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Comment It depends (Score 1) 368

If you have the ability to take something back it might not be so bad. Also, it seems like it would be pretty easy to tell who you are sharing with and avoid sending the wrong people (like your gay black boss) your inflammatory homophobic racist rants.

Comment CS is a science (Score 1) 229

and a much more practical one at that. Much of other scientific disciplines (chemistry, biology, physics, etc...) is based primarily on observation. What can we observe and record about things that already exist. Computer science involves taking those observations about natural phenomena (electrons, etc...) and doing innovative things with them.

Figuring out how to manipulate electricity in such a way that a 12-year old boy in a village in India can search the entire corpus of Shakespeare from his phone in milliseconds is pretty damn impressive if you ask me. A lot of Nobel-worthy breakthroughs occurred to get us to where we are now.

Then again, the Nobel foundation was set up by Alfred Nobel long before anyone thought of such a thing. If they want to keep their traditions and not add any new prizes, that's their right. It's just unfortunate that to the general public, the Nobel prize is the prize to get if you've done anything useful in science.

Submission + - Sharing Netflix Could Land You in a TN Jail (tennessean.com)

billlava writes: "Tennessee governor Bill Haslam has signed legislation making it illegal to share passwords for Netflix, Rhapsody, or other subscription-based streaming services.

From TFA: The legislation was aimed at hackers and thieves who sell passwords in bulk, but its sponsors acknowledge it could be employed against people who use a friend’s or relative’s subscription. While those who share their subscriptions with a spouse or other family members under the same roof almost certainly have nothing to fear, blatant offenders — say, college students who give their logins to everyone on their dormitory floor — could get in trouble."

Facebook

Submission + - The Freedom Box Alternative to Facebook (ieee.org)

wjousts writes:

“The human race has a susceptibility to harm, but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record. He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Because he harnessed ‘Friday Night,’ that is, ‘Everybody needs to get laid,’ and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality. And he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal, namely ‘I will give you free Web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time.’ ”

These are the provocative words of Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen and begins IEEE Spectrum's interview with the Software Freedom Law Center's James Vasile, one of the minds (along with Moglen) behind the idea of the Freedom Box.

Submission + - Anonymous hacks Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs

An anonymous reader writes: Anonymous has publicly announced today that OpIran has hacked into the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and published thousands of raw emails sent to and from the Iranian Government agency. The emails can be downloaded via a password protected .rar file. The password which was released today is fittingly, opiranopiran.

Comment Rogue group announces alternative to Google wallet (Score 2) 253

Certain renegade elements of the consumer sector are considering switching to alternate methods of payment in retaliation against Google's proprietary monetary transaction system. "Basically the plan is to exchange small rectangular pieces of green paper in exchange for all debts, public and private," said one proponent of this new monetary system. When asked how his purchasing history would be tracked, indexed, and made available to advertisers in order to better serve him, he responded, "That's kind of the point."

More on this story, and new developments that indicate water may be wetter than once thought, at 11.
NASA

Submission + - Goodbye Spirit! (nasa.gov)

Jhon writes: "Last night, just after midnight, the last recovery command was sent to Spirit. It would be an understatement to say that this was a significant moment. Since the last communication from Spirit on March 22, 2010 (Sol 2210), as she entered her fourth Martian winter, nothing has been heard from her. There is a continued silence from the Gusev site on Mars."

Goodbye, and thanks for all the bits!

Submission + - Engraving Machine Font to Windows Font?

babywhiz writes: Let's say there is a 'type set' for a manual engraving machine that does not have a 'windows font' version. If we were to purchase the 'type set' hardware (aka all the individual letters that would be used in the engraving machine), and used that to create a digital version (aka a windows font), who owns the copyright for the Windows Font?

Comment Re:What's a DNS server? (Score 1) 129

I think we're pretty much on the same page here. I agree that DNS blocking will be very inefficient. As a matter of fact, it will probably just increase people's awareness of what DNS is, and how to take advantage of it.

However, as I said before, I'm afraid that this is just a foot in the door. To borrow a phrase from paranoid philosophers of years past, this is a slippery slope. It's not hard to imagine regulators blocking swaths of IP address space or even filtering out specific pages on websites. If China can get away with it (with most people content to be censored and kept in the dark) who's to say it couldn't happen here?

Comment What's a DNS server? (Score 5, Interesting) 129

I think you greatly overestimate the technological literacy of the average American. Most people aren't going to have a clue how to change their DNS servers, but even for those who do understand how to get around such restrictions, this is still disturbing. This is just a way for government to get its foot in the door. Soon, they'll be mandating to ISPs which DNS servers their clients are allowed to use, and what IP ranges are 'legal' to access on the internet. Maybe I should just take off the tinfoil hat and relax, but I can't see how government getting involved in legislating the internet in ANY way is a good thing.
Wikipedia

Submission + - Wikipedia Edits Around the World (wikimedia.org)

billlava writes: "Wikipedia continues on its inexorable march toward becoming the repository for the world's knowledge — to the tune of four and a half edits a second. Just who is doing all these edits? And where do they live? Erik Zachte compiled data from a day in May 2011 into an interesting set of animations and maps to show update activity as it occurred during the day.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/animations/requests/"

Comment FlashForward (Score 1) 602

FlashForward was a victim of piss poor planning by the network. They took like a 3-month hiatus, then put it up against tough competition (I think like American Idol or something) that already had strong viewership, and wondered why their numbers were down from before. It's a crying shame too, because FF was, in my opinion, the best show on TV, and its single season stands as the best scifi thriller series ever. Some of the episodes were really, REALLY good. I recently purchased the dvds as a gesture of my support for quality television and have been rewatching them for the third time.

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