In all fairness, if you want to make a contribution that is worth co-authorship of a paper, you might need at least a good amateur telescope (maybe on the order of 10 inch aperture) and a CCD camera.

With such equipment, and clear skies, you can do photometric monitoring of stars (e.g. for outbursts, or planet transits). Asronomers always have the problem that big observatories focus on big telescopes, and it's difficult to do things that require small telescopes, but long-term monitoring.

One example would be monitoring of the transits of extrasolar planets, to detect timing anomalies (which could be caused by undetected additional planets). Or monitoring stars with planets detected by radial velocity variations, to discover eventual transits. Or monitoring of ongoing gravitational lens events... there are quite a few oportunities for amateurs.

Ubuntu has apparmor sandboxing of firefox as an option that's turned off by default, and even if you turn it on it's not sandboxed enough IMO (firefox can read and write almost anything in the user's home directory with the exclusion of just a few directories).

It's trivial to simply run Firefox under a different user id. I use about three applications that need to access the net (web, mail, chat), and each of them gets started (via a simple wrapper script) under a different, dedicated UID.

There isn't any useful data to work with that we have about stars - only their light. Yet some people have seen that as a challenge, and have built a whole branch of science on it. There's plenty of obvious structure in that visualisation, meaning there's plenty of information.

I have a separate sandbox user for each application that accesses the net (mail, browser, ...). Each of these sandbox users is in its own group, and thus has access only to their own files and world readable (and eventually writeable, like /tmp) locations. Applications get started from my "real" account with sudo. I wonder why distros don't support that out of the box at least for the browser, because it would be fairly trivial to set up as part of a "create new user" script.

The problem with videoconferencing is that you see half of the audience only through the tiny "keyhole" of the video screen. In a public seminar talk, it's distracting and confusing for the speaker and the part of the audience that is physically present. I've been at seminar talks involving videoconferencing, and I've been in SL seminar talks, and I found the latter a much better, more consistent experience.

Totally wrong. Thanks to the relaxed privacy standards in the US of A, there's tons of readily available personal information in online databases that you can use to pass the age verification.

They measure cumulative size distribution (how many groups of size >= N) and churn (how many people leave the group for another one in a given period).

They are able to come up with a simple mathematical model for the behaviour of players (essentially: recruit people with diverse attributes/skills) that reproduces the observed data extremely well. And they also show that the alternative 'kinship' model (recruit people with similar attributes/skills) fails to reproduce the observed data.

I would say that their model does quite a good job at modeling some rather nontrivial data.

It's a big hit among the people who have the creativity to actually do something, rather than just consuming. It's a big fail with those who expect a game with a set goal, those who need to cling to someone/something telling them what to do.

I'm doing freeform roleplay, and it's great fun. There's plenty of roleplay communities in SL.

Depends on your local jurisdiction. In Germany there was a lawsuit against a government agency because it logged IP addresses of website vistors. The court decided that IP addresses are individual user information, and the agency was ordered to stop logging IP addresses because it was a violation of privacy laws.

Au contraire.. it's probably one of the few countries where there is a place for this. In Europe, Greenbaum would now face a lawsuit because of privacy violation (I'm sysadmin in Germany, I am well aware that I would probably lose my job if I did what that Greenbaum guy has done).

3 - Cut and Paste really isn't an issue anymore, either.

I beg to differ - it wasn't an issue, but now it is one. Once upon a time, every app supported the standard way of cut and paste (right and middle mouse button).. but now we have apps who do it like this, and others who want me to do Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V because someone thought it would be cool to emulate MS Windows and force me to get my hand from the mouse and to the keyboard. And then there are apps where cut and paste would work one way for some input fields, and the other way for some other input fields...

The Linux manpage (on Ubuntu 8.04) says ldd prints the shared libraries required by each program or shared library specified on the command line. Note that it doesn't mention anywhere that the program is executed, and doesn't contain any security warning. If there is no hint of the problem at the primary source of usage information, then the issue IS undocumented.

I offer some of my software for 'pick your price'. I recommend a price, but clearly state that any price is ok. Most buyers buy at the recommended price. Very few pay significantly less (pay is through Paypal, which I think imposes a minimum price of $1). And - not quite unexpectedly - almost nobody ever pays more :-)

They probably don't care that much about MySQL, that isn't why they bought Sun(or why IBM tried to buy Sun earlier). To be honest, I don't think they ever thought that the whole MySQL thing would cause them the dramas it has, especially not during the whole global recession when everyone was approving everything.

Now of course, they probably think that going ahead as is will take them less time than backing out and trying to sell off the MySQL component of Sun, getting that sale approved, and then trying to run the acquisition through again. Sun doesn't really have all that much longer to live, and if Oracle were interested in trying to grab up Sun assets at the bankruptcy fire sale, they'd have just waited for Sun to collapse on its own. If the EC ordered them to sell off MySQL as soon as possible as part of the deal, they'd probably still go through with it. They just don't care that much about MySQL.

Correlation is not causation, anecdotes is not data, etc., but you're not making the case for vaccines with that one.