Comment Wtf? (Score 1) 796
I got to the bottom of the comments and no one had suggested 'The C Programming Language'. Slashdot, I'm not sure I know you anymore.
Comment Re:bit of a tricky question with forums (Score 1) 171
Saying they're your property most likely just means that you retain copyright. In order to store, backup, and display the messages you must have granted some license to the site. Otherwise you could just issue dmca takedown requests for all your posts.
NSA's Legal Win Introduces a Lot of Online Insecurity 239
Nerval's Lobster writes "The decision of a New York judge that the wholesale collection of cell-phone metadata by the National Security Agency is constitutional ties the score between pro- and anti-NSA forces at one victory apiece. The contradictory decisions use similar reasoning and criteria to come to opposite conclusions, leaving both individuals and corporations uncertain of whether their phone calls, online activity or even data stored in the cloud will ultimately be shielded by U.S. laws protecting property, privacy or search and seizure by law-enforcement agencies. On Dec. 27, Judge William H. Pauley threw out a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that sought to stop the NSA PRISM cell-phone metadata-collection program on the grounds it violated Fourth Amendment provisions protecting individual privacy and limits on search and seizure of personal property by the federal government. Pauley threw out the lawsuit largely due to his conclusion that Fourth Amendment protections do not apply to records held by third parties. That eliminates the criteria for most legal challenges, but throws into question the privacy of any data held by phone companies, cloud providers or external hosting companies – all of which could qualify as unprotected third parties."
Ruby 2.1.0 Released 65
Today marks the release of Ruby version 2.1.0. A brief list of changes since 2.0.0 has been posted, and file downloads are available. Here are some of the changes:
- Now the default values of keyword arguments can be omitted. Those 'required keyword arguments" need giving explicitly at the call time.
- Added suffixes for integer and float literals: 'r', 'i', and 'ri'.
- def-expr now returns the symbol of its name instead of nil.
- rb_profile_frames() added. Provides low-cost access to the current ruby stack for callstack profiling.
- introduced the generational GC a.k.a RGenGC (PDF).
Comment Re:How is it their fault? (Score 1) 653
I thought California had it set up so property taxes are set when a house is purchased and never change?
Interview: Ask Bruce Sterling What You Will 60
One of the founders of the cyberpunk genre, Bruce Sterling needs little introduction to science fiction fans.
You can read what "Chairman Bruce" has to say at Beyond the Beyond on Wired and the Sterling tumblr. He has agreed to to sit down and answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Comment Re:I have a land line, you insensitive clod (Score 1) 136
My landline does text-to-speech on any SMS sent to it, which works fine for the 2-factor schemes I've run across that use purely numeric codes. Have you tried sending an SMS to your land line to see what happens?
Comment Re:Legacy Support (Score 1) 211
That's pretty much how Linux does it as well, for libraries that do backwards compatibility at all. You provide a file that tells the ELF linker which version of an exposed api method links to which internal implementation. The linker embeds the library version linked against into the executable and voila, your program can run against a newer version of the library with no expensive, bloated vm infrastructure required.
Comment Re:That old business partner I want to get back at (Score 1) 219
If you have committed a crime depends on where you are. Around here fuel oil is a hazardous waste and it is illegal to put it into the sewage system - it needs to be taken to a waste station.
Comment Re:what's taking so long (Score 1) 394
This is bullshit. Even if they did have some dirt on every member of congress unless you only elect rapists and murderers there is no way that that kind of mass blackmail would work on the people holding the purse strings. The NSA continues to exist because they are useful. They provide information intelligence your leaders want, and this sort of mass surveillance means that they can provide information on anyone, even someone they didn't know would be interesting a day ago.
Comment Re:Irony not lost on me (Score 1) 191
No, not at all. If you modify GPL software you don't have to contribute anything. If you distribute the changed software then you must make available the source code to the people you have distributed the binary to, and you must license it in a way that is compatible with the GPL. So if I take GCC,fix some bugs, and sell it I must give my customers the source code I have created. I must license it to them with terms that allow them to distribute it freely, so long as they continue to follow the GPL when they distribute it. I am under no obligation to give it away to the world for free, however I can not stop my customers from doing so.
Book Review: Minecraft 77
Nick Kolakowski writes
"Markus 'Notch' Persson is the famous indie-game developer behind Minecraft, which is also the name of the new book about his life and work by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson. (The effect is slightly odd, like naming the Steve Jobs biography iPhone.) Minecraft traces Persson’s development from an isolated young man building simple PC games in his bedroom, to a frustrated game developer who feels the software conglomerates are stifling his creativity, to a multimillionaire who's had some trouble coming to grips with his gamer-land fame. The Persson described in the book is an introvert's introvert, far more interested in coding than partying, although he does display flashes of entrepreneurial aggression that would make Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos proud: at one point, he confesses that he wants to build a gaming behemoth on the scale of Valve."
Read below for the rest of Nick's review.
Comment Re:Smartphone required to browse? (Score 4, Insightful) 234
Or just create a browser plugin that will read a QR and open a new tab to the link. No smartphone required. Of course, that kind of highlights why it's a dumb idea anyway.
Comment Re:Yes! (Score 2) 167
A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.
Charlie Stross: Why Microsoft Word Must Die 479
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. 'Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates... to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- ...should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible... Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.' Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?"
