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Comment: The "Queen" is just a normal person. (Score 1) 212

by Futurepower(R) (#43674759) Attached to: Did the Queen Just Resurrect the Snooper's Charter?
Manipulation of men can function only if the men do not realize they are being manipulated. The fact that the connection is not obvious is necessary to make manipulation function.

Pretending that someone is especially important only because she is the member of a family is not honest.

Comment: Dishonesty is not healthy. (Score 1, Flamebait) 212

by Futurepower(R) (#43673253) Attached to: Did the Queen Just Resurrect the Snooper's Charter?
You said, "The Queen's speech will have been written for her by Parliament, so in instances like this, her opinions are not really her own."

Notice that you are suggesting that dishonesty is acceptable.

I lived in the U.K. for 5 months with an English woman. We were interviewing each other for marriage. It was my impression that allowing constant dishonesty helped English women manipulate English men. If the English culture is arranged such that the Queen can lie and be accepted, other women can lie and their lies will be accepted.

+ - Massive 17-Year Cicada Swarm Has Arrived on the East Coast

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The swarm has officially arrived. After 17 years of lurking beneath the ground, cicadas are hatching and popping out of the dirt like six-legged daisies. Thousands of insects will infest yards all along the East Coast--so you'd better be ready. The brood, which is known as Magicicada Brood II, is emerging as the ground begins to thaw. They only begin to fight their way out of the dirt once the soil eight inches below the surface reaches a balmy 64 degrees."

+ - Microsoft is killing Linux shops with Secure Boot

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Here are some examples (Dutch so I passed the links through Google Translate)

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mingos.nl%2F&act=url

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hettes.nl%2F

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Flinuxcomputers.nl%2F

It's now impossible to buy a Linux laptop in the Netherlands. You HAVE to pay for Windows, even though you don't want to use that OS at all.

Seems like we're back to square one. And the worst part is, nobody seems to care. No outcry from the developer community. It's really sad. We don't seem to give a shit about freedom and choice."

+ - Explaining the persistence of Microsoft in the Enterprise->

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes "Galen Gruman writes in InfoWorld about the persistence of Microsoft technologies in the enterprise. He notices that IT groups are the most likely buyers fro Windows tablets, despite their users preference for Android and IOS tablets. He blames this on "in-breeding" within IT groups — who simply expect Microsoft technologies "to extend into the newfangled technologies such as mobile and cloud". IT groups, he writes, will wait for Microsft to deliver the technologies that are already available from other sources. He summarizes the status of Microsoft's offerings thus:
"It's clear Microsoft's strategy is to withhold its better technologies to force users to stick with the inferior Windows platforms. IT is waiting for that magic day when Microsoft's Windows delivers beyond the legacy desktop.
Users, meanwhile, have moved on. They'll buy more tablets than PCs this year, and adoption will only accelerate as users start augmenting their PCs at work with tablets, not just buy them for home use as is usually the case today""
Link to Original Source

+ - The $99 Linux supercomputer ..->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Chip-company Adapteva announced on April 15th at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, California, that they've built their first Parallella parallel-processing board for Linux supercomputing, and that they'll be sending them to their 6,300 Kickstarter supporters and other customers by this summer."
Link to Original Source

+ - YouTube wins again 3

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Once again YouTube has defeated Viacom and other members of the content cartel; once again the Court has held that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act actually does mean what it says. YouTube had won the case earlier, at the district court level, but the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, although ruling in YouTube's favor on all of the general principles at stake, felt that there were several factual issues involving some of the videos and remanded to the lower court for a cleanup of those loose ends. Now, the lower court — Judge Louis L. Stanton to be exact — has resolved all of the remaining issues in YouTube's favor, in a 24-page opinion. Among other things Judge Stanton concluded that YouTube had not had knowledge or awareness of any specific infringement, been 'willfully blind' to any specific infringement, induced its users to commit copyright infringement, interacted with its users to a point where it might be said to have participated in their infringements, or manually selected or delivered videos to its syndication partners. Nevertheless, 5 will get you 10 that the content maximalists will appeal once again."

