Comment Boing boing and the Wash Post have them (Score 1) 381
this is more than 25% am I missing something here
Submission + - THE CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES OF CLOUD COMPUTING (msnbc.com)
swestcott writes: Would James Madison, for example, agree with some current interpretations of the Fourth Amendment, which hold that old-fashioned letters stored in a dresser drawer enjoy stronger legal protection against search and seizure than an e-mail stored on the Web or a private post left for a friend on Facebook?
Comment Re:Woo hoo (Score 1) 367
Note the CO-author part. My wife is the person who handles punctuation, spelling and all that.
Comment Woo hoo (Score 2, Interesting) 367
Sorry but that's my wife quoted as the co author of the Digitally Daunted book I am the other co author and well to have that on slashdot is CRAZY cool and I am going to waste Karma on that
Prison Bans D&D For Mimicking Gang Structure 496
Trepidity writes "In a case that has been winding its way through the courts for a while now, a Wisconsin prison banned inmates from playing Dungeons & Dragons, using the justification that 'one player is denoted the Dungeon Master... [who] is tasked with giving directions to other players... [which] mimics the organization of a gang.' The prison also cited some sparse evidence that a handful of non-inmate D&D players once committed some crimes that allegedly were related to their D&D playing. On Monday the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the regulation (PDF) against challenges from inmates. The court appeared skeptical of the ban, sarcastically referring to it as the 'war on D&D,' but upheld it nonetheless as having a 'rational basis.' Law professor Ilya Somin suggests that the court may have had no choice, given how deferential rational-basis review usually is."
Bill Gates Remembers 1979 310
Hugh Pickens writes "Last week Gizmodo had a special celebration of 1979, the last year before a digital tsunami hit, that put Bill Gates in a nostalgic mood this week. Bill chimed in with his own memories of that seminal year when everything changed. 'In 1979, Microsoft had 13 employees, most of whom appear in that famous picture that provides indisputable proof that your average computer geek from the late 1970s was not exactly on the cutting edge of fashion,' wrote Gates. 'By the end of the year we'd doubled in size to 28 employees. Even though we were doing pretty well, I was still kind of terrified by the rapid pace of hiring and worried that the bottom could fall out at any time.' What made Gates feel a little more confident was that he began to sense that BASIC was on the verge of becoming the standard language for microcomputers. 'By the middle of 1979, BASIC was running on more than 200,000 Z-80 and 8080 machines and we were just releasing a new version for the 8086 16-bit microprocessor. As the numbers grew, we were starting to think beyond programming languages, too, and about the possibility of creating applications that would have real mass appeal to consumers.' Gates remembers that in 1979 there were only 100 different software products that had more than $100 M in annual sales and all of them were for mainframes. 'In April, the 8080 version of BASIC became the first software product built to run on microprocessors to win an ICP Million Dollar Award. Today, I would be surprised if the number of million-dollar applications isn't in the millions itself' writes Gates. 'More important, of course, is the fact that more than a billion people around the world use computers and digital technology as an integral part of their day-to-day lives. That's something that really started to take shape in 1979.'"
Submission + - The Fight Over NASA's Future
Submission + - Recent Video Game survey tainted
swestcott writes: ""H&K survey shows 60% of respondents agree that the government should regulate the sale of video games." this little ditty was released after the The Entertainment Software Association — better known as the lobby for video game producers chose a diffrent PR group to repersent them see this short article in the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/10/AR2007121001676.html"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/10/AR2007121001676.html"
Submission + - Walter Schirra 84 died of a heart attack May 3
swestcott writes: Walter M. Schirra Jr., 84, one of the original seven astronauts and the only man to fly in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs, died of a heart attack May 3 at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, Calif. He also had cancer.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/05/03/AR2007050300879.html
