Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:not surprised at racism and naive WASPs (Score 2) 1737

Perhaps when you finish high school you will have learned some basic probability so you won't be amazed at such events.

Well, the problem with your figures is that you are assuming a randomly selected jury. That is not how it works, although your figures are perhaps representative of the pool of potential jurors. The defense and state lawyers have some flexibility to reject potential jurors that they feel would be biased. The state in this case would have wanted to reject white or hispanic men while the defense would probably want to reject blacks. Given those strategies, the likelihood of eliminating all blacks from sample of Florida's population if fairly high. I bet you could eliminate blacks form the jury in 90% or more of that state's trials if a lawyer was so inclined. Perhaps you should finish university and get some real life experience applying statistics in real life circumstances before you shoot off about your mastery of a subject.

Comment Re:Yes. (Score 1) 660

Wrong. Apple may have the biggest single device, but that's only because they refuse to give their own fans choice. They're #1 with 32% of the market, which means everyone else is choosing the larger alternatives.

Comment Death of $60 games is greatly exaggerated (Score 4, Insightful) 435

Are you kidding? There are men out there who will pay $200 if a woman will just get naked and call him daddy for an hour. Anyone who thinks gamers won't pay $1.50/hour for a game is crazy. Hell, I pumped more than 6 quarters an hour into arcade games once a week when I was a kid, and that's back when you'd actually pick up a quarter in the street if you found one.
Cloud

What Happens To Your Files When a Cloud Service Shuts Down? 592

MrSeb writes "Megaupload's shutdown poses an interesting question: What happens to all the files that were stored on the servers? XDA-Developers, for example, has more than 200,000 links to Megaupload — and this morning, they're all broken, with very little hope of them returning. What happens if a similar service, like Dropbox, gets shut down — either through bankruptcy, or federal take-down? Will you be given a chance to download your files, or helped to migrate them to another similar service? What about data stored on enterprise services like Azure or AWS — are they more safe?" And if you're interested, the full indictment against Megaupload is now available.
Security

Hackers Get Their Own Scoreboard and Rankings 106

wiredmikey writes "Sometimes hacking is about money; other times, it's about competition, and when that happens, it is also about getting a little credit. Enter RankMyHack.com. The site is described as the world's 'first elite hacker ranking system,' and invites people to submit proof of their Website hacks in exchange for points — the higher the points, the higher the place on the leader board. In order to get ranked, hackers need to prove they have indeed hacked a site – by inserting a predetermined text into the hacked site page. Rankmyhack then scans for the text in the page and gives score based on how popular the website is, with lower points awarded for XSS attacks. Assuming the site is real – and early reports indicate that it is – hackers can now see where their hacks stack up against those of their peers. Will this morph into a playground for hacktivists to hone their skills?"
Image

Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook Screenshot-sm 60

Dmitry Dulepov writes "Magento is a very popular open source e-commerce platform. It was created by the company named Varien in 2007. Varien worked with osCommerce but it did not suit Varien's expanding requirements. After writing more and more changes to osCommerce, Varien finally wrote its own e-commerce software from scratch. It took Varien seven months in 2007 to publish the first public version of Magento." Read on for the rest of Dmitry's review.
Businesses

Ex-Sun Chief Dishes Dirt On Gates, Jobs 241

alphadogg writes "Former CEO of Sun Microsystems Jonathan Schwartz has taken to his personal blog, provocatively titled 'What I couldn't say ...,' to dish some industry dirt and tell his side of the story about the demise of Sun. He has already hinted at plans to write a book, and a new post suggests a tell-all tome could indeed be in the offing. 'I feel for Google — Steve Jobs threatened to sue me, too,' Schwartz writes, apparently referring to Apple's patent lawsuit against HTC, which makes Google's Nexus One smartphone. As for Bill Gates, Schwartz says he was threatening regarding Sun's efforts in the office software space."
Communications

Earliest "Writing" On 60,000-Year-Old Eggshells 214

New Scientist reports on research published in PNAS (abstract here) about what may be the earliest writing yet discovered, on eggshells dated to 60,000 years ago. "Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa. They show the same symbols are used over and over again, and the team say there are signs that the symbols evolved over 5,000 years. This long-term repetition is a hallmark of symbolic communication and a sign of modern human thinking, say the team. [Another researcher is quoted:] 'Judging from what we know about the evolution of art all over the world, there may have been many [written language] traditions that were born, lasted for some time, and then vanished. This may be one of them, most probably not the first and certainly not the last.'"
Google

Nexus One First Phone Linus Torvalds "Doesn't Hate" 308

SpuriousLogic writes "Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being 'mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights' even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems. Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google's Nexus One a couple of days ago."
Google

Mozilla Exec Urges Switch From Google To Bing 527

Andorin writes "Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, has published a brief blog post in which he recommends that Firefox users move from using Google as their main search engine to Bing, citing privacy issues. Disregarding the existence of alternative search engines such as Ask and Yahoo, Dotzler asserts that Bing's privacy policy is better than Google's. Dotzler explains the recommendation with a quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google: 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time...' Ars Technica also covers the story."
Space

Herschel Spectroscopy of Future Supernova 21

davecl writes "ESA's Herschel Space Telescope has released its first spectroscopic results. These include observations of VYCMa, a star 50 times as massive as the sun and soon to become a supernova, as well as a nearby galaxy, more distant colliding starburst galaxies and a comet in our own solar system. The spectra show more lines than have ever been seen in these objects in the far-infrared and will allow astronomers to work out the detailed chemistry and physics behind star and planet formation as well as the last stages of stellar evolution before VYCMa's eventual collapse into a supernova. More coverage is available at the Herschel Mission Blog, which I run."

Slashdot Top Deals

"Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai

Working...