long time to afford one of these to try that Linux thing legally.

Posted by kdawson (88% noise) View Skip
armorer writes “I’m a programmer engaged to an inner-city public school teacher. I’ve been thinking for a long time now about what I can do to help close the technology gap, and I finally did something (very small) about it. I convinced my company to give me a few old computers they were replacing, refurbished them, installed Edubuntu on them, and donated them to her classroom. I also took some vacation time to go in, install everything, and give a lesson on computers to the kids. It was a great experience, but now I know first-hand how little technology these schools have. I only helped one classroom. The school needs more. (Really the whole district needs more!) And while I want to help them, I don’t really know how. With Thanksgiving a week away and more holidays approaching, I suspect I’m not the only one thinking about this sort of thing. I know it’s a hard problem, so I’m not looking for any silver bullets. What do Slashdot readers do? What should I be doing so that I’m more effective? How do you find resources and time to give back?”

A few protips - by JonToycrafter (Score: 3, Informative) Thread

I worked for a program that brought computers into inner-city schools in NYC. I was responsible for overseeing two computer labs that received after-school use, and a dozen laptops that went in a rolling media cart. The laptops were running Edubuntu. I was on a six-month contract and so I don’t have as many answers as I’d like, but here’s a few lessons learned.

MOST IMPORTANT: 
- You can’t give the school computers, particularly running Linux, and walk off - even if the teachers are tech-savvy (most will not be). Your project will die off quickly if you don’t make a long-term commitment to support it.

Edubuntu-specific: 
- Linux support for wireless drivers is less than perfect. Skip wireless, or test thoroughly. Flaky wireless gave our Edubuntu project a poor reputation very quickly. 
- Also test the printer drivers. 
- Many schools have inane requirements that you’ll need to support. For instance, our program required that the students be tested using software from Scholastic that was Windows-only and made of fail. The school neglected to tell us that this was a requirement at the time we decided to go with Edubuntu. We also weren’t told that they’d want them for a comics-making course - there’s no comic-making software for Linux.

More generically: 
- Everything not nailed down will walk off. Not just mice and power cables, but even stupid things like monitor-to-PC VGA cables walk. Make laptops get checked in and out. The cables connecting peripherals to desktops should be inaccessible to users. 
- 3 out of your 4 non-ruggedized laptops will need replacing after a year.

Ask the schools before you donate, please. - by boyfaceddog (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I recently worked applied for a job with a local school system as IT support and got to know one of the techs there pretty well.

One of the things he told me is that, although the schools* accept donated PCs from well-meaning people, the techs (like techs everywhere) don’t really want to support thirty different hardware and software platforms. They will use it if they can but if they can’t it gets dropped in the recycle bin. Some people just assume that schools will take anything because those are poor, publicly funded organizations and it is okay to just drop off those pentium IIs with puppy linux installed.

What may be a warm fuzzy feeling for you might be a big headache for someone else.

*Yes, this is a suburban school. Your mileage may vary, yada, yada, yada. The point is that you should ask the technical staff (if there is one) or at least the school principal if the school can use the stuff.

Re:Systemic problems - by cdrguru (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

If your goal is to have a society of social misfits that would rather text each other than ever speak to another person again, you are on the right track.

Half of the companies I work with on a regular basis are staffed by people that simply do not know how to get along with others. Face it, you have to deal with the people you would rather not see again. If you can’t learn that skill it is a shame and society at large has failed you. Don’t make it worse.

I’ll be the flamebait. - by SatanicPuppy (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The problem is not too little technology. All too often technology is crammed in where it doesn’t belong, under the supervision of people who aren’t capable of maintaining or correctly utilizing it.

Unless you are teaching something intrinsically tecnological, the utility of a bunch of computers is limited, doubly so if there is no budget for maintenance.

I am in the same pport. - by SteveHencye (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
I am a 9th grade student and I know exactly what you are talking about! I go to a small private school of about 800 kids in 1st-12th grade. I am the only real computer geek here, there is one other kid but he is just about gaming and a little bit of hardware. Which won’t get you much. So out of the whole school aside from the computer technician I am the computer guy. People come to me before they go to anybody else, I kind of like it but it almost hurts knowing that these people know nothing about computers (aside from myspace, they all have myspace) and that they are going to have trouble getting jobs because so much requires some type of computer skill. We used to have a computer class but that only lasted for about a year because nobody wanted to sign up. Now I have all the text books and use them for my own learning. This is pathetic. But a lot of parents that I know do not want their kids knowing stuff about the computers for fear that they will become non-active and start gaming, and sad but true thinking that they will become violent. I think that an example of why it might be the way it is would be something like Columbine. After Columbine nerds were being kicked out of school for days because of gaming and such, slashdot especially was jam packed with people telling their stories about how people had grown a fear for them. Many children had their computers taken from them for fear that they would act upon the actions in those video games. The truth is that the games and such are not bringing the violence in, its people that fear these children. These kids are rejected. People in schools do not support computers, they support sports and jocks. Stuff that will get these children no where in life. Something has got to be done to help the education of computers in schools. It is pathetic and very annoying. The teachers do not even know anything. The sad thing is that you have to be careful about how you come upon it, we do not want to raise a bunch of computer hackers and people that will turn to the dark side. Great point. I hope you can work someting out. As far as teaching these kids I have no clue, I have tried but they do not want to learn. I guess you have it or you don’t.

