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Media

Two US States Restrict Used CD Sales 500

Posted by kdawson from the papers-please dept.
DrBenway sends us to Ars Technica for a report that Florida and Utah have placed draconian restrictions on the sale of used music CDs; Wisconsin and Rhode Island may soon follow suit. In Florida, stores have to hold on to CDs for 30 days before they can sell them — for store credit only, not cash. Quoting: "No, you won't spend any time in jail, but you'll certainly feel like a criminal once the local record shop makes copies of all of your identifying information and even collects your fingerprints. Such is the state of affairs in Florida, which now has the dubious distinction of being so anal about the sale of used music CDs that record shops there are starting to get out of the business of dealing with used content because they don't want to pay a $10,000 bond for the 'right' to treat their customers like criminals."
Linux Business

Submission + - Dell to sell Novell's version of Linux

Submitted by unchiujar
unchiujar writes: Newsfactor reports Dell's part of the pact with Microsoft and Novell is to purchase SUSE Linux Enterprise Server certificates from Microsoft and establish a program to migrate existing Linux users who are not Dell Linux customers to Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The deal is geared to companies dealing with a mixture of SUSE Linux and Windows.
Businesses

Submission + - H1-B visa abuse by Indian outsourcing firms

Submitted by sledge_hammer
sledge_hammer writes: I found several articles detailing the ways in which the H1-B visas are being abused by Indian outsourcing firms. It provides evidence to a lot of the arguments already made on Slashdot including how lack of skilled labor should be driving IT wages up. Even though I am an Indian citizen that would need an H1-b to work in this country, I have to say that this a gross miscarriage of the program and raising the visa cap is not the solution to the problem. Personally, these abusive practices have resulted in me not having an H1 visa slot after this year's lottery even though I am a recent mech. engineering graduate of a top 10 school working for an industrial goods fortune 500 company and getting paid better on par with my peers and industry standards. http://www.sharedprosperity.org/bp187.html — Paper from the Economic Policy Institute detailing problems with the current system and ways in which it can be abused. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/conten t/feb2007/db20070208_553356.htm — Article detailing how numerous outsourcing firms are abusing the system to gain visas. This in turn prevents legitimate employers from hiring foreign nationals. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2007/03/30/EDGRJN7CFB1.DTL — Article about how Microsoft has been abusing the system for years. BTW sorry about the links, but I am a n00b, so I have no clue how to do HTML tags! :-)
Java

Submission + - BeanShell gets renewed life from community

Submitted by
DalDei
DalDei writes: "Developers following the BeanShell language got some excitement last week as a slew of posts on the beanshell-users forum brought up the old topic of updates. Beanshell hasnt had an update in several years, causing many users to feel concerned with known bugs over 170 and very little comments from the authors. Suggestions about forking the source so that bugs could be fixed by the community brought the attention of the author, Patrick Niemeyer who commented about BeanShell's future. Userlist messages can be found on the Beanshell Archive. Particularly notworth are comments from Patrick namely,
=== Quote ======
Here are some things that have happened in the past few months:

1) We added a new member to the JSR-274 expert group: Tom Copeland, who recently wrote a book on JavaCC.

2) Oracle negotiated a non-LGPL license for BeanShell for use in their products.

3) Dan Leuck and I have resumed planning for a BeanShell book.

4) I have continued to make plans for how we're going to approach BeanShell 3.0. I want the next release to be a significant refactoring that rebases BeanShell on a newer Java version and makes it much more accessible and easier to work on for everyone.
========== End Quote ===========
The pace of progress, however, has not satisfied everyone so a BeanShell fork has been created at http://code.google.com/p/beanshell2/ for the purpose of bug fixes and enhancements of BeanShell. Only time will tell if this garners enough userbase to become successful."
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Light Sabers Explained

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The popular science learning site HowStuffWorks.com has recently shed light upon the elusive details of light sabers. For those of us laymen without the force, we get an article explaining their history, their basic mechanics, and proper usage for everyday activities.
The Internet

Submission + - Fight MS in Second Life

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: SCION AND MOVIETICKETS.COM PRESENT THE FIRST-EVER MS FLY IN SECOND LIFE Help achieve a world free of multiple sclerosis (MS) by soaring into the virtual world June 11th through 17th. The MS Fly — an expansion of the National MS Society's successful annual walk, is an engaging and interactive adventure dedicated to ending the unpredictable and chronic disease. Participate in this exciting and cause-worthy event on a week-long scavenger hunt as you journey through the virtual world of Second Life with your avatar and MS Cape. Scour islands for digital tokens that grant you completion of one phase of the hunt. With each new digital token acquired comes a new incentive for the participant and more money to help end MS. MS stops more than 2.5 million people worldwide from moving. The National MS Society exists to make sure it doesn't. It's Time to Fly! Register now at www.themsfly.org
Security

