Nipok Nek - Slashdot User

BT Blocks Access To Pirate Bay 360

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday April 21, 2009 @08:48AM from the i-feel-better-already dept.

Barence writes "BT and other mobile broadband providers are blocking access to The Pirate Bay as part of a 'self-regulation' scheme with the Internet Watch Foundation. BT Mobile Broadband users who attempt to access the notorious BitTorrent tracker site are met with a 'content blocked' message. The warning page states the page has been blocked in 'compliance with a new UK voluntary code.' 'This uses a barring and filtering mechanism to restrict access to all WAP and internet sites that are considered to have "over 18" status,' the warning states. It goes on to list a series of categories that are blocked, including adult/sexually explicit content, 'criminal skills,' and hacking. It's not stated which category The Pirate Bay breaches, although the site does host links to porn movies."

Vatican To Build 100 Megawatt Solar Power Plant 447

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday April 20, 2009 @07:04PM from the go-big-or-go-home dept.

Karim Y. writes "The Vatican is going solar in a big way. The tiny state recently announced that it intends to spend 660 million dollars to create what will effectively be Europe's largest solar power plant. This massive 100 megawatt photovoltaic installation will provide enough energy to make the Vatican the first solar powered nation state in the world! 'The 100 megawatts unleashed by the station will supply about 40,000 households. That will far outstrip demand by Pope Benedict XVI and the 900 inhabitants of the 0.2 square-mile country nestled across Rome's Tiber River. The plant will cover nine times the needs of Vatican Radio, whose transmission tower is strong enough to reach 35 countries including Asia.'"

Comment Re:Is this test legal in the US...? (Score 5, Funny) 547

by Nipok Nek on Tuesday March 24, 2009 @06:14AM (#27309501) Attached to: Dealing With a Copyright Takedown Request?

(epileptics probably shouldn't drive buses for example)

Epileptics who are not controlled by medication, thank you very much. Some of us have been lucky enough to find the right drug, and have happy productive lives, and don't kill people very often at all.

Best Practice For Retiring RSS Feeds? 71

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @09:57AM from the cleaning-up-in-advance dept.

GBJ writes "I work for an organisation that runs seasonal online competition events. Each event has its own news feed which becomes obsolete shortly after the event finishes. We're still getting RSS requests for some events as far back as 2004. I'd like to close a few thousand old feeds and remove the resource hit they cause, but I'm not sure what is the best approach. Currently I'm considering just returning a 404, but I have no idea if there is a better way to handle this. Uncle Google hasn't turned anything up yet, but sometimes it's hard to find something when you don't know what it's called ..."

Most Extreme Gamma-Ray Blast Yet Detected 128

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 21, 2009 @03:07AM from the in-a-galaxy-far,-far-away dept.

Matt_dk sends in a quote from a story at NASA: "The first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is one for the record books. The blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen. ... Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Astronomers believe most occur when exotic massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star's core collapses into a black hole, jets of material — powered by processes not yet fully understood — blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time. ...Fermi team members calculated that the blast exceeded the power of approximately 9,000 ordinary supernovae, if the energy was emitted equally in all directions."

Human Eye Could Detect Spooky Action At a Distance 255

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 19, 2009 @09:37PM from the I-seen-things dept.

KentuckyFC writes "The human eye is a good photon detector--it's sensitive enough to spot photons in handfuls. So what if you swapped a standard photon detector with a human eye in the ongoing experiments to measure spooky-action-at-a-distance? (That's the ability of entangled photons to influence each other, no matter how far apart they might be.) A team of physicists in Switzerland have worked out the details and say that in principle there is no reason why human eyes couldn't do this kind of experiment. That would be cool because it would ensure that the two human observers involved in the test would become entangled, albeit for a short period time. The team, led by Nic Gisin, a world leader on entanglement, says it is actively pursuing this goal (abstract) so we could have the first humans to experience entanglement within months."

Europa Selected As Target of Next Flagship Mission 168

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @10:00PM from the my-favorite-moon dept.

volcanopele writes "NASA and the European Space Agency announced today that they have selected the Europa/Jupiter System Mission as the next large mission to the outer solar system. For the last year, the Europa mission has been in competition with a proposal to send a mission to Saturn's moon Titan, as reported on Slashdot earlier. The Europa Mission includes two orbiters: one developed by NASA to orbit the icy moon Europa and another developed by ESA to orbit the solar system's largest moon, Ganymede. Both orbiters would spend up to 2.5 years in orbit around Jupiter before settling into orbit around their respective targets, studying Jupiter's satellites, rings, and of course the planet itself. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2020 and arrive at Jupiter in 2025 and 2026."

