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Submission + - Social network Facegloria bans swearing, gay content, and sin (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Need a social network to connect with friends and likeminded individuals? Take your pick; there are dozens to choose from. Facebook remains by far the most popular and, as it is used by real people, it is filled with everything that makes up life — the good and the bad. In response, a group of Evangelical Christians in Brazil set up Facegloria with the aim of becoming "morally and technically better than Facebook".

Actually the real aim of the site is to promote Christianity — to the extent that rather than a Like button, there is an Amen button. Think "godbook", if you will. Of course there are restrictions — religion isn’t meant to be fun, you know. On the list of banned content is violence and pornography, swearing (there are literally hundreds of banned words), anything that violates "biblical principles", and depicting or referring to homosexual activity.

Comment Re:Spending cuts one way or another (Score 1) 431

You know and I know that "Robbing Paul to pay Peter" is not sustainable; the problem is most people will whine about the short-term excuse "But think of the children! and are too stupid to focus on long term stability at the expense of greed.

This whole situation is similar to how banning forest fires ironically and paradoxically led to an increase in fires.

* http://www.npr.org/2012/08/23/...

I like your journal entry where you go over the USA Budget 2013 numbers ...

* http://slashdot.org/journal/30...

1. The total tax revenues for USA Federal government are 2.46 Trillion USD.
2. The total expenses for USA Federal government are 3.8 Trillion USD.
3. The interest payment on the outstanding public debt that is on the books is at least 360 Billion USD for the year based on the interest rate (which is manipulated by Federal reserve and other banks, but that's a separate subject matter).
4. Social Security benefit payouts are budgeted as 882.7 Billion USD.
5. Medicare for the year is budgeted at 523 Billion USD.
6. Medicaid for the year is budgeted at 283 Billion USD.
7. Other mandatory programs for the year is budgeted at 654 Billion USD.
8. War will cost 525.4 Billion USD.

So the total revenues are 2.46 Trillion USD, total expenses are 3.8 Trillion USD, the interes payment is 360 Billion USD.

Agreed, that the US doesn't have a saving problem, it has a spending problem.

The US is fucked. :-( It is not a matter of if but when.

Comment Re:Been standing for years... (Score 1) 340

by UnknownSoldier (#50057601) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Have You Tried a Standing Desk?

> 3. You'll find yourself sitting way too often and never get adjusted to standing all day.

Disagree on #3. This isn't the same as quitting an addiction where you go cold-turkey.

HEALTH WARNING: If your body isn't used to the change in extended posture you'll simply end up hurting yourself until you become accustomed to it. If you go the gym you don't just pick up 100 lbs of weights, you ease into. The trick is be gradual and persistent.

Also, for some tasks I just can't stand 100% time. A extended standing chair lets you transition from sitting 100% all the time to standing most of the time.

If your co-workers are sitting more then standing then they aren't disciplined enough to be (and stay) healthy. The world's best environment and ergonomics won't help someone not disciplined and interested in their health.

Submission + - UK Student's Dissertation Redacted Thanks to Wassenaar Rules

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: U.S.-based security researchers may soon be championing the case of Grant Wilcox, a young U.K. university student whose work is one of the few publicly reported casualties of the Wassenaar Arrangement.

Wilcox last week published his university dissertation, presented earlier this spring for an ethical hacking degree at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, England. The work expands on existing bypasses for Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), free software that includes a dozen mitigations against memory-based exploits. Microsoft has on more than one occasion recommended use of EMET as a temporary stopgap against publicly available zero-day exploits.

Wilcox’s published dissertation, however, is missing several pages that describe proof-of-concept exploits, including one that completely bypasses a current EMET 5.1 installation running on a fully patched Windows computer. He said last Wednesday in a blogpost that the missing pages and redactions within the text happened partly because of the Wassenaar Arrangement.

“Whilst it has impacted the release of my research it has not impacted my passion and I plan to continue researching such material as and when I feel like, though in an ideal world I would like clearer instructions so I can figure out how to do this appropriately (of which there seems to be some confusion),” Wilcox said in an email to Threatpost.

Submission + - MInecraft For Windows 10 Beta Release July 29th (windows.com) 1

Submitted by westlake
westlake writes: At Minecon 2015, Microsoft announced that Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition Beta will be available for download in the Windows 10 Store beginning July 29, the same day Windows 10 is released.
Players who already have the PC edition of Minecraft will be able to download the Windows 10 beta version for free. Others can download Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition at a discounted price of $10 throughout the beta period.
Players who download Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition during the beta phase will still have the game when it comes out of beta, and receive all future updates to the game at no additional cost.

