Comment Re:Who knew! (Score 2, Insightful) 156
Try not to be ignorant, not to say idiotic. "Any possible message" includes "any reasonable message".
Come back when you understand Shannon's theorem.
Can Solar Storms Cause Wildfires? 87
astroengine writes "In the wake of recent solar activity, some space cadets were very quick to point out a causal link between geomagnetic storms and the wildfires currently ravaging the landscape surrounding Moscow. Of course, this is patently false. But is there a scenario when the onset of a solar storm could have secondary effects, sparking fires in already arid regions? Possibly. What's more, it already happened, 150 years ago."
Submission + - 11th Circuit Eliminates 4th Amend. in E-mail (volokh.com)
Artefacto writes: Orin Kerr writes in the Volokh Conspiracy:
Last Thursday, the Eleventh Circuit handed down a Fourth Amendment case, Rehberg v. Paulk, that takes a very narrow view of how the Fourth Amendment applies to e-mail. The Eleventh Circuit held that constitutional protection in stored copies of e-mail held by third parties disappears as soon as any copy of the communication is delivered. Under this new decision, if the government wants get your e-mails, the Fourth Amendment lets the government go to your ISP, wait the seconds it normally takes for the e-mail to be delivered, and then run off copies of your messages.
Last Thursday, the Eleventh Circuit handed down a Fourth Amendment case, Rehberg v. Paulk, that takes a very narrow view of how the Fourth Amendment applies to e-mail. The Eleventh Circuit held that constitutional protection in stored copies of e-mail held by third parties disappears as soon as any copy of the communication is delivered. Under this new decision, if the government wants get your e-mails, the Fourth Amendment lets the government go to your ISP, wait the seconds it normally takes for the e-mail to be delivered, and then run off copies of your messages.
Submission + - MySpace to sell user data (readwriteweb.com)
OnlyJedi writes: Hot on the news of Netflix canceling its latest contest over privacy concerns, news has spread that MySpace is going the opposite direction. Apparently, the one-time leading social network is now selling user data to third party collection firms. From the article, the data that InfoChimps has listed includes, "user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes." InfoChimps is a reseller that deals with individuals and groups, from academic researchers to marketers and industry analysts. So if you're worried about your data on MySpace being sold off to anybody with a few hundred dollars, now's the time to delete that little-used account.
Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic 807
DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."
Comment Re:So (Score 1) 334
That's strange, I find that behavior much worse in Linux (i.e., Linux is more aggressive swapping out applications). I usually tune the "swappiness" (see http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000 ) to very low levels, but sometimes after having to wait a few seconds each time I switched to some huge application such as NetBeans made me disabled the swap space.
Comment Bogus Story; Statute from the 1950s (Score 1) 849
This statute was actually passed in 1951; actually, there was an attempt to get the law repeated and they got it backwards. See http://volokh.com/2010/02/10/did-south-carolina-pass-a-subversive-activities-registration-act-last-year/
Comment BRANDENBURG v. OHIO (Score 1) 849
Exactly. The first amendment should be applied in declaring this unconstitutional. In BRANDENBURG v. OHIO (1969). This is the summary:
Appellant, a Ku Klux Klan leader, was convicted under the Ohio Criminal Syndicalism statute for "advocat[ing] . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform" and for "voluntarily assembl[ing] with any society, group or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism." Neither the indictment nor the trial judge's instructions refined the statute's definition of the crime in terms of mere advocacy not distinguished from incitement to imminent lawless action. Held: Since the statute, by its words and as applied, purports to punish mere advocacy and to forbid, on pain of criminal punishment, assembly with others merely to advocate the described type of action, it falls within the condemnation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
Eight PHP IDEs Compared 206
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Rick Grehen provides an in-depth comparative review of eight PHP IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. 'All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use,' Grehen writes.'"
Supreme Court Takes Texting Privacy Case 184
TaggartAleslayer writes with this excerpt from the NYTimes:
"The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a police department violated the constitutional privacy rights of an employee when it inspected personal text messages sent and received on a government pager. The case opens 'a new frontier in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,' according to a three-judge panel of an appeals court that ruled in favor of the employee, a police sergeant on the Ontario, Calif., SWAT team. ... Members of the department's SWAT team were given pagers and told they were responsible for charges in excess of 25,000 characters a month. Under an informal policy adopted by a police lieutenant, those who paid the excess charges themselves would not have their messages inspected. The lieutenant eventually changed his mind and ordered transcripts of messages sent and received by Sgt. Jeff Quon. In one month in 2002, only 57 of more than 456 of those messages were related to official business. According to the trial judge, many of the messages 'were, to say the least, sexually explicit in nature.'"
Comment Re:Infeasible? (Score 1) 759
Actually "infeasible" is a valid word: http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=infeasible , it's the same as "unfeasible".
Moreover, "in-" is the typical prefix for words of latin origin, so it would be more likely to exist than "unpossible".
Comment Partition the disk and use both (Score 2, Interesting) 569
Or you could partition the disk, format the first partition (the only one Windows sees on removable media) with FAT32 and the other one with ext3/whatever when you want to keep the meta-data. The best of both worlds.
Bookmark WPA keys gone in 60 seconds (theregister.co.uk)
NASA's Skylab $400 Littering Fine Paid By DJ
111
astroengine writes "Space Disco speaks with a Californian radio DJ about his role in raising, and paying, NASA's 30-year old littering fine levied by a Western Australian town. Skylab parts fell on Esperance in 1979, but the space agency's refusal to pay $400 has resulted in an entertaining annual grudge. Now the Barstow radio DJ is guest of honor at this weekend's 30th anniversary celebrations in Oz and the two small towns at opposite ends of the Pacific will be twinned... all because Skylab had a messy re-entry..."
Desktop As a Cellphone Extension? 199
spaceman375 writes "Like many slashdotters, I've given up on landlines and have only a cell account. The problem: when I am home I don't want to carry my phone on my person, AND I don't want to have to run (possibly up or down stairs) to answer a call. Landlines solved this with extensions. I could go buy an xlink or other Bluetooth-to-POTS solution, but that takes money for equipment. My desktop has Bluetooth, as do my laptop and cell. All I want is a program that can use my cell's Bluetooth to make and receive calls from my Linux PC. I can do this with asterisk or related programs, but that is like buying UPS when I just need a taxi ride. Yet all I can find are programs that either use 'presence' to shift other-sourced calls to my cell, or ways to use a Bluetooth headset when receiving a call on a PC. Has anyone found a way to use their desktop to make and receive calls through their cell via Bluetooth?"
