Comment Re:First Impression (Score 1) 182
And if the contract is in Dutch but you're not in Flanders, it's null and void, right?
Comment How quickly we forget: "posture photos" (Score 5, Informative) 468
From the 1940s to the 1970s, Ivy League colleges took naked pictures of every incoming freshman, supposedly for use in scientific studies of the students' posture.
I am not making this up. See, e.g., this Times coverage from 1995.
I'm not going to make any kind of normative statement about whether people should say Yes to Cal's offer, here, but just wanted to point out that weird-ass instrusions into student privacy are nothing new.
Comment Re:Looking at that entry (Score 1) 44
The contest is to figure out a way to make more bits available.
It is not obvious that Twitter messages are always guaranteed to carry 4339 bits of information (which is why the original post announcing the contest offers only 4200 bits).
Any attempt to use "compression" as we usually understand it would be pointless because you can't always fit x bits of arbitrary data in an x-1 bit channel.
If it makes you feel any better, a lot of commenters didn't get it, either.
Comment Store small, high-value secrets (Score 1) 546
Type up your passwords and encryption keys and put the device in a safe somewhere.
It seems like a 1 kilobyte file is more likely to last on a hard drive if you store 50 million copies of it. (And if you store 500,000 copies of the file on a CD, you're less likely to be screwed by a scratch.) Is there an easy way to automate this duplication? Some weird "very small, very-high-repetition on same volume" file system, or just a perl script?
Comment Re:Memory?...keep their cool?? Huh??? (Score 1) 200
Not sure what you mean by keeping their cool, but you can't be referring to heat since they both run cooler than any PC.
We use six previous-generation Mac Minis in our office (1.83GHz Core 2 Duo).
We tried stacking four of them on top of each other, but saw frequent system instability related to overheating issues. No surprise there, really.
One of the other two occasionally fails -- the system freezes completely with no response to keyboard or mouse input. This pretty much only happens when we run it out in the sun during the day, though; so we just close the blinds and hard-reboot the machine.
Submission + - UCLA Probe Finds Taser Incident Out Of Policy (ucla.edu)
Bandor Mia writes: Last November, it was reported that UCLA cops Tasered a student, who forgot to bring his ID, at the UCLA library. While an internal probe by UCLAPD cleared the officers of any wrongdoing, an outside probe by Police Assessment Resource Center has found that the police actions on Mostafa Tabatabainejad were indeed out of UCLA policy. The probe was conducted at the behest of acting UCLA Chancellor Norman Abrams.
From the report:
"In light of UCLAPD's general use of force policy and its specific policies on pain compliance techniques, Officer 2's three applications of the Taser, taken together, were out of policy. Officer 2 did not take advantage of other options and opportunities reasonably available to de-escalate the situation without the use of the Taser. Reasonable campus police officers, upon assessing the circumstances, likely would have embraced different choices and options that appear likely to have been more consistent both with UCLAPD policy and general best law enforcement practices."
From the report:
"In light of UCLAPD's general use of force policy and its specific policies on pain compliance techniques, Officer 2's three applications of the Taser, taken together, were out of policy. Officer 2 did not take advantage of other options and opportunities reasonably available to de-escalate the situation without the use of the Taser. Reasonable campus police officers, upon assessing the circumstances, likely would have embraced different choices and options that appear likely to have been more consistent both with UCLAPD policy and general best law enforcement practices."
Submission + - Hacker's Case May Add to Students' Privacy Rights
An anonymous reader writes: Article in Inside Higher Ed says the legal loss of a hacker in federal appeals court may result in students at public universities having MORE privacy rights. The hacker lost, but federal appeals court also said he had (generally) a right to privacy on computer in his dorm room:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/09/heck enkamp
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/09/hec
Submission + - Vendor aims to 'cloak' WEP...
Ant writes: "This three page NetworkWorld news story says Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) could be safe again. AirDefense is developing a sofware that will insert fake frames into the air that the attacker thinks are real, and this messes up the statistical analysis of the attacker.
Seen in a Broadband Reports' wireless security forum thread."
