Sir Mal Fet - Slashdot User

Submission + - President Obama pledges to kill SOPA (forbes.com)

Submitted by

EliSowash

on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @03:39PM

EliSowash writes: "With Wikipedia, Reddit, and a host of other sites readying themselves for a blackout tomorrow, President Barack Obama has stepped in and said he would not support SOPA. California congressman Darrell Issa, who has been opposed to the bill from the beginning, praised the Internet action that has swept like a virus across the Web the past week. “The voice of the Internet community has been heard,” said Issa. “Much more education for members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal.”"

Comment The largest virtual protest ever? (Score 2) 291

by Sir Mal Fet on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @09:30AM (#38723564) Attached to: Wikipedia Still Set For Full Blackout Wednesday

I believe this must be the largest virtual protest ever made. It will affect what, 20 million persons? I hope this is enough to get the regular public to know about this law.

Submission + - Multicellular life made in months (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @09:17AM

ananyo writes: The origin of multicellular life, one of the most important developments in Earth’s history, could have occurred with surprising speed, US researchers have shown. In the lab, a single-celled yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) took less than 60 days to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals. The clusters even developed a primitive division of labour, with some cells dying so that others could grow and reproduce.

Multicellular life has evolved independently at least 25 times, but these transitions are so ancient that they have been hard to study.

The researchers wanted to see if they could evolve multicellularity in a single-celled organism, using gravity as the selective pressure. In a tube of liquid, clusters of yeast cells settle at the bottom more quickly than single cells. By culturing only the cells that sank, they selected for those that stick together. After many rounds of selection over 60 days, the yeast had evolved into 'snowflakes' comprising dozens of cells.

Many single-celled organisms, including yeast, often form clumps of genetically distinct cells. But Ratcliff’s snowflakes were made up of genetically identical cells that had budded off and stuck together. Many other multicellular organisms may well have evolved through a similar 'divide-and-stick' process.

Submission + - iTunes Match Available in most of Latin America, N (apple.com)

Submitted by Sir Mal Fet on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @09:11AM

Sir Mal Fet writes: iTunes Match, Apple's service that allows re-downloading all your music, ripped CDs, and other music files across all your libraries using the iCloud service, has been made available in most of Latin America, the Netherlands, and the Baltic states. A nice review of one user can be found here. So fellow slashdotters, is it worth the $25/year? Do you use the service?

Submission + - Notes on Reducing Firefox's Memory Consumption (mozilla.com)

Submitted by Skuto on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @09:09AM

Skuto writes: At yesterdays linux.conf.au Browser miniconference in Ballarat, Australia, Mozilla engineer Nicholas Nethercote gave a detailed presentation about the history of Firefox's memory consumption. The 37 slides-with-notes explain in gritty detail what caused Firefox 4's memory usage to be higher than expected, how many leaks and accidental memory use bugs were tracked down with Valgrind plugins, as well as the pitfalls of common memory allocation strategies. Current work is now focused on reducing the memory usage of popular add-ons such as AdBlock, GreaseMonkey and Firebug.
Required reading for people working on large software projects, or those who missed that Firefox is now one of the most memory-efficient browsers in heavy usage.

Submission + - English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout (wikimediafoundation.org)

Submitted by intellitech on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @07:46AM

intellitech writes: Yesterday, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECTIP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate — that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia. This will be the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a decision that wasn’t lightly made.

Submission + - Scientists Uncover the Mathematics Of Serial Kille

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Monday January 16, 2012 @10:10PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Andrei Chikatilo, “The Butcher of Rostov,” was one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history committing at least 52 murders between 1978 and 1990 before he was caught, tried and executed. The pattern of his murders, though, was irregular with long periods of no activity, interrupted by several murders within a short period of time. Hoping to gain insight into serial killings to prevent similar murders, Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury at UCLA built a mathematical model of the time pattern of the activity of Chikatilo and found the distribution of the intervals between murders follows a power law with the exponent of 1.4. The basis of their analysis is the hypothesis that “similar to epileptic seizures, the psychotic affects, causing a serial killer to commit murder, arise from simultaneous firing of large number of neurons in the brain.” In modeling the behavior the authors didn't find that "the killer commits murder right at the moment when neural excitation reaches a certain threshold. He needs time to plan and prepare his crime” so they built delay into their model. The killings eventually have a sedative effect, pushing the neuronal activity below the “killing threshold” – which is why there are large intervals of time between groups of murders. "There is at least qualitative agreement between theory and observation (PDF)," conclude the authors. "Stats can’t tell you who the perp is, but they’re getting better and better at figuring out where and when the next crime might happen," writes criminal lawyer Nathaniel Burney adding that "catching a serial killer by focusing resources based on when and where he’s likely to strike next is a hell of a lot better than relying on the junk science of behavioral profiling.""

