wrp103 - Slashdot User

UK Teen Banned From US Over Obscene Obama Email 555

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday September 14, 2010 @11:06AM from the sticks-and-stones dept.

British teenager Luke Angel has been banned from the US for sending an email to the White House calling President Obama an obscenity. The 17-year-old says he was drunk when he sent the mail and doesn't understand what the big deal is. "I don't remember exactly what I wrote as I was drunk. But I think I called Barack Obama a p***k. It was silly -- the sort of thing you do when you're a teenager and have had a few," he said. The FBI contacted local police who in turn confronted Luke and let him know that the US Department of Homeland Security didn't think his email was funny. "The police came and took my picture and told me I was banned from America forever. I don't really care but my parents aren't very happy," Angel said.

Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch 191

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday September 12, 2010 @05:17AM from the messy-verdict dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."

Oil-Spotting Blimp Arrives In the Gulf 109

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @10:35PM from the lazy-eye-in-the-sky dept.

GAMP writes "A Navy blimp to assist oil skimming operations will be arriving to the Gulf Coast Wednesday evening, according to the Unified Command Joint Information Center. 'The airship will operate relatively close to shore, primarily supporting skimmers to maximize their effectiveness,' said US Coast Guard Capt. Kevin Sareault."

Apple Reverses iPad "No Cash Purchase" Policy 377

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 20, 2010 @03:25PM from the so-it's-free-now dept.

ZipK writes "After a few days of bad publicity, Apple has reversed its no cash purchase policy, explaining that the policy was originally implemented to limit the number of iPads an individual could buy during the introductory period of short supply. Now that supply has caught up with demand — and the story has hit front pages and gained national attention — Apple has reversed its policy, and taken the opportunity to put a bow on the story by giving the formerly scorned Diane Campbell a free iPad."

YouTube Blocked In Pakistan 299

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 20, 2010 @02:41PM from the differential-fragility dept.

kokoko1 submits this snippet from The Telegraph, which reports that Facebook isn't alone — now YouTube, too, is being censored in Pakistan. "The blocking of YouTube comes a day after a Pakistani court blocked Facebook amid a growing row over a competition on the social networking website to design cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad." Update: 05/20 18:58 GMT by T : According to an anonymous reader, Wikipedia and Flickr are out, too.
Update: 05/21 12:11 GMT by KD : And now add Twitter to the blocked list. This post claims that more than 1,000 sites are being blocked in Pakistan.

Websites That Don't Need to Be Made Anymore 161

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday May 20, 2010 @01:47PM from the do-not-want dept.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but there is a finite number of social networking or selling websites that the world needs. Here is a collection of the eight kinds of websites that absolutely don't need to be made anymore. I'd add dating sites and anybody who uses pop-up ads myself, but I think that would eliminate half the Web.

PA Laptop Spying Inspires FSF Crowdsourcing Effort 135

Posted by timothy on Saturday March 13, 2010 @09:37AM from the inspiration-comes-from-many-places dept.

holmesfsf writes "Creeped out by the Lower Merion School District's remote monitoring of students? Check out the Free Software Foundation's response to the laptop spying scandal and help build a wiki listing of school districts that provide students with laptops, so that the FSF can campaign against mandatory, proprietary laptops."

Why the First Cowboy To Draw Always Gets Shot 398

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 04, 2010 @04:00PM from the more-guns-less-crime dept.

cremeglace writes "Have you ever noticed that the first cowboy to draw his gun in a Hollywood Western is invariably the one to get shot? Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr did, once arranging mock duels to test the validity of this cinematic curiosity. Researchers have now confirmed that people indeed move faster if they are reacting, rather than acting first."

Dinosaur Feather Color Discovered 219

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 27, 2010 @05:28PM from the horsefeathers-still-a-mystery dept.

anzha writes "Do you remember being a kid and told we'd never know what colors the dinosaurs were? For at least some, that's no longer true. Scientists working in the UK and China have closely examined the fossils of multiple theropods and actually found the colors and patterns that were present in the fossilized proto-feathers. So far, the answer is orange, black and white in banded and other patterns. The work also thoroughly thrashes the idea that fossils might not be feathers, but collagen fibers instead. If this holds up, Birds Are Dinosaurs. Period. And colorful!"

Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers 149

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 23, 2010 @04:03AM from the love-the-gold-mylar dept.

krou writes "Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed. Shah spent £20,000 on the equipment, hooking up a telescope in his shed to his home computer, and the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Most men like to putter about in their garden shed,' said Shah, 'but mine is a bit more high tech than most. I have fitted it with a sliding roof so I can sit in comfort and look at the heavens. I have a very modest set up, but it just goes to show that a window to the universe is there for all of us – even with the smallest budgets. I had to be patient and take the images over a period of several months because the skies in Britain are often clouded over and you need clear conditions.' His images include the Monkey's head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula, and are being put together for a book."

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson on Friday December 11, 2009 @01:48PM from the toil-and-trouble dept.

Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."

Comment Re:Also makes social engineering harder (Score 1) 446

by wrp103 on Thursday December 10, 2009 @12:11PM (#30389048) Attached to: Facebook Masks Worse Privacy With New Interface

I don't know where the original poster got their information, but nothing is forced to be public. You can control the privacy on any of the fields. If you look at your privacy settings, they look locked, but there is a "Change Privacy Settings" button that will prompt for your password before it will let you change any of the settings. It seems to me that would provide more protection against a robot changing profile settings.

Comment Re:The state is correct (Score 1) 554

by wrp103 on Monday October 12, 2009 @06:59PM (#29725773) Attached to: Blogger Loses Unemployment Check Because of Ads

In PA, you can make up to $200 a week (depending on what you were making) without it affecting your unemployment benefits. If you go over the limit, the amount in excess is deducted from your benefits check for that period.

This allows people on unemployment to look for part-time work, which might turn into full-time work, and thus take them off unemployment benefits. Of course, in this economy ...

Comment Needed: Artificial Common Sense (Score 2, Insightful) 652

by wrp103 on Sunday July 26, 2009 @10:27AM (#28826787) Attached to: Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man

This "concern" has been around for some time, and has always been 5 to 20 years away.

IMHO, rather than concentrating increasing artificial intelligence, we need to figure out how to give computers common sense. Every programmer that has worked on AI has encountered cases where their program went off on a tangent that the programmer didn't expect (and probably couldn't believe). That isn't artificial intelligence, it is artificial stupidity. If we could get to the point where a program could ask "does this make sense?" we would be much better off than coming up with new and improved ways for computers to act like idiots.

New Final Fantasy XIII Details, Website Launched 78

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday January 11, 2009 @06:18AM from the pretty-pictures dept.

Square Enix has launched an official website for Final Fantasy XIII. At the moment, it contains screenshots, game music, and brief character bios written in Japanese. Square also launched a site for Final Fantasy Versus XIII, though it doesn't have any content on it yet. A fan site has translated new details about the game from Weekly Famitsu, including information on the battle system. "Players select the 'Action' (the five buttons near the bottom left of the screen) they would like to use, which is then moved to the Command Stock slots (three slots above the Action buttons) to be executed in turn. Some 'Action' buttons seem to have several layers behind them, which means you'll have more than five actions to choose from. Each of the 'Actions' has a number attached to them; this is the 'Cost' or the number of slots that particular 'Action' will take in the Command Stock. For example, you can have three Fire commands in the list since its 'Cost' is only 1, but you can only use Firaga, which costs 3, if you have three empty slots in the Command Stock."

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