Comment Re:Facts... (Score 1) 743
Posting to cancel incorrect moderation caused by accidental click.
Maryland Bans Employers From Asking For Facebook Passwords 211
Freddybear writes with news that yesterday Maryland passed a bill through both houses of the state legislature that would forbid employers from requiring job applicants or employees to provide access to social media accounts. The bill now awaits only the signature of governor Martin O'Malley. "The bill is the first of its kind in the country, and has shined a spotlight on the practice of employers demanding personal social media passwords from potential hires, [said Melissa Goemann of the ACLU]." Similar legislation is being developed in California, Illinois and Michigan, according to the Washington Post.
Comment Re:Rotation is the hardest stuff (Score 1) 188
ODE only does rigid body dynamics, no force fields. The guy just need a basic game dev tutorial on force integration.
Swiss To Build Orbital Cleaning Satellite 147
garyebickford writes "As The ETH Lausanne says: 'The proliferation of debris orbiting the Earth – primarily jettisoned rocket and satellite components – is an increasingly pressing problem for spacecraft, and it can generate huge costs. To combat this scourge, the Swiss Space Center at EPFL is announcing today the launch of CleanSpace One, a project to develop and build the first installment of a family of satellites specially designed to clean up space debris.' This looks like a reasonable method, although I think that at some future point it might be useful to just put at least the smaller stuff in a higher 'parking orbit' for later destruction or recycling. This way you wouldn't lose one vacuum cleaner for each satellite retrieved. And much later down the road, it might be useful to collect bigger units — expended boosters, for example — as raw materials and/or containers. The cost of getting the mass into space has already been spent.
I optimistically foresee a future where much of the stuff sent into orbital space has a recycling function built into the design."
Same Platform Made Stuxnet, Duqu; Others Lurk 89
wiredmikey writes "New research from Kaspersky Labs has revealed that the platform dubbed 'tilded' (~d), which was used to develop Stuxnet and Duqu, has been around for years. The researchers say that same platform has been used to create similar Trojans which have yet to be discovered. Alexander Gostev and Igor Sumenkov have put together some interesting research, the key point being that the person(s) behind what the world knows as Stuxnet and Duqu have actually been using the same development platform for several years." An anonymous reader adds a link to this "surprisingly entertaining presentation" (video) by a Microsoft engineer, in which "he tells the story of how he and others analysed the exploits used by Stuxnet. Also surprising are the simplicity of the exploits which were still present in Win7." See also the report at Secureist from which the SecurityWeek story draws.
For Texas Textbooks, a Victory For Evolution 626
An anonymous reader writes "The Texas Board of Education has unanimously come down on the side of evolution. In an 8-0 vote, the board today approved scientifically accurate high school biology textbook supplements from established mainstream publishers — and did not approve the creationist-backed supplements from International Databases, LLC."
Comment Re:NOT Ubuntu -- try Mandriva. (Score 1) 622
Wrong. They use different kernel versions, with different kernel patches. And most importantly, the userland apps certainly differ here and there. The most important example is the Mandriva Control Center. It's task-oriented, making it far more friendly than searching for configuration tools by name - in particular, if you have a localized system, where translations are often arbitrary and non-intuitive.
For specific examples, check out Mandriva's wizards for video cards, disk partitioning, network setup, network sharing. Now try to setup those things under Ubuntu without hitting the Ubuntu forums first.
That said, network card compatibility is pretty much hit or miss, as they often depend on binary blobs (either proprietary or windows drivers) that break in different ways with different kernel versions. My dad's current laptop's wifi only works reliably with WEP, not WPA, while mine kernel-panics with WEP. I bet bugs would manifest themselves differently on Ubuntu.
Ask Slashdot: Easiest Linux Distro For a Newbie 622
anymooseposter writes "My mom is taking a computer class at the local Community College. she asks: 'I need to download a Linux OS and try it out for class. The assignment is to use an OS different from what you normally use. Well, since I use Windows and OS X, the assignment suggests Linux. But, my question is, what is the easiest version based on Linux for me to put on CD and try? I saw several on the web. Any thoughts off the top of your head?' What Linux Disto would be easiest to set up without having to resort to dual booting and/or driver issues?"
