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Censorship

British Men Jailed For Online Hate Crimes 778

Posted by timothy from the don'tcha-just-hate-online-crime dept.
chrb writes "Two British men have become the first to be jailed for inciting racial hatred online. The men believed that material they published on web servers based in the United States did not fall under the jurisdiction of UK law and was protected under the First Amendment. This argument was rejected by the British trial judge. After being found guilty, the men fled to Los Angeles, where they attempted to claim political asylum, again arguing that they were being persecuted by the British government for speech that was protected under the First Amendment. The asylum bid was rejected and the two were deported back to the UK after spending over a year in a US jail."
The Courts

Downloading Copyrighted Material Legal In Spain 323

Posted by kdawson from the presumed-innocent dept.
Sqwuzzy notes a judge's ruling in Spain that makes that country one of the most lenient in the world as respects sharing copyrighted material over P2P networks. "The entertainment industries in Spain must be progressively tearing their hair out in recent months as they experience setback after setback. ... After Spain virtually ruled out imposing a '3-strikes' regime for illicit file-sharers, the entertainment industries said they would target 200 BitTorrent sites instead. Now a judge has decided that sharing between users for no profit via P2P doesn't breach copyright laws and sites should be presumed innocent until proved otherwise." This ruling occurred in a pre-trial hearing; the case will still go to trial.
Input Devices

Best Mouse For Programming? 569

Posted by timothy from the keep-it-away-from-cigarettes-and-drugs dept.
LosManos writes "Which is the best programming mouse? Mandatory musts are wireless, and that it doesn't clog up like old mechanical mice. Present personal preferences are for: lots of buttons, since if I have moved my hand away from the keyboard I can at least do something more than move the pointer; sturdy feeling; not too light, so it doesn't move around by me accidentally looking at it." What would you recommend?
NASA

NASA Requests Help With Von Braun's Notes 148

Posted by CmdrTaco from the yes-actually-it-is-rocket-science dept.
DynaSoar writes "NASA is soliciting ideas from the public on how best to catalog and digitize the collected notes of Wernher von Braun. 'We're looking for creative ways to get it out to the public,' said project manager Jason Crusan. 'We don't always do the best with putting out large sets of data like this.' The PDF notes are those of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the first director of NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and are typed with copious handwritten notes in the margin. According to the official request for information, NASA needs ideas on what format to use (PDF), how to index the notes, and how to create a useful database. The unique nature and historical value of the data, literally discovered in boxes six months ago, is what motivated NASA to ask the public for ideas."
Transportation

Why Don't MMOs Allow Easier Transportation? 337

Posted by Soulskill from the i'm-looking-at-you-eve dept.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun is running an opinion piece which asks why the majority of MMOs force users to spend a fair portion of their time traveling around a virtual world. At what point does moving from one location to another become a chore? From the article: "I love big, explorable worlds. They're by far one of my most favourite things about games. Running off in a direction without any idea what I might encounter is a rare pleasure, and one far more likely to result in an exciting discovery in a game's world than the real one. ... Not knowing what's coming up is huge and exciting, and I'd not want to take it away from gaming, not ever. But you know what? Once I've been there, that moment's gone. I've discovered it already. I did the exploring. I don't need to spend half an hour of my time that I've allocated for playing games trudging at whatever stupidly slow speed a game's decided to impose upon me. There is no good reason, whatsoever, to not just let me be there."
Microsoft

Microsoft-Backed Firm Says IBM Is Anticompetitive 174

Posted by timothy from the ibm's-suffered-under-the-antitrust-whip-before dept.
BBCWatcher writes "Microsoft has long claimed that the mainframe is dead, slain by the company's Windows monopoly. Yet, apparently without any mirror nearby, Microsoft is now complaining through the Microsoft-funded Computer & Communications Industry Association that not only are mainframes not dead, but IBM is so anticompetitive that governments should intervene in the hyper-competitive server market. The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is worried that the trend toward cloud computing is introducing competition to the Windows franchise, favoring better-positioned companies including IBM and Cisco. HP now talks about almost nothing but the IBM mainframe, with no Tukwila CPUs to sell until 2010. The global recession is encouraging more mainframe adoption as businesses slash IT costs, dominated by labor costs, and improve business execution. In 2008, IBM mainframe revenues rose 12.5% even whilst mainframe prices fell. (IBM shipped 25% more mainframe capacity than in 2007. Other server sales reports are not so good.) IBM mainframes can run multiple operating systems concurrently, including Linux and, more recently, OpenSolaris."