Submission + - How the BBC Micro Educated Britain
Gammu writes: Unlike the North American computer market in the late seventies and early eighties, Britain was largely dominated by domestic companies. Beginning with the early eighties, the BBC selected a computer that schools schools would use for more than a decade, not unlike the Apple II, the BBC Micro. The computer was the BBC Micro and was the subject of a massive computer literacy program in Britain and the Commonwealth.
Submission + - Josh Wolf and Shield Laws
PaulLev writes: "http://www.paullevinson.net/archives/free_josh_wol f.phtml
Josh Wolf sits in a prison in California. His "crime"? — refusal to turn over his videotapes to a Grand Jury. Another victim of the failure of Congress to enact a Federal shield law."
Alternatives To SF.net's CompileFarm? 186
cronie writes "Not long ago, SourceForge.net announced the shutdown of the Compile Farm — a collection of computers running a wide variety of OSes, available for compiling and testing open source projects. SF.net stated their resources 'are best used at this time in improving other parts' of the service. I consider this sad news for the OSS community, because portability is one of the strengths of OSS, and not many of us have access to such a variety of platforms to compile and test our software on. As a consequence, I expect many projects dropping support for some of the platforms they can't get access to. Are there any sound alternatives with at least some popular OS/hardware combinations? Any plans to create one? (Perhaps Google or IBM might come up with something?)"
Submission + - New Mexico secedes, might declare Pluto Planet
pease1 writes: "Wired and others are reporting for New Mexico, the fight for Pluto is not over.
Seven months after a conclave of scientists downgraded the distant heavenly body to a "dwarf planet," a state representative in New Mexico aims to give the snubbed world back some of its respect. State lawmakers will vote Tuesday on a bill that proposes "as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico's excellent night skies, it be declared a planet."
Actual wording of the resolution.
For many of us old timers and those who had the honor of meeting Clyde, this just causes a belly of laughs and is pure fun. Not to mention a bit of poking sticking in the eye."
For many of us old timers and those who had the honor of meeting Clyde, this just causes a belly of laughs and is pure fun. Not to mention a bit of poking sticking in the eye."
Subliminal Messages Might Actually Work 172
GrumpySimon writes "New research indicates that subliminal messages may actually work. In a paper titled Attentional Load Modulates Responses of Human Primary Visual Cortex to Invisible Stimuli, Bahrani et al. demonstrate that even though stimuli may not be available to consciousness, they are processed by the visual cortex. While I'm sure that marketing agencies all over the world are rubbing their hands in glee at this news, the authors report that there's no evidence that this can make people buy things against their will. So with any luck the use of subliminal messages in advertising will remain an urban legend."
Submission + - Hans Reiser up for trial
An anonymous reader writes: According to German IT news site http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/86524 , Hans Reiser will soon be up for trial.
The content of the link, Babelfished and slightly polished, reads as follows:
The namesake and creator of the file systems ReiserFS and Reiser4, Hans Reiser, will probably have to appear in front of a California court shortly, due to the accusation of murder. Reiser has been behind bars since the middle of October 2006, after his wife Nina at the end of of Septembers living in separation disappeared without trace. In house and car of the Linux programmer traces of his wife's blood were found.
Although the police could not find a corpse, the judge found that there are sufficient reasons to believe that Reiser must have been at least involved in the disappearing of his wife. For example is still missing the passenger seat of Reisers car, which was removed short time after Nina Reisers disappearing. Reisers lawyer assumes now within the next 90 days officially accusation is raised against its mandator.
The content of the link, Babelfished and slightly polished, reads as follows:
The namesake and creator of the file systems ReiserFS and Reiser4, Hans Reiser, will probably have to appear in front of a California court shortly, due to the accusation of murder. Reiser has been behind bars since the middle of October 2006, after his wife Nina at the end of of Septembers living in separation disappeared without trace. In house and car of the Linux programmer traces of his wife's blood were found.
Although the police could not find a corpse, the judge found that there are sufficient reasons to believe that Reiser must have been at least involved in the disappearing of his wife. For example is still missing the passenger seat of Reisers car, which was removed short time after Nina Reisers disappearing. Reisers lawyer assumes now within the next 90 days officially accusation is raised against its mandator.