Comment Re:Cmake? Maven? (Score 3, Interesting) 29
CMake is there in the summary. Maven is not that popular probably due to its design to do "everything".
What seems to be really missing is autotools. Even if you don't want to admit it is better than most alternatives, it's the only one that really solves a ton of problems that no other tool is able to handle. Simply reading through the autoconf, automake and libtool manuals will teach you a lot about the many issues most other tools just ignore, or solve poorly.
Comment Re:I dont understand what the "Target" category is (Score 2) 183
Apparently, games where you launch deadly projectiles at enemies. I'm surprised they didn't have a "Jump" or "Save the world" genre to match that. Read it as "random genre because we don't actually play games so we have no clue".
Comment Re:One amusing aspect. (Score 1) 254
It's funny how the so called "homebrew" community is quick to hand anyone's head in a plate, when these companies would very much like to hang them all together. It's not like the bits fail0verflow didn't break were any harder anyways. They brought the pirates 80% of the way in, Geohotz already had the last, say, 15%, only feasible because of the first 80%. And fail0verflow now claims they have no responsibility on the piracy matter.
I don't have anything against the fail0verflow dudes, but I'm sure I will have an ironic smile on my face once one of them gets canned in the same way.
Submission + - Netflix likes open source (netflix.com)
Art3x writes: Netflix's VP of Systems and E-commerce Engineering, Kevin McEntee, just blogged his appreciation for open-source software and open standards. 'At Netflix we jumped on for the ride a long time ago and we have benefited enormously from the virtuous cycles of actively evolving open source projects,' he writes, and he says that Netflix not only uses but has contributed back to projects such as Hudson, Hadoop, Hive, Honu, Apache, Tomcat, Ant, Ivy, Cassandra, and HBase. Instantly streamed in a bunch of comments asking why there's no player for Linux.
Submission + - New Clothing Line Reminds TSA of the 4th Amendment (aolnews.com)
Hugh Pickens writes: "AOL News reports that there's a line of underclothes that offer a friendly reminder of the Fourth Amendment called 4th Amendment Wear. Metallic ink printed on shirts spells out the privacy rights stated in the amendment and is designed to appear in TSA scanners. The 4th Amendment Wear line also includes non-metallic options, including underpants for both adults and children. Should a passenger be stripped down, instead of the full amendment, they'll receive a more direct message: "Read the 4th Amendment Perverts." "If you're getting that close to kids' underwear, you have license to say something a little tongue-in-cheek," says creator Tim Geoghegan."
Submission + - Paypal account frozen for making Wikileak donation (rathergather.com) 3
kaptink writes: Reddit user 'hellokevin11' blogs:
"I go to log into my business account, and it's locked. The girl on the phone told me it's because my account handles a large amount of money (it's a biz account), I recently sent a lot of money ($4000) overseas, and I also sent money to wikileaks. My account is being investigated for illegal activities and I have to account for what the money was used for. They want invoices and such."
I've been blacklisted as well. "This account has been permanently locked. All information associated with this account has been blocked from the PayPal system and cannot be registered with another account."
"I go to log into my business account, and it's locked. The girl on the phone told me it's because my account handles a large amount of money (it's a biz account), I recently sent a lot of money ($4000) overseas, and I also sent money to wikileaks. My account is being investigated for illegal activities and I have to account for what the money was used for. They want invoices and such."
I've been blacklisted as well. "This account has been permanently locked. All information associated with this account has been blocked from the PayPal system and cannot be registered with another account."
Submission + - Could the Wikileaks scandal boost Bitcoin? 1
An anonymous reader writes: Could the Wikileaks scandal and in particular the refusal of payment services such as PayPal to broker money boost the profile of Bitcoin, the decentralised peer-to-peer currency that nobody can control? PC World thinks so. FTA: "There's no single point of weakness. Nobody can stop the Bitcoin system or censor it, short of turning off the entire Internet. If Wikileaks had requested Bitcoins then they would have received their donations without a second thought"
