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Comment Why does he fear Sweden will send him to US? (Score 2) 530

by DuncanE (#35299066) Attached to: Julian Assange To Be Extradited To Sweden

"Assange fears that an extradition to Sweden would make it easier for Washington to extradite him to the US on possible charges relating to the release by WikiLeaks of leaked US embassy cables."

I never got that. He's in England and he's from Australia. Surely these are the 2 biggest allies of the US.
Databases

Submission + - Is there an Open Source Web 2.0 Database? 2

Submitted by DuncanE
DuncanE writes: A number of Web 2.0 databases have appeared in recent times and make excellent web based replacements for Microsoft Access. The likes of DabbleDB, Zoho Creator and Lazybase make great tools for an end user to make small scale database applications, but they all require the data to be hosted on third party servers. Are there any open source alternatives that could be hosted in-house?
The Courts

French Record Labels Go After Limewire, SourceForge 326

Posted by kdawson from the lawyers-on-airplanes dept.
An anonymous reader notes that TorrentFreak is reporting: "French record labels have received the green light to sue four US-based companies that develop P2P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus. Shareaza is the fourth application, for which the labels are going after the open source development platform SourceForge. ... Putting aside the discussion on the responsibilities of application developers for their users activities, the decision to go after SourceForge for hosting a application that can potentially infringe, is stretching credibility beyond all bounds." SourceForge is Slashdot's corporate parent.
Google

OpenOffice Five Times As Popular As Google Docs 207

Posted by kdawson from the still-small-potatoes dept.
CWmike writes "Confirming recent comments by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, an independent report released Friday found that OpenOffice.org's free office suite is five times more popular than Google Docs. This was according to a survey of 2,400 adult Internet users conducted between May and November. Microsoft's share was 10 times that of OpenOffice.org. Microsoft hopes to cement that lead with its upcoming Office Web, as well as online versions of its Exchange and SharePoint products to be announced on Monday. OpenOffice.org may provide some resistance, however. The latest version, OpenOffice.org 3.0, had a strong first week in October, with more than 3 million downloads. After one month, OpenOffice.org 3.0 had been downloaded 10 million times." And reader Peter Toi informs us of the open source release of yet another office suite, Softmaker Office. Its claimed advantages are its compactness and speed (making it suitable for netbooks), its excellent MS Office filters, and the fact that it can be installed to USB flash drives.
Television

Unhappy People Watch More TV 193

Posted by kdawson from the cause-or-effect-or-both dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as 'very happy' spend more time reading and socializing. 'TV doesn't really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,' says researcher John P. Robinson. 'It's more passive and may provide escape — especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise.' Unhappy people also liked their TV more: 'What viewers seem to be saying is that while TV in general is a waste of time and not particularly enjoyable, "the shows I saw tonight were pretty good."' The researchers analyzed two sets of data spanning nearly 30 years (PDF), gathered from nearly 30,000 adults, and found that unhappy people watch an estimated 20 percent more television than very happy people, after taking into account their education, income, age, and marital status — as well as other demographic predictors of both viewing and happiness. 'TV can become a kind of opiate in a way. It's habitual, and tuning in can be an easy way of tuning out.'"
Graphics

NVIDIA Releases New Video API For Linux 176

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the finally-starting-to-play-ball dept.
Ashmash writes "Phoronix is reporting on a new Linux driver nVidia is about to release that brings PureVideo features to Linux. This video API will reportedly be in nVidia's 180 series driver for Linux, Solaris, and *BSD. PureVideo has been around for several nVidia product generations, but it's the first time they're bringing this feature to these non-Windows operating systems to provide an improved multimedia experience. This new API is named VDPAU, and is described as: 'The Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) provides a complete solution for decoding, post-processing, compositing, and displaying compressed or uncompressed video streams. These video streams may be combined (composited) with bitmap content, to implement OSDs and other application user interfaces.'"
Graphics

Radiohead Open Sources Music Video 120

Posted by kdawson from the look-ma-no-cameras dept.
ruphus13 writes "Following up their 'pay what you like' music album, Radiohead is once again pushing forward with trying to innovate in an industry that has typically innovated with lawsuits alone. Radiohead has now decided to open source a music video. According to the article, 'Its new single "House of Cards" has a video that was created using advanced visualization techniques and various computer-rendered models. The band has teamed up with Google to release the data for the promo as open source using a Creative Commons license.'" The article links a making-of video on YouTube. The music of "House of Cards" was not open sourced, just the visual data. according to a story in the UK Guardian, people are beginning to play around with the data.
Programming

Submission + - What are the best programming blogs?

Submitted by
anthroguy
anthroguy writes: "I've been reading Slashdot for years and enjoy it as a cross-reference for nerdy news, but I'm wondering something: what are the best blogs on programming — or otherwise — on the internet at the moment that we should all be reading (to submit to Slashdot, if worthy, of course)?"

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