pfff banning killing animals in prolonged, painful ways for magic rituals - those right wing fascists!

Well, they do need 'Cleanfeed' as a blanket excuse to force all ISPs into line and censor the web in a coordinated fashion. Rather than bicker and get involved in court cases to get each individual ISP to add each individual site to their IP filters, the government can just force all ISPs to run Cleanfeed proxy censorship systems using the same blacklist, where sites can be added silently if the government disapproves of them. Obviously it hasn't progressed that far yet, but I'm sure that's what they want.

Ahh, so that's what 'Cleanfeed' was for. What a surprise!

Wow, that's bad news... someone I actually admired and had an incredibly wide reaching, positive influence on computer science. I can't even imagine how different the tech world would be today without his amazing accomplishments.

While both of the situations you describe sound fairly innocuous, I personally think a no-photo policy is more in line with preserving civil liberties, and I'm surprised I seem to be in the minority. Imagine being photographed around shops, and having those photos then submitted to random corporate entities like Facebook and Flickr. With the advances in facial recognition software and increasing government/corporate control, pretty soon your privacy and freedom is a distant memory, and everything you buy and everywhere you go is public knowledge. There are even disgusting sites like http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/ dedicated to trying to publically humiliate people who have non-consensual photographs taken of them in supermarkets. In these circumstances, I think it's essential that stores have no-photograph policies (perhaps permission/supervision could be granted by staff on a case-by-case basis?)

+1 I've never experienced this on any other site - I constantly think Firefox has frozen or crashed because closing a Slashdot tab causes the browser to become unresponsive for several seconds - I can't believe this sort of fault (presumably caused by dodgy bloated car-crash Javascript) is even allowed by the browser! Oh, and congrats to the Slashdot coders for getting OPENING LINKS in comments working again after about half a year.

Well, actually, after the Columbine massacre news media emphasized how the killers used level editors in Doom or Duke3D (forget which) to recreate their school layout and carry out fantasy massacres. So I suspect your competent parenting efforts (i.e. spending time with them and teaching them stuff) had a much bigger positive influence on their ability to discern between reality and fantasy, and not become spree killers, than the aquisition of modding knowledge alone...

Well, it actually is a silent movie - the blog author says that he had the 8mm reel digitised, and added the music (apparently by Dave Brubeck) himself.

Remember they're still very young so just cut it down to the basics - maybe start by introducing some design patterns from GOF, explain the main software development methodologies and processes and their respective pros/cons, and maybe finish up with some quality management strategies such as Six Sigma and perhaps introduce some basic formal verification theory.

I'm fairly sure device manufacturers would be glad to "donate" plenty of licenses to indoctrinate/lock-in new generations of students.

I'd imagine that the "help" has been greatly downplayed/not reported on, to emphasize the narrative of the Libyan people overthrowing their terrible dictator by themselves. In the next few weeks/months we might find out the extent of UK/French bombing and assistance.

This is the UK police service's latest tactic: quietly observe as teenage thugs burn down peoples' homes and businesses, beat people to death, and loot main shopping streets, and then afterwards, spring into action and arrest people who submitted text to Facebook. Fantastic job they're doing, the streets seem safer already!

When I was in college, the lecturers used moogle or custom submission scripts, and I didn't have to register accounts with private companies and accept draconian contracts like allowing all communications to be data-mined and monetized. Any communication with lecturers was by e-mail or in "meatspace" - if any had insisted we had to register with some random commercial social networking site and "friend" them to communicate with them, I doubt I'd have complied! I guess it's different in the US? Or for non-CS degrees?

No, it's more like the teacher saying "Hey anyone can phone/email me for help at any time, but you must use a specific telecom company/webmail company that I like to pimp, anyone who uses a different service provider can just fuck off, sorry"

The console business is a "razer and blades" style business - the game publishers have to give a huge percentage to the console makers. Although PC games are more niche, the publisher gets a bigger cut and there's pretty much no second-hand market stealing sales. Also, while console games require a huge amount of compliance testing (meeting the console makers' specific demands/requirements), you can pretty much release whatever broken, buggy shit you want for PC (hell you can release something like "Big Rigs" if you want), although obviously, similar requirements/licensing costs are required for content distribution systems like Steam/GFWL.