Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Image

Ohio Prison Shows Pirated Movies To Inmates Screenshot-sm 186

An anonymous reader writes "Richard Humphrey was sentenced to 29 months in prison for selling pirated copies of movies through the subscription-based USAWAREZ.com. He was later sent to the Lorain County prison in February for a parole violation and while he was a prisoner, he says guards showed inmates Ride Along and The Wolf of Wall Street before they were released on DVD. A spokesperson for Lorain County Correctional Institution Warden Kimberly Clipper said prison officials are aware that pirated movies are being shown to prisoners and the issue is being investigated. But she said she couldn't comment further because the investigation is ongoing."

Submission + - Pedophile Asks To Be Deleted From Google Search After European Court Ruling

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Jane Wakefield reports at BBC that a man convicted of possessing child abuse images is among the first to request Google remove links links to pages about his conviction after a European court ruled that an individual could force it to remove "irrelevant and outdated" search results. Other takedown requests since the ruling include an ex-politician seeking re-election who has asked to have links to an article about his behaviour in office removed and a doctor who wants negative reviews from patients removed from google search results. Google itself has not commented on the so-called right-to-be-forgotten ruling since it described the European Court of Justice judgement as being "disappointing". Marc Dautlich, a lawyer at Pinsent Masons, says that search engines might find the new rules hard to implement. "If they get an appreciable volume of requests what are they going to do? Set up an entire industry sifting through the paperwork?" says Dautlich. "I can't say what they will do but if I was them I would say no and tell the individual to contact the Information Commissioner's Office." The court said in its ruling that people could request the removal of data related to them that seem to be "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed."

Comment OS on a stick is not novel (Score 5, Insightful) 201

We have other OS distributions that that live just fine on SD cards or sticks, already. If you want to bring computing to slums as a useful resource, the big problems are probably really:

1) actual hardware, shared or not, to run whatever open source OS you pick;
2) electricity to run the hardware and shelter for the hardware;
3) people to train those who have never used computers before, may have other literacy issues besides, and quite possibly speak dialects you will have difficulty getting localization for; and
4) affordable/free network access if these people want to use the internet.

I'll bet these are not the only issues, but if you don't address these, I suspect your money and time will be mostly wasted.

Comment Seems a bit of a setup. (Score 2) 127

They only have one option that mentions immediately practical applications in its supporting information. That's the Technology skin, with the applications being easier crew identification, etc. Precisely the only reason why you would think they would invest the resources to play with pretty lights on the surface of a prototype, right now. The others are designs that might be nice to have someday, if there are large populations in these environments that might want to express individuality and creativity.

Submission + - U.S. Cedes Control of DNS to ICANN (doc.gov)

Midnight_Falcon writes: Sixteen years after Jon Postel's famed attempt to bring the DNS system under IANA control, the U.S has agreed to cede control of the root DNS servers of the internet to ICANN. With NSA spying (some of which utilizing the U.S's privileged access to the internet system) a hot button issue, this may indicate a step in the right direction for internationalizing the internet.

Submission + - Mozilla Scraps Firefox For Windows 8 Citing Low Adoption of Metro

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today announced it is abandoning the Metro version of its Firefox browser, before the first release for Windows 8 even sees the light of day. Firefox Vice President Johnathan Nightingale ordered the company’s engineering leads and release managers to halt development earlier this week, saying that shipping a 1.0 version "would be a mistake." Mozilla says it simply does not have the resources nor the scale of its competitors, and it has to pick its battles. The Metro platform (which has since been renamed to Modern UI, but many prefer the older name) simply doesn’t help the organization achieve its mission as well as other platforms Firefox is available for: Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

Submission + - Mars Rover Opportunity Faces New Threat: Budget Ax (discovery.com)

astroengine writes: NASA’s baseline budget for the year beginning Oct. 1 pulls the plug on the 10-year-old Mars rover Opportunity, newly released details of the agency’s fiscal 2015 spending plan show. The plan, which requires Congressional approval, also anticipates ending the orbiting Mars Odyssey mission on Sept. 30, 2016. “There are pressures all over the place,” NASA’s planetary science division director Jim Green said during an advisory council committee teleconference call on Wednesday.

Submission + - Monster Rare Yellow Hypergiant Star Discovered (discovery.com) 2

astroengine writes: A gargantuan star, measuring 1,300 times the size of our sun, has been uncovered 12,000 light-years from Earth — it is one of the ten biggest stars known to exist in our galaxy. The yellow hypergiant even dwarfs the famous stellar heavyweight Betelgeuse by 50 percent. While its hulking mass may be impressive, astronomers have also realized that HR 5171 is a double star with a smaller stellar sibling physically touching the surface of the larger star as they orbit one another. “The new observations also showed that this star has a very close binary partner, which was a real surprise,” said Olivier Chesneau, of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. “The two stars are so close that they touch and the whole system resembles a gigantic peanut.