Comment Re:Mung (Score 2, Informative) 288

by collinstocks (#28445745) Attached to: Has Google Broken JavaScript Spam Munging?

From Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) [jargon]:

    mung /muhng/, vt.

          [in 1960 at MIT, "Mash Until No Good"; sometime after that the
          derivation from the {recursive acronym} "Mung Until No Good" became
          standard; but see {munge}]

          1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and irrevocable
          changes. See {BLT}.

          2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The
          system only mungs things maliciously; this is a consequence of
          {Finagle's Law}. See {scribble}, {mangle}, {trash}, {nuke}. Reports
          from {Usenet} suggest that the pronunciation /muhnj/ is now usual in
          speech, but the spelling `mung' is still common in program comments
          (compare the widespread confusion over the proper spelling of
          {kluge}).

          3. In the wake of the {spam} epidemics of the 1990s, mung is now
          commonly used to describe the act of modifying an email address in a
          sig block in a way that human beings can readily reverse but that will
          fool an {address harvester}. Example: johnNOSPAMsmith@isp.net.

          4. The kind of beans the sprouts of which are used in Chinese food.
          (That's their real name! Mung beans! Really!)

          Like many early hacker terms, this one seems to have originated at
          {TMRC}; it was already in use there in 1958. Peter Samson (compiler of
          the original TMRC lexicon) thinks it may originally have been
          onomatopoeic for the sound of a relay spring (contact) being twanged.
          However, it is known that during the World Wars, `mung' was U.S.: army
          slang for the ersatz creamed chipped beef better known as `SOS', and
          it seems quite likely that the word in fact goes back to Scots-dialect
          {munge}.

          Charles Mackay's 1874 book Lost Beauties of the English Language
          defined "mung" as follows: "Preterite of ming, to ming or mingle; when
          the substantive meaning of mingled food of bread, potatoes, etc.
          thrown to poultry. In America, `mung news' is a common expression
          applied to false news, but probably having its derivation from mingled
          (or mung) news, in which the true and the false are so mixed up
          together that it is impossible to distinguish one from another."

See the third definition.

Comment Re:or not! (Score 1) 273

by collinstocks (#28394373) Attached to: German Parliament Enacts Internet Censorship Law

The problem with voting in people with strong principles is that they often expect everybody else to also have strong principles, and pass laws accordingly. For example, libertarianism in the strictest sense works if everybody has strong principles and foresight. In the long run, it is disadvantageous to be anticompetitive as a company because it prevents you from improving your product. Soon (or several years) after something significantly better arrives at a better price than you can give, it will take over. However, people in charge of companies do not think that way. They think in the short term, as does any competition they may have at the moment. Therefore, they cannot be trusted to not be anticompetitive.

This is only one example why strict libertarianism does not work, and also only one example why relying on politicians with strong principles does not work. Thinking of other examples is an exercise left to the reader.

Comment Re:DRM (Score 1) 417

by collinstocks (#28323159) Attached to: DRM Group Set To Phase Out "Analog Hole"

He said, "...invented to benefit the people...", not "...invented to benefit people..."

You are twisting his words instead of coming up with a real counter-argument.

Note: there are real counter-arguments, but you have not produced one here.
Data Storage

How To Manage Hundreds of Thousands of Documents? 438

Posted by timothy from the you-have-the-planes-just-fly-files-around dept.
ajmcello78 writes "We're a mid-sized aerospace company with over a hundred thousand documents stored out on our Samba servers that also need to be accessed from our satellite offices. We have a VPN set up for the remote sites and use the Samba net use command to map the remote shares. It's becoming quite a mess, sometimes quite slow, and there is really no naming or numbering convention in place for the files and directories. We end up with mixed casing, all uppercase, all lowercase, dashes and ampersands in the file names, and there are literally hundreds of directories to sort through before you can find the document you are looking for. Does anybody know of a good system or method to manage all these documents, and also make them available to our satellite offices?"
Transportation

For Airplane Safety, Trying To Keep Birds From Planes 368

Posted by timothy from the they-hit-very-few-passenger-pigeons dept.
The Narrative Fallacy writes "Every year pilots in the US report more than 5,000 bird strikes, which cause at least $400 million in damage to commercial and military aircraft. Now safety hearings are beginning on the crash of US Airways Flight 1549, where a flock of eight-pound geese apparently brought down a plane, plunging it and 155 people into the frigid waters of the Hudson River. Despite having experimented with everything from electromagnetics to ultrasonic devices to scarecrows, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has yet to endorse a single solution that will keep birds out of the path of an oncoming aircraft." (More below.)

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