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 291

by Sir Mal Fet on Tuesday January 03, 2012 @08:43PM (#38580132) Attached to: Chile Forbids Carriers From Selling Network-Locked Phones

Thing is, if you already own a smartphone and you hire one of those plans, then the price is exactly the same as if you also had a phone tied up.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 291

by Sir Mal Fet on Tuesday January 03, 2012 @08:41PM (#38580112) Attached to: Chile Forbids Carriers From Selling Network-Locked Phones

The nice thing about how the law has impacted the market is that NO company even thought about selling the phones at full price. Under the new law, you either receive an unlocked phone at a subsidized price by signing an 18-month contract, or you buy an unlocked, provider free phone. In case you want to switch providers mid-contract, you can: a) pay a penalty fee (which is more or less the remaining price of the phone considering how long you've been on contract), or b) give back the phone. I don't think it's a bad deal at all.

Submission + - What's Keeping You on XP? 2

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Monday January 02, 2012 @10:52PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "PC World reports that Windows XP lost more than 11 percent of its share from September to December 2011 to post a December average of 46.5 percent, a new low for the aged OS as users have gotten Microsoft's message that the operating system should be retired. Figures indicate that Windows 7 will become the most widely used version in April, several months earlier than previous estimates. Two months ago, as Microsoft quietly celebrated the 10th anniversary of XP's retail launch, the company touted the motto "Standing still is falling behind" to promote Windows 7 and demote XP and in July, Microsoft told customers it was "time to move on" from XP, reminding everyone that the OS would exit all support in April 2014. Before that, the Internet Explorer (IE) team had dismissed XP as the "lowest common denominator" when they explained why it wouldn't run IE9. The deadline for ditching Windows XP is in April 2014, when Microsoft stops patching the operating system. "Enterprises don't want to run an OS when there's no security fixes," says Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner Research rejecting the idea that Microsoft would extend the end-of-life date for Windows XP to please the 10% who have no plans to leave the OS. "The longer they let them run XP, the more enterprises will slow down their migration.""

Submission + - Law That Allows Summary Closing of Websites Passed (elpais.com)

Submitted by Sir Mal Fet on Monday January 02, 2012 @07:25PM

Sir Mal Fet writes: In a very polemic move by the Spanish parliament, the infamous 'Sinde' law, already discussed here, was passed on December 31st. Albeit modified from their original version, the law will allow the Spanish government to request ISPs to summary close a website due to copyright infringment (Original in Spanish, Google translation). If the ISP refuses, then it's passed to court where a judge can order the website closed. It seems it's one good, one bad over there. The law is in public consult until March, and No Les Votes, a Spanish organization that opposes the law, has already started a campaign to boicot it (Original in Spanish; Google translation).

Submission + - Canada Welcomes Hemingway to the Public Domain (activepolitic.com)

Submitted by bs0d3 on Monday January 02, 2012 @06:53PM

bs0d3 writes: As Public Domain Day has passed, we had a good look at what could have entered the Public Domain in America if we had pre-1978 copyright laws. Works ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Return of the King — the final installment in his Lord of Rings trilogy to Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash would be free to use. Under the law that existed until 1978.. Up to 85% of all copyrighted works from 1983 might have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2012. This isn't the same story for the rest of the world though. As the US and EU have long lasting, stern, copyright laws; the law in Canada is a little less intense. While Europe marks the entry of James Joyce into its public domain, Joyce has been in the public domain in Canada for the past 20 years. In Canada, the term is life of the author plus 50 years, consistent with international law. In the U.S. and Europe, the term exceeds international requirements by requiring 70 years, meaning many works take two more decades to enter the public domain. Wallace McLean offers his annual list of new entrants into the Canadian public domain, which notably includes Ernest Hemingway.

Submission + - Geo-physicist Tries to Recreate an Ice Age Ecosyst (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by formaggio on Monday January 02, 2012 @06:18PM

formaggio writes: Russian geo-physicist Sergei Zimov has come up with an effective way to stop the escape of nearly 500 billion tons of methane seeping out of the ground and threatening global agriculture and climate, and he’s doing it by recreating the last ice age across 160 sq km of Siberian “desert" in a project he calls the Pleistocene Park. His plans even include cloning the wooly mammoth.

Submission + - Humility encourages helpfulness, study shows (fellowgeek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, 2012 @06:09PM

An anonymous reader writes: Psychologists have found evidence that ‘humble’ people have a higher propensity to give up time for other people compared to ‘arrogant’ people. The research, which supports intuitive understanding on the matter, was conducted by researchers from Baptist institute, Baylor University. It was recently published in the Journal of Positive Psychology.

"The findings are surprising because in nearly 30 years of research on helping behaviour, very few studies have shown any effect of personality variables on helping,"

Submission + - Chile forbids carriers from selling network-locked (twitter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, 2012 @11:50AM

An anonymous reader writes: As from today, network operators in Chile are no longer allowed to sell carrier-locked phones, and must unlock free of charge all devices already sold to costumers through a simple form on their respective websites. The new regulation came into effect in preparations for the rollout of Mobile Number Portability, set to begin on January 16th. This is one among other restrictions that forbid carriers to lock in the customers through "abusive clauses" in their contracts, one of which was through selling locked devices. Now if a customer wishes to change carriers he/she needs only to have the bills up to date and the process of porting the number should only take 24hrs.

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