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Comment Re:Noone in Russia will use such a distribution =) (Score 2) 51

I'm not telling you about gay people. No homophobia here, no.

What I actually say is that the expected reaction from an average russian-speakin user is highly predictable. 'Pidor' is a banned word, it is highly offensive, maybe the closer analog will be your 'nigger'. Would you use such a distribution, like, 'Nigger Linux' ?

Submission + - What's wrong with Fedora Raspberry Pi remix? (h-online.com)

SMOKEING writes: New Linux distributions nowadays do not necessarily make breaking news, yet the arrival of a Fedora remix for Raspberry Pi managed to attract unhealthy attention, and for all the wrong reasons (Pidora announcement on G+): for any Russian-speaking bloke the word "Pidora" stands linguistically just too closely to "bugger". It's arguably a serious brand blunder), which it's interesting how the Canadian team is (or is not) going to extricate itself from.
Software

Opera 11 Beta Released, With Extensions Support 142

An anonymous reader writes "Opera 11 Beta has just been released and now includes support for extensions. Also new in this release Tab Stacking, Visual Mouse Gestures, performance improvements, new installer, and much more. Even with its many new features, Opera 11 is 30% smaller than Opera 10.60. That means that Opera downloads more quickly and installs in fewer steps. There are over 130 extensions and climbing including NoScript and AdBlock! Extensions can be found here."
Space

Extra-Galactic Planet Discovered In Milky Way 111

astroengine writes "Between six to nine billion years ago, the Milky Way collided with another galaxy. As you'd expect, this caused quite a mess; stars, dust and gas being ripped from the intergalactic interloper. In fact, to this day, the dust hasn't quite settled and astronomers have spotted an odd-looking exoplanet orbiting a metal-poor star 2,000 light-years from Earth. Through a careful process of elimination, the extrasolar planet (known as HIP 13044b) actually works out to be an extragalactic planet, a surviving relic of the massive collision eons ago."
Science

Laser Camera Can See Around Corners 97

Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers at MIT have developed a laser camera that can 'see' around corners and take pictures of a scene not in its direct line of sight. The camera system fires extremely short bursts of light that can reflect off one object, such as the open door of a room, and then off a second object inside the room before reflecting back to the first object and being captured by the camera, after which algorithms can use the information to reconstruct the hidden scene exploiting the fact that it is possible to capture light at extremely short time scales, about one quadrillionth of a second. By continuously gathering light and computing the time and distance that each pixel has traveled, the camera creates a '3D time-image' of the scene it can't directly see. 'It's like having X-ray vision without the X-rays,' says Professor Ramesh Raskar. 'We're going around the problem rather than going through it.'"
Red Hat Software

Alternative To the 200-Line Linux Kernel Patch 402

climenole writes "Phoronix recently published an article regarding a ~200 line Linux Kernel patch that improves responsiveness under system strain. Well, Lennart Poettering, a Red Hat developer, replied to Linus Torvalds on a mailing list with an alternative to this patch that does the same thing yet all you have to do is run 2 commands and paste 4 lines in your ~/.bashrc file."
Businesses

Rural North Carolina Experiences Data Center Boom 153

1sockchuck writes "Rural counties in western North Carolina have hit the data center trifecta, landing major projects from Google, Apple and Facebook. These marquee tech companies will invest more than $2 billion in small towns like Forest City, Kings Mountain and Maiden, a town of just 3,300 residents. How did western North Carolina become a tech hub? Aggressive tax incentives and an abundant supply of cheap power, a legacy of the textile mills that once thrived in the region, which narrowly missed winning a $499 million Microsoft data center project that ended up in Virginia."
Biotech

Muscle Mice 116

SilasMortimer writes "Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder have accomplished that for which humankind has been desperate since the dawn of civilization: turning sad, injured regular mice into angry, beefed-up super-mice. Well, okay, there's no official word in the article about the rodents' emotional states, but certainly when stem cells were injected into mice with leg injuries, the muscle grew back... almost twice as big as it was before the injury [abstract, supplemental material (PDF)]. This has many exciting implications, from better healing after injuries to slowing down the aging process to a spike in the number of cases of Generalized Anxiety Disorder among cats. I, for one, refuse to perpetuate outdated memes. (But feel free to make up for the lack.)" If these mice are bred with those given previously discovered treatments to make them smarter and fearless, we might be in trouble.
Australia

Aussie Gov't Says Wiretap Laws Fine, Telcos 'Wrong' 127

mask.of.sanity writes "A top bureaucrat from the Australian Attorney-General's department has said telcos are wrong to complain about changes to the country's wiretapping laws, which will force them to report every product and network system change to law enforcement for approval, lest they affect the ability to intercept communications. The telcos argue there are simply too many products and network architecture changes to report and that it would become overbearing. It's the latest in a string of changes to communications law in the country, and comes as the government mulls data retention and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement."
Math

Scientists Overclock People's Brains 314

arshadk writes with this excerpt from the BBC about researchers at Oxford University who found that inducing a small current in a subject's parietal lobe boosted their capacity for numerical learning: "The current could not be felt, and had no measurable effect on other brain functions. As it was turned on, the volunteers tried to learn a puzzle which involved substituting numbers for symbols. Those given the current from right to left across the parietal lobe did significantly better when given, compared to those who were given no electrical stimulation. The direction of the current was important — those given stimulation running in the opposite direction, left to right, did markedly worse at these puzzles than those given no current, with their ability matching that of an average six-year-old. The effects were not short-lived, either. When the volunteers whose performance improved was re-tested six months later, the benefits appear to have persisted. There was no wider effect on general maths ability in either group, just on the ability to complete the puzzles learned as the current was applied."
Cellphones

Researcher To Release Web-Based Android Attack 136

CWmike writes "A computer security researcher says he plans to release code Thursday that could be used to attack some versions of Google's Android phones over the Internet. The attack targets the browser in older, Android 2.1-and-earlier versions of the phones. It is being disclosed Thursday at the HouSecCon conference by M.J. Keith, a security researcher with Alert Logic. Keith says he has written code that allows him to run a simple command line shell in Android (video) when the victim visits a website that contains his attack code. The bug used in Keith's attack lies in the WebKit browser engine used by Android. Google said it knows about the vulnerability. 'We're aware of an issue in WebKit that could potentially impact only old versions of the Android browser,' Google spokesman Jay Nancarrow confirmed in an e-mail. 'The issue does not affect Android 2.2 or later versions.' Version 2.2 runs on 36.2 percent of Android phones, Google says"

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