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Comment Re:Wait, what ? (Score 1) 72

German rulings do not apply to Europe or any part of Europe other than Germany.

A German court ruling doesn't even apply to another case in the same German court, nor a Dutch ruling to another Dutch court. None of these countries are common law countries, which means precedence is non-binding. They do however _look_ at other court rulings and look at the arguments and conclusions, which you can do across any curistiction, so in most countries (since only very few are common law like the UK and US), looking at a ruling from another country is not that odd especially when the laws are the same or similar.

Comment Re:Display Port (Score 1) 186

This is more about HDMI being a broken standard to me. I just don't like DisplayPort because it's sort of Apple's thing.

It is fortunately only the silly mini-displayport port that is Apple specific. I still have nightmares of trying to buy a displayport cable at a computer store and they send me to the horror that is the Apple section of the store, which was rows and rows of incompatible crap.

EU

EU, South Korea Collaborate On Superfast 5G Standards 78

jfruh writes The European Commission and the South Korean government announced that they will be harmonizing their radio spectrum policy in an attempt to help bring 5G wireless tech to market by 2020. While the technology is still in an embryonic state, but one South Korean researcher predicts it could be over a thousand times faster than current 4G networks.
Programming

Ask Slashdot: Best Rapid Development Language To Learn Today? 466

An anonymous reader writes "Many years ago, I was a coder—but I went through my computer science major when they were being taught in Lisp and C. These days I work in other areas, but often need to code up quick data processing solutions or interstitial applications. Doing this in C now feels archaic and overly difficult and text-based. Most of the time I now end up doing things in either Unix shell scripting (bash and grep/sed/awk/bc/etc.) or PHP. But these are showing significant age as well. I'm no longer the young hotshot that I once was—I don't think that I could pick up an entire language in a couple of hours with just a cursory reference work—yet I see lots of languages out there now that are much more popular and claim to offer various and sundry benefits I'm not looking to start a new career as a programmer—I already have a career—but I'd like to update my applied coding skills to take advantage of the best that software development now has to offer. (More, below.)
Democrats

After Non-Profit Application Furor, IRS Says It's Lost 2 Years Of Lerner's Email 372

As reported by the Associated Press, via US News & World Report, the IRS says that it cannot locate much of the email sent by a former IRS official over a two-year period. "The IRS told Congress Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups." Three congressional committees are investigating the agency because of the allegations of politically motivated mishandling of those applications, as is the Justice Department and the IRS's own inspector general. As the story says, "Congressional investigators have shown that IRS officials in Washington were closely involved in the handling of tea party applications, many of which languished for more than a year without action. But so far, they have not publicly produced evidence that anyone outside the agency directed the targeting or even knew about it." CBS News has a slightly different version, also based on the AP's reporting.
AI

Was Turing Test Legitimately Beaten, Or Just Cleverly Tricked? 309

beaker_72 (1845996) writes "On Sunday we saw a story that the Turing Test had finally been passed. The same story was picked up by most of the mainstream media and reported all over the place over the weekend and yesterday. However, today we see an article in TechDirt telling us that in fact the original press release was just a load of hype. So who's right? Have researchers at a well established university managed to beat this test for the first time, or should we believe TechDirt who have pointed out some aspects of the story which, if true, are pretty damning?" Kevin Warwick gives the bot a thumbs up, but the TechDirt piece takes heavy issue with Warwick himself on this front.

Comment Re:Arbitrage (Score 3, Interesting) 382

Could always unwind it if something unforseen results.

To play devil's advocate for a position I find distasteful, but haven't yet heard a totally valid takedown of: the neo-liberal set(republicans, libertarians, you know) argue that pragmatically speaking, regulatory laws don't get unwound.

I consider myself insufficiently informed to either debunk or accept that argument, and lack a good tool to find out more.

Sweden tried a transaction tax in the 90s, but they made the tax too high (1% if I remember correctly). The results were not good for the Swedish economy so they rolled the law back. So there you go, even socialist countries like Sweden can rollback socialist laws if they turn out bad.

Encryption

GnuTLS Flaw Leaves Many Linux Users Open To Attacks 127

A new flaw has been discovered in the GnuTLS cryptographic library that ships with several popular Linux distributions and hundreds of software implementations. According to the bug report, "A malicious server could use this flaw to send an excessively long session id value and trigger a buffer overflow in a connecting TLS/SSL client using GnuTLS, causing it to crash or, possibly, execute arbitrary code." A patch is currently available, but it will take time for all of the software maintainers to implement it. A lengthy technical analysis is available. "There don't appear to be any obvious signs that an attack is under way, making it possible to exploit the vulnerability in surreptitious "drive-by" attacks. There are no reports that the vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild."

Comment Re:Since when does Qt "work" with OS X? (Score 4, Informative) 636

Take a simple one from Mac versus Windows: On the Mac, in a dialog box, the default button is always the right-most button. So you have a dialog box that says, "Are you sure you want to do this?" and the right-most button would say, "OK" and the button to the left of it would say, "Cancel." On Windows, the default "OK" button would be on the left with the "Cancel" button the right of it.

Oh, stop trolling. You have obviously never used Qt, it will automatically fix the order of the dialog buttons for you. You can even launch the same application under GNOME and get one order, and under KDE and get another. It is controlled by the widget-style it uses. And it does more than that, it also matches the reading direction of the language you are using so that it reverses for Hebrew, Arabic or other right-to-left languages.

There are things that you need to handle yourself in a crossplatform application, but that is not one of them.

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