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Republicans

McCain Campaign Offers Rewards For Turn-Key Comments 375

Posted by timothy from the free-booze-for-edgar-allen-poe dept.
According to a story at the Washington Post, John McCain's presidential campaign is offering more than moral suasion to fire people up for a McCain presidency; they're also offering ready-made snippets of rhetoric for interested supporters to supply under their own names in public comments to online news sources and forums. Such pre-written commentary by itself is neither new nor necessarily nefarious, but it seems a bit off-kilter that prolific commenters are eligible for rewards — not just campaign swag like hats and stickers, but higher-ticket items like a ride with McCain on his campaign bus. Probably a script could be whipped up to compare the canned suggestions on the site with "grassroots" comments on political news sites around the web.
Science

Large Hadron Collider Goes Live September 10th 409

Posted by timothy from the get-your-affairs-in-order dept.
Naznarreb writes "CERN announced today that the first attempt to circulate a beam through the Large Hadron Collider will be on September 10th, 2008. You can read the press release here. They also announced the event will be webcast live. According to the release, they're just planning to run a few tests laps, not smash any particles, so the world won't be ending quite yet." And despite that September 10th date, according to the BBC, "On 9 August, protons will be piped through LHC magnets for the first time."

Comment Re:Huh (Score 2, Insightful) 722

by Senjutsu (#24498525) Attached to: New Olympics Scoring: No More Perfect 10.0

He makes the claim that the scoring is not subjective, then goes on to explain the scoring process. So far so good. When he makes the statement that the starting value is rated on "degree of difficulty" he is describing a subjective judgment. Therefore, his argument has broken down at that point in the post.

The degree of difficulty is not a subjective judgement made at scoring time; it is specified on a list of valid moves that the judges score from.

So a foobar tuck might be defined as having a degree of difficulty of 5, whereas a bazbang flip might be a DoD of 3.

Assumptions, try making fewer of them.
Cellphones

FSF's "Defective By Design" Targets Apple Genius Bars 838

Posted by timothy from the win-friends-and-influence-people dept.
mjasay writes "At OSCON this year, MySQL's Brian Aker made this bold statement: 'Microsoft is irrelevant ... We're more worried about Apple.' The Free Software Foundation appears to have caught the hint, and has turned its attention to all-things-Apple with a 'denial of service' attack on the Apple Genius Bars. The idea is to completely book all Genius Bars and then ask the 'geniuses,' over and over again, a few questions about Apple's proprietary ways (while, apparently, real customers with support issues are left to flounder). Lost in this anti-Apple fervor, however, is the Free Software Foundation's complete and conscious failure to protect the web. Richard Stallman has long felt that software that doesn't sit on his desktop doesn't affect his freedom, but isn't the opposite true? Why is the FSF focused on Apple when the bigger concern should be Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, and other web players, a point made by Tim O'Reilly recently at OSCON?" Defective by Design is just one of many FSF projects, remember; it hardly seems fair to say that the FSF has been ignoring the implications of software as a service.
The Courts

Submission + - Apple, Cisco settle iPhone trademark lawsuit

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cisco and Apple have settled the trademark-infringement lawsuit over the use of the iPhone name for Apple's new multimedia phone. The agreement allows Apple and Cisco to use the iPhone brand on their own products. Also, the companies said they would explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, consumer and business communications.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Hiring Student Propagandists

Submitted by
Ed
Ed writes: "It seems Microsoft is looking to hire students for "word of mouth advertising" on college campuses. The marketing service's code of ethics stresses the importance of honesty, but somehow I doubt they'd be willing to pay me to give my honest opinions..."
The Internet

Submission + - Why Digg Failed (or may)

Submitted by beakerMeep
beakerMeep writes: David Marcus, a user on Kuro5hin, recently put together an excellent piece on the perils and faults behind the workings of Digg.com. From the article: 'As I write, the top story on Digg is "Transparency in Social News", a newspaper-as-blog item that the Digg community have used as a little self-congratulatory pat on the back. I understand why Digg's users feel like they deserve to toast themselves now and then — after all, they've made the place one of the Web's Top 100 sites, and they've made Digg, Inc. upwards of $200 million.' Incidentally, as I submit this story to Slashdot, Digg has appears to have removed the story from the list of upcoming stories.
Handhelds

