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Education

Exam Board Deletes C and PHP From CompSci A-Levels 663

Posted by samzenpus
from the who-needs-them dept.
VitaminB52 writes "A-level computer science students will no longer be taught C, C#, or PHP from next year following a decision to withdraw the languages by the largest UK exam board. Schools teaching the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance's (AQA) COMP1 syllabus have been asked to use one of its other approved languages — Java, Pascal/Delphi, Python 2.6, Python 3.1, Visual Basic 6, and VB.Net 2008. Pascal/Delphi is 'highly recommended' by the exam board because it is stable and was designed to teach programming and problem-solving."
Space

Supermassive Black Hole Is Thrown Out of Galaxy 167

Posted by samzenpus
from the moving-to-better-quarters dept.
DarkKnightRadick writes "An undergrad student at the University of Utrecht, Marianne Heida, has found evidence of a supermassive black hole being tossed out of its galaxy. According to the article, the black hole — which has a mass equivalent to one billion suns — is possibly the culmination of two galaxies merging (or colliding, depending on how you like to look at it) and their black holes merging, creating one supermassive beast. The black hole was found using the Chandra Source Catalog (from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The direction of the expulsion is also possibly indicative of the direction of rotation of the two black holes as they circled each other before merging."

Comment: Eliminating the Gold farmers (Score 2, Interesting) 158

by Baljet (#27757677) Attached to: Legitimizing Real Money Trading In Games
CCP introduced Game Time cards that can be purchased with real cash and then sold in game. Player rich in game can play from their in-game profits and casual players who would otherwise fund the farmers get cash from them. CCP keep all the money within their system and have virtually eliminated gold-farmers from their universe, it's not worth their time or the consumers risk when compared to the system they've made available themselves. Granted there's no way for a player to get cash out of the system, but once we start doing that there's going to be alot of Treasuries taking an interest in people with tax-free incomes.
Games

EVE Devs Dissect, Explain Massive Economic Exploit 139

Posted by Soulskill
from the this-is-how-you-deal-with-such-events dept.
In December we discussed news that a major exploit in EVE Online had just been widely discovered after being abused by a few players for up to four years, creating thousands of real-life dollars worth of unearned in-game currency. Representatives from CCP Games assured players that the matter would be investigated and dealt with; a familiar line in such situations for other multiplayer games, and often the final official word on the matter. Yesterday, CCP completed their investigation and posted an incredibly detailed account of how the exploit worked, what they did to fix it, how it affected the game's economy, and what happened to the players who abused it. Their report ranges from descriptions of the involved algorithms to graphs of the related economic markets to theatrically swooping through the game universe nuking the malfunctioning structures. It's quite comprehensible to non-EVE-players, and Massively has summarized the report nicely. It's an excellent example of transparency and openness in dealing with a situation most companies would be anxious to sweep under the rug.
The Courts

FTC Kills Dirty Online Check Processing Outfit 82

Posted by kdawson
from the dirty-pretty-checks dept.
coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today got a US District Court to stop permanently what it called the illegal operations of an Internet-based check creation and delivery service, and to require the group to give up over half a million dollars in ill-gotten gains. According to the FTC, Qchex.com created and sent checks drawn on any bank account that a Qchex user identified, but did not verify whether the user had authority to draw checks on that account. As a result, fraudsters worldwide used the Qchex service to draw thousands of checks on bank accounts that belonged to unwitting third parties. 'The evidence shows that the launch of Qchex.com was a "dinner bell" for fraudsters and resulted in a high number of accounts frozen for fraud...' said District Court Judge Janis Sammartino."
Enlightenment

Green I.T.

Submitted by
WeirdMike
WeirdMike writes "Green IT: How Important Is It to You?
Lots of talk lately about "Green IT" — attention to energy-efficiency and, to some degree, other sustainability issues related to IT implementations in the enterprise. How Green IT aware is your business?

1. We've been thinking about Green IT for years
2. Just starting to look at it
3. It's on the to-do list...we'll get to it later this year
4. Not on the radar
5. I think there's some of that growing in my coffee mug"
The Courts

First court system running on FOSS

Submitted by vaidhy
vaidhy writes "One more for India. Allahabad high court in India is now running completely on FOSS software and supports ODF (open document format) and it provides the judgement in RSS format too. Sometime actions speak louder than words."

The improved DIY infrared filter for stygian photogs->

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Digital Cameras


If you have a taste for surreal photography then you'll want to pay attention, goth boy. The kids at Instructables have a new, improved guide for building an infrared filter for your digital cameras and camcorders. While the filter will work with any point-and-shoot, your camera should feature plenty of manual controls over the ISO, exposure, and white balance for best results. The effect is particularly interesting when shooting foliage since chlorophyl is transparent at these wavelengths. As such, scenic landscapes process as lurid white nightmares haunting jet black skies. The longer infrared wavelengths also cut through the dust and haze of the atmosphere (and your tortured mind) better than visible light. The filter assembly consists of an empty bottle of your mom's antidepressants, an old floppy disk of ennui, and a piece of unexposed film processed by the disintegrations of youth. That's it, you're ready to shoot, assuming you can even get out of bed. Now click-on to see the completed filter if you still possess the will.

Continue reading The improved DIY infrared filter for stygian photogs

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!


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Microsoft

Privacy concerns with Windows Vista's Shadow Copy->

Submitted by
lukas84
lukas84 writes "I've written about privacy concerns with Windows Vista's Shadow Copy feature. This feature allows users of the better Windows Vista editions to restore files from a direct online backup, without having to restore from tape.

This however brings new problems, as many people do not know about this new feature, and might consider data deleted which is still on their computer. Especially clearing your browser history might not do what you expect it to do."
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United States

No Climate Change Consensus Among Top Scientists->

Submitted by
Lawrence Person
Lawrence Person writes "When Financial Post reporter Lawrence Solomon started interviewing top scientists who dissented from the global warming orthodoxy, he "accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies...Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop — the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series. Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists — the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects — and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.""
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Sum quod eris.