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The Internet

British MP Calls For Pornography 'Opt-In' 335

Posted by samzenpus from the join-the-club dept.
Robadob writes "Internet providers should create an 'opt-in' system to prevent children gaining access to pornography, a Conservative MP has said. Claire Perry wants age-checks to be attached to all such material to reduce exposure to it. The mother-of-three, who has prompted a Commons debate on the issue, said internet firms should 'share the responsibility' of protecting children."
Google

Big Media Wants More Piracy Busting From Google 186

Posted by samzenpus from the lend-a-hand dept.
suraj.sun writes "Last month, executives from two music-industry trade groups, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), asked Google if it could provide a means to help them track down pirated material more efficiently. Typically, copyright owners are responsible for finding pirated links and alerting Google, which is required by law to quickly remove the links. But Google's response raised eyebrows at some of the labels. James Pond, a Google manager, wrote in a letter dated September 20, that Google would be happy to help — for a price."
Space

Earth-Like Planet That Could Sustain Life Found 575

Posted by samzenpus from the guess-who's-coming-to-dinner dept.
astroengine writes "An exoplanet, 20 to 50 percent the mass of Earth, has been discovered 20 light-years away and it appears to have all the ingredients conducive to sustaining life. It has enough gravitational clout to hold onto an atmosphere and it orbits well within the 'Goldilocks Zone' of its parent star. However, it would be a very different place to Earth; it is tidally locked to its star, creating one perpetual day on the world. Interestingly, this may also boost the life-giving qualities of the exoplanet, creating stable temperatures in its atmosphere."
Image

Student Wants Science To Name 'Hella' Big Number Screenshot-sm 193

Posted by samzenpus from the big-way-big-and-hella-big dept.
thodelu writes "Austin Sendek, a 20-year-old UC Davis student, is trying to get scientists from Boise to Beijing to use the term 'hella' to denote the unimaginably huge, seldom-cited quantity of 10 to the 27th power. From the article: 'It started as a joke, but Sendek's Facebook petition: to the Consultative Committee on Units, a subdivision of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, has drawn more than 60,000 supporters. Its chances for formal adoption by the global weights-and-measures community are hella dim, but Google was so taken with Sendek's modest proposal that it incorporated "hella" in its online calculator.'"

Comment Virtualise! (Score 1) 300

by tomm3h (#32541262) Attached to: Volume Shadow Copy For Linux?

Dump the disks to a virtual image, virtualise the machines and then you can snapshot away to your hearts content. Be it via the virtualisation tech, or the host's file systems.

However, as already said, if you're still running 2.4 kernels, you're well over-due an upgrade/migration to newer software AND hardware environments. Why not combine both suggestions?

Understandably, uptime is really golden, but everyone understands that you have to upgrade and/or maintain systems at some point.
Government

In Argentina, Law Against Plagiarism Plagiarized 165

Posted by kdawson from the send-yourself-to-jail dept.
An anonymous reader writes "An Argentinian politician who introduced a law to send plagiarists to jail for three to eight years appears to have plagiarized the explanation of his bill directly from Wikipedia. The bulk of his explanation is three paragraphs that are taken, verbatim, from Wikipedia, without acknowledgment."
The Almighty Buck

iPad UK Pricing Confirmed; Apple UK Tax Applied 248

Posted by kdawson from the dig-deep dept.
The iPad will be available in the UK and eight other countries from 28 May 2010; both models will be available for pre-order on 10 May. Reader marcopolo007uk adds a note from iPad-Review.co.uk with pricing: "WiFi Models: 16GB / 32GB / 64GB — £429 / £499 / £599. 3G versions: 16GB / 32GB / 64GB — £529 / £599 / £699. These are a little higher than some had guessed... The Apple Tax stings the UK consumer again." At the current exchange rate, these prices are right around 150% of those offered in the US.
Google

Google Demonstrates Quantum Computer Image Search 106

Posted by Soulskill from the superposition-of-evil-and-not-evil dept.
An anonymous reader sends along this quote from New Scientist: "Google's web services may be considered cutting edge, but they run in warehouses filled with conventional computers. Now the search giant has revealed it is investigating the use of quantum computers to run its next generation of faster applications. Writing on Google's research blog this week, Hartmut Neven, head of its image recognition team, reveals that the Californian firm has for three years been quietly developing a quantum computer that can identify particular objects in a database of stills or video (PDF). Google has been doing this, Neven says, with D-Wave, a Canadian firm that has developed an on-chip array of quantum bits — or qubits — encoded in magnetically coupled superconducting loops."
Government