+ - Small doses of 'sewer gas' could greatly boost food, biofuel production->

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes "Low doses of hydrogen sulfide, which has been implicated in some of Earth's mass extinctions, could greatly enhance plant growth, bringing a sharp increase in global food supplies and plentiful stock for biofuel production. In the new research reported April 17 in the journal PLOS ONE, University of Washington biologist Frederick Dooley set out to examine the toxic effects of hydrogen sulfide on plants, but he mistakenly used only one-tenth the amount of the toxin he had intended. The results were so unbelievable that he repeated the experiment. Still unconvinced, he repeated it again – and again, and again. In fact, the results have been replicated so often that they are now “a near certainty,” he said."
Link to Original Source

+ - Taking the pain out of debugging with live programming->

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes ""Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place," Brian Kernighan once wrote (adding: "So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?") However, Sean McDirmid, a researcher at Microsoft, has been working to remove some of the pain from debugging. McDirmid, based at Microsoft Research Asia, has been studying ways of implementing usable live programming environments: a solution that is less intrusive than classical debuggers. The idea is to essentially provide a programming environment in which editing of code and the execution of code occur simultaneously — and in the same interface as code editing — with tools to track the state of variables in a more or less live manner."
Link to Original Source

+ - US Bill to Ensure A Free Internet->

Submitted by halls-of-valhalla
halls-of-valhalla writes "The United States Congress is working on proposing a bill intended to "promote a global Internet free from government control and to preserve and advance the successful multistakeholder model that governs the Internet".

A primary intent of this bill is to demonstrate an opposition to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), however many critics believe that ulterior motives behind the new proposition include limiting the authority of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

One US Representative, Marsha Blackburn, states, "With all the problems we face domestically and internationally, the last thing we need is to back away from aggressively defending Internet freedom. Failing to [pass the bill] would send an incredibly bad and discouraging message to the rest of the world and put our innovators here at home in a very difficult position".

Many supporters of the bill claim that the primary concern of the bill is to send a message to the world that the US is opposed to a takeover of Internet governance by the United Nations' ITU.

Many critics worry that the bill, with it's current wording, would hinder attempts to combat cyber crime and to maintain a safe, free flow of information on the Internet. However, the bill is currently still in the development stages, so this wording may soon change."
Link to Original Source

+ - Alien code in our DNA? 1

Submitted by dnrck
dnrck writes "News.com
http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/we-are-star-people-scientific-proof-we-were-created-by-aliens/story-fn5fsgyc-1226617200225
reports this week on the the theory that due to it's extreme orderliness, dna is actually extraterrestrial derived. N.B. Evidently, before writing their very serious piece, the News authors failed to notice the publishing date of their source material (20130401)
http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/could-an-alien-message-be-embedded-in-our-genetic-code-130401.htm
Regardless of the intent, the original articles and papers
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.6739.pdf
provide a very thought provoking topic which has been weighed in by everyone from Astrobiologists to ID Creationists.
What do Slashdotters think?"

+ - IRS wants to tax Silicon Valley Free Lunches->

Submitted by CuteSteveJobs
CuteSteveJobs writes "The IRS wants to tax tech companies who provide employees with free food. Unfortunate timing because while the IRS looks at a new tax, the GAO has released a report criticizing the government for a high-level of waste as have Citizens Against Waste in their "Pig Book". I don't get free lunches, but what about free coffee?"
Link to Original Source

+ - The Freedom From Information Act->

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes "Thomas Claburn at InformationWeek says, "In June 2007, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to learn more about the basis for Google's complaint that Microsoft's implementation of desktop search in Windows Vista violated the terms of its 2002 antitrust consent agreement. In September 2011, I was notified that material relevant to my request would be provided, with a $15 fee to cover copying costs. I sent the check the following month and it was cashed in November 2011. It then took more than a year of hectoring the Department of Justice and the intercession of the Office of Government Information Services to actually get the "responsive materials." The documents arrived in late March. After six years, the truth can finally be told. What follows is an excerpt from an email sent by Kulpreet Rana, Google's director of intellectual property, to Justice Department attorney Aaron Hoag, dated Oct. 4, 2006. Thanking Hoag for taking the time to meet the previous week, Rana wrote, "During that meeting, you raised a few questions that we wanted to follow-up on. Rather than waiting to get all of the answers, I wanted to get back to you on some of the more pressing issues...probably the most important of which is REDACTED."""
Link to Original Source

When it is incorrect, it is, at least *authoritatively* incorrect. -- Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy

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