Comment They're kids .. (Score 0, Redundant) 663
.. and they don't want to goto school.
Adobe (Temporarily?) Kills 64-Bit Flash For Linux 272
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that with the release of the 10.1 security patches, Adobe has, at least temporarily, killed 64-bit Flash for Linux. The statement says: 'The Flash Player 10.1 64-bit Linux beta is closed. We remain committed to delivering 64-bit support in a future release of Flash Player. No further information is available at this time. Please feel free to continue your discussions on the Flash Player 10.1 desktop forums.' The 64-bit forum has been set to read-only."
Comment Forget the higher level languages (Score 1) 407
If you want to give these kids a solid foundation to build on that will instill good habits and understanding of how computers work - C.
Java runs on top of an engine written in C - same with Python. They're great for doing that they do which is providing a massive library to take out all the menial tasks, but those menial tasks are the ones that teach people how everything works in the first place. How do they become a menial task if no one ever learned they were there?
Do we teach calculus without first teaching numbers and then general addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, etc etc etc
I have spent years beating the bad habits of Java out of programmers. Garbage collection is all nice and wonderful but it prevents programmers from having to think about memory at all. Taking that Java programmer and trying to get them to write even simple C/C++ code or even something as basic as assembler is damn hard! Everything they have learned has to be re-grounded. It's like boot camp - break them down to so they can be built up into something useful.
It's easy to teach someone who knows C how to write C++, Java, Python, or the zillion of other languages out there.
Aussie Attorney General Says Gamers Are Scarier Than Biker Gangs 409
Sasayaki writes "South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson claims, in an interview with Good Game, that gamers were more of a threat to his family than biker gangs. This is the man who has been the biggest opponent to Australia receiving an R18+ rating for video games and who has the power to veto any such law introducing it."
Comment Re:Wrong agency; should have claimed NSA (Score 1) 24
Any of the contact addresses here:
Comment Re:Much ado about nothing (Score 1) 288
My gmail account has had 2 spams make it to my inbox in the last 6 months (probably longer) of the 20-50 spams a day the account receives. I have never published the address and have only even given it out to friends and family but it has received spam since the day I opened it. I also don't have any other email addresses forward to it. Very effective for me.
Pixar's Next Three Films Will Be Sequels 379
brumgrunt writes "Should we be worried? As Pixar, with Up, once more proves itself to be home to some of the most original and daring blockbusters on the planet, the news that its next three films are likely to be sequels — with the confirmation of Monsters, Inc. 2 — gives cause for concern. Are commercial pressures catching up with one of our most inventive movie companies?"
Comment Re:Solution: Public Key Auth (Score 3, Interesting) 327
All my servers have SSH sitting on a high port and have never had SSH attacks on them. In the one case where someone found the port, their bot attempted to use the port to proxy a web page.
On port 22 I run a program that firewalls out anyone who creates a full TCP connection :)
Comment Re:Synergy? (Score 1) 189
I've found that Synergy doesn't work correctly with the mouse look in WoW. It just spins the view around really fast and eventually settles on looking straight up - quite annoying. Keys & clicking on things work just find though.
Dell Abandons Its Customization Roots 372
LiveFreeOrDieInTheGo writes "Dell intends to scale back its build-to-order service model, while increasing sales of prepackaged systems. The goal: $3B USD savings by 2011. The downside: customers expect Dell to build-to-order. The deeper downside: Dell will outsource more production and assembly."
Journal SPAM: Cancel My Subscription / To the Resurrection 2
Watch The Film
Amnesty International have just released a truly powerful film to coincide with the official launch of the unsubscribe campaign.
This film shows a performance artist undergoing, for real, interrogation techniques permitted in the CIA handbook.
Warning: Some viewers may find this disturbing. Unsuitable for under 14s.
Please turn your speakers up
AT&T Invests in Filtered Networking 152
Filtered Coward writes "Last summer, AT&T announced its intention to begin filtering copyrighted content at some point. The telecom has now bought a chunk of Vobile, whose core product is VideoDNA. "Like other systems of its kind, VideoDNA develops a unique signature from every frame of video. The signature is meant to be robust enough to survive various transformations and edits, and it can then be used to run matches against incoming content.' Vobile claims that VideoDNA is good enough to be used on video when transmitted over a network. 'Based on the complexity of the problem, we suspect that anything initially deployed by AT&T will fall far short of a robust P2P video filter. But should AT&T truly have its eyes on just such a prize, the company would be in a powerful position to impose its own policies on the entire US, since it owns major parts of the Internet backbone.'"
Submission + - Sensitive Guantánamo Manual Leaked via Wi (wired.com)
James Hardine writes: Wired is reporting that a never-before-seen military manual detailing the day-to-day operations of the U.S. military's Guantánamo Bay detention facility has been leaked to the web, via the whistleblowing site Wikileaks.org, affording a rare inside glimpse into the institution where the United States has imprisoned hundreds of suspected terrorists since 2002.
The 238-page document, "Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures," is dated March 28, 2003.
The disclosure highlights the internet's usefulness to whistle-blowers in anonymously propagating documents the government and others would rather conceal. The Pentagon has been resisting — since October 2003 — a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union seeking the very same document.
Anonymous open-government activists created Wikileaks in January, hoping to turn it into a clearinghouse for such disclosures. The site uses a Wikipedia-like system to enlist the public in authenticating and analyzing the documents it publishes.
The Camp Delta document includes schematics of the camp, detailed checklists of what "comfort items" such as extra toilet paper can be given to detainees as rewards, six pages of instructions on how to process new detainees, instructions on how to psychologically manipulate prisoners, and rules for dealing with hunger strikes.
Submission + - Earthrise/earthset (www.jaxa.jp) 1
GSGKT writes: The iconic "Earthrise" photo taken during Apollo 8 mission has been hailed as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken". Japanese lunar explorer, Kaguya (a moon princess in Japanese folklore), has entered lunar orbit on Oct 19. It has been sending back pictures/movies of the moon taking with its high-resolution camera before that. Movies of earthrise and earthset taken by the Kaguya are now available. This is the first of such a movie since NASA's 1969 Appolo 11 mission, and the first taken using HD camera, according to Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's press release.
Submission + - Verizon DNS wildcarding FIOS/DSL (publicknowledge.org)
obsidian97 writes: Verizon has taken a page from the Verisign Sitefinder debacle and turned on DNS wildcarding for FIOS and DSL customers. For these customers, a DNS query for "asdf1234", for which there isn't even a TLD, yields a Verizon sponsored landing page where they can automatically piss off their customers. Don't they ever learn?