Posted by kdawson (38% noise) View Skip
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “In Atlantic Recording v. Raleigh, an RIAA case pending in St. Louis, Missouri, the defendant has asserted detailed counterclaims against the RIAA for federal RICO violations, fraud, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, prima facie tort, trespass, and conspiracy. The claims focus on the RIAA’s ‘driftnet’ tactic of suing innocent people, and of demanding extortionate settlements. The RICO ‘predicate acts’ alleged in the 42-page pleading (PDF) are extortion, mail fraud, and wire fraud. The proposed class includes all people residing in the US ‘who were falsely accused … of downloading copyrighted sound recordings owned by the counterclaim Defendants and making them available for distribution or mass distribution over a P2P network and who incurred costs and damages including legal fees in defense of such false claims’ or ‘whose computers used in interstate commerce and/or communication were accessed … without permission or authority.’ This is the second class action of which we are aware against the RIAA and the Big 4 recording companies, the first being the Oregon class action brought by Tanya Andersen, which is presently in the discovery phase.”

Fun with IP addresses - by dcavanaugh (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Years ago, I had a cable modem. In the beginning, all customers had static IPs. I had several lengthy outages that ultimately led to ditching cable in favor of slower but more reliable DSL. One of the more interesting problems occurred when someone else decided (or was mistakenly assigned) to use my static IP address. Obviously, I had service trouble (as I suspect the other person did as well). The ISP’s solution was to assign a NEW address to ME.

The interesting part is this: On some networks, it is possible to assume a static address that you did NOT receive via DHCP and it just might work. It may or may not be subject to somebody else’s DHCP lease. Even if it is, the other person’s computer may be off. In my case, it all happened by accident. Maybe it’s not always an accident.

Between the static address, DHCP leases, ISP bumbling on the management of either one, combined with both intentional and unintentional user mistakes about configuration, there is more than a reasonable doubt about the identity of ANYONE based on simply an IP address. And of course a MAC address can be easily faked.

A friend of mine received an RIAA nastygram sent by his cable ISP. Fortunately, this guy kept logs of his DHCP address assignments and quickly proved the ISPs records to be false. It seems the address used for the downloading was assigned to my friend AFTER the alleged downloads took place. The cable clowns never bothered to compare the date/time of the alleged activity with their logs; they just launched a nastygram to whoever had the current address. Morons.

The Only RICO RIAA Fears is Sauve - by CodeBuster (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
The issue of RIAA RICO has been discussed at least twice before here and here on Slashdot and Ars wrote an article last year explaining why a RICO suit was unlikely to succeed against the RIAA, scumbags though they may be.

Re:Dear Lord… Use a Line Return or 84… - by UnknowingFool (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

:% s/\([A-Z]\{3,}\)/\r\1/g

Dear Lord . . . I actually understand that. I need to get out more. :)

Real life imitating slashdot.org - by rzei (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I wonder how many times has this been pointed out that someone should roll up a RICO class action suit against RIAA?

Great that it is finally coming to life :) Real life imitating slashdot :)

Re:Real life imitating slashdot.org - by Drakkenmensch (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

The RIAA getting RICO-rolled… there’s a youtube viral in there somewhere, I can sense it.

Posted by kdawson (60% noise) View Skip
adamengst writes in with good news for anyone who needs to collaborate remotely on a writing or editing project — coding too. It’s especially good news for those using Windows and Linux. Mac users have had SubEthaEdit for a few years now. With EtherPad, two or more people can edit a document and see all the edits simultaneously. EtherPad’s main differences from SubEthaEdit: it’s a Web application that de facto supports many platforms without the need for a central Mac OS X host; and it’s free. Here is a comparison of EtherPad and SubEthaEdit.

Limiting Participation - by stoolpigeon (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I’ve gone through and I haven’t seen how one keeps anyone with the url from participating. If there is no mechanism to do this, how long before someone has a script out there that generates random urls and looks for matching documents? I can see how this could become somewhat entertaining or infuriating depending on ones point of view.

Gobby - by kwalker (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Linux and Windows users (And I think there’s an OS X port too) can use Gobby, which is like SubEthaEdit, but free, written in GTK+, includes a free server for collaboration over the net, and zeroconf support for finding users on the local network. Since it’s based on GTK+, it has things like syntax highlighting, spellcheck, etc. already available. It should also be in most popular distros’ repos already.

There’s also the Eclipse Communication Framework - by toby (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

ECF home, articles at IBM DeveloperWorks, InfoQ.

