Comment Re:Pity (Score 1) 148
I had no problem with the 0.5 release, but I also prefer an up-to-date Firefox over Ubiquity, so I downgraded.
Thanks again!
Comment Re:Pity (Score 1) 148
Huh. At one point they made 1.9 (I believe) as a transitional release to 0.5, which had a different, mostly incompatible, command structure.
So they've updated 1.9 to be compatible with FF 3.6, but the latest release I have, 0.5.4, remains incompatible.
Odd decision, but if it works, it works. Thanks for the heads-up.
Comment Pity (Score 2, Interesting) 148
Damn shame. I used it all the time to create tinyurls, to translate text on the fly, and so on. It was a handy little utility, and I was excited with the direction they wanted to go it.
It'd be nice if they could even just do a version update so I could use it with Firefox 3.6.
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 Wessels (Score 1) 81
I think the more alarming statistic is that 75% of Enterprises have suffered Klingon attacks.
xkcd, Devotion To Duty
167
xkcd really hit the nail on the head today.
Operation Titstorm Hits the Streets 458
schliz writes "Hacker group 'Anonymous' is organising international, real-life protests of the Australian mandatory internet filter this coming Saturday. Protests will take place in major Australian cities as well as at Australian embassies around the world. The protests are said to be the second stage of 'Operation Titstorm,' which unleashed a prolonged DDoS attack on Australian government websites last week. Organisers of the so-called Project Freeweb said: 'If passed, this legislation will set a disturbing precedent at an international level. The public, not the Government, should have the right to decide what is deemed appropriate for you or your family to be exposed to.'"
Google Mystery Domain Reroutes 3% of Net Surfers 140
An anonymous reader writes "A new Google domain — 1e100.net, a nod to the company's famously misspelled name — is now the net's 44th most visited site. Google says the domain is used to 'identify servers' on its internal network, hinting that reverse DNS plays a role. The domain was registered in September and launched in October, about the same time Google unveiled Spanner, a new addition to its backend infrastructure designed to shift loads automatically among its data centers."
$300 Sci-Fi YouTube Video Lands $30m Movie Deal 315
krou writes "A producer from Uruguay who made a short science fiction film and uploaded it to YouTube has landed a film deal with Sam Raimi's Ghost House worth $300 million. The film, which shows spaceships and giant robots attacking Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, was made by Fede Alvarez for around $30. 'I uploaded (Panic Attack!) on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios,' he said. Alvarez is to develop and direct a film based on one of his ideas, but there is no word yet on the writer."
Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."
Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released 272
supersloshy writes Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3.
Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3's improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements. Download here."
Emulating New Super Mario Bros. Wii At 1080p 76
KingofGnG writes "An impressive confirmation of the Dolphin Wii emulator's capabilities comes from a YouTube video, which shows off recently-added video clips of New Super Mario Bros. Wii in full HD. It demonstrates the growing compatibility of Dolphin with the latest games published for the Nintendo console."
Student Orchestra Performs Music With iPhones 65
A course at the University of Michigan ends with a live concert featuring students using iPhones as instruments. “Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble“ teaches students to code musical instruments for the iPhone, using the Apple-provided software-development kit. Georg Essl, assistant professor of computer science and music, says, "What’s interesting is we blend the whole process. We start from nothing. We teach the programming of iPhones for multimedia stuff, and then we teach students to build their own instruments.”
Hunting the Mythical "Bandwidth Hog" 497
eldavojohn writes "Benoit Felten, an analyst in Paris, has heard enough of the elusive creature known as the bandwidth hog. Like its cousin the Boogie Man, the 'bandwidth hog' is a tale that ISPs tell their frightened users to keep them in check or to cut off whoever they want to cut off from service. And Felten's calling them out because he's certain that bandwidth hogs don't exist. What's actually happening is the ISPs are selecting the top 5% of users, by volume of bits that move on their wire, and revoking their service, even if they aren't negatively impacting other users. Which means that they are targeting 'heavy users' simply for being 'heavy users.' Felten has thrown down the gauntlet asking for a standardized data set from any telco that he can do statistical analysis on that will allow him to find any evidence of a single outlier ruining the experience for everyone else. Unlikely any telco will take him up on that offer but his point still stands." Felten's challenge is paired with a more technical look at how networks operate, which claims that TCP/IP by its design eliminates the possibility of hogging bandwidth. But Wes Felter corrects that mis-impression in a post to a network neutrality mailing list.
Modded Xbox Bans Prompt EFF Warning About Terms of Service 254
Last month we discussed news that Microsoft had banned hundreds of thousands of Xbox users for using modified consoles. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now pointed to this round of bans as a prime example of the power given to providers of online services through 'Terms of Service' and other usage agreements.
"No matter how much we rely on them to get on with our everyday lives, access to online services — like email, social networking sites, and (wait for it) online gaming — can never be guaranteed. ... he who writes the TOS makes the rules, and when it comes to enforcing them, the service provider often behaves as though it is also the judge, jury and executioner. ... While the mass ban provides a useful illustration of their danger, these terms can be found in nearly all TOS agreements for all kinds of services. There have been virtually no legal challenges to these kinds of arbitrary termination clauses, but we imagine this will be a growth area for lawyers."
