Targen - Slashdot User

Comment This is considered surprising? (Score 5, Insightful) 229

by Targen on Monday August 29, 2011 @11:54PM (#37249826) Attached to: Another CA Issues False Certificates To Iran

Security people have since forever warned the rest of the world against the risks of blindly trusting centralized/hierarchical trust schemes. It's not the first time this happens. It won't be the last. And while standard practices remain as they currently are, we're all in the hands of whoever's got money and power, and governments tend to have a lot of both. Most of you might not care much about this since you probably live in places with decent governments*, but it's a real concern for an enormous portion of the world's population.

*IN RELATIVE TERMS. I know many of the governments of the "free world" are guilty of all manners of despicable privacy violations with all manners of awful consequences, but please don't even attempt to compare these issues to the sorts of oppression that happen in full-blown totalitarian regimes.

Submission + - British PM considers ban on Twitter, Facebook (yahoo.com)

Submitted by tryptogryphic on Friday August 12, 2011 @06:15PM

tryptogryphic writes: "British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Thursday that he is considering a limit on social media use in an attempt to curtail the riots that have spread throughout England" This comes as no surprise, but still presents a dangerous precedent which would put the UK on par with countries like Iran which have been looked down upon for limiting internet connectivity of any kind during public outcry that the government considers distasteful.

Submission + - C++0x approved (herbsutter.com)

Submitted by Intropy on Friday August 12, 2011 @05:26PM

Intropy writes: At long last, C++0x is an approved standard. The vote was unanimous.

Submission + - Sega: Death of Packaged Games a Total Exaggeration (industrygamers.com)

Submitted by donniebaseball23 on Friday August 12, 2011 @05:23PM

donniebaseball23 writes: Digital is on the rise, yes, but that doesn't mean physical software is about to become extinct, notes Sega West CEO Mike Hayes. While game sales at retail declined to 71% last year according to the Entertainment Merchants Association, and July retail game sales in the U.S. were the worst they've been since October 2006, Hayes sees no problem with physical and digital coexisting for many years to come. "I think that the death of packaged games is a total exaggeration," he told IndustryGamers. "I think everyone’s saying it’s becoming all digital and no packaged; I just can’t see that. I think both are going to coexist to a greater or lesser degree."

Submission + - Venezuelan government event's "socialist software" (diadebian.org.ve)

Submitted by

Targen

on Friday August 12, 2011 @05:21PM

Targen writes: "A government-organized Debian installation party type event in Venezuela promotes free software and helps the uninitiated enter the world of GNU/Linux. Cool, right? Well, as most things done by the government in Venezuela, it's also full of politics (a fact that detractors despise and supporters acclaim, but nobody denies). The event's motto: "From free software, towards socialist software"; next to it, a picture of Tux wearing a beret like the ones made popular by Chavez. How does the free software community feel about being associated with or used by political movements in this manner?"

Submission + - Donations Help Revive SETI's Alien Research

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Friday August 12, 2011 @05:04PM

adeelarshad82 writes: For years, the SETI (Search of Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute's Allen Telescope Array (ATA) listened intently for messages from space, but lack of funds shut down the project earlier this year. Thanks to private donations, however, SETI is on track to restart the ATA next month. In just 45 days, space enthusiasts donated more than $200,000 to the effort, which will allow SETI to put ATA back online in mid-September.

Submission + - Modified "Chimeric" T-Cells attack Leukemia (nejm.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12, 2011 @04:29PM

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine report a promising result in treating lymphoid leukemia. The idea of modifying the patient's immune cells to attack the cancer is not new, but previous trials have had issues making the change stick in the patient's body. By tweaking the specifics of the gene transfer, the researchers were able to produce a modified T-cell so effective that the patient's kidneys were almost overrun by the debris of dead cancer cells. Six months later, the patient appears to be completely cured.

Submission + - Space Elevator Conference Prompts Lofty Questions (itworld.com)

Submitted by

itwbennett

on Friday August 12, 2011 @04:24PM

itwbennett writes: "Even the most ardent enthusiasts gathered at the annual Space Elevator Conference on Friday don't expect it to be built anytime soon, but that doesn't stop them from dreaming, planning, and trying to solve some of the more vexing problems. One of the trickiest questions is who's going to pay for the operational costs when an elevator is eventually built. 'It's been nine years we've been looking for someone' to study that, said Bryan Laubscher, one of the leading space elevator enthusiasts and principle at Odysseus Technologies, a company working on high-strength materials."

Submission + - Spectrum programming legend Joffa Smith has died.