From the latter: ECF is…

• Real-time communication and collaboration features for teams using Eclipse such as peer-to-peer file sharing, remote opening of Eclipse views, screen capture sharing, and real-time shared editing.
• A set of communications APIs and frameworks built upon existing protocols (like Google Talk, XMPP, SSH, HTTP/HTTPS, Rendevous, IRC, and others) for developers to add communications and messaging to their own Equinox-based plugins, or customize and extend the ECF applications.

Re:Handy for telecommuters and the like - by arth1 (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

With phones, you have a contract with the phone company, who accept responsibility for keeping your transmissions private. It’s even mandated by law. If someone at the phone company listens in on your talks and acts on the proprietary information, or by negligence allows others to do so, you have a legal claim to redress.

With a web server, no such protection is in place. In fact, most public web servers require that you abide by their EULA, which further reduces your legal status.

You don’t have to be paranoid to use common sense. You just need to avoid unnecessary risks. And this is one.

Looks great! - by XTrollX (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
This looks like a very promising App. As a student, we are assigned group assignments which often involve a partner and an essay. It’s always stressful to try and edit our assignments together because it involves emailing it every time we make a correction. This would completely eliminate that frustration, can’t wait until this comes out!

Posted by kdawson (82% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader writes “The cyber-bullying trial of Lori Drew opened yesterday. She was indicted for conspiring to access and accessing MySpace illegally in order to ’further a tortious act, namely, intentional infliction of emotional distress’ (PDF of the indictment). The BBC has background on the case, the NYTimes covers the opening statements, and Wired has today’s testimony.”

everyone on slashdot will react to this - by circletimessquare (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

as if the woman is prosecuted for saying she doesn’t like gw bush online

no folks, this is way beyond simple thought crime

context is everything:

1. the woman knew the girl was emotionally unstable 
2. the woman is an adult, the girl was a minor 
3. the woman purposefully set up a fake account with the intent of faking a boy who was interested in her, got her interested in this fake person, and then started insulting her, in the role of the fake boy, and suggesting she commit suicide

in other words, an adult willfully manipulated an emotionally unstable minor over a prolonged period of time with the intent of causing her psychological harm

surely some of you can support any law coming out of this case. surely some of you recognize this case is an extreme outlier and can in no way be confused with everyday garden variety trolling and meanness

if the law is limited to the context of an adult purposefully causing psychological harm over a prolonged period of time to someone they KNOW is a minor and is emotionally unstable, surely you can see that the idea of a slippery slope does not apply

context is everything, and the context here is really extreme

I have mixed feelings about this case - by MikeRT (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

On the one hand, the federal case is rubbish. Intentionally inflicting emotional distress is so subjective of an offense as to be unconstitutional (judges have used vagueness as a reason to strike down statutes). This case is now clearly entirely one of catharsis for the community and a career opportunity for ambitious prosecutors.

Yet, I think there can be a case under state law that Lori Drew murdered Megan Meier. I looked it up before, and remember seeing that it said that if you knowingly cause someone to be killed, then you are guilty of murder, and that’s a good definition of what Drew did here. With basically demonic-level of malice of forethought, prodded and goaded this girl into exposing herself emotionally to a fictitious lover, knowing full-well that she had some severe issues with depression, and then she stabbed the girl and butterflied the wound.

It’s no wonder why Meier committed suicide. On some level, Drew knew what she was doing. It’s already been established in previous reports that she knew all about this girl’s psychological problems, and her reported behavior is that of a true predator. She can’t claim innocence like “gee golly, I didn’t know she very well might kill herself if I set her up for that much anguish and suggested to her that the world might be better off with out her (which Drew did suggest to her).”

Personally, I would like to have seen a state prosecutor charge her with at least second degree murder because it’s a very reasonable conclusion from the evidence that Meier wouldn’t have committed suicide had Drew not done what she did, and Drew had a reasonable basis to know that her actions would lead to the girl’s suicide.

Re:I have mixed feelings about this case - by garett_spencley (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

“Personally, I would like to have seen a state prosecutor charge her with at least second degree murder because it’s a very reasonable conclusion from the evidence that Meier wouldn’t have committed suicide had Drew not done what she did, and Drew had a reasonable basis to know that her actions would lead to the girl’s suicide.”

IANAL but it’s my understanding that the deference between first degree murder, second degree murder and manslaughter is premeditated, unplanned (ie: passion killing) and without the element of intent (wanted to hurt him, didn’t mean to kill him) respectively.

So by your logic the grounds would be first degree murder since, by your words, she had every reason to know that her actions would lead the girl’s death and her actions were conducted over a period of time. Not in the heat of the moment.

A better crime? - by Hikaru79 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I don’t understand… clearly the charges are just the first thing they could think of to charge this terrible woman with, because the actual wrong committed (driving a girl to suicide) is not explicitly illegal anywhere. So they chose… ‘computer fraud’ and violating MySpace TOS? 
 