Submission + - Telstra to Apple: 'stick to your knitting'

Submitted by
Whiney Mac Fanboy
Whiney Mac Fanboy writes: "Australia's monopoly Telecommunications provider Telstra has ruled out carrying Apple's iphone, in a rather stinging attack on Apple, the Telco's spokesman said:

"There's an old saying — stick to your knitting — and Apple is not a mobile phone manufacturer, that's not their knitting," Mr Winn told AAP. "You can pretty much be assured that Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and ZTE and others will be coming out with devices that have similar functionality."
It should be noted that Telstra has the only cell network (2.5G) in Australia that is capable of supporting the iPhone. Does this mean Australian's will not be getting iPhones at all?"
Music

Submission + - EMI Considering Selling Entire Collection as MP3s

Submitted by BobbyJo
BobbyJo writes: According to the Wall Street Journal [subscription required], EMI has been pitching the possibility of selling its entire music collection to the public in MP3 form, without all of the pesky DRM protection that we are all such big fans of. According to the article, several other major music companies have considered this same route, but none as far as EMI. From the article:

The London-based EMI is believed to have held talks with a wide range of online retailers that compete with Apple's iTunes. Those competing retailers include RealNetworks Inc., eMusic.com, MusicNet Inc. and Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks. People familiar with the matter cautioned that EMI could still abandon the proposed strategy before implementing it. A decision about whether to keep pursuing the idea could come as soon as today.
Encryption

Journal Journal: NSA CryptoKids Website

Journal by AppleButter
Most love to ponder the inner workings of intelligence agencies, and the link on the NSA's website (http://www.nsa.gov/) labeled "Kids Page" is no exception. Hardball recruiting practices aside, I wonder how long it will be before someone either a) tells the story of how they first became interested in cryptography when they were just a "CryptoKid", or b) writes a screenplay based on some ridiculous scenario where an adolescent genius hacks into the NSA's comput
Programming

Submission + - Ada inventor Jean Ichbiah dies

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Jean Ichbiah, French inventor of the programming language Ada, died Jan. 26, at age 66. He suffered from brain cancer.

Ada, created at the end of the 1970s, was the first object-oriented language to become an international standard, in 1995. It is still widely used today, mainly for real-time systems in the aeronautical industry; the code is embedded in the Rafale and Mirage 2000 fighters and in the Boeing 777 airliner.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9010058&intsrc=new s_ts_head
Privacy

Submission + - Canadian coins not bugged after all

Submitted by Foobar_
Foobar_ writes: The Defense Security Service (an agency of the Department of Defense) has retracted its claims that it found tiny transmitters hidden inside Canadian coins, as previously reported on Slashdot and just about everywhere else. From the release: "This statement was based on a report provided to DSS. The allegations, however, were found later to be unsubstantiated following an investigation into the matter. According to DSS officials, the 2006 annual report should not have contained this information." Canada.com reports further.
Unix

Submission + - FreeBSD 6.2 released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE has now been made available. It is around 2 months behind schedule, but the ISO images of the CD's are now available at ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD.
Nintendo

Gates Pegs Nintendo, Not Sony, as Toughest Competition 178

Posted by Zonk from the when-white-plastic-fights dept.
njkid1 writes "Microsoft's Bill Gates thinks that because of the 'impressive strength' of the company and its new Wii console Nintendo is now Microsoft's biggest competition when it comes to videogames. This is somewhat understandable, given Nintendo's new projections for this year. The Japanese game maker plans to sell an impressive 100 Million DS games this year, along with 21 Million Wii games and some six million consoles. This may seem to be just more flack, to go along with Peter Moore's dismissive comments towards Sony at CES this week, but news of the Halo DS game that almost was puts credence to Microsoft's new priorities."

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