Is the Bar of Soap Tomorrow's Smarterphone? 141

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @05:00PM from the next-generation-uses-earwax-proximity dept.

Barence writes "Researchers at MIT have developed a gadget that knows whether you want to use it as a camera or smartphone, just by the way you're holding it. So, if you hold the device, dubbed the Bar of Soap, out in front of you like a camera it will automatically bring up an LCD viewfinder. However, if you then switch to holding it as you would a mobile phone, it will bring up a touchscreen keypad instead. The Bar of Soap utilises a three-axis accelerometer and 72 surface sensors to track the position of the user's fingers and its position."

Half the Charges Against Pirate Bay Dropped 347

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 17, 2009 @10:40AM from the duh-it's-not-a-pirate-submarine dept.

eldavojohn writes "Half the charges have been dropped in the second day of the trial against the Pirate Bay. The charges dropped are those relating to 'assisting copyright infringement,' so the remaining charges are simply 'assisting making available.' No information on how this affects the size of the lawsuit or a settlement."

I'm a PC and I'm 4-1/2 435

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday February 11, 2009 @05:55AM from the tweedledum-tweedledee dept.

theodp writes "Microsoft's new Windows ad made its debut during the Grammy Awards on Sunday. It stars a 4-year-old cutie named Kylie (Silverlight required) showing how easy it is to use Windows Live Photo Gallery to edit and share photos. And while it's impressive that little Kylie is able to transfer a snapshot of her pet fish from her camera to a PC, color-correct it, and e-mail it to her family, what's truly amazing is that the toddler was also apparently able to read, understand, and accept Windows Live's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. (But minors can't legally execute contracts, can they?)"

Average User Only Runs 2 Apps, So Microsoft Will Charge For More 842

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday February 09, 2009 @10:36AM from the so-it-can-charge-for-more dept.

Barence writes "Microsoft's decision to limit Windows 7 Starter Edition to running only three concurrent applications could force up the price of netbooks as many manufacturers opt for the more expensive Home Premium. The three-app rule includes applications running in the background but excludes antivirus, and the company claims most users wouldn't be affected by the limit. 'We ran a study which suggested that the average consumer has open just over two applications [at any time]. We would expect the limit of three applications wouldn't affect very many people.' However, Microsoft told journalists at last year's Professional Developers Conference that 70% of Windows users have between eight and 15 windows open at any one time."

Four Threats For '09 You Haven't Heard of 126

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday January 02, 2009 @04:02PM from the fear-mongering dept.

ancientribe writes "Security experts are cautiously on the lookout for some lesser-known but potentially lethal threats that could be more difficult to prepare for and defend against in 2009. These aren't your typical enterprise hack attacks. They're mainly large-scale Internet threats — attacks that knock out sections of the Internet infrastructure, radical extremist hackers, Web attacks that adversely affect online ad revenue, and even the unthinkable: human casualties as a result of a cyberattack." Also known as the new group of things the fear mongers will use to make you do their bidding.

Why Mirroring Is Not a Backup Solution 711

Posted by kdawson on Friday January 02, 2009 @01:25PM from the pointed-lesson dept.

Craig writes "Journalspace.com has fallen and can't get up. The post on their site describes how their entire database was overwritten through either some inconceivable OS or application bug, or more likely a malicious act. Regardless of how the data was lost, their undoing appears to have been that they treated drive mirroring as a backup and have now paid the ultimate price for not having point-in-time backups of the data that was their business." The site had been in business since 2002 and had an Alexa page rank of 106,881. Quantcast said they had 14,000 monthly visitors recently. No word on how many thousands of bloggers' entire output has evaporated.

Fundraiser For "White Male" Illness Dropped 241

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday November 27, 2008 @02:32PM from the stop-the-penis-party dept.

gubachwa writes "The student association at Carleton University in Canada recently voted that Cystic Fibrosis was a charity unworthy of receiving money raised during orientation week fund-raising activities. The reason behind the decision, as given in the motion on which the student association voted, is that Cystic Fibrosis 'has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men.'" I'm speechless.

Comment Re:Not how trademarks work (Score 1) 393

by Nipok Nek on Wednesday October 22, 2008 @03:17PM (#25472655) Attached to: Feds Target "Mongols" Biker Club's Intellectual Property

So, wait a minute. Are you telling me that if, for example, someone were to legally buy the trademark to the name and logo "Fleetwood Mac", they could come and take my Concert T shirt I bought twenty years ago? For that matter, forget selling the IP. Can Fleetwood Mac just come out and announce that everyone has to give back all of the albums because their logo is on them? Not in a million years. There is no precedent for that kind of control.

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