Submission + - "Mr. Sulu" George Takei Goes Racist: Justice Thomas 'a clown in blackface' (washingtontimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Washington Times reports, "Gay rights activist and former “Star Trek” star George Takei recently told a local Fox affiliate in Arizona that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a “clown in blackface.” Mr. Takei told a Phoenix station that the justice was “a disgrace to America” over his Obergefell v. Hodges dissent. The 5-4 ruling prohibits states from banning same-sex marriage. “Human dignity has long been understood in this country to be innate. When the Framers proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,’ they referred to a vision of mankind in which all humans are created in the image of God and therefore of inherent worth. That vision is the foundation upon which this Nation was built,” Justice Thomas wrote in his dissent ... "... The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away,” the justice continued."

Submission + - What happens when it's suddenly illegal to move money out of your country?

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Basic Internet services disappear.

Just as individual Greeks are losing access to Apple's iCloud, as the Athens staff of Bloomberg News recently discovered, so companies are finding themselves cut off from services critical to their ongoing operations.

The problem demonstrates a hidden risk in today's otherwise efficient vertical disintegration. Taking for granted the easy flow of money across borders, system designers never foresaw a situation in which companies with adequate funds would find that they couldn't pay foreign vendors.

"Greek companies are not able at this moment to pay for hosting (Amazon), storage (Dropbox), email services (MailChimp) and many other services," says Jon Vlachogiannis, a Bay Area entrepreneur, in an email. Without these services, otherwise viable businesses are in trouble.

Vlachogiannis and other expats are stepping up to pay the bills from California, rescuing companies with astonishingly small amounts.

Comment Re:Who watches this crap? (Score 1) 135

by UnknownSoldier (#50034313) Attached to: Watching People Code Is Becoming an (Even Bigger) Thing

Oh get off your high horse already with your myopic POV.

A bunch of us game devs "stream" coding. Some on Twitch others on YouTube.

The real-time nature of Twitch means people can ask questions and get insight into why the coder is doing it _that_ way instead of _this_ way.

If you want to see how "professionals" solve problems it can be worth while. For experienced developers I agree it is probably a waste of time, but for inexperienced developers you can learning coding style, naming conventions, organization, IDE usage, etc. You're right that experience it the best teacher but sometimes is is beneficial to see what others are doing. I assume you *never* use StackOverflow / StackExchange?

The downside is that more often then not the conversation gets derailed with the "noobs" clogging up the topics with flamewars over the "right" way to do something.

Comment Re:UO, EQ, WoW and now (Score 1) 75

by UnknownSoldier (#50028909) Attached to: 18 Years On, Ultima Online Is Still Going

You keep using this word "best". It doesn't mean what you think it means.

> UO was the most popular mmorpg until EQ came out. EQ was the most popular mmorpg until WoW came out. WoW has been the most popular mmorpg ever since.

FTFY.

Your logic is akin to McDonalds being the best simply because they are the most popular.

Quality != Quantity.

Comment Re:Trammel killed Ultima Online (Score 1) 75

by UnknownSoldier (#50027127) Attached to: 18 Years On, Ultima Online Is Still Going

Completely disagree with your first statement. I played UO for 4 years (Lake Superior FTW). I lost many friends who quit due to rampant unwanted PK'ing.

By the time Trammel came out most of us stayed for a little while and then said "Fuck it." The game was already old to us "veterans". New content only delayed saying goodbye.

Yeah the 3D clients were a complete clusterfuck. They actually shipped more then one 3D client? wow.

UO Renaissance was like kicking a dead horse. The people who stayed weren't interested in trying new games -- they stayed because of the social aspect.

I don't know how bad a director / producer Crofwall is. The damage about UO had already been done.

Submission + - Exploring the Relationships Between Tech Skills (Visualization) (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Simon Hughes, Dice's Chief Data Scientist, has put together an experimental visualization that explores how tech skills relate to one another. In the visualization, every circle or node represents a particular skill; colors designate communities that coalesce around skills. Try clicking “Java”, for example, and notice how many other skills accompany it (a high-degree node, as graph theory would call it). As a popular skill, it appears to be present in many communities: Big Data, Oracle Database, System Administration, Automation/Testing, and (of course) Web and Software Development. You may or may not agree with some relationships, but keep in mind, it was all generated in an automatic way by computer code, untouched by a human. Building it started with Gephi, an open-source network analysis and visualization software package, by importing a pair-wise comma-separated list of skills and their similarity scores (as Simon describes in his article) and running a number of analyses: Force Atlas layout to draw a force-directed graph, Avg. Path Length to calculate the Betweenness Centrality that determines the size of a node, and finally Modularity to detect communities of skills (again, color-coded in the visualization). The graph was then exported as an XML graph file (GEXF) and converted to JSON format with two sets of elements: Nodes and Links. "We would love to hear your feedback and questions," Simon says.

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