Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Massachusetts enacts 6.25% sales tax on "prewritten" software consulting (codingoutloud.com) 1

Submitted by marshallr
marshallr writes: Technical Information Release TIR 13-10 becomes effective in Massachusetts on July 31st, 2013. It requires software consultants to collect a 6.25% sales tax from their clients if they perform "computer system design services and the modification, integration, enhancement, installation or configuration of standardized software." TIR 13-10 was published to mass.gov on July 25th, 2013 to provide the public a few working days to review the release and make comments. Can someone clue me in on what's meant by "prewritten" or "standardized" software?

Comment LaTeX, really? (Score 0) 160

While writing my Ph.D in anthropology I found out it's almost impossible to get non-geeks to help me with editing my thesis because it was written in Latex

is this really a surprise? seriously, why would you expect for someone someone that is doing you a favor to learn something that is alien to them?

Google Docs is web based and near-WYSIWYG, but lacks support for professional print formats such as Latex

ok, so you expected people to learn LaTeX but you can be bothered to reformat the page after someone edits it for you? WTF?

i understand you want peer review but people are putting in effort to help you. the very least you could do is to put in some effort to accommodate them in return. it's this kind of bullshit behavior that gives geeks like me a bad name. stop telling people there is/was nothing wrong with GIMP and that they are holding their phone wrong!

johanneswilm, you are ruining geekdom for the rest of us!

</rant>

Comment trust has been lost (Score 2) 616

by Gravis Zero (#44402403) Attached to: US Promises Not To Kill Or Torture Snowden

let's face it, we cant trust what the government says.

a list of summarized lies and realities:

"the first thing i'll do is close guantanamo bay" - didnt happen, still open.
"we do not torture" - because we renamed it "enhanced interrogation" or "rendition" them to other countries
"there is no drone program" - not long after "oh, we have a drone program"
"we do not have a program to collect information from everyone" - not long after "well, i tried to tell the least untruth" and seriously, PRISM is the least untruth?

i'm just waiting for the NSA to get busted using PRISM freely on anyone and everyone.

there is a good deal of criminal activity from congressmen and their friends that have gone completely unpunished and the police have abused the hell out of the PATRIOT act.

how far we have fallen.
B.I.H. Constitutional rights (R.I.P. is so OVER)

Submission + - World's fastest embedded memory with eMMC 5.0 support developed (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Samsung has announced world’s fastest NAND memory that supports the eMMC 5.0 standard. The new memory chips are based on 10nm class NAND flash technology and features an interface speed of 400MB/s. Further, the 32GB and 64GB densities have a random read and write speeds of 7,000 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second) while the sequential read and write speeds stand at 250MB/s and 90MB/s respectively. The chips will provide for better multitasking, HD video recording, gaming and browsing.

Submission + - Cryptography experts meet inunction against publishing research (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by dhaen
dhaen writes: The Guardian runs a story that VW group who build Porches, Audis, Bentleys and Lamborghinis plus some lesser cars that ordinary mortals can afford, have banned publication of research that exposes security algorithms. It's becoming well known that security through obscurity is flawed and the Streisand Effect will now get to work

Submission + - Obama's promise to "Protect Whisleblowers" disappears from the web

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Obama administration's campaign site Change.gov has been removed, a possible reason Sunlight Foundation comments may be that a statement from the Administration that outlined the protection of Whistleblowers, "Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government." when the exact opposite has occurred and Obama is threatening trade sanctions against countries who give Edward Snowden asylum.

Submission + - US cloud companies see immediately decline in business thanks to NSA Prism (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: Well here comes the economic cost for the Snowden leaks. EU companies immediately cancel up to 10% of their current contracts over security concerns with the NSA spying on their data and 56% of EU companies plan to re-examine or be less likely to choose an American cloud based provider as a result. Likely they will chose a Canadian, European, or Chinese cloud company instead in their future projects. Since the politicians do not care about the US privacy will business losses invigorate an re-examination instead?

Submission + - Researchers Stop Light for One Minute (newscientist.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: From the article, "To break the minute barrier, George Heinze and colleagues at the University of Darmstadt, Germany, fired a control laser at an opaque crystal, sending its atoms into a quantum superposition of two states. This made it transparent to a narrow range of frequencies. Heinze's team then halted a second beam that entered the crystal by switching off the first laser and hence the transparency."

Submission + - How America's Top Tech Companies Created the Surveillance State (nationaljournal.com)

Submitted by sertsa
sertsa writes: What? You thought this started recently?

FTA — . . .the cooperation was usually “voluntary” in large part because companies couldn’t afford to seem uncooperative, . . . “The ways that pressure works in Washington are very subtle,” he says. “No one’s getting bribed, or punished outright. But it’s the good little Indian that gets rewarded. And these companies needed the goodwill of the NSA and other agencies.”

Submission + - Software-defined data centers might cost companies more than they save (datamation.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: As more and more companies move to virtualized, or software-defined, data centers, cost savings might not be one of the benefits. Sure, utilization rates might go up as resources are pooled, but if the end result is that IT resources become easier for end users to access and provision, they might end up using more resources, not less.

That's the view of Peder Ulander of Citrix, who cites the Jevons Paradox, a 150-year-old economic theory that arose from an observation about the relationship between coal efficiency and consumption. Making a resource easier to use leads to greater consumption, not less, says Ulander. As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used.

The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck. It won't mean cost savings, but it could mean higher revenues.

Submission + - Judge Denies Obama Administration Request to Delay NSA Hearing (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by sl4shd0rk
sl4shd0rk writes: Federal Judge William Pauley has dismissed an Obama Administration request to delay a hearing on Verizon/NSA data sifting. The ACLU has argued that the sifting is not authorized by statute and even if it were it would still be unconstitutional. The Obama Administration requested the delay on the grounds it needed more time to search through it's classified material to determine what was suitable for disclosure.

Submission + - India Army Mistook Planets for Spy Drones (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: BBC reports that India's army spent six months watching "Chinese spy drones" violating its air space, only to find out they were actually Jupiter and Venus. Between last August and February, Indian troops had already documented 329 sightings of unidentified objects over a lake in the border region next to China. India accused the objects being Chinese spy drones. The incident has even escalated to military build-up and stand-off at border between the two countries. High level talks were held between the two military. The Chinese denied they invaded Indian space and told India to shoot down the objects if they can and the India side replied the objects were too high, according to a Chinese news report (Google translation). At the meantime, residents of the solar system are grad that India does not possess the capability to shoot down such high attitude objects.

Submission + - Lenovo computers banned from top secret networks (afr.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Since Lenovo bought out IBM's PC division its computers have been blacklisted by the secret services of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand because evidence was found that security vulnerabilities had been left hidden, which could have allowed "back door" entry.
It is essentially a fresh example, after Huawei of Western governments refusing to deal with Chinese tech companies due to spying concerns.

Submission + - 'Space Vikings' Spark NASA Inquiry (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: For Ved Chirayath, an astrophysics graduate student and amateur fashion photographer, a photo project that involved NASA researchers dressed as Vikings was just a creative way to promote space science. “I started this project hoping maybe one day some kid will look at it and say, ‘I want to work for NASA,’ ” says Chirayath, a student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who also works nearby at NASA’s Ames Research Center. He never suspected that his fanciful image would put him in the crosshairs of a government waste investigation triggered by a senior U.S. senator.

Slashdot Top Deals

If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.

Close