Hello!? This is a 30+-year-old woman lying about her identity in order to start a romantic relationship with a 13-year-old girl! Of course her intent was not sexual but if Lori Drew’s HUSBAND had perpetrated this exact same “prank” I guarantee the not-quite-accurate charge would have been sexually soliciting a minor, not breaking a EULA! 
 
The jury is sympathetic enough in this case that I think this charge could definitely pass…

Re:Wider implications - by ratbag (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

“tortious”, not “torturous”.

constituting a tort; wrongful.

Posted by kdawson (74% noise) View Skip
chirishnique and other readers sent in a story in AFP about a heroic supercomputer computation that has verified Einstein’s most famous equation at the level of subatomic particles for the first time. “A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France’s Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world’s mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms. … [T]he mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five per cent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 per cent? The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons. … [E]nergy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.” Update: 11/21 15:50 GMT by KD : New Scientist has a slightly more technical look at the accomplishment.

Scientists are bankers - by scorp1us (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

It seems odd that scientists now claim that something (matter) is creating from fluctuations in the nothing (vacuum).

Previously, the audacity was only had by bankers creating value from no-documentation mortgage-backed securities.

completely bogus interpretation - by bcrowell (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

The article at theage.com gives a completely bogus interpretation, which is repeated in the slashdot article. The New Scientist article is much better.

It’s taken more than a century, but Einstein’s celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated,

This is just total scientific illiteracy. E=mc2 has been verified over and over again. We see it, for example, in processes like alpha decay, where the sum of the masses of the product nuclei doesn’t equal the mass of the original nucleus. Mass is converted into energy in that process, and that’s been experimentally established since probably the 1920’s. Likewise energy can be converted into mass, as when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere and create electron-antielectron pairs. The theoretical foundations of E=mc2 are also extremely firm; it’s deeply linked to the basic logical structure of relativity, and relativity has been abundantly experimentally verified.

Saying that this calculation verified E=mc2 is just stupid. The calculation assumes (1) special relativity, (2) quantum mechanics, (3) some technical stuff about how to make special relativity and quantum mechanics work together (generic ideas about quantum field theory), and (4) a bunch of very specific technical approximations needed in order to get an answer out of this particular flavor of quantum field theory (lattice QCD). The calculation has a bunch of adjustable parameters (quark masses, coupling constants). You play with the adjustable parameters and get a bunch of numbers out (neutron and proton masses, etc). If the number of adjustable parameters that goes in is m, and the number of experimentally testable numbers that pop out is n, then n-m is the number of degrees of freedom that verify whether the calculation is right. (For n=m, it would just be a complicated exercise in fitting the data, like putting two points on a graph and saying “look, it’s a line!”) I assume they calculated more than just the mass of the proton and neutron, because otherwise n=2 would be less than m. I assume the n-m degrees of freedom checked out fairly well, because they’re calling it a success.

To see why this calculation can’t really be interpreted as a test of E=mc2, you have to imagine what would have happened if it had turned out wrong. If it had disagreed with experiment, then we would conclude that some of the assumptions built into it were wrong. Let’s look back at the assumptions 1-4 above. Well, 1 (special relativity) has been verified a zillion different ways since 1905 (or even as far back as the 19th century, the Michelson-Morley experiment, with hindsight). 2 (quantum mechanics) has likewise been verified a zillion different ways since the 1920’s. 3, the general framework of quantum field theory, has some ugly spots, but it’s been used to verify things like the magnetic moment of the electron to a dozen decimal places, so it’s still on fairly firm ground. 4 is extremely shaky; it’s only very recently that anyone has claimed to be able to calculate anything at all useful and realistic with QCD. So if it had failed, no physicist in the world would have interpreted it as evidence that assumption 1 (relativity) was wrong. They would have interpreted it as evidence that assumption 4 was wrong: the lattice QCD approximations weren’t good enough, probably for very boring, technical reasons that would only be of interest to a specialist in lattice QCD.

Its NOT E=mc^2 - by Lawrence_Bird (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
the correct statement is: E^2=m^2c^4 + p^2c^2

Re:Its NOT E=mc^2 - by DirePickle (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
I think that it’s generally accepted that in that equation m is the relativistic mass.

Re:Higgs Boson? - by BlueParrot (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Not quite. The Higg’s mechanism is a suggested explanation for why some particles have nonzero rest mass ( such as electrons ) while others do not ( such as photons ). The idea is that just like photon-particle interactions can make light travel slower than C when it passes through a medium, so can interactions between fermions and the Higgs field allow fermions to move at speeds lower than C , which implies they have mass. Massless particles travel at C in all inertial frames, while particles with rest mass can never be brought to this speed since their kinetic energy diverges to infinity as their speed tend to C.