Submitted by LoTonah on Thursday July 08, 2010 @11:57PM

LoTonah writes: Its been several days, but it looks like a programming legend has passed. Joffa Smith died at the age of 43, after a 3-month illness. Joffa was responsible for some of the best Sinclair Spectrum games that ever came out.

More details here: http://www.retrofusion.org.uk/news/40/joffa-smith-dies-today/

Submission + - Two arrested in Venezuela for tweeting (eluniversal.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 08, 2010 @11:51PM

An anonymous reader writes: The director of Venezuela's CICPC announced that a man and a woman were detained for being involved in spreading rumours with the purpose of destabilizing the country's banking system. The offending tweet suggests that Banesco, one of Venezuela's largest banks, will soon be taken over by the state as several others have (along with some other financial institutions). Police seized, among other things, the cell phone from which the tweet was sent. It appears the author will be charged under article 443 of Venezuela's general law of banks and other financial institutions (PDF):

Persons who spread false news or utilize other fraudulent means capable of causing distortions to the national banking system that affect the country's economic conditions will be imprisoned for 9 to 11 years.

Submission + - AI Predicts Manhole Explosions in New York City (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by reillymj on Thursday July 08, 2010 @11:24PM

reillymj writes: Every so often, a 300-pound manhole cover in blows sky high in Gotham, followed sometimes by a column of flame. Researchers have applied machine learning algorithms to Con Edison's warren of aging electrical wires and sewage access points around Brooklyn and the Bronx (Manhattan's next). As the system learns where dangerous mixtures of sewer gas and decrepit wiring are likely to come in contact, it makes forecasts about trouble spots, including where the next explosion may occur.

Submission + - Blizzard Admits that Real ID is a Privacy Issue (blogspot.com)

Submitted by tiffanybliss on Thursday July 08, 2010 @11:22PM

Submission + - Fan-Developed Ultima VI Remake Released (u6project.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 08, 2010 @08:10PM

An anonymous reader writes: 20 years after the original game was released, a fan-developed Ultima 6 remake has finally been released! The Ultima 6 Project was formed in 2001 by Sliding Dragon to develop a remake of Origin's Ultima VI: The False Prophet with newer graphics and a more immersive engine. Soon assembled under the banner Archon, the team members, who hail from all over the globe, have set about recreating the world of Britannia, adding an enhanced storyline to bolster intraseries continuity and building on the Ultima legacy in a way that will please fans new and old.

Submission + - Study of homework copying in MIT (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by mathfeel on Thursday July 08, 2010 @07:34PM

mathfeel writes: A statistical study by MIT professors of their calculus-based introductory physics courses (Journal version here: http://prst-per.aps.org/abstract/PRSTPER/v6/i1/e010104 for those who have access.) has a few interesting conclusions, not the least of which is "repetitive copiers have approximately three times the chance of failing":

Equating speedy answers with copying, the team concluded that about 10 percent of the students copied more than half of their homework, about 40 percent copied 10 to 50 percent of their homework, and about half the students copied less than 10 percent of their homework. By the end of the semester, students who copied 50 percent or more homework earned almost two letter grades below students who didn't copy very much, the team found. Heavy copiers were also three times more likely to fail the course.

They also report that certain change in course formatting and self-reporting academic dishonesty survey has reduced copying by factor of 4.

Comment Re:citation needed (Score 0) 420

by Targen on Friday August 28, 2009 @01:07PM (#29232863) Attached to: "Violent" Video Games To Be Banned In Venezuela

The reasons the coup failed are indeed far closer to what you mentioned than to the silly romantic notion of a massive group of Chavez supporters taking over the Miraflores palace and forcing the new government out (which in turn is about as ridiculous as the idea some Chavez supporters have of the coup having been carried out by hordes of opposition protesters and such; in reality, it was strictly a military matter from start to finish: part of the military carried out the coup, and another part of the military reversed it).

The theory on Wall Street is that Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil fields, replaced its board of directors, and halted the export of oil from Venezuela (in collusion with Saddam Hussein who halted oil production in Iraq at the exact same time).

The problem this theory is that it's simply not how things happened. A three-day strike and halt on production was declared by PDVSA executives and several of its unions against Chavez's various policies regarding the (state-owned yet still supposed to run autonomously) oil company. In response to this, Chavez announced on live national TV the firings of every high-level executive of PDVSA and several other state-owned companies associated to it that also participated in the strike (no big deal, you might think, but it's estimated some 6000 workers were fired in the later months for the sole reason of having taken part in the strike, and many more were later purged after the greater strike of 2002-2003 and when Tascon's list came around). The halt in production was in protest against Chavez and was the cause of the takeover, naturally predating it. Not the other way around.

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