Clearly all the Slashdot commenters are busy patching their bosses' JBoss servers against this vulnerability.

From TFA:

>> According to the slides, the Ceylon Project aims to create a programming language and SDK for business computing, designed with an eye to the successes and failures of the Java. It is built to run on the JVM

>>> the Ceylon Project is built to run on the JVM

Whoops!

"Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata went on the offensive today against his smartphone counterparts, arguing that the model pursued by individuals like Peter Vesterbacka is 'dying.' In a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Iwata said that innovation wasn't coming from independent game coders, but from large and established companies like his own. Iwata also pointed to the major concern over the price model for smartphone games. Compared to games on established consoles, which hover around fifty dollars, mobile titles like Angry Birds run for 99 cents and make their developers little money due to the policies of online app stores. At these price points, "there's no motivation [for] high-value video games," Iwata said. Still, the executive did admit that the business model for console games had yet to be completely figured out."

Okay, not exactly, but Iwata-san did say something against smartphones at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a mere 13 days ago.

Mandate from CRTC disallows operation.
Decision from cabinet to overturn the mandate allows operation.
Ruling from court to reject the decision disallows operation.

Unscrambled as requested.

That is right, but if Google and Mozilla get their way, Google will have saved themselves $6.5 million a year by not needing to encode H.264 anymore for YouTube, and everyone else for not needing to put in support anymore. I seem to have tripped up in my explanations again.

The other side of that coin is that, if Google decided to include H.264 support in Chrome, other browser makers, without or with little money, could have been unable to pay the royalties needed to be paid to patent owners to support it in their browsers. Does Google saving itself $6.5 million annually pale in comparison to Google saving itself and everyone else up to $6.5 million annually?

The Web does not need H.264 to function, so if everyone drops support for it preemptively, then even the small browser makers (I'm thinking of Flock here, which is based on Chromium but has a user base of its own) won't need to pay royalties to anyone.

This is like the GIF patents by Unisys* driving adoption of the PNG format, except that the patents are being assessed now because we know of a few formats that are** suitable for the job but unencumbered already. For instance, WebM can, like H.264, be implemented by anyone, but in addition to that, WebM intentionally doesn't require that royalties be paid. It can become a standard, like PNG originally wasn't a standard but then became an ISO/IEC standard 8 years later.

________________
* = As well as other factors such as the lack of true-color support, alpha and ICC in a lossless format, but that's off-topic.
** = May not be for now, due to lack of hardware acceleration, but could become in the future. Some people don't really care about power usage or CPU usage, so it's already suitable for them.

Disable your ad blocker. Ding, instant shitload of ads.

That's because you can't really use HTML 5 to make an ad that is going to be served to users of IE below version 9, in all of which support for HTML 5 does not exist.

So what do you use to advertise IE 9? Either Flash, or Java, or HTML 4 + JavaScript, or some other solution.

Java is bulky. HTML 4 + JavaScript is not that fast in IE 8 and earlier, so it's liable to freeze IE up and disrupt page navigation. Other solutions may mess up even further. You're left with Flash.

And I thought Google TiSP was just a joke...

I believe you meant http://www.jerseys-2010.xn--mgba3a4fra/

Iran, Islamic Republic of. ccTLDs: xn--mgba3a4f16a, xn--mgba3a4fra.

The Unicode whitelist on Slashdot is preventing us from having the Farsi reading, so see here.

Slight inaccuracy, you can't DM a user on Twitter unless you're following that user and they also follow you back. You can still @reply to them, and they'll see it in their Mentions tab, which I don't know how many people check and how often.

You're entirely right about it being easy to search for keywords the company is interested in, so that it can know who is talking about it, though. Even more so with the new Streaming API... :)

500 KB Web fonts on a Slashdotted page... I guess one thing you can do now is replace that declaration with "font-face: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" everywhere.

Just for future reference,

33,000 USD of hard drives, currently at about 1.5 TiB for 80 USD, is 633,600 GiB.

633,600 GiB can store 158,400,000 songs, at 4 MiB apiece.

The second trial of Jammie Thomas awarded the RIAA 1,920,000 USD for 24 songs, which comes out to 80,000 USD apiece.

For 158,400,000 songs, the RIAA would be awarded 12,672,000,000,000 USD (12 trillion short scale). That's only a bit less than the national US debt, which is 13,208,593,598,669 USD (13 trillion short scale) as of this comment!

It is given. "At least one of whom is a boy" means that the number of boys is guaranteed to be greater than 0. Therefore, one child is a boy, and I pinpointed him as being the given of the problem, and gave him a name to differentiate him from the other unspecified child. If the problem had stated "Exactly one of whom is a boy", then the probability of both children being boys is 0 (0%), because the number of boys is guaranteed to be greater than 0 and less than 2.

You gave the right probability here, but for the wrong reason. "Is at least one of your children a boy?" answered in the affirmative means that you can now answer the question as if one boy was a given. The question now is, "Given that I have at least one son, what is the probability that I have 2 sons?"

Per this page, this can be written as P(2 sons | at least 1 son) = P(2 sons and at least 1 son) / P(at least 1 son) = (1/4) / (3/4) = 1/3.

And I just invalidated all of my other comments on this thread... Ouch!

*takes a huge bite of humble pie*