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Comment Re:So how much power will this use? (Score 1) 212

by kingbyu (#48419665) Attached to: Launching 2015: a New Certificate Authority To Encrypt the Entire Web
OK, I'll give you that: in order to be a logged in user or to post comments, the connection should be encrypted. But there is no reason I should need SSL just to view the page. One could argue that on an unsecured connection, I could be shown content that didn't really come from the slashdot servers. But I don't trust anything I get from slashdot anyway.

Comment Re:So how much power will this use? (Score 1) 212

by kingbyu (#48413601) Attached to: Launching 2015: a New Certificate Authority To Encrypt the Entire Web
Indeed, there is a lot of traffic on the web that has no need to be private. This slashdot page for example. But encrypting communications takes extra CPU cycles, and extra CPU cycles take extra energy, and will require more servers. Sure there is a lot of web traffic which should be encrypted, but the rest of it shouldn't be, for the sake of the environment and for the sake of that battery powered device in my pocket.

Comment Google's Paypal (Score 2) 105

by kingbyu (#48386999) Attached to: Google Wallet API For Digital Goods Will Be Retired On March 2, 2015

I spent a lot of time coding a good checkout solution that worked with Google Checkout, so I was pretty mad when all the work I did went down the drain when they discontinued it. I was fortunate to had already integrated Paypal and Amazon checkout before it was discontinued, so the business impact was pretty small.

But it did teach me to be 10 times more careful when investing time to integrate with a third party platform.

But this also shows an interesting trend away from APIs and "Mashups." 5 to 10 years ago, providing an API for your startup was considered an essential way to promote your platform by having it integrated all over the place. I suspect too many developers got burned in the way that I was with Google Checkout, and stopped trying to "mashup" APIs to the point where there was no longer much benefit to provide them.

Submission + - Goodyear's New State-of-the-Art Airship Makes its First Flight (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: The Goodyear blimp may have been flying around for almost 90 years, but it still manages to turn heads. On Friday, there was another reason to look beyond nostalgia for the days of the great airships of old as Goodyear unveiled its new state-of-the-art blimp to the media, Goodyear associates and dealers at its Wingfoot Lake hangar in Suffield, Ohio. Built in partnership with the Zeppelin company, the new craft that replaces the 45-year old GZ-20 blimp fleet is not only larger and faster, it isn’t even a blimp, but a semi-rigid airship.

Submission + - THX Caught with Pants Down over Lexicon BD player (audioholics.com)

Submitted by SchlimpyChicken
SchlimpyChicken writes: Lexicon and THX apparently attempted to pull a fast one on the consumer electronics industry, but got caught this week when a couple websites exposed the fact that the high-end electronics company put a nearly-unmodified $500 Oppo Blu-ray player into a new Lexicon chassis and was selling it for $3500. AV Rant broke the story first on its home theater podcast with some pics of the two players' internals. Audioholics.com then posted a full suite of pics and tested the players with an Audio Precision analyzer. Both showed identical analogue audio performance and both FAILED a couple of basic THX specifications. Audioholics also posted commentary from THX on the matter and noted that both companies appear to be in a mad scramble to hide the fact that the player was ever deemed THX certified.

Submission + - Geek Shortage? (wired.com)

Submitted by gb123
gb123 writes: The Pentagon’s far-out research arm Darpa is soliciting proposals for initiatives that would attract teens to careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), with an emphasis on computing.

Ah, future /. members!

Submission + - Darl McBride, former SCO CEO, Fighting Back (sys-con.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Recently fired, the former CEO of SCO Group, Darl McBride, has suggested that there may be a shareholder lawsuit against the trustee running the company. Maureen O'Gara (yes that one) has published a copy of a letter McBride says he sent to the trustee, and which makes a number of allegations about how the company is now being running. Oh, and McBride still thinks SCO could make up to $14 billion dollars by selling licenses to Linux.
Government

Organized Online, Students Storm Gov't. Buildings In Moldova 199

Posted by timothy from the no-emoticon-for-what-I-feel dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Reacting to allegedly fraudulent election procedures, students are storming the presidency and parliament of the small eastern European country of Moldova. It is reported that they used Twitter to organize. Currently twitter and blogs are being used to spread word of what is happening since all national news websites have been blocked. If the 1989 Romanian revolution was the first to be televised, is this the first to be led by twitter and social networks?" Jamie points out this interesting presentation (from March 2008) by Ethan Zuckerman about the realities of online activism, including how governments try to constrain it.
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Will the real MySQL please stand up? (livejournal.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Patrick Galbraith, an X core MySQL Server Engineer raises the question in "What is the official branch of MySQL?".. With Monty Widenius having left Sun and forked off MySQL for MariaDB, and Brian Aker running the Drizzle fork inside of Sun, where is the official MySQL tree? Sun may own the trademark, but it looks like there is doubt that they are still the maintainers of the actual codebase after their Billion dollar acquisition of the code a year ago. Smugmug's Don MacAskhill, who is the keynote at the upcoming MySQL Conference, has commented that he is now using the Percona version of fork of MySQL, and is no longer making use of the Sun version.
Science

Dinosaurs Could Hold Basketballs, But Not Dribble 73

Posted by timothy from the always-subject-to-revision dept.
Gre7g writes "Long before the invention of the photocopier, mud was the ideal way to preserve an image of your butt. 'We got lucky with this one [sitting] on a slope,' which brought its hands closer to the ground, said study author Andrew Milner of the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm. Full disclosure: My wife did the artistic reconstruction."
Earth

Black Holes From the LHC Could Last For Minutes 672

Posted by kdawson from the becoming-greyer dept.
KentuckyFC writes "There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet (or this way either) when it eventually switches on some time later this year. And yet a few niggling doubts are persuading some scientists to run through their figures again. One potential method of destruction is that the LHC will create tiny black holes that could swallow everything in their path, including the planet. Various scientists have said this will not happen because the black holes would decay before they could do any damage. But physicists who have re-run the calculations now say that the mini black holes produced by the LHC could last for seconds, possibly minutes. Of course, the real question is whether they decay faster than they can grow. The new calculations suggest that the decay mechanism should win over and that the catastrophic growth of a black hole from the LHC 'does not seem possible' (abstract). But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?"
Government

Obama Picks RIAA's Favorite Lawyer For Top DoJ Post 766

Posted by kdawson from the paging-mister-lessig dept.
The Recording Industry of America's favorite courtroom lawyer, Tom Perrelli, who has sued individual file swappers in multiple federal courts, is President-elect Barack Obama's choice for the third in line at the Justice Department. CNet's Declan McCullagh explores the background of the man who won the RIAA's lucrative business for his DC law firm: "An article on his law firm's Web site says that Perrelli represented SoundExchange before the Copyright Royalty Board — and obtained a 250 percent increase in the royalty rate for music played over the Internet by companies like AOL and Yahoo," not to mention Pandora and Radio Paradise. NewYorkCountryLawyer adds, "Certainly this does not bode well for CowboyNeal's being appointed Copyright Czar."
Medicine

What the Papers Don't Say About Vaccines 737

Posted by Soulskill from the headlines-over-reason dept.
jamie tips an article in The Guardian's "Bad Science" column which highlights recent media coverage of the MMR vaccine. A story circulated in the past week about the death of a young child, which the parents blamed on the vaccine. When the coroner later found that it had nothing to do with the child's death, there was a followup in only one of the six papers who had covered the story. "Does it stop there? No. Amateur physicians have long enjoyed speculating that MMR and other vaccinations are somehow 'harmful to the immune system' and responsible for the rise in conditions such as asthma and hay fever. Doubtless they must have been waiting some time for evidence to appear. ... Measles cases are rising. Middle class parents are not to blame, even if they do lack rhetorical panache when you try to have a discussion with them about it. They have been systematically and vigorously misled by the media, the people with access to all the information, who still choose, collectively, between themselves, so robustly that it might almost be a conspiracy, to give you only half the facts."
Earth

Acorns Disappear Across the Country 474

Posted by kdawson from the curiouser-and-curiouser dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Botanist Rod Simmons thought he was going crazy when couldn't find any acorns near his home in Arlington County, Virginia. 'I'm used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it's something I just didn't believe,' said Simmons. Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill. Simmons and Naturalist Greg Zell began to do some research and found Internet discussion groups, including one on Topix called 'No acorns this year,' reporting the same thing from as far away as the Midwest up through New England and Nova Scotia. 'We live in Glenwood Landing, N.Y., and don't have any acorns this year. Really weird,' wrote one. 'None in Kansas either! Curiouser and curiouser.' The absence of acorns could have something to do with the weather and Simmons has a theory about the wet and dry cycles. But many skeptics say oaks in other regions are producing plenty of acorns, and the acorn bust is nothing more than the extreme of a natural boom-and-bust cycle. But the bottom line is that no one really knows. 'It's sort of a mystery,' Zell said."

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