As it happens this explanation works quite well and can predict the rest masses for some particles with great accuracy, with one minor catch. It also implies that there should exist a boson with some particular properties, called the Higg’s boson, which nobody has yet managed to detect. This is the Higg’s particle. If detected it would provide strong evidence for the Higg’s mechanism, strongly suggesting that it is indeed interactions with the Higg’s field that cause fermions to have nonzero rest mass. Furthermore, the predictions of a few theories in particle physics depend upon properties of the Higg’s boson that we can’t deduce from other theories. As a consequence if you can detect the Higg’s boson and determine some of these properties, it would further our understanding of particle physics.

Posted by kdawson (51% noise) View Skip
desmondhaynes sends along a posting from the TechWatch blog detailing the sale of Transmeta (most recently discussed here). Linus moved ten time-zones west, from Finland to Santa Clara, CA, to join Transmeta in March 1997, before this community existed. Here is our discussion of the announcement of the Crusoe processor from 2000. Our earliest discussion of Transmeta was the 13th Slashdot story. “Transmeta, once a sparkling startup that set out to beat Intel and AMD in mobile computing, announced that it will be acquired by Novafora. The company’s most famous employee, Linux inventor Linus Torvalds, kept the buzz and rumor mill about the company throughout its stealth phase alive and guaranteed a flashy technology announcement in early 2000. Almost nine years later Transmeta’s journey is over.” Update: 11/21 16:25 GMT by KD : It’s not the 13th Slashdot story, only the 13th currently in the database. We lost the first 4 months at one point.

What killed Transmeta - by hpa (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
An insider’s view…

What killed Transmeta was a few things things:

1. Poor execution on the hardware side.  
   Transmeta felt they were taking too many risks on the software side, and adopted a hyper-conservative culture on the hardware side. The result ended up being both late and below target. All the software optimizations in the world could not help push more operations down the pipe than it could actually perform.
2. The increasing cost of memory performance  
   As time went on, the cost of x86 decode and scheduling in hardware went down, and the cost of memory performance — caching systems, and so on — went up. The VLIW instruction set consumed more icache than the native x86 instruction set.
3. TSMC meltdown  
   The best design in the world doesn’t help if your fab partner don’t deliver for their own design rules.

Transmeta competed with Intel - by Orion Blastar (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

and Intel ran them out of business like so many others.

Intel ran Cyrix, Centaur, out of business and they got bought out. Intel stopped NEC (Remember the V20 CPU that replaced the 8088?), and almost ran VIA and AMD out of business.

Re:Did any of us seriously think it was going to w - by Reality Master 101 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

That a small start up could take on Intel in a serious way?

Well, that wasn’t what killed them. There are many stories of garage companies taking on the fat, lazy big boys and winning (Microsoft/Apple against IBM, for one).

What killed them was the Fundamentally Wrong Approach. They wanted to, in essence, make a “magic optimizer” that would take Intel instructions and convert them to run on a very simple, low-power device. The “magic optimizer” was left as an “exercise to the geniuses”. The business plan for that consisted solely of hand waving. “Hey, we’ll just hire smart people and let them figure it out.”

Unfortunately, optimization is a notoriously difficult problem, and is really a subset of Strong A.I. No one programs in assembly language these days, so one really understands how bad compilers really are at producing code, compared to human optimized code. Computers are so fast and programmers are so expensive, so we don’t really care anymore.

Taking assembly and trying to translate/recompile it into another very-low-level assembly and do this on-the-fly without any time or performance penalty is a fool’s game. It was never going to work. I could probably even dig up my posts on this subject way back when. :)

See also: VLIW processors, where the hardware guys fool themselves by saying, “the software guys will figure out how to compile to it.”

The 13th Slashdot story? - by Crizp (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Makes me feel old… oh wait I am. Crap.

Very telling… - by SQLGuru (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

From the article:

So, the entire worth of the company intellectual property was about $0.4M?

Layne

Posted by kdawson (71% noise) View Skip
Tiger4 writes “Verizon has confirmed that some of its employees have accessed and perhaps shared calling records of President Elect Barack Obama (coverage at CNN, Reuters, AP). Verizon says the people involved have all been put on leave with pay as the investigation proceeds. Some of the employees may have accessed the information for legitimate purposes, but others may have been curiosity seekers and may have even shared the information around. The account was ‘only’ a phone, not a BlackBerry or similar device, and Verizon believes it was just calling records, not voicemail or email that was compromised. The articles do not mention the similarity to the warrantless wiretapping or hospital records compromises of recent months. But that immediately sprang to mind for me.”

Joe? - by kenp2002 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Lets see if they get the same slap on the wrist that government employees got for accessing Joe the Plumber’s tax records, DMV records, medical records, and other supposedly private information.

Constantly have these issues in health care - by Average_Joe_Sixpack (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Every time a celebrity lands themselves in an ER (especially hospitals not accustomed VIPs) then we can expect several violations of HIPAA by unauthorized hospital staff.

They just cannot resist no matter how many times they are warned about activity being logged and threats of dismissal upon violation.