Real-LIfe Distributed-Snooping Web Game To Launch In Britain 419

Posted by timothy from the no-room-for-abuse-there dept.
corerunner writes "A new internet game is about to be launched which allows 'super snooper' players to plug into the nation's CCTV cameras and report on members of the public committing crimes. The 'Internet Eyes' service involves players scouring thousands of CCTV cameras installed in shops, businesses and town centres across Britain looking for law-breakers. Players who help catch the most criminals each month will win cash prizes up to £1,000."
The Internet

Amazon To Block Phorm Scans 140

Posted by Soulskill from the take-this-dpi-and-shove-it dept.
clickclickdrone writes "The BBC are reporting that Amazon has said it will not allow online advertising system Phorm to scan its web pages to produce targeted ads. For most people this is a welcome step, especially after the European Commission said it was starting legal action against the UK earlier this week over its data protection laws in relation to Phorm's technology. Anyone who values their privacy should applaud this move by Amazon."
Medicine

Are Human Beings Organisms Or Living Ecosystems? 397

Posted by Soulskill from the little-of-column-a,-little-of-column-b dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Every human body harbors about 100 trillion bacterial cells, outnumbering human cells 10 to one. There's been a growing consensus among scientists that bacteria are not simply random squatters, but organized communities that evolve with us and are passed down from generation to generation. 'Human beings are not really individuals; they're communities of organisms,' says microbiologist Margaret McFall-Ngai. 'This could be the basis of a whole new way of looking at disease.' Recently, for example, evidence has surfaced that obesity may well include a microbial component. Jeffrey Gordon's lab at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published findings that lean and obese twins — whether identical or fraternal — harbor strikingly different bacterial communities that are not just helping to process food directly; they actually influence whether that energy is ultimately stored as fat in the body. Last year, the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project to characterize the role of microbes in the human body, a formal recognition of bacteria's far-reaching influence, including their contributions to human health and certain illnesses. William Karasov, a physiologist and ecologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that the consequences of this new approach will be profound. 'We've all been trained to think of ourselves as human,' says Karasov, adding that bacteria have usually been considered only as the source of infections, or as something benign living in the body. Now, Karasov says, it appears 'we are so interconnected with our microbes that anything studied before could have a microbial component that we hadn't thought about.'"
Data Storage

Submission + - Aesthetically-pleasing, disk-intensive benchmarks.

Submitted by tomm3h
tomm3h writes: I am a final year University student in the UK, studying Network Engineering. At present I'm finishing-off my dissertation, which is based around a comparison of low-cost storage networking protocols. Whilst this comparison isn't meant to be world-changing or radical, I am required to 'show-off' my project at an exhibition held by the University shortly after the hand-in date. I am simply un-sure how best this can be accomplished where mere mortals are involved.

My testing setup consists of a cheap Ubuntu 8.10 Server, hosting some WD Raptor disks, a Dell 5224 Gigabit switch, and my own workstation (running Ubuntu 8.10) which hosts VirtualBox virtual machines. All storage is abstracted across the network with whichever protocol I'm testing, the best of which will be used within the demonstration.

There is a certain amount of competition on the day, thus I believe that the judges and potential employers present will need to be 'caught' before I can properly explain my project. As we all know that humans respond well to shiny things, I thought that the readers of Slashdot might know of a relevant, disk-intensive benchmark (running on any guest platform that VirtualBox supports) that also provides an eye-catching element to aid me with hooking-in the judges. Any suggestions?
PC Games (Games)

Does Professional Gaming Have a Future? 116

Posted by Soulskill from the fatal-one-thank-you dept.
mr_sifter writes "Three years ago, celebrity gamers such as Fatal1ty were bagging millions in prizes, and TV channels were queuing up to broadcast games on TV. Professional gaming looked set for the big time. It never happened, and in the current economic crisis, sponsors and media organizations are cutting costs, resulting in the closure of many pro gaming competitions (as we recently discussed) and a down-scaling in prize money. This feature looks at whether pro gaming can bounce back, and whether it will always be a PC sport, or if pro gaming on consoles is the future."

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