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Comment Re:MLK and friends went to jail as well (Score 2) 243

If you're saying it shouldn't illegal for me to break into a school's wiring cabinet and hook up my laptop to get access to things, you're a moron.

There are perfectly valid laws against burglary and breaking and entering. If Aaron Swartz were persecuted for that, no one would complain. The problem is that he was not; he was being persecuted for computer fraud and he was facing a longer prison sentence than someone who assists a terrorist group in building a nuke (20 years max), while his "computer crime" was totally victimless.
Bradley Manning did commit a nonvictimless crime. He stole secret documents, but in doing this he uncovered some far more horrible crimes of the American army. He might be a criminal, but he does not deserve a 10-year prison sentence.

Comment Re:I didn't know him... but this is beyond words. (Score 1) 589

A man who fought for my freedom has died.
The Three Bills which he defied,
COICA, SOPA, PIPA could,
Not stop the power of the world,
Led by this great modern sage,
Who died at a far too young age,
We fought, we struggled and we won,
Aaron Schwartz was the internet's son.

Oh, Creator of Reddit and RSS,
Was it fear of the feds?
We shall never know.
We can hypothesize though,
We can talk, comment forlorn,
But Aaron Schwartz is forever gone.

Slashdot, BoingBoing, Reddit, and 4chan,
BBC and Reuters all mourn this man.

Thank you Aaron Schwartz,
I wish you would have stayed a bit longer.

Submission + - Aaron Swartz, suicide. (reuters.com)

Ralph Spoilsport writes: Aaron Swartz committed suicide. As a teenager, he helped create an early version of RSS and later played a key role in stopping a controversial online piracy bill in Congress. He also downloaded zillions of articles from JSTOR. JSTOR declined to press charges. MIT, where it happened, gave less of a clear signal, so the Feds went after him. They wanted him bad for his efforts re: RECAP, a system that gave Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law. He was arrested and charged with felonies. He committed suicide two years to the day of his arrest. Lessig gives his testimonial here and Cory Doctorow gives tribute to this young tragic genius here. This is an enormous tragedy and blow to Access To Knowledge activists the world over.
China

Submission + - China Demands All New Homes Install Fiber Optic Networks (ibtimes.com)

redletterdave writes: "Only a small number of US cities can boast fiber optic connections, but in China, it’s either fiber or bust. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has now ordered all newly built residences to install fiber optic connections in any city or county “where a public fiber optic telecom network is available.” The new standards will take effect starting on April 1, 2013, and residents will be able to choose their own ISP with equal connections to services. The Chinese government reportedly hopes to have 40 million families connected to fiber networks by 2015, which is nearly one-third of the country's entire population."
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Watch R`ha a short about a robot uprising (blogspot.ca)

An anonymous reader writes: It`s only 6 minutes long, but it is really good. Sci-Fi at it`s finest, not going to spoil anything but it`s basically about a robot uprising on an alien world. Great work by it`s 22 year old creator Kaleb Lechowski.
Space

Submission + - Scientists Discover Universe's Largest Structure (discovery.com)

astroengine writes: "What’s the biggest thing in the universe? That would be a cluster of quasars so large it would take a vehicle traveling at the speed of light 4 billion years to cross. The structure, known as a Large Quasar Group, or LQG, is so massive scientists say it may challenge a fundamental principle of cosmology, laid out by Albert Einstein, which states that when viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers."

Comment Re:You need to work on communications skills (Score 2) 232

"I find networking technology absolutely trivial"

A physicist's "trivial" means something more like "it won't take me more than a year to work out the general theory, and then I might be able to provide a full description somewhere in the next two years, but it isn't TOO hard.".
In other words, he groks networking technology.

Encryption

Submission + - WW2 pigeon code decrypted by Canadian? (bbc.co.uk)

Albanach writes: At the start of November Slashdot reported the discovery of a code, thought to be from the second world war, found attached to the leg of a pigeon skeleton located in an English chimney. Now a Canadian by the name of Gord Young claims to have deciphered the message in less than 20 minutes. He believes that the message is comprised mostly of acronyms.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to convince a bank to use FOSS in non-critical mission stuff?

Uthark writes: We are a small software company that develops applications for customer service. From our beginning we've always used free software to build our products, making sure to contribute with donations, translations (we are a Latin American company) and support contracts from projects that offer them.

We understand how reluctant some companies can be to use free software, so our approach has always been to offer trial periods before purchase. However, we found a bank (non-US) that, despite the trial periods, demands that we remove all free software and replace them with products from Microsoft and Oracle, arguing regulatory compliance.

We have other banks among our customers that never asked for that change, so we suspect it may be a whim or a deal under the table with these suppliers. Since this client can be a very good business opportunity for our company, how I should address the issue, while keeping our product as it is, since changing it to use Microsoft / Oracle products would be time consuming, very expensive, requires helpdesk training and does not add significant value to our products?.

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