Comment In memory of Dennis Ritchie... (Score 2) 176
space* dennis_ritchie[];
Comment Re:i know! (Score 1) 284
Debian releases when *everything* is ready, which means that it release well after *some* things are ready. More frequent releases means less pressure on developers to make deadlines, and less pressure on users to upgrade to bleeding-edge software just to get a few new features they want.
Comment Mudge? This might actaully work then. (Score 4, Interesting) 44
If you recall,there was a campaign to make Mudge the USA cyber-czar back when Obama created that post. The guy knows what he's doing, and even now that he's in big-government stuff, the community still trusts him.
Comment Re:The obvious question (Score 0) 315
The GPL is a distribution license. There are no restrictions on the *use* of GPL software - it's not a EULA. So if the programmer isn't distributing his program to other people, the GPL has nothing say say about it.
Comment Re:DNS or IP blocked? (Score 1) 230
TPB's firewall has always blocked ICMP. No one can "ping" them even when everything is working fine.
Submission + - The Vatican lauds hackers (techworld.com.au)
angry tapir writes: "Internet hackers have acquired a dubious reputation for piracy, sabotage and the spilling of sensitive secrets, but an authoritative Vatican publication appears to rehabilitate them and traces parallels between hacker philosophy and the teachings of Christianity. The charitable view of hackers was expressed by the Jesuit priest Father Antonio Spadaro in an article for the fortnightly magazine Civilta Cattolica, the text of which is vetted by the Vatican Secretariat of State prior to publication. Hackers should not be confused with crackers, Spadaro wrote, citing a definition penned by technology writer Eric S. Raymond: "Hackers build things, crackers break them.""
Submission + - Dating site creates profiles from public records (itnews.com.au)
schliz writes: Online dating company Gotham Dating Partners has announced plans to create profiles for non-registered individuals based on publicly available information from social networking sites, e-mail registries, mailing lists, marketing surveys, government census records, real estate listings and business websites. Although the Australian Privacy Commissioner has warned that the automatic creation of identifiable profiles of individuals without their knowledge is "not good privacy practice", Gotham Dating Partners does not expect to face any privacy issues from the move, which is expected to boost its membership from 6.5 million to 340 million worldwide.
Submission + - Tunisia: the first Wikileaks revolution? (blogspot.com)
jgarzik writes: Although a credible case can be made that food prices stirred Tunisian unrest, many are asking if the political changes in Tunisia today, which included President Ben Ali fleeing to parts unknown, is the first Wikileaks revolution?
Comment Re:Function re-ordering inside the image? wow (Score 4, Informative) 141
The Story of Mel! http://foldoc.org/The+Story+of+Mel (That's not the original, that's the "free verse" version which is better IMHO.) It might even be a true story! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Kaye
Thousands of Blackbirds Fall From Sky Dead 577
Dan East writes "In a fashion worthy of a King or Hitchcock novel, blackbirds began to fall from the sky dead in Arkansas yesterday. Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 birds rained down on the small town of Beeb, Arkansas, with no visible trauma. Officials are making wild guesses as to what happened — lightning strike, high-altitude hail, or perhaps trauma from the sound of New Year's fireworks killed them."
Submission + - Thousands of blackbirds fall from sky dead (reuters.com) 1
Dan East writes: In a fashion worthy of a King or Hitchcock novel, yesterday blackbirds began to fall from the sky dead. Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 birds rained down on the small town of Beeb, Arkansas, with no visible trauma. Officials are making wild guesses as to what happened — lightning strike, high-altitude hail, or perhaps trauma from the sound of New Year's fireworks killed them.
Submission + - Slashdot, Meet Slashtags
theodp writes: With content mills like Associated Content and Demand Media joining forces with spammers and marketers to manipulate Google's page-ranking systems, laments Vivek Wadhwa, we're fighting a losing battle for the web and need alternative ways of finding the information that we need. Search startup Blekko, notes Wadhwa, aims to clean up the spam and clutter. In addition to providing regular search a la Google, Blekko allows you to define what it calls 'slashtags' — mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic — to filter the information you retrieve. So if you're looking for info about swine flu, you can add '/health' to your query to search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands of spam sites. Blekko also takes a stab at chronological searches, allowing you to add the slashtag “/date” to the end of a query to retrieve info based on the date on which it was actually created. Always good to see some competition for the big search dogs — hopefully, Blekko will fare better than Cuil (RIP).
Submission + - PS3 with3.50 Firmware jailbroken without downgrade (shoutpedia.com)
Khyber writes: "Hackers: 2 Sony: 0 — that's the current standing score now that the X3 team have successfully performed a jailbreak on the official 3.50 PS3 firmware, allowing homebrew applications and more to be enabled. Here's a video of the jailbreak in action."
Submission + - Leslie Nielsen's Bold Trek to a Forbidden World (discovery.com)
astroengine writes: "Long before Star Trek’s captain Kirk, there was Commander J.J. Adams of United Planet cruiser C57D who dared to visit the Forbidden Planet. Adams, played by a 30-year old Lesley Nielsen who passed away on Nov. 28, explored a deserted planet (save a powerful machine that wiped out their creators), a storyline that was picked up by Gene Roddenberry, underpinning a pilot episode for Star Trek."
Wikileaks Vows Release '7x the Size' of Iraq Leak 491
CWmike writes "WikiLeaks has promised to release a load of information seven times bigger than the Iraq War Logs, which raised the Internet group's profile around the world and caused some nations to take notice of the issue of leaks of top-secret documents online. In a note on Twitter, WikiLeaks said, 'Next release is 7x the size of the Iraq War Logs. Intense pressure over it for months,' and asked supporters to continue donating to the cause. WikiLeaks did not say what the new release of information would be about."