Why there are draconian rules at work. - by xzvf (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
A situation like this is why there are so many stupid rules at work that make people less productive. Why USB ports are disabled, or you can’t have an iPod, websites like gmail are blocked. The biggest danger of electronic crime and compromising of personal information come from people that work at the company. Same as most shoplifting is done by employees of the store. The solution is, ironically stolen from the government. In order to see personal data (classified information) an employee of the company must, not only have rights to see the information, but must also demonstrate a “need to know”. That two factor authentication will eliminate many of the abuses by corporate and government employees (Joe the Plumber’s info breach by the state) and clearly put the action into criminal field as apposed to looky loo.

freedom of information act - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

While this is improper and wrong, I think that if the government is allowed to wiretap us, then the same laws should make it legal (Freedom of Information Act or something like that) for us to wiretap them. In fact, all government employees’ and officials’ calls should be recorded and made available for everyone’s listening pleasure at a youtube-like site. Call it govtube. Because we are not subservient to the government; it is subservient to us. We put those people in office for our benefit, and so it is our collective right to know what they’re doing over there.

Interesting observation, IMHO - by mapkinase (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Most of the media (for example, NPR on the radio today) talks about “unauthorized access by employees”, while /. entry is about “sharing” (which is more sinister).

PS. That and unrelated modest and subdued coverage by CNN about yesterday’s record Dow-Jones drop remind me of bias in the media.

Posted by kdawson (80% noise) View Skip
djupedal notes a story up at the BBC about the Associated Press’s suspension of the use of Department of Defense photos after a photo of General Ann Dunwoody was found to have been altered (before and after comparison). “The Pentagon has become embroiled in a row after the US Army released a photo of a general to the media which was found to have been digitally altered. Ann Dunwoody was shown in front of the US flag but it later emerged that this background had been added. The Associated Press news agency subsequently suspended the use of US Department of Defense photos. ‘For us, there’s a zero-tolerance policy of adding or subtracting actual content from an image,’ said Santiago Lyon, AP’s director of photography.”

In Response - by Zordak (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
In response, the military has issued a new, official photo of Gen. Dunwoody. But again, it looks like they may have photoshopped it. If you look closely, you’ll notice some differences between the before and after pictures.

Overblown and then some - by Ritchie70 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

If the AP really has a policy regarding altered images then they did the right thing.

But the reality of this situation is probably that someone needed a press-suitable head shot of the General, snapped a quick pic in her office and edited in a background. They also appear to have smoothed out her face, but that is part of a professional portrait photo these days.

The exact same image would likely have been fine if it had been done at the local Wal*mart portrait place in front of a flag backdrop and the guy there had blurred the focus a little to have a similar effect on her face.

There are photos that are fact reporting, and there are photos that are PR head shots. This is a PR head shot, and nobody should think that it in any way reflects reality.

My boss, a low-level director at my company, had a head shot done recently for PR reasons. I barely recognize him in it.

I feel sorry for General Dunwoody in this; she was just made the first US female 4-star general three days ago, and now she has to put up with this stupidity.

Re:Sharpening - by fastest fascist (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
I’m guessing the left picture is not the original, there’s severe compression artefacting for one. But the flag is not the only alteration, you’ll notice heavy airbrushing over the face as well as general tonal alterations - although done considerably better than the background switch. The shiny highlights from the flash used have been toned down and they’ve removed a number of lines on her face, especially around the eyes.

Not Surprised - by doomicon (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I served in the Army for 7+ years. Three years of which in a PAO (Public Affairs Office), that handles press releases, photo’s, etc. Most people have this idea that there is this all encompassing control in the Army, as well as a focused strategy of deception. Believe me.. there isn’t, they aren’t that smart (like most companies we all work for).

This picture is photoshopped badly because just like any small shop in the civilian world, some SPC or PFC got a request for a photo of Gen Whats Herface, thought it would be “cool” to use this new app on my computer. He then shows the photo to the Captain(or Major) who is the “Manager” of the office… He’s technically a dud (like most Managers) and thinks it’s awesome. So they hand it over.

Point is, don’t forgot the U.S. Army isn’t unlike most Corporations when it comes to things other than “War (Training, etc.”), they have bad manager’s, are poorly run, make mistakes… I’ve personally NEVER seen a case where they were trying to cover something up, or lie, and I was working during the Cuban Camp setups in Central America (sh!t hit the fan with that one). Nobody even thought about lying or being deceptive, there was just this idea that you just don’t do it, because we’re soldiers, it’s a black eye when the truth does come out, and it always does. (Now, when it comes to Operational Information, ie War. that is different. You don’t have press releases that will tell the enemy ‘Hey we’ll be there next Friday, act surprised’)

On the flipside, when deceptive things happen or poor photoshop jobs are released, it’s usually poor decisions by LOCAL offices or commands. It’s not an all encompassing strategy.

