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Comment SL4A is great (Score 1) 783

by bergelin (#38501806) Attached to: Why Can't We Put a BASIC On the Phone?

I've been using the Scripting Layer for Android to code a small python app. It uses the voice recognition and speech synthesizer to do do things like read the weather for me, and connect via socket to my home computer where I have a server running to execute some commands like playing music and such.
It work great! The entire python standard library is included and some things like Twister works as well.

The Android API is not entirely fully fledged, but I've been able to access all functions I want (sensors, speech, build menus among other things). If you need full control and access to all API-functions though, java is the only way to go.

I could't imagine why you would want to use BASIC instead of Python. If for some reason you dislike Python, you've got Ruby, Perl, Shell and more.

Comment This is pretty old news here in Sweden by now (Score 5, Informative) 182

by bergelin (#37417644) Attached to: Famous Wildlife Photographer Busted For Using Stock Images

This is pretty old news here in Sweden by now. He won the prize of wildlife photographer of the year and has held several courses, so I'm pretty sure he cashed in on this.

When the accusations started, he said that he was completely innocent and a lot of people believed him thanks to his reputation (one of the most - if not the most famous - wildlife photographers in Sweden.) However, he wouldn't show the raw pictures which added on to the suspicions.
A large "investigation" started on internet forums and eventually people found the original pictures of animals that he had pasted onto his pictures. Like http://a.yey.nu/QHL7RE.jpgfor example (mirror reversed). This forced him to admit of course.

The funny thing is that he has been outspoken against editing of photos and said never to use Photoshop on his images: "I'm a photographer, not a pixel artist".

Submission + - Wikileaks to sue Visa/Mastercard (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After 6 months of financial blockade by Visa and Mastercard, during which they claim to have lost over $15,000,000 in donations, Wikileaks and Datacell are filing a complaint against the two financial giants, with plans to litigate should the block not be lifted. Wikileaks stated, "On June 9th a the law firms Bender von Haller Dragested in Denmark and Reykjavik Law Firm in Iceland acting on behalf of DataCell and WikiLeaks told the companies that if the blockade is not removed they will be litigated in Denmark and a request for prosecution will be filed with the EU Commission." It has also been repeatedly noted that both financial companies still allow financial transactions by the Ku Klux Klan.

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bfp1qh
Books

The End of Paper Books 669

Posted by samzenpus from the last-folded-page dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Books are on their way to extinction, writes Kevin Kelly, adding that we are in a special moment when paper books are plentiful and cheap that will not last beyond the end of this century. 'It seems hard to believe now, but within a few generations, seeing an actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion.' But a prudent society keeps at least one specimen of all it makes, so Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has decided that we should keep a copy of every book that Google and Amazon scan so that somewhere in the world there was at least one physical copy to represent the millions of digital copies. That way, if anyone ever wondered if the digital book's text had become corrupted or altered, they could refer back to the physical book that was archived somewhere safe. The books are being stored in cardboard boxes, stacked five high on a pallet wrapped in plastic, stored 40,000 strong in a shipping container, inside a metal warehouse on a dead-end industrial street near the railroad tracks in Richmond California. In this nondescript and 'nothing valuable here' building, Kahle hopes to house 10 million books — about the contents of a world-class university library. 'It still amazes me that after 20 years the only publicly available back up of the internet is the privately funded Internet Archive. The only broad archive of television and radio broadcasts is the same organization,' writes Kelly. 'They are now backing up the backups of books. Someday we'll realize the precocious wisdom of it all and Brewster Kahle will be seen as a hero.'"
Censorship

Chinese Subvert Censorship With a Popular Pun 272

Posted by timothy from the what'dju-say-about-my-mother-horse-hemp-rebuke? dept.
Anonymusing writes "In spoken Chinese, 'grass-mud horse' sounds virtually identical to an obscenity (hint: it begins with "mother-") — and as a cartoon character, it has become an amazing phenomenon. Meant as a subversive attack on censors, the alpaca-like mythical creature has led to a cuddly stuffed animal — selling over 180,000 in a few weeks — and a wildly popular YouTube video with children's voices singing words that are either completely benign or incredibly offensive, depending on how you listen." Update: 03/13 09:29 GMT by T : Since this story was set up, the originally linked video seems to have been pulled. Searching YouTube reveals that there are some alternatives available, at least for now.
Security

Norton Users Worried By PIFTS.exe, Stonewalling By Symantec 685

Posted by timothy from the and-nobody-saw-me dept.
An anonymous reader writes that "[Monday] evening, on systems with Norton Internet Protection running, users began to see a popup warning about an executable named PIFTS.exe trying to access the internet. The file was shown to be located in a non-existent folder inside the Symantec LiveUpdate folder. There were several posts about this to the Norton customer forums asking for help or information on this mysterious program. The initial thread received several thousand views and several pages of replies in a few short hours before being deleted. Several subsequent posts to the Norton forum were deleted much more quickly. These actions — whether actively covering up, or simply not well thought through — have spurred people to begin crafting conspiracy theories about the purposes of this PIFTS program. I for one am blocking the program until more information becomes available." The current top link on Google for "PIFTS.exe" links to one of these deleted questions on Norton's support boards, which sounds innocent enough: "I searched this forum but did not see PIFTS.exe. Any idea what this is?"
The Courts

Pirate Bay Founder Begs For Hacker Ceasefire 243

Posted by CmdrTaco from the please-hammer-don't-hurt-'em dept.
Barence writes "Pirate Bay's co-founder has pleaded for hackers to stop attacking the sites of those organizations lined up against him. Peter Sunde is on trial with Pirate Bay's three other founders for allegedly distributing copyrighted material. The trial is about to enter its fourth day, and in a gesture of support for the four men hackers have begun assaulting plaintiff websites, beginning with that of the The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The campaign has caused concern in the Pirate Bay camp, prompting Sunde to write a post titled 'We're winning, stop hacking, please' on his blog."
Security

Website Security Without Breaking the Bank? 195

Posted by kdawson from the man-who-is-his-own-lawyer dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I do my own Web design and have a few websites — MySQL, PHP, CSS, HTML, that kind of thing. It's simple, amateur stuff, but I would love to have some reasonable ways to assess their security myself and patch the big holes, or possibly enlist someone to do 'white hat' work to assist me. I have absolutely no idea how to proceed. I don't want to get mired in a never-ending paranoia-fueled race to patch holes before the hackers find them, but on the other hand, I don't want my websites to look like Swiss cheese. Right now, I wouldn't know what kind of cheese they look like: Swiss, Havarti, or hard as Parmesan. How can I take reasonable steps to protect these websites myself? What books has the community found useful? What groups (if any) can offer me inexpensive white-hat hacking that won't end up costing me a first-born child? Or am I better off just waiting until a problem arises and then fixing it?"
Mozilla

Mozilla Pitches Firefox 3.1 Alpha For July Release 257

Posted by kdawson from the fast-track dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Just a week after Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.0, the open-source developer has proposed ship dates for the next version that, if approved, would produce an alpha release next month and a final no later than early 2009. According to a draft schedule discussed at a recent meeting, Mozilla wants to have the first Firefox 3.1 developer preview ready by July, then move to a beta by August. The schedule slates final code delivery in the last quarter of this year or the first quarter of 2009. A month ago, when Mozilla first started discussing Firefox 3.1 internally, Mike Schroepfer, the company's vice president of engineering, said the upgrade's target ship date was the end of 2008. If Mozilla holds to that plan, Firefox 3.1 would be its first fast-track update. Firefox 3.0, for instance, launched approximately 20 months after its predecessor, Firefox 2.0."

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