A Foolproof Way To End Bank Account Phishing? 436

Posted by kdawson from the worth-a-try dept.
tcd004 writes "F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen proposes an elegant solution to the problem of bank account phishing in the latest Foreign Policy magazine. Hypponen thinks banks should have exclusive use of a new top-level domain: .bank. 'Registering new domains under such a top-level domain could then be restricted to bona fide financial organizations. And the price for the domain wouldn't be just a few dollars: it could be something like $50,000 — making it prohibitively expensive to most copycats. Banks would love this. They would move their existing online banks under a more secure domain in no time."
Google

Submission + - Google violating "Don't be Evil" motto?

Submitted by
ihuntrocks
ihuntrocks writes: "Search engine giant Google, along with several other large companies purchase their server systems from Dell. The catch: Dell doesn't do the work on them. Instead, it is contracted out to another company, which only hires temporary employees, the majority of which have no technical background whatsoever. This company also largely does not supervise these inexperienced employees, but rather leaves that task to other temporary employees (who may also have no technical knowledge). This often times leads to misconfiguration of things, like Google servers, or sometimes worse: systems leaving the warehouse completely blank. This lack of supervision and technical background allow employees to bypass the quality control checking and additional auditing on these systems and make such errors, often times with impunity when this is discovered by the company. I also believe, as an IS professional, that companies like the one contracted by Dell hurt trained and experienced IT/IS professionals by offering jobs like this to temporary employees only, for near poverty scale wages. These temporary employees are often hired at the end of the quarter, when Dell places things on sale, to meet the volume demand, and are then laid off until needed again. Are companies like Google hurting IT/IS professionals by allowing their work (perhaps unknowingly) to be done by companies like this? What do the members of the Slashdot community think should be done about this by companies like Google, if anything, and what should we, as IT/IS professionals do to preserve quality of work and competitive wages when faced with issues like this?"
United States

Submission + - Getting out of IT, where to start?

Submitted by cavtroop
cavtroop writes: I've been doing IT for almost 12 years now, with the typical progression: pc support, server support, network support, etc. I used to love my job, and look forward to coming into work, learning something new, and surmounting challenging obstacles. After years of doing this and that in IT, I'm now an IT Generalist, and finding a job is getting tougher and tougher — most hiring managers are looking for subject matter experts. My lack of a degree (I joined the military, and went straight to work after that) is also beginning to hinder me greatly.

I've been giving some thought to getting out of IT lately. I find I no longer enjoy my work — most of the work I do provides little challenge, and I honestly don't remember the last time I learned something new and interesting. With the recent news of IBM possibly laying of 100k people plus (and the years long trend towards out-sourcing), the prospects of ever getting a meaningful IT job again are looking dim.

I think its time to hit the eject button on my IT career. But where to begin? I tried searching for a career counselor, but most of the hits were shady fly by night places, or people that just want to sell you a book.

Has anyone out there in /. land had a similar experience? What can I expect, and where can I start? Any tips, etc would be beneficial.
Editorial

Submission + - MySpace photo sagas continue

Submitted by gwoodrow
gwoodrow writes: We've all heard the "fired because of myspace" issues, where a simple blog or picture gets someone canned. But even as it's getting worse, the targets are fighting back:

"Teacher in training Stacy Snyder was denied her education degree on the eve of graduation when Millersville University apparently found pictures on her MySpace page 'promoting underage drinking.' As a result, the 27-year-old mother of two had her teaching certificate withheld and was granted an English degree instead. In response, Snyder has filed a Federal lawsuit against the Pennsylvania university asking for her education diploma and certificate along with $75,000 in damages."

The offending picture? A picture from halloween 2005 of Stacy in a pirate outfit drinking from a cup.
Slashback

Submission + - Winter 2006-07 ties for second-warmest on record

Submitted by Socguy
Socguy writes: Figures from Environment Canada show that the winter of 2006-07 tied with 1986-87 as the second-warmest winter since records began in 1948.
David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada, said the winter was a surprising one, hitting different parts of the country at different times and seeing huge temperature variations. He noted that Canadians experienced very different winters depending on where they live.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/03/20/winter-w rap.html

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