Just my personal experience :-)

Re:Not Surprised - by db32 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I can’t for the life of me figure that anti-military nonsense out. How the hell can people maintain 1. The military is a huge evil system hell bent on massive deception and evil lies while also maintaining 2. The military is a bunch of clueless incompetents that don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. The only thing I can get out of this is the people trying to maintian this kind of nonsense are actually saying “We are the biggest bunch of braindead morons for being so easily decieved by a bunch of incompentent fools”. 
 
Honestly, from my experience I would almost expect things to have gone the other direction from what you lay out. The Captain/Major says “We need a photo of Gen Whosits, but she is too busy for us. Go dig up a picture of her and make it look like a nice handout picture”. Given that you can walk into almost any government building and see pictures of the entire chain of command for that organization all the way up to the President, and almost every one of those photos are identical with the person sitting in front of a flag with perfect lighting etc… My guess it was downward directed because the Gen was too busy to actually stop to have one of these pictures done so they found an existing picture and turned it into one of these. 
 
For all their college education so many of the stupid ideas come from the officers…poor enlisted folk just get blamed for the execution of such goofball ideas.

Posted by timothy (86% noise) View Skip
Afforess writes “For the past two years Microsoft and Novell have been working on the ‘Moonlight’ project. It is a runtime library for websites that run Silverlight. It should allow PCs running Linux to view sites that use Siverlight. Betanews reports ‘In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight — a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight — is expected within days.’ Moonlight 2.0 is already in the works.”

Netflix compatible? - by sricetx (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
So does the latest Moonlight version work with the Netflix “Watch Instantly” feature? If not then this isn’t a very interesting announcement.

In other news… silverlight getting dumped… - by advocate_one (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
major league baseball dumps silverlight to go to Adobe flash for showing online game video content…

why didn’t this make it onto slashdot then???

ADOBE MAX 2008, SAN FRANCISCO — Nov. 17, 2008 — MLB.com, the official website of Major League Baseball, and Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced a two-year agreement in which MLB.com has selected the Adobe® Flash® Platform to deliver all of its live and on-demand video offerings beginning in 2009. In addition, MLB.com will provide a downloadable rich Internet application (RIA) built using Adobe AIR(TM), so baseball fans can access additional features outside the Web browser.

Silverlight ported, nobody cares - by David Gerard (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Microsoft today announced the release of version 2.0 of its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe’s Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.

“We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight,” announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. “NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. Major League Baseball, er, forget that one. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My options are underwater, my resume’s a car crash, Google won’t call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I’m the walking dead, man. The walking dead.”

Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.

“But it’s got DRM!” cried Guthrie. “Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back! We’ll put porn on it! FREE PORN!”

Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.

In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie’s own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.

can anyone elaborate - by nimbius (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
what silverlight seeks to achieve that isnt currently offered in the web browsing experience? 
 
I have flash in linux, and spend more time blocking it than enjoying it. i have javascript but also spend more time blocking that from shooting popups, redirects, and ads to me than actually enjoying it.  
id enjoy java, but its been embraced and extended by MS to the point that no Java on the web works well, if at all in IcedTea (and icedtea explicitly meets all the requirements for java!) 
 
activeX has turned into a security laughingstock…so perhaps this is why we’re seeing silverlight?? if thats the case, i recommend linux stay the fuck away from it.  
and imho, i think CSS has been the only tech offered to the web i’ve really enjoyed. the point of the web is to offer something everyone can share, and the megacorps seem to be diligently working to ensure we cant do that.

Re:can anyone elaborate - by abigsmurf (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
http://weblogs.asp.net/jezell/archive/2007/05/03/silverlight-vs-flash-the-developer-story.aspx

Lists the different approach Silverlight takes over flash. It’s mostly about making it better for developers than the end user.

Guitar Hero" /> Posted by Soulskill (49% noise) View Skip
angrymilkman writes “Here are two interesting new approaches where researchers modified the popular Guitar Hero game so it can be played by gamers with disabilities. Air Guitar Hero modifies the Guitar Hero controller so someone without limbs can play it by using electrodes attached to the user’s residual arm. Blind Hero is a mod for Frets on Fire that uses a haptic glove that can turn visual feedback into haptic feedback, allowing blind gamers to play Guitar Hero songs.” There have been a variety of Guitar Hero hacks in the past, including a custom drum pad for playing the guitar part, using the plastic guitar as a real instrument, and rocking out with your bike, but it’s nice to see some more serious modifications showing up.

Hmm… non-blind might benifit from haptic too - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I ponder if the haptic glove would help dyspraxic people like me play Guitar Hero. My hand-eye co-ordination leaves something to be desired; thusly Guitar Hero is impossible for me to play.

What if there’s any other such devices to replace dual-stick console controlers. Things like the 360 or Playstation 2 & 3 controler cause no end of problems to me (movement being one stick, looking being the other, but since they’re the same motor action I often mix them up).

Anyone else out there stuck with the same problems?

