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Submission + - French law to allow police to plant spyware 1

Submitted by ICantFindADecentNick
ICantFindADecentNick writes: In a classic case of "think of the children" lawmaking the French senate is debating the "Loppsi 2" law which amongst its wide ranging 48 articles includes more telephone tapping and video surveillence (now renamed video protection) and the right of the police to plant spyware.
Lemonde carries the story here (google translation fairly acceptable) http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemonde.fr%2Fpolitique%2Farticle%2F2010%2F09%2F06%2Fle-senat-se-penche-sur-la-loppsi-2-heteroclite-fourre-tout-legislatif_1407540_823448.html%23ens_id%3D1407597
Zeropaid also has an english language discussion. http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86252/new-french-loppsi-2-law-proposal-to-allow-police-to-upload-malware-to-file-sharers/

Submission + - Build your own Open Source WAN Optimization Device (trafficsqueezer.org) 1

Submitted by trafficsqueezer
trafficsqueezer writes: Build your Open Source WAN Optimization device with Traffic Squeezer.

Traffic Squeezer is a free Open-Source Linux WAN Network Traffic Accelerator.

URL: www.trafficsqueezer.org
Traffic Squeezer is free software, developed and distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The software has been made free(open-source) so that it gives you the freedom to use a program, study how it works, improve it, and share it with others.

Traffic Squeezer does WAN Acceleration with the technologies such as Traffic Compression, Traffic PDU Coalescing, Protocol Specific Acceleration (ex: TCP Acceleration Mechanisms), Quality of Service, etc.

Interested user groups/Organizations can test and make us various use-cases of Traffic Squeezer which fits their use-case scenarios, especially optimizing their Satellite based communication links. Traffic Squeezer is FREE Open-Source any one can also participate, support, as well subscribe services.

Comment It's not just partitioning (Score 1) 165

by ICantFindADecentNick (#31295304) Attached to: Exploring Advanced Format Hard Drive Technology
After the "linux doesn't handle it story" a couple of weeks ago http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/02/14/1541244/Linux-Not-Quite-Ready-For-New-4K-Sector-Drives I wondered if the mis-alignment was what was causing my poor postgres performance on the WD Caviar Green. After quite a lot of effot moving things around I didn't actually see any noticeable difference. Now I'm left wondering whether the mis-alignment effect is dwarfed by the effort of reading 3.5K of a 4K block for every random 0.5K block write. The fact that the disk is lying to the driver is the big deal here. Does anybody know how to force the linux sd driver to use 4k blocks regardless of the what the disk tells it about blocksize?
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus from the less-math-more-social-science dept.
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
Image

Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki Screenshot-sm 249

Posted by samzenpus from the 9cm-edited dept.
sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"
Idle

Canadian Blood Services Promotes Pseudoscience 219

Posted by samzenpus from the type-A-negative-personality dept.
trianglecat writes "The not-for-profit agency Canadian Blood Services has a section of their website based on the Japanese cultural belief of ketsueki-gata, which claims that a person's blood group determines or predicts their personality type. Disappointing for a self-proclaimed 'science-based' organization. The Ottawa Skeptics, based in the nation's capital, appear to be taking some action."
Programming

Haskell 2010 Announced 173

Posted by kdawson from the eddie-and-the-beav dept.
paltemalte writes "Simon Marlow has posted an announcement of Haskell 2010, a new revision of the Haskell purely functional programming language. Good news for everyone interested in SMP and concurrency programming."

Comment I wouldn't start there (Score 2, Interesting) 32

It's an interesting test looking for something you know, but you do have to be careful extrapolating the quality of the data from some edge cases. For those who don't know London well, Barkingside is an eastern suburb about 15 miles from the centre, where a lot of the original "East Enders" moved after the war. If you did a similar test for New York you'd be doing something out past Newark NJ. It's not exactly where you'd start your mapping effort.
Image

Race Car Made With Veggies And Powered By Chocolate Screenshot-sm 83

Posted by samzenpus from the mad-lib-motors dept.
IS4110 writes "A new racing car made with potatoes and carrots and powered with chocolate waste has been developed by the Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre of the University of Warwicks in the UK. The university's vehicle, called WorldFirst F3 project, has a steering wheel made of curran, a material derived from carrots, that is expected to replace glass fiber and carbon fiber. It also has a racing seat made of SoyFoam, a soybean oil-based, flexible foam material. Wing mirrors incorporate materials derived from potato starch, a bib made from flax fiber, and lubricants based on plant oils."
Power

Submission + - Planned Obsolesence

Submitted by
ICantFindADecentNick
ICantFindADecentNick writes: "I've had power supplies for several devices give up on me over the last year. Notably two HomePlug powerline ethernet bridges and two external PSUs for USB hard drive cases. I was starting to suspect dirty power (although the disks were on surge protectors — obviously the Homeplugs weren't) but then the post mortem on the devices showed bulging capacitors. The problem of bad capacitors is reasonably well documented — but checking on the rated life of the replacement components I see that it's only 2000 hours even when they're not bad. These devices are in my servers — they're meant to be left on and 2000 hours is only 83 days. Annoyingly they can hold out a bit longer than that and seem to just manage to see out their 1 year warranty period. So the question for Slashdot is — Is this what other people are seeing? Isn't it outrageous — and shouldn't we be demanding a decent design life of either the capacitors themselves of the switching PSU designs which stress them?"

Comment Re:"Happy Ending" not necessary (Score 1) 519

by ICantFindADecentNick (#19465463) Attached to: The Sopranos Ends With a ...
It's not just that it doesn't need to have a neatly tied up ending - it's that it doesn't have to spoon feed it to you. The Sopranos are trying to break you out of the bad Hollywood habits like making sure that everybody in their demographic can understand it instantly. Go and watch some European cinema for example. You actually can't resolve who did what in Hidden (Caché) - and it doesn't matter - it isn't what it was about.

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