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Submission + - Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Your Friends (thenextweb.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook’s ongoing war on pseudonyms is well-documented. The company wants everyone to use their real name on the social network, and ideally this would be their only identity on the Internet. Menlo Park often bans users that use fake names (most are spammers, but many are just using pseudonyms), but it recently went further than that: the company is now asking you to snitch on your friends if they are not using their real name.
Businesses

Submission + - Can Microsoft really convince people to subscribe to software? (xconomy.com)

curtwoodward writes: "For most consumers, monthly subscriptions are still something for magazines and cable TV. With Office 365, Microsoft is about to embark on a huge social experiment to see if they'll also pay that way for basic software.
But in doing so, Microsoft has jacked up prices on its old fee structure to make subscriptions seem like a better deal. And that could really leave a bad impression with financially struggling consumers."

Security

Submission + - ShowIP Firefox add-on secretly leaks URL data (sophos.com)

An anonymous reader writes: According to researchers at Sophos, a popular Firefox add-on appears to have started leaking private information about every website that users visit to a third-party server, including sensitive data which could identify individuals or reduce their security.

ShowIP is designed to "show the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar" and is used by over 170,000 Firefox users.

However, the full URL of every webpage visited is sent to the Germany-based ip2info.org website, using unencrypted connections.

In addition, the add-on has no warning that sites you visit might be disclosed, no privacy policy small print explaining its behaviour, and no apparent way to opt-out of the data-sharing.

Science

Submission + - Researchers Model Pluto's Atmosphere, Find 225 mph Winds (txchnologist.com)

MatthewVD writes: "Pluto may have been downgraded to a dwarf planet, but researchers modeling its wisp of an atmosphere continue to find that it is asurprisingly complex world, particularly when it comes to weather patterns. Howling winds that sweep clockwise around the planet at up to 225 mph — though the atmosphere is so thin, it would only feel like 1 mph hour on Earth. The algorithms used to model the atmosphere will be helpful in studying far more complex atmospheres, like Earth's."

Comment Re:To whoever tagged story as uk (Score 1) 157

Proper spanish translation is "Estadounidense".

They use it in Ecuador as well. I lived and worked there for most of 1998, Spanish being my working language. With no alternative languages to use my Spanish got quite good in the end, to the point that people from Spain could easily identify where I learnt it (Ecuador o Peru). They used "estadounidense" as an adjective for people from the U.S., and generally inferred that you meant something/someone from South America if you said "americano/a". Using "americano" about someone from the U.S. was plain wrong, they didn't get annoyed, most just didn't understand what you meant.

By the way, the Argentinian dialect of Spanish is by far the coolest one I've heard. It's to Spanish what the Scottish accent is to English :)

Comment Re:placebo means... (Score 1) 349

Aliens are an other race and react different to medications. meds that are effectieve to alien races and and the mysterious race called "women" are more difficult to create.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Comment Re:java's performance depends heavilly on applicat (Score 1) 195

Even better: that "import" statement just tells the compiler how to resolve names: All names in the output .class file are fully qualified, and only the classes actually referenced by the code need be loaded. If you have an import statement that isn't used, or that pulls too much; it becomes irrelevant at runtime. Also, you don't actually have to import any classes; you may refer to them by their fully qualified names, and the exact same .class file is output either way.

Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 1077

The good news is that most of those strings also have numeric equivalents, so you can still (try) to get things to work - just as long as the variable names you chose do not conflict with reserved words in that language. For instance, in English, you would normally say:

setMode("GRAPH","FUNCTION")

but you could instead use

setMode("1","1")

to do the same thing in every language. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for every option.

Comment Re:Drivers??? (Score 1) 265

What I find really weird is that on Windows, the default paper size is always "letter", when most people use A4.

In the United States, just about everyone uses "US Letter" (8.5 in. × 11 in., or 216 × 279 mm), and not "A4" (210 × 297 mm), which means that oftentimes on Linux, you have to remember to switch from A4 to Letter. In other words, there isn't really a sensible default for everyone.

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