Comment MAFIAAfire (Score 1) 219
Oh, great, finally an udate to MAFIAAFire.... plus advertising for the seized domains! Now I want to check out what the US is censoring, and thanks to MAFIAAFire I can!
Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 465
How do you know? I'm surprised I had to dig this deep in the comments to find out.
Comment Wesnoth (Score 1) 329
Wesnoth has some of the most beauutiful C++ out there (yes, there is such a thing as beautiful C++). If C++ is what you want to work with, I recommend you start looking at their stuff. Play the game first, of course, so you can start to get a feel for what sorts of things it does. Then you should be able to start guessing where things in the code may be. Step through the code with a debugger too, of course. I find that "ok, I'm gonna try to make the code do this", i.e. starting with a specific goal, setting breakpoints, and stepping through the code is the best way to get comfortable with an unfamiliar codebase, no matter its size.
Submission + - Emacs violates GPL since 2009 (gnu.org)
Digana writes: Emacs, one of GNU's flagship products and most famous software creation of Richard Stallman, has been discovered to be violating the GPL since 2009-09-28 by distributing binaries that were missing source. The CEDET package, a set of contributed files for giving certain IDE functionality related to static code analysis, has distributed files generated from bison grammars without distributing the grammar itself. This happened for Emacs versiones 23.2 and 23.3, released during late 2009, and has just been discovered.
The Internet's Age of Rage 315
RackNine sends this excerpt from an editorial at the Guardian:
"The worldwide web has made critics of us all. But with commenters able to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, the blog and chatroom have become forums for hatred and bile. ... The psychologists call it 'deindividuation.' It's what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are concealed. The classic deindividuation experiment concerned American children at Halloween. Trick-or-treaters were invited to take sweets left in the hall of a house on a table on which there was also a sum of money. When children arrived singly, and not wearing masks, only 8% of them stole any of the money. When they were in larger groups, with their identities concealed by fancy dress, that number rose to 80%. The combination of a faceless crowd and personal anonymity provoked individuals into breaking rules that under 'normal' circumstances they would not have considered. ... One simple antidote to this seems to rest in the very old-fashioned idea of standing by your good name. Adopt a pseudonym and you are not putting much of yourself on the line. Put your name to something and your words are freighted with responsibility."
Hybrid Human-Animal DNA Experiments Raise Concerns 311
Kevin Fishburne writes
"British scientists are calling for a new agency to oversee the mixing of human and animal DNA, which is progressing at a rate most may not be aware of: 'Among experimentation that might spark concern are those where human brain cells might change animal brains, those that could lead to the fertilization of human eggs in animals and any modifications of animals that might create attributes considered uniquely human, like facial features, skin or speech. ... Some disagree. "We think some of these should be done, but they should be done in an open way to maintain public confidence," said Robin Lovell-Badge, head of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at Britain's Medical Research Council, one of the expert group members. He said experiments injecting human brain cells into the brains of rats might help develop new stroke treatments or that growing human skin on mice could further understanding of skin cancer.'"
Comment Re:Some OS X projects that deserve more attention (Score 1) 152
MAME isn't open source, though. It forbids commercial use.
Comment Re:Don't know why - but I like it (Score 1) 2288
YMMV. That said,
I see what you did there...
Comment Re:Since when? (Score 1) 385
Since when has a University Professors role been "intellectuals working for the public good"?
Since they were mostly paid by with tax money.
Comment Re:D'jever Notice... (Score 1) 792
...that the guys most paranoid about people listening in on their conversations are the ones with the least interesting things to say...?
Such as Julian Assange. Pffft, who needs encryption and Swedish server bunkers.
Submission + - Octave 3.4 released after 2 years of development (nabble.com)
Digana writes: Two years have passed since the last 3.2 release, so the Octave team is proud to announce its 3.4 release stable release. Besides lots of indexing optimisations, function handle improvements, and a large rewrite of sparse matrix support, there is a particularly exciting new OpenGL plotting engine that is ready to replace gnuplot in most cases.
Comment Re:Windows (Score 4, Insightful) 425
That's not how genericity of a trademark works.
If Microsoft were in the business of selling large crystal panes that you can attach to walls to see through them, then yes, it couldn't call them "windows", because you're using the generic word for that product. It's just like Apple isn't selling produce, so they can use that common word as a trademark. The genericity of a trademark depends on the domain to which it is applied. In the case of "app store", Microsoft has a good case, because Apple is trying to trademark the general shortening of "application". I don't think the shortening of "application store" to "app store" will be able to withstand the attack of genericity.
Comment Re:Take that Italy (Score 1) 254
Comment Science news cycle (Score 1) 430
The article doesn't say exactly what the summary says. This is a clear case of Science news cycle.
Comment Re:Valueless and Inane (Score 1) 334
"I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction" —John Steinbeck:
