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Comment Mark Zuckerberg (Score 5, Interesting) 317

Mark Zuckerberg is the most unethical guy in the industry today. As is obvious by the origins of Facebook, his infamous hacking of the journalists passwords during the the-facebook era and countless other fiascoes that come to news from time to time. Everyone who has ever dealt with him says have bad things to say about him.
If he is the face of the next generation entrepreneurs, then god saves the industry.
Slashdot.org

Slashdot Discussions Now Include Roulette Video Chat 192

It's been a long time coming, but we're pleased to announce the latest updates to our discussion software. We've been paying a lot of attention to what other websites have been doing in the space, and as we are only too happy to steal good ideas, from now on all Slashdot stories will now be accompanied by a Roulette-style webcam video chat. In testing, we've discovered that Slashdot users are amazingly likely to engage in informative, troll-free discussion when presented with the video image of one of their peers. This new addition to Slashdot nicely rounds out and improves the discussion experience for all users.
Spam

Submission + - Spam Filters Force Magazine Name Change (bbc.co.uk)

krou writes: After 90 years of publication, a Canadian history journal is being forced to change its name because of spam filters. The Beaver, which chose its name because of Canada's iconic dam-building creatures, has been forced to change its name to Canada's History, because 'attempts to reach a new online audience kept falling foul of spam filters — particularly in schools — because beaver is also a slang term for female genitalia.' They 'also noticed that most of the 30,000 or so visitors to their website per month stayed for less than 10 seconds', and they probably correctly suspected that those visitors were not interested in 'learning about the trade in beaver fur which built Canada's early economic fortunes'.
News

Submission + - Suicide Bombers Wreak Havoc in Moscow (guardian.co.uk)

reporter writes: About four hours ago, two women wearing belts loaded with explosives walked into two subway stations — the Lubyanka station and the Park Kultury station — in Moscow and detonated the belts. Twenty-two people died at the former station, and 12 died at the latter. Both stations are near the heardquarters of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the K.G.B. "Moscow's red Sokolnicheskaya line, where the first explosion occurred, is used by members of Russia's security service to get to work."

The news wires are lighting up with this story. See the reports at "Times Online", "The New York Times", "Telegraph.co.uk", and "guardian.co.uk"

Submission + - 12 button keypads better than touchpad keyboards 1

prayag writes: "Using phones with touchpads is more demanding than using traditional mobile phones. Even small external interferences complicate writing SMSes on a touchpad, according to results achieved by implementing a new research method developed by a research institute from Finland. "If you can write using your phone without anything disturbing you, it is fastest to type them with a Physical-Qwerty keyboard, the small keyboard similar to one in a normal computer. If you have to concentrate on something else while typing or if you, for instance, cannot see the phone while typing, the ITU-12 keypad, the most traditional mobile phone keypad with 12 buttons is fastest for typing SMSes," said Antti Oulasvirta, Senior Researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. Oulasvirta's research group's study will be published in April at CHI 2010. Original paper can be found here"

Comment Re:How much free speech do you need at aged 6? (Score 5, Insightful) 368

You obviously haven't lived in a totalitarian country. My girlfriend is from a Soviet-Era-communist country. She was very young when the communist regime was repelled but she has distinctive memories of the era, how you could only get state television channel, how going abroad was almost impossible, how it was impossible to get foreign made goods, how the country was everything and criticizing the country was frowned upon. In addition, please remember that Antisemitism in Soviet Union was a de-jure policy after WW2. Also remember, that Sergey Brin's parents were academics, which made them an active target of the government. If you live not under a fear of the government but also under the fear of a government openly hostile to your community and your parents are marked people, it makes a pretty damn good impact on your childhood. In addition, do you think as a child his parents would've never talked about their life in Soviet Union ? These are the experiences that shape your thinking. Just because he was young doesn't mean he doesn't know how it was.

Comment Re:State vs Internet (Score 2, Informative) 186

Actually money transfer to India is not difficult at all. I use bank and wire transfer and it works fine to transfer money to and from India. The problem is that Indian government wants to keep a full track of where and how money crosses border. It always had. Transfers through PayPal, unless it registers itself as a bank, are difficult to track. That is why the problem.
BTW, for this reason, hawala transfers are illegal in India and have come under heavy fire.

