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Comment Regular Expressions. (Score 1) 121

by snowraver1 (#44701873) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Hands-On Activity For IT Career Fair
Get some computers with Notepad++ installed on them and a file that has some various lines of text. Teach them about pattern matching and regular expressions. It doesn't really require any previous knowledge, and it makes you kind of think like a programmer. It's very useful even if you only have a basic knowledge of it, especially when tearing through log files with grep. Some of the students might not find it interesting at all, but I think you'll find that regardless of what you do.
Open Source

Open Source Licensing Debate Has Positive Effect On GitHub 96

Posted by Soulskill from the clearly-we-need-another-new-license dept.
New submitter Lemeowski writes "Critics have been pounding GitHub recently, claiming it is hosting tons of code with no explicit software license. The debate was thrust into the limelight last year when James Governor of RedMonk issued an acclaimed tweet about young developers being 'about POSS — post open source software,' meaning they disliked or avoided licensing and governance. Red Hat's IP attorney Richard Fontana explores the complaint saying there is a positive aspect of the POSS and GitHub phenomenon: Developers are, for the first time in the history of free software, helping inform each other about licensing and aiding in the selection process. The result is that it's becoming easier to suggest legal improvements to GitHub-hosted repositories."
Education

MIT President Tells Grads To 'Hack the World' 86

Posted by timothy from the but-gently dept.
theodp writes "On Friday, MIT President L. Rafael Reif exhorted grads to 'hack the world until you make the world a little more like MIT'. A rather ironic choice of words, since 'hack the world' is precisely what others said Aaron Swartz was trying to do in his fateful run-in with MIT. President Reif presumably received an 'Incomplete' this semester for the promised time-is-of-the-essence review of MIT's involvement in the events that preceded Swartz's suicide last January. By the way, it wasn't so long ago that 2013 commencement speaker Drew Houston and Aaron Swartz were both welcome speakers at MIT."
The Media

Chicago Sun Times Swaps iPhone Training For Staff Photographers 316

Posted by timothy from the cross-training-nervous-reporters dept.
frdmfghtr notes (via Cult of Mac) that "the reporters of the Chicago Sun-Times are being given training in iPhone photography, to make up for the firing of the photography staff. From the CoM story: 'The move is part of a growing trend towards publications using the iPhone as a replacement for fancy, expensive DSLRs. It's a also a sign of how traditional journalism is being changed by technology like the iPhone and the advent of digital publishing.'"
Robotics

Drones: Coming Soon To the New Jersey Turnpike? 249

Posted by Soulskill from the you-can-trust-us dept.
redletterdave writes "The FAA predicts 30,000 drones will patrol the US skies by 2020, but New Jersey drivers could see these unmanned aerial vehicles hovering above the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway much sooner than that. New Jersey lawmakers from both Republican and Democratic parties have introduced a number of bills to tackle the drones issue before the federal government starts issuing the first domestic drone permits in September 2015."
Communications

France Demands Skype Register As a Telco 209

Posted by Soulskill from the regulators-mount-up dept.
jfruh writes "Skype made a name for itself by largely bypassing the infrastucture — and the costs, and the regulations — of the legacy telecommunications industry. But now the French telecom regulator wants to change that, at least in France. At issue is not the service's VoIP offering, but rather the Skype Out service that allows users to dial phones on traditional networks. Regulators say that this service necessitates that Skype face the same regulations as other telecoms."

Comment Re:They're certainly free to do this... (Score 5, Interesting) 217

by snowraver1 (#43111975) Attached to: Canadian Newspaper Charging $150 License Fee To Publish Excerpts
Hmm... That is rather interesting. Can you illegally circumvent a digital lock through inaction? By not running this script, or if we remember back to the Sony fiasco, by not running the autoplay root-kit, is that criminal?

Are you supposed to wrap yourself in the chains that bind you?

Comment Re:Just disable Javascript (Score 1) 217

by snowraver1 (#43111859) Attached to: Canadian Newspaper Charging $150 License Fee To Publish Excerpts
I hope i'm not being wooshed here....

Firstly, HTML and javascript are seperate. To use a car analogy, think of a gas can. You have a gas can, and then you have the gas in it. The HTML is just a delivery mechanism and container for the javascript. Both HTML and javascript are based on standards, and there is nothing in either of the standards trying to screw the user out of copy/pasting text.

Go to maps.google.com. Right Click on the map. See how it presents you with a few options? Now, instead of presenting that menu, display nothing, and pop up a ransom box. Delselect text, and bam! done! Do the same for ctrl+c, and you have defeated 95% of the public.

So, this is not a javascript problem or an HTML problem. If this is a problem (I personally don't know), then it it a management being greedy problem.
Twitter

Researchers Analyze Twitter To Find Happiest Parts of the United States 160

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the alternatively-adhd-affliction dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "If you live in Hawaii, congratulations: according to a new study (PDF) by researchers at the University of Vermont, you live in the happiest state in the union — at least as far as Twitter sentiment is concerned. (Hat tip to The Atlantic for posting about the research.) The researchers — affiliated with the University's Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Complex Systems Center, Computational Story Lab, and Advanced Computing Core — collected 10 million geo-tagged Tweets from 373 urban areas across the United States in 2011 and ran them through a system designed to tag each on a scale from 1 (sad) to 9 (happy). According to the study, the five happiest states include Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont; the five saddest are Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware and Georgia. In general, the West and Northeast seemed much happier than the Mid-Atlantic and South—with the exception of Florida, which shaded 'happier' than many of the surrounding states. While the researchers admitted their study's limitations, there are certainly a lot of opportunities for refining the model: for example, if Hawaii's status as a vacation state affects its rate of 'happy' Tweets, or if incorporating languages other than English into the dataset would affect the ultimate results."
Google

Oxford Temporarily Blocks Google Docs To Fight Phishing 128

Posted by timothy from the you've-been-cloud dept.
netbuzz writes "Fed up with phishers using Google Forms to commandeer campus email accounts as spam engines, Oxford University recently blocked access to Google Docs for two-and-a-half hours in what it called an 'extreme action' designed to get the attention of both its users and Google. 'Seeing multiple such incidents the other afternoon tipped things over the edge,' Oxford explains in a blog post. 'We considered these to be exceptional circumstances and felt that the impact on legitimate University business by temporarily suspending access to Google Docs was outweighed by the risks to University business by not taking such action.' The move generated widespread complaints from those affected, as well as criticism from outside network professionals."
Handhelds

Surface Pro Sold Out; Was It Just Understocked? 413

Posted by timothy from the ladies-and-gentleman-just-a-few-left dept.
TechCrunch is one of the many outlets to report that Microsoft's Surface Pro tablet computer sold out on its first day of wide availability. Business Insider points to Reddit threads complaining that "selling out" was largely a product of not having all that many in stock to begin with, in some cases not even enough to cover pre-ordered devices.

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