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The Internet

Submission + - Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
El Reg
El Reg writes: "Showing a new-found resolve to crack down on self-serving edits, Wikipedia has banned contributions from all IPs addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology. According to Wikipedia administrators, this marks the first time such a high-profile organization has been banished for allegedly pushing its own agenda on the 'free encyclopedia anyone can edit.' The Register has the full story."
Security

Homeland Security To Scan Citizens Exiting US 676

Posted by timothy from the subtle-messages dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The US Department of Homeland Security is set to kickstart a controversial new pilot to scan the fingerprints of travellers departing the United States. From June, US Customs and Border Patrol will take a fingerprint scan of travellers exiting the United States from Detroit, while the US Transport Security Administration will take fingerprint scans of international travellers exiting the United States from Atlanta. The controversial plan to scan outgoing passengers — including US citizens — was allegedly hatched under the Bush Administration. An official has said it will be used in part to crack down on the US population of illegal immigrants."

Comment Web rewriting tools (Score 1) 79

by laburu (#28131397) Attached to: SourceForge To Acquire Development Portal Ohloh.net

Even AdBlock and NoScript may not be enough. I've read about a recent trend where adverts are hosted directly on the content server. So if your website "requires" JavaScript and/or people have whitelisted it, ads will get through because the scripts and images are hosted directly on your website. Bastards.

In case you are willing to do something about it:

the last of which is hosted by... SourceForge.
The Courts

Allegedly Rigged Product Demo In SAP Suit Goes Missing 210

Posted by timothy from the dig-deep-fellas dept.
narramissic writes "Waste Management sued SAP in March 2008 over a failed ERP project. Now, well into the pre-trial discovery process, a presale product demonstration software package that Waste Management says was a key element of the 'false representations' SAP made to 'induce Waste Management into entering a software licensing and implementation agreement' has gone missing. Naturally, both sides say the other has it. And SAP, for its part, says it has 'searched extensively' for the system and wants it 'as much or more' as Waste Management, since it 'will help SAP disprove WM's fraud claim.'"
Medicine

Submission + - Doctors Scan Photo ID for Treatment (philosecurity.org)

Submitted by
Sherri Davidoff
Sherri Davidoff writes: "Spurred by the FTC's "Red Flags Rule," more health care clinics are requiring photo identification and storing high-resolution copies in their computer systems. Ironically, this probably puts patients at greater risk of identity theft, not less. From the article: "Walking into the doctor's office, I was surprised to see a new sign which read: 'Red Flag Identity Theft Rule: We are now required by law to ask for a Photo ID at the time of each visit. Please have your Photo ID ready for the receptionist to scan.' As an avid bicyclist, I wasn't carrying a driver's license. 'I'm sorry, we'll have to reschedule you,' said the receptionist.

"Everyone should have access to medical care- not just people who have registered with the government and obtained a photo ID. Furthermore, patients should have the right to health care without being forced to give up control of our personal information. As a patient, I don't really want a copy of my Photo ID stored on a crappy unpatched Windows box at my doctor's office. Today's patients do not even have the right to know how well doctor's offices and hospitals are secured, even in the face of constant reports of medical data breaches. That's sick.""
Businesses

SourceForge To Acquire Development Portal Ohloh.net 79

Posted by timothy from the get-your-conspiracy-on dept.
SourceForge, Inc. (parent company of Slashdot, and the corporate overlord of SourceForge.net and ThinkGeek) announced today plans to purchase Ohloh, a three-year-old Seattle company that runs Ohloh.net, a software-development portal that specializes in the community aspects of distributed open source projects. The purchase will probably be final as of next month. (I hope no one requires that I show up to an office, just because one will be nearby.)
Security

Submission + - Homeland Security to scan citizens exiting US (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: The US Department of Homeland Security is set to kickstart a controversial new pilot to scan the fingerprints of travellers departing the United States. From June, US Customs and Border Patrol will take a fingerprint scan of travellers exiting the United States from Detroit, while the US Transport Security Administration will take fingerprint scans of international travellers exiting the United States from Atlanta. The controversial plan to scan outgoing passengers — including US citizens — was allegedly hatched under the Bush Administration. An official has said it will be used in part to crack down on the US population of illegal immigrants.
Education

Submission + - Charge Vendors for Software Deployed in Schools

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ZDNet blogger posed the following suggestion "Rather than our public-sector education organisations paying for software, they should in fact not only get the software for free, they should actually be billing the software vendors for the right to place their wares and branding in front of millions of school students. Much like television and radio stations offer up a bidding system to advertisers who want to capture the eyes and ears of the 'audience', schools could operate a bidding process where vendors bid for accessing student's attention for their software."
Censorship

Submission + - Spanish SGAE goes where no RIAA has gone before (elmundo.es)

Submitted by Planetalia
Planetalia writes: Just when you thought RIAA — sueing deceased people, sick pepole, children and elders — had reached its limit, the spanish version of it — SGAE — has gone where no other RIAA has gone before. On May 26th, four people knocked on the door of Jose Manuel Carrasco — the owner of two spanish torrent sites, told him they had a search warrant and proceeded to rummage for over two hours throughout his house, testing computers and browsing through personal information like contacts and emails. During that time, Jose Manuel managed to reach his lawyer and it turned out that these people did not actually have a search warrant, and had simply lied to get entry to the house. They had to leave the hard drives behind, and on leaving one of them told Jose Manuel "We shouldn't have allowed you to speak to your lawyer".
Image

Bitterness To Be Classified As a Mental Illness 511

Posted by samzenpus from the that-should-fix-everything dept.
Some psychiatrists are trying to get excessive bitterness identified as a mental illness named post-traumatic embitterment disorder. Of course this has some people who live perfect little lives, and always get what they want, questioning the new classification. The so called "disorder" is modeled after post-traumatic stress disorder because it too is a response to a trauma that endures. "They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It's one step more complex than anger. They're angry plus helpless," says Dr. Michael Linden, the psychiatrist who put a name to how the world works.
Space

Submission + - Pulsar Signals Could Be Used For Interstellar GPS (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "We're all familiar with GPS. It consists of a network of satellites that each broadcast a time signal. A receiver on Earth can then work out its position in three-dimensional space by comparing the arrival times of the signals from at least three satellites. That's handy but it only works on Earth. Now astronomers say that the millisecond signals from a network of pulsars could allow GPS-style navigation on a galactic scale. They propose using four pulsars that form a rough tetrahedron with the Solar System at its centre, and a co-ordinate system with its origin at 00:00 on 1 January 2001 at the focal point of the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, the radio telescope near Cambridge in the UK that first observed pulsars. The additional complexity of sending signals over these distances is that relativity has to be taken into account (which is why the origin is defined as a point in space-time rather than just space). The pulsar GPS system should allow users to determine their position in space-time anywhere in the galaxy to within a few nanoseconds, which corresponds to an accuracy of about a metre."
Windows

Submission + - Asus slaps Linux in the face (techgeist.net) 2

Submitted by
vigmeister
vigmeister writes: "Techgeist has an article about an 'It's better with Windows' website from Asus and MS. I think the article should've been title 'Asus stabs Linux in the back'. "Linux just got a major slap in the face today from Asus. One of the highlights of Linux going mainstream was the wildly popular Asus Eee PC preinstalled with a customized Linux distro geared towards web applications. While I personally never got what the big deal was, I was still happy for all the Linux people out there waiting for this day, but it looks like the cause for celebration won't be lasting much longer. Asus and Microsoft have teamed up and have made a site called It's Better With Windows. The page touts how easy it is to get up and ready with Windows on an Asus Eee PC, while slyly stating that you won't have to deal with an "unfamiliar environment" and "major compatibility issues." While it is silly to state such a thing since Asus built the Linux distribution specifically for the Eee PC, I give Microsoft two points for snarky comments.""
Medicine

Submission + - Stair Climbing Wheelchair Discontinued

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Johnson & Johnson quietly sold the last iBOT, ending the manufacture of the revolutionary stair climbing wheelchair whose wheels rotated up and over one another to go up and down steps using gyroscopes that sense and adjust to a person's center of gravity — but which failed to sell more than a few hundred a year. Now iBOT users who fear their chairs wearing out are joining high-profile inventor Dean Kamen, best known for his Segways, in lobbying Congress for reimbursement changes that they hope could revive a technology that left the market with a $22,000 price tag but that Medicare deemed worth about $6,000. "If I ever had to get out of this chair, I really don't know if I'd want to live anymore, to be honest with you," says Alan T. Brown who is mostly paralyzed from the chest down and on his second iBOT. "Guys in these chairs ... we might be disabled now, but then we'd really become disabled." The iBOT episode also sends a cautionary signal about pricey innovation. Today's emphasis is to expand access to health care rather than provide pricier improvements, says University of Michigan business professor Erik Gordon. "To a certain extent, there are breakthroughs we just can't afford.""
Earth

Submission + - Paint the World White to Fight Global Warming 2

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Dr. Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white and said at the opening of the St James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium that by lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the color of cement, it would be possible to cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world's cars off the roads for 11 years. Pale surfaces reflect up to 80 per cent of the sunlight that falls on them, compared with about 20 per cent for dark ones, which is why roofs and walls in hot countries are often whitewashed. An increase in pale surfaces would help to contain climate change both by reflecting more solar radiation into space and by reducing the amount of energy needed to keep buildings cool by air-conditioning. Since 2005 California has required all flat roofs on commercial buildings to be white and Georgia and Florida give incentives to owners who install white or light-colored roofs. Put another way, boosting how much urban rooftops reflect would be a one-time carbon-offset equivalent to preventing 44 billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. For the first time, we're equating the value of reflective roof surfaces and CO2 reduction," says Dr. Hashem Akbari. "This does not make the problem of global warming go away. But we can buy ourselves some time.""
Programming

Submission + - Maintaining/Optimizing Inherited C/C++/Java Code

Submitted by mrise
mrise writes: Hi, on more and more projects, I end up needing to port, integrate, maintain, and optimize other people's code I've never seen before. I work mainly in C/C++ with some Java, mainly in embedded applications, fairly low-level, performance-challenged, and mostly on Linux.

I use basic profiling tools, but I often get bogged down reading through code trying to understand what's what. I often end up rewriting too much code just trying to get it working well. Do good tools and/or methodologies exist which can help me- some sort of super profiler/debugger that helps me with understanding data structures and code flow? Even just cross-referencing the variables and identifying what is global/static... would help.

Optimization often involves refactoring code- things like loop optimizations, recoding to leverage SIMD effectively, redoing data layouts for cache optimization, restructuring exception handling, etc. Nasty stuff, like endian issues really frustrate me. Are there any analysis tools that identify these things and help guide optimizations? Any favorite references to all the code optimizations I should be considering?

Beyond this, I'm increasingly migrating sequential code to parallel threaded code- pthreads and OpenMP. Any additional pointers?

I appreciate any and all suggestions. Thanks.

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