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Comment Warn them your profile contains off-limits info. (Score 5, Insightful) 396

I don't know about other countries, but in the US, employers may not ask about the following.

        Race
        Color
        Sex
        Religion
        National origin
        Birthplace
        Age
        Disability
        Marital/family status

Let the person asking the question know that by asking for the Facebook information, they are using a back door approach to gather information they are not entitled to ask and that you object to giving that information.

Any reasonable employer would not want that legal liability.

Comment Re:Take it to court (Score 1) 131

Their only option would be to ask the photographer to leave and put them on trespass notice. They would not gain any control of the images taken, those become protected property of the photographer as soon as the image is recorded. Malls are restaurants are treated the same way.

It sounds like they are trying to Trademark the floor itself in an attempt to prevent photographers from photographing it. That is BS, even if the Trademark is upheld, using it in a news story is an acceptable use of the Trademark.

Other trademarked structures are photographed all the time, there are guidelines on how they may be used, but news organizations are given a lot of latitude.

Remember that Trademarks are primary designed to protect consumers and to prevent confusion in the marketplace.

Security

Submission + - Next Adobe Reader Will Include Sandboxing (threatpost.com)

Trailrunner7 writes: The next major version of Adobe's PDF Reader will feature new sandboxing technology aimed at curbing a surge in malicious hacker attacks against the widely deployed software. The security feature, called "Protected Mode," is similar to the Google Chrome sandbox and Microsoft Office 2010 Protected Viewing Mode, according to Adobe's security chief Brad Arkin.

In an interview with Threatpost, Arkin said the sandbox is scheduled for release before the end of this year and is based on Microsoft's Practical Windows Sandboxing technique. The sandbox will be turned on by default and will display all operations in a PDF file in a very restricted manner. The first sandbox implementation will isolate all “write” calls on Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2003. Arkin believes this will mitigate the risk of exploits seeking to install malware on the user’s computer or otherwise change the computer’s file system or registry.

Politics

Submission + - A tool for sorting political bias in the media (left-right.us)

Anonymusing writes: Slashdot is much more popular among liberals than among conservatives — at least judging by a search on Left-Right. I recently launched the site as an experiment to study political bias across American media sources. Type a search term in the box, and the site will return Google results drawn from more than 100 top politically-relevant web sites, displaying pages from liberal-oriented sites on the left side, and pages from conservative-oriented on the right. Sometimes the differences are striking: that search for "Slashdot is" returns dozens of results on the left, but only five on the right. Similarly, a search for obstetric fistula — a hot topic in international health — turns up dozens of results on the left, and only four on the right. Slashdot readers, what do you think of Left-Right? How would you improve it? And can you find any other searches with extreme differences?

Comment Re:OMFG (Score 4, Informative) 481

But the Star Wars props aren't original designs. The early ones were Graflex flash guns with very minor modifications. They evolved slightly over the years, but the design didn't originate with Lucas.

Basically George is mad that someone ripped off a design that he ripped off already.

Comment Re:I have to say it but (Score 1) 481

Actually it's not. According to the story, they make no mention of any Star Wars property. Third parties have gotten on the bandwagon and made comparisons, but not the manufacturer.

Besides, the props in the movies were just modified Graflex flash guns. I don't know if Lucas licensed those are not, but his designs are far or original.

Comment Re:I say good riddance (Score 1) 426

What you are getting in the mailbox is most likely a TMC (Total Market Coverage) product. These products exist only to serve as a vehicle to deliver the advertisements. They may be part of the local paper, but they are not the main product, they only exist to generate revenue by giving the advertisers deeper penetration into the market.

The real local newspapers are the ones that cover the activates of the local government, police and schools. They are the ones that play watchdog on local officials, and while they are by no means perfect, they serve a very valuable purpose that won't be easily replaced by your average bloggers. The signal to noise ratio in the blogosphere is just abysmal. Even a poorly run a newspaper provides better information than every local blogger I've read. There may be exceptional bloggers out there, but they only cover a fraction of what needs to be covered.

We don't necessarily need newspapers, but we do need journalism. The problem is that newspapers provide more journalists in more local areas than any other medium. The local TV and radio stations in my area only report on 2 things - What the hear on the police scanner and what they read in our local paper. The same is true with the "news" bloggers. We may think that online news exists independent of newspapers, but that's just not true yet.

I honestly don't care if the companies that own the newspapers die, but if the papers themselves are allowed to die then democracy will certainly suffer for it. A conversion to non-profit might serve us well while we wait for the next big thing to emerge that will successfully replace newspapers.

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