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Slashdot Turns 100,000 443

Posted by CmdrTaco from the has-it-been-that-long-already dept.
This entry represents the 100,000th story posted on Slashdot. Technically this is a bit late since we're missing the first few months of stories from the DB, but there are now 100k items in the story database and I thought that milestone was worthy of sharing with the universe. We've come a long way in the last 12 years, and while the site isn't always exactly what I want it to be, I'm very proud of the work done by our thousands of submitters and by the editors our readers have "affectionately" referred to as "The Slashdot Janitors" for so many years. Special grats to timothy who is just short of his 17,000th story and is far and away the most prolific person here. The hall of fame has a few other bits of trivia.
The Almighty Buck

Virtual Money For Real Lobbying 85

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the sheeple-happy-to-be-paid-shills dept.
ogaraf writes "Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that health-insurance industry group 'Get Health Reform Right' paid Facebook users with virtual currency to be used in Facebook games in exchange for lobbying their Congressional Rep. 'Instead of asking the gamers to try a product the way Netflix would, "Get Health Reform Right" requires gamers to take a survey, which, upon completion, automatically sends the following email to their Congressional Rep: "I am concerned a new government plan could cause me to lose the employer coverage I have today. More government bureaucracy will only create more problems, not solve the ones we have."'" Relatedly, Trailrunner7 illustrates growing concern over realistic spammer profiles in social networking sites and their potential to wreak havoc, especially if these two methods were combined. "Many spammers now have large staffs of people working on nothing but building out completely fake personas for non-existent users on social networking sites and blog networks. The spammers use these personas to create accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot and other sites that have high levels of user interaction."

Comment Silverlight was supposed to be a departure from CO (Score 3, Interesting) 251

by localtoast (#30182484) Attached to: New Microsoft Silverlight Features Have Windows Bias
The full .Net framework has a lot of hacks to support COM. Your STA running managed code can get preempted at any time to Release COM objects behind RCWs that get garbage collected. This can cause interesting stress bugs. It gets even worse when an RCW around an STA gets finalized on the finalizer thread. That blocks the finalizer thread, because it waits for .Net to Release the COM object on the original STA thread. If the STA thread is in a wait state, you can hang the finalizer thread. Another big issue is around supplying alternative credentials for DCOM. .Net has no exposure of the CoCreateInstanceEx API that allows you to specify alternative credentials. Even if you wrap it yourself, you have to make sure you call CoSetProxyBlanket before you do any calls - and .Net does QueryInterface under the hood for you, and you have to make sure CoSetProxyBlanket is called again, then the simple programming interface of .Net becomes more of a hindrance than a help. They were supposed to get away from COM in the Silverlight versions. Now the waters are even muddier, because WPF is still supported on the Full version of the CLR.
Programming

Russia's New Official Holiday — Programmer's Day 306

Posted by Soulskill from the feel-free-to-take-sunday-off dept.
Glyn Moody writes "Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, has decreed a new holiday for his country: Programmer's Day. Appropriately enough, it will be celebrated on the 256th day of the year: September 13th (September 12th for a leap year). Do programmers deserve their own holiday ahead of other professions? Should the rest of the world follow suit?"
Earth

"Gigantic Jets" Blast Electricity Into the Ionosphere 168

Posted by kdawson from the more-things-in-heaven-and-earth dept.
New Scientist has an update on the so-called "gigantic jets" first discovered in 2003 — these are lightning bolts that reach from cloud tops upward into the ionosphere, as high as 90 kilometers. (There's a video at the link.) What's new is that researchers from Duke University have managed to measure the electrical discharge from a gigantic jet and confirm that they carry as much energy skyward as ordinary lightning strikes carry to the ground. According to the article, "Gigantic jets are one of a host of new atmospheric phenomena discovered in recent years. Other examples are sprites and blue jets."
Censorship

US Tests System To Evade Foreign Web Censorship 219

Posted by timothy from the worthy-objective dept.
D1gital_Prob3 excerpts from a Reuters story that says "The US government is covertly testing technology in China and Iran that lets residents break through screens set up by their governments to limit access to news on the Internet. The 'feed over email' (FOE) system delivers news, podcasts and data via technology that evades web-screening protocols of restrictive regimes, said Ken Berman, head of IT at the US government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is testing the system. The news feeds are sent through email accounts including those operated by Google, Microsoft's Hotmail, and Yahoo. 'We have people testing it in China and Iran,' said Berman, whose agency runs Voice of America. He provided few details on the new system, which is in the early stages of testing. He said some secrecy was important to avoid detection by the two governments."
Editorial

Encryption? What Encryption? 500

Posted by Soulskill from the these-are-not-the-files-you're-looking-for dept.
Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton writes with his take on the news we discussed early this morning about the UK government's prosecution of two people who refused to disclose their encryption keys: "Is it possible to write a program that enables you to encrypt files without drawing suspicion upon yourself if anyone ever seizes your computer? No; a program by itself, no matter how perfectly written, couldn't do this because you'd still attract suspicion just for possessing the software. You'd need a social element driving the program's popularity until it gets to the point where people no longer look suspicious just for having the program installed. Here are some theories on how that could happen — but it would be a high bar to clear." Hit the link below for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.
Hardware Hacking

Apple Working On Tech To Detect Purchasers' "Abuse" 539

Posted by timothy from the if-not-expressly-allowed-then-goto-prohibited dept.
Toe, The writes "Apple has submitted a patent application for technologies which would detect device-abuse by consumers. The intent presumably being to aid in determining the validity of warranty claims. 'Consumer abuse events' would be recorded by liquid and thermal sensors detecting extreme environmental exposures, a shock sensor detecting drops or other impacts, and a continuity sensor to detect jailbreaking or other tampering. The article also notes that liquid submersion detectors are already deployed in MacBook Pros, iPhones and iPods. It does seem reasonable that a corporation would wish to protect itself from fraudulent warranty claims; however the idea of sensors inside your portable devices detecting what you do with them might raise eyebrows even beyond the tinfoil-hat community."
Space

NASA's LCROSS Spacecraft Discovers Life On Earth 171

Posted by timothy from the that-was-the-control-group dept.
Matt_dk writes "On Saturday, Aug. 1, 2009, the LCROSS spacecraft successfully completed its first Earth-look calibration of its science payload. 'The Earth-look was very successful' said Tony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist. 'The instruments are all healthy and the science teams was able to collect additional data that will help refine our calibrations of the instruments.' During the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation."

RadioShack To Rebrand As "The Shack"? 629

Posted by CmdrTaco from the a-little-old-place-where-we-can-get-together dept.
Harry writes "Rumor has it that RadioShack is planning to re-brand itself as The Shack later this year, after eighty-eight years under the old name (most of them with a space in between 'Radio' and 'Shack'). I hope it's not true, because I don't think the move would do a thing to make the retailer a better, more successful business." Where will we go to buy soldering irons and those RCA to headphone jack adapters now?
Image

Arizona Considers Selling Capitol Buildings Screenshot-sm 301

Posted by samzenpus from the everything-must-go dept.
Things are so bad in Arizona that legislators are considering selling the House and Senate buildings where they've met and worked for more than 50 years. Dozens of other state properties may also be sold. The plan is to sell the properties and then lease them back over several years before assuming ownership again. "We've mortgaged the legislative halls," said an exasperated state Rep. Steve Yarbrough, a Chandler Republican. "That just tells you how extraordinary the times are. To me, it's something we're going to have to do no matter how much we find it undesirable." I bet they could get a great price on the Grand Canyon.

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