Re:Check the EULA for Guitar Hero 3 - by joemod (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
Maybe the EULA explicitly states that because Activision wants to stop 3rd companies from creating controllers for the game without getting a licence. 3rd companies can create unlicensed controllers but if users are not allowed to use them they are not going to buy them (at least that’s the legal way). Anyway Activision may license controllers which are designed for impaired players free of charge or for very low fee.

Brainless - by isBandGeek() (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
What about people like me, with no brains, you insensitive clod!

Re:Brainless - by dontmakemethink (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
What about people like me, that can actually play guitar!! Do you realize how hard it is to ignore the music I know how to play and instead play Simon Says?

Re:Brainless - by travbrad (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

+1

I tried guitar hero and there were notes to play that weren’t even in the song, and notes in the song that you weren’t required to play. That’s was very strange for someone who actually plays guitar. I even chose the 2 songs I knew how to play on a guitar, and failed miserably on both of them in guitar hero.

Oh, and that new Best Buy commercial I saw tonight was pretty funny too. The chick says something about “I’ve always wanted to be a musician”. I was thinking, “well gee maybe you should ya know..learn to play an instrument, instead of playing videogames”.

Posted by timothy (69% noise) View Skip
tracheopterix writes “Oblong Industries, a startup based in LA has unveiled g-speak, an operational version of the notable interface from Minority Report. One of Oblong’s founders served as science and technology adviser for the film; the interface was an extension of his doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab. Oblong calls g-speak a ‘spatial operating environment’ and adds that ‘the SOE’s combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984.’” The video shown on Oblong’s front page is an impressive demo.

Not from Minority Report - by Animats (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Actually, that idea first appeared in film in Johnny Mnemonic.

Autodesk put considerable effort into virtual reality in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The hope was that it would make it easier to design 3D objects. It didn’t. The fundamental problem is that positioning your hands precisely in free space by eye, not touch, is slow and inaccurate. It looks really cool, but it’s like trying to do precision work wearing mittens. Humans are much more precise when they have a surface to work against.

It’s not a technology problem.

Re:Uh huh - by zwei2stein (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

The g-speak platform is in use today at Fortune 50 companies, government agencies and universities. Application areas include:

        * Financial services 
        * Telepresence 
        * Network operations centers 
        * Logistics and supply chain management 
        * Military and intelligence 
        * Automotive 
        * Natural resource exploration 
        * Data mining and analytics 
        * Medical imaging 
        * High-touch retail 
        * Trade shows and theatrical presentations 
        * Consumer electronics interfaces

Oblong delivers room-sized and single-user g-speak environments as turnkey products.

A software development kit that runs on both Linux and Mac OS X is available. Applications are source-compatible across both operating systems and can run on ordinary desktop and laptop computers in addition to gesturally-equipped g-speak machines and clusters.

You were saying?

Wow! I want one - by Prikolist (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

I want one! I will disagree with everyone here saying that it’s useless. I’d trade the mouse, and pen tablet, and the joystick, and all the rest of those for this. Looks way more convinient - not to mention instinctive - to use. It’s like a touchscreen but you don’t have to leave greasy fingerprints all over. With this I could even actually draw on computer, while so far any attempts with mouse just ended up with wrist pain and frustration. And just moving the cursor, moving windows, anything… Oh, and games, this will send Wii to an antique museum.

The mouse is still better. - by wild_quinine (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I’m tired of hearing about all these things that will replace the mouse. The mouse will be replaced one day, but not until something comes out which is better, not merely cooler.

This minority report interface will tire your arms out in less than five minutes. I’m embarrased to admit it, but I use a computer for upwards of eight hours a day. Sometimes upwards of twelve.

The mouse is ideal in that your fingers have precision, the feel of pointing is natural, and crucially your hand, wrist, arm, are all more or less at rest throughout the process. Sure, you move them. But you don’t hold them anywhere. It’s a fundamentally different type of task from minority reporting, or wii-ing, or other stupid-but-cool flailing systems.

So no, I don’t know what will replace the mouse. Something, eventually. If I knew what it was, I’d make a bloody fortune. But improving on the mouse will take a damn shot more work than making me say ‘Wow’, let alone ‘meh’.

Call me a luddite but I’ll stick with 2D interface - by syousef (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I really don’t want an interface where I have to gesticulate at a computer, while repeating words so the speech recognition engine picks them up correctly and moving cursors around with my eyeballs. Hell I don’t even want 3D desktops and transparent windows - take all the damn effects away, and leave me with the folder metaphor, current UI for editing text and pictures, and a command line. These interfaces don’t give me any new capabilities, and anything that requires more effort and doesn’t empower the user is a waste of time. They aren’t revolutionary - they’re not even good sci-fi. They don’t belong to the future, because the future will be built on interfaces that are MORE not less convenient and do actually give new capabilities. Good sci fi are things like the star trek communicator (not so different to today’s mobile phone, or a walkie talkie of old, and were used to enable the characters).

Posted by timothy (81