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Government

Submission + - FBI raids homes of suspected Anonymous hackers (cbsnews.com)

suraj.sun writes: FBI agents conducted raids at four New York residences as well as locations in California Tuesday morning in connection with an ongoing investigation into the hacking group Anonymous, a law enforcement source confirmed for CBS News.

The source said that no arrests were made but agents seized computers and computer accessories under search warrants at four homes of suspected hackers in Baldwin and Merrick both on Long island, in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

CBS News: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/07/19/national/main20080685.shtml

Censorship

Submission + - US Ed Dept demanding principals censor more 3

Toe, The writes: "Education Department officials are threatening school principals with lawsuits if they fail to monitor and curb students’ lunchtime chat and evening Facebook time for expressing ideas and words that are deemed by Washington special-interest groups to be harassment of some students. Under the new interpretation of civil rights laws, principals and their schools are legally liable if they fail to curb “harassment” of students, even if it takes place outside the school, on Facebook or in private conversation among a few youths. When children are concerned, where is the line between protection and censorship?"
Facebook

Submission + - White House, Facebook join forces against bullying (dbune.com)

dbune writes: The White House and social networking site Facebook joined forces Thursday to battle bullying.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michele Obama opened a White House conference on bullying, while Facebook launched two new safety measures that will allow members of the site to privately report content to parents, teachers and other support groups.

Comment Re:1984 (Score 1) 1238

The nature of the United States is that there are primarily two opposing political forces vying for control.

This is quite right, and is what is at issue here. One side has been controlling education for decades...really a century or so, and the other side is finally fighting back, trying to wrest control.

Now, in my opinion, the real answer is decentralization of education, with more homeschooling, and devolving large schools into small, independent (preferably private) neighborhood schools. Then, you have less centralized power for anyone to try to control.

Comment Re:Gates and the defense contractors (Score 1) 449

Too bad the Americans can't tolerate the idea of an empire based on non-American culture and values, as such an empire wouldn't necessarily listen to political and military pressure of the American government as it tries to enforce the ideas of political capitalism, that is, a capitalism providing benefits for the few instead of the many as it feeds the hungry, overweight employees of the American companies and the dictatorships formed by political assassinations.

As much as I tend towards isolationism, it's still hard not to respond that over the past century, at least a couple of "empire(s) based on non-American culture and values" have been proposed and imposed, with somewhat less than positive results.

Comment Re:Monopoly or not. (Score 1) 439

As long as you don't distribute what you create, you are free to do whatever you like with GPL software. You can *use* it however you like. You are not required to even accept the GPL. The only limitation is that you have no right to distribute any derivative works, other than those provided by the GPL, if you choose to accept it. Read COPYING some time.

Comment PHP vs. C++ (Score 3, Insightful) 752

This is idiotic, and is typical of the kind of pseudo-science underlying much of the climate alarmism currently en vogue. Like a lot of things, it is pretty much impossible to quantify which language ultimately uses more power, because of all the variables. As others have pointed out, you might save some power in the deployment of the code, but you would surely use more power in the development of that code. Then, you have to figure out what the total impact of that is, since you'd have more man-hours of coding, using human coders, who sit at desks, in offices, which must be heated and cooled, etc., etc.

Science

Submission + - The Climatic Research Unit hacked, files leaked (wattsupwiththat.com) 5

huckamania writes: The Climatic Research Unit is widely recognised as one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change. Consisting of a staff of around thirty research scientists and students, the Unit has developed a number of the data sets widely used in climate research, including the global temperature record used to monitor the state of the climate system, as well as statistical software packages and climate models.

An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertised an FTP file on a Russian FTP server, here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today:

"We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents"

The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files. It contained data, code, and emails apparently from the CRU. If proved legitimate, these bombshells could spell trouble for the AGW crowd.

Discussion and analysis of the leaked items can be found at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/19/breaking-news-story-hadley-cru-has-apparently-been-hacked-hundreds-of-files-released/#more-12937. The BBC is also reporting but with few details http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8370282.stm.

Security

Submission + - Data leak from climate change research center (examiner.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A significant data leak, apparently from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, may have revealed emails between some of the most prominent researchers in climate change/global warming, as well as a large amount of code and documents. (The leak is reported by the SF examiner, and is currently being dissected on the skeptic blogs.) The authentiicity of the data is still very much in question, as it arrived in a zipbomb via a Russian ftp server. Some are claiming it's a mix of real emails/docs, together with the payload of fake ones. The latter category presumably includes one very senior researcher describing the death of a global warming skeptic as "cheering, in an odd sort of way".

Comment Re:Backwards (Score 3, Insightful) 853

Clinton did the same stuff, FYI. So, you could just say that Obama is continuing Bush's continuation of Clinton's anti-privacy policies.

Yes, you can argue that it's really Congress that is doing this, but there is a lot of coordination, especially when you are talking about a Congress controlled by the same party.

And there isn't a single "right wing" or "left wing" view on this. What it boils down to is a statist view, and an anti-statist view.

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