Submission + - Bitcoin, Meet Darwin: Crypto Currency's Future (informationweek.com)

kierny writes: Today, Bitcoin, tomorrow, the dollar? Former Central Intelligence Agency CTO Gus Hunt says governments will learn from today's crypto currencies and use them to fashion future government-protected monetary systems. But along the way, expect first-movers such as Bitcoin to fall, in a repeat of the fate of AltaVista, Napster, and other early innovators. But the prospect of fashioning a better, more stable crypto currency system — and the likelihood that Bitcoin may one day burn — is good news for anyone who cares about crypto currencies, as well as the future and reliability of our monetary systems.

Submission + - Jewish school removes evolution questions from exams

Alain Williams writes: Religious sponsored ignorance is not just in the USA, a school in Hackney, England is trying to hide the idea of evolution from its pupils. Maybe they fear that their creation story will be seen for what it is if pupils get to learn ideas supported evidence. The girls are also disadvantaged since they can't answer the redacted questions, thus making it harder to get good marks.

Submission + - Deadly Avian Flu Strain Penetrates Biossecurity Defenses in Seuol (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: A new, deadly H5N8 strain of avian influenza penetrated the biosecurity defenses of a National Institute of Animal Science (NIAS) campus near Seoul, prompting authorities to cull all of the facility's 11,000 hens and 5000 ducks. The incident highlights the difficulty of protecting poultry farms from circulating avian influenza viruses. “We are taking this situation very seriously," said Lee Jun-Won, deputy agriculture minister, at a press conference yesterday in Seoul. He noted that NIAS has the country’s most secure facilities and most vigilant staff. Lee said they were looking at three possible routes the virus could have taken onto campus: wild birds, NIAS vehicles, and supply deliveries. "We will determine the reason for the infection, and we are going to hold those responsible accountable," he said.

Submission + - UK Conservatives Promise to Scrap Human Rights Act (theguardian.com)

vinehair writes: At the Conservative Party Conference, UK Home Secretary Theresa May stated that the party is prepared to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR.) "The next Conservative manifesto will promise to scrap the Human Rights Act. It's why Chris Grayling is leading a review of our relationship with the European court [of human rights]," she told the party's conference. "And it's why the Conservative position is clear – if leaving the European convention is what it takes to fix our human rights laws, that is what we should do," she said to applause.

This shortly follows a YouGov poll that claimed that up to 70% of UK voters want immigration stopped completely. What kind of picture does this paint for the future of the United Kingdom on the international stage?

Submission + - Google Has $100 for Girls Who Study Coding, $0 for Boys 1

theodp writes: "Thanks to Google," reads the Codecademy website (image), "every U.S. public high school girl who completes this 15-hour JavaScript curriculum will receive a $100 DonorsChoose.org gift code, which can be applied to a project requesting awesome resources for public school classrooms." Boys need not apply? You got it. Codecademy explains, "Why just girls? Currently only 12% of computer science graduates are women, and great tech companies like Google want to see more smart girls like you enter this awesome profession!" Sorry, Charlie. "DonorsChoose.org gift codes will be distributed only to girls," further explains the text accompanying the I'm-a-girl-at-a-U.S.-public-high-school checkbox, "but we'd love for boys to learn to code as well!" A recent FastCompany piece on DonorsChoose promoted by Melinda Gates suggests boys won't get too far protesting this promo or other girl-friendlier DonorsChoose partnerships with Code.org and Google — the non-profit reportedly has two words for critics of its tactics: 'Screw You.'

Submission + - In Norway, drones hinder firefighting helicopters (www.vgtv.no)

An anonymous reader writes: On the night before sunday, the town of Laerdal in western Norway fought against the flames. More than 30 houses burned and the firefighters called in helicopters to aid in protecting the town. But this time, the firefighters met a new adversary: Drones, small remote controlled helicopters with cameras vied with firefighting helicopters for the airspace over Laerdal. The norwegian newspaper VG published a video taken by one of the drones (see link), allegedly before any firefighting helicopters had arrived on the scene. In the morning hours, Nils Erik Eggen of the local police force called for people to pull their UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) out of the area, as they were in imminent danger of colliding with the manned helicopters of the norwegian 720-squadron, with potentially fatal results.

Submission + - Alleging 'Malpractice' With Climate Skeptic Papers, Publisher Kills Journal (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: A European publisher today terminated a journal edited by climate change skeptics. The journal, Pattern Recognition in Physics, was started less than a year ago. Problems cropped up soon afterward. In July, Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, noted “serious concerns” with Pattern Recognition in Physics. As he wrote on his blog about open-access publishing, Beall found self-plagiarism in the first paper published by the journal. “In addition," says another critic, "the editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis, which we regard as malpractice in scientific publishing.”

Slashdot Top Deals

For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!

Working...