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Microsoft

Microsoft a Weak Link In Possible Cyber War 371

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the almost-as-bad-as-hfcs dept.
climenole writes 'Microsoft has vast resources, literally billions of dollars in cash, or liquid assets reserves. Microsoft is an incredibly successful empire built on the premise of market dominance with low-quality goods,' says former White House advisor Richard Clarke in a recent book. Microsoft makes the list of risks because so many people have installed its software for critical systems.

Comment: Re:You Cannot Give Offense (Score 1) 783

by LGagnon (#30239178) Attached to: Google Apologizes For "Michelle Obama" Results

Say what you want about the Right (and being an equal opportunity center-of-the-aisle kind of snark, I've said a lot...), they have much thicker skins than the Left, I've noticed."

Except if you make a comment about religion, or abortion, or raising taxes, or anything that makes the pundits on Fox News and AM radio go nutty. If they really were thick-skinned, they wouldn't be reacting with so much illogical rage to everything.

Every joke made about the current administration can never really be just a joke about the current administration, it's either borne of "racism" or a "disturbing indication of a growing violence and unrest."

Except that they actually are making death threats to Obama (at twice the rate that Bush got them), most notably in their "water the tree of liberty" signs (which is a reference to an old quote about violent action). Or have you not noticed the Birthers and Teabaggers carrying those signs (many of which involve racist images of Obama as a witch doctor, monkey, or eating fried chicken and Kool-Aid)?

Funny how you use anecdotal evidence to show a lack of outrage on the part of the right (as we know that works so well) whiloe giving no evidence for your claims that the left is obsessed with being cool (last I looked, the "cool" factor was about being outside of the mainstream, whether people are on the left or right).

Spam

Spam Flood Unabated After Bust 188

Posted by kdawson
from the removing-a-cup-of-water-from-the-sea dept.
AcidAUS writes "Last week's bust of the largest spam operation in the world has had no measurable impact on global spam volumes. The spam gang, known by authorities and security experts as HerbalKing, was responsible for one-third of all spam, the non-profit antispam research group Spamhaus said." The article speculates that the operators of HerbalKing simply passed on to associates the keys to the automated, 35,000-strong botnet, and the spam flow didn't miss a beat.
Education

Australian State May Give Students Linux Laptops 302

Posted by kdawson
from the keep-it-cheap dept.
Whiteox writes "The Australian Prime Minister's plan to equip high schools with 'one laptop per child' may go open source. Kevin Rudd's $56 million digital revolution will include 'laptops [that will] run on an open source operating system with a suite of open source applications like those packaged under Edubuntu. This would include Open Office for productivity software, Gimp for picture editing and the Firefox internet browser.' So far this has been considered for New South Wales and I think other states may follow."
Biotech

Seeing With Your Skin? 138

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the eyes-in-the-back-of-my-head dept.
Iddo Genuth writes to tell us that a researcher from Tel Aviv University is exploring the possibility that humans may be able to "see" via their skin. Professor Leonid Yaroslavsky hopes to utilize this possible technology to find solutions for the blind in addition to new types of image capture that might be able to work where conventional lenses fail. Unfortunately he has a long uphill battle ahead to convince others that his theories are possible. "The lenses currently used for optics-based imaging have many problems. They only work within a limited range of electromagnetic radiation. Relatively, these are still costly devices greatly limited by weight and field of view. The imaging Professor Yaroslavsky has in mind has no lenses and he believes the devices can be adapted to any kind of radiation and wavelength. They could essentially work with a 360-degree field of view and their imaging capability will only be determined by computer power rather than the laws of light diffraction."

Comment: Re:FITD vs DITF (Score 1) 592

by LGagnon (#24965267) Attached to: Researchers Find Racial Bias In Virtual Worlds
That is a load of pseudo-scientific neo-nazi bullshit. Modern science does not recognize race as a natural construct, but as a social construct. None of what you said would be accepted by any real biologist living in this century. It's sad that something like this gets treated as "insightful" on a website that is supposed to have people educated in science amongst its membership.
Image

Waterboarding Attraction Comes to Coney Island 2 Screenshot-sm

Posted by samzenpus
from the wotta-boggin dept.
For the reasonable price of $1 visitors to New York's Coney Island amusement park can watch a man with a black hood pour water on the face of a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit strapped to a table. Unfortunately both men are actually robotic dolls created by artist Steve Powers to protest waterboarding. It's a shame that they couldn't find some college kids to get waterboarded. There are few things I like to do in the summer more than have some beers, get bloated with corn dogs and pour water over the face of someone tied down.
Power

Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election Records Lost

Submitted by ScrappyLaptop
ScrappyLaptop writes "In 56 of Ohio's 88 counties, ballots and election records from 2004 have been "accidentally" destroyed, despite a federal order to preserve them — it was crucial evidence which would have revealed whether the election was stolen. From http://www.alternet.org/story/58328/ :

Under federal and Ohio law, all ballots and election records from federal races must be preserved for 22 months after Election Day, which fell on Sept. 2, 2006. While election integrity activists and reporters from a Columbus website, FreePress.org, had sought the ballots and other election records soon after the presidential election, Blackwell would not allow county boards to release the ballots, citing court challenges to the 2004 results and a 2005 suit from the League of Women Voters alleging the state was not following the newest federal election law, the Help America Vote Act.

On Sept. 11, 2006, U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the election boards "to preserve all ballots from the 2004 Presidential election, on paper and in any other format, including electronic data, unless and until such time otherwise instructed by this Court."

Somehow, the counties never got the message:

"Our staff unintentionally discarded boxes containing Ballot Pages as requested in (Brunner's) Directive 2007-07 due to unclear and misinterpreted instructions," wrote Butler County Board of Election Director Betty McGary and Deputy