Comment Re:Apple is just trying not to appear weak (Score 1) 374

Looking at valuation, Apple could probably buy Nokia if they decided to, but that's not in the least bit likely. Apple's not big into the low end.

Nokia is as big as apple in terms of total assets. They are equal in terms of annual income and bigger in terms of revenue. Nokia equally matches Apple in terms of finances and has more employees. Just because Apple has more presence in US, doesn't mean it can just buy it out.

Comment Re:Not a good source (Score 1) 689

I'd probably consider myself right of center, but I also don't think World Net Daily is a very unbiased source.

The list of theories following that are just some of the theories they mention in the early part of the article; that's not a list of theories they explicitly say should be "banned".

From the academic paper

Some conspiracy theories create serious risks. They do not merely undermine democratic debate; in extreme cases, they create or fuel violence. If government can dispel such theories, it should do so. One problem is that its efforts might be counterproductive, because efforts to rebut conspiracy theories also legitimate them. We have suggested, however, that government can minimize this effect by rebutting more rather than fewer theories, by enlisting independent groups to supply rebuttals, and by cognitive infiltration designed to break up the crippled epistemology of conspiracyminded groups and informationally isolated social networks. 29

In fact, on the contrary it says the the governments should rebutt as many conspiracy theories it can instead of banning them. It never talks about banning any websites. That's just a loads of BS.The article does not say that the theories or the websites need to be banned. It does talk of cognitive infiltration. Which the author feels is justified given the problems conspiracy theories can lead to. It might be right or wrong, in your opinion, however, it is definitely not an encroaching on any freedom of expressions

Submission + - India to get new copy-right laws (medianama.com) 1

prayag writes: "India, is supposed to introduce a new copyright law. Despite opposition from broadcasters, the Indian government has approved the introduction of a bill to amend the Copyright Act of 1957 in a far-reaching step that will give artists and musicians protection, long overdue recognition and locus standi. According to the government's communique, the "Amendment is proposed to give independent rights to authors of literary and musical works in cinematograph films, which were hitherto denied and wrongfully exploited, by the producers and music companies."

The amendments are in line with international treaties such as the WIPO Copyright Treaty and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. Though India has not signed either treaty as yet, it is trying to align its laws with them."

Submission + - Firefox in Parallel - A Pre-Release Version (myoutsourcedbrain.com)

clickbanklib writes: While Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 support multi-threading (running on different processors), Firefox still lacks it in the official version. Support for multiple processors in Firefox is in the works and the author tested a pre-release version of Firefox that loads different tabs in parallel. In this post he show some of the results. Among his conclusions is that the javascript engine is much faster than in previous version.
Patents

Submission + - HP Patents Bignum Implementation From 1912 (blogspot.com)

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "The authors of GMP (the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library) were invited to join Peer-to-Patent to review HP's recent patent on a very old technique for implementing bignums because their software might infringe. Basically, the patent claims choosing an exponent based on processor word size. If you choose a 4-bit word size and a binary number, you end up working in hexadecimal. Or for a computer with a 16-bit word and a base-10 number, you use base 10,000 so that each digit of the base-10,000 number would fit into a single 16-bit word. The obvious problem with that is that there's plenty of prior art here. Someone who spent a few minutes Googling found that Knuth describing the idea in TAOCP Vol 2 and other citations go back to 1912 (which did the same algorithm using strips of cardboard and a calculating machine). None of this can be found in the 'references cited' section. Even though the patent examiner did add a couple of references, they appear to have cited some old patents. The patent issued a few months ago, was filed back in October of 2004, and collected dust at the USPTO for some 834 days. It might seem amazing that there's prior art for a software patent from a time so long before computers as we know them existed, but it's not so amazing if you realize that computers are just automatic mathematicians that perform software as a mathematical calculation."
The Internet

Submission + - Net users in Belarus may soon have to register. (msn.com)

Cwix writes: A new law proposed in Belarus would require all net users and online publications to register with the state. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34633201/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

MINSK, Belarus — Belarus' authoritarian leader is promising to toughen regulation of the Internet and its users in an apparent effort to exert control over the last fully free medium in the former Soviet state. He told journalists that a new Internet bill, proposed Tuesday, would require the registration and identification of all online publications and of each Web user, including visitors to Internet cafes. Web service providers would have to report this information to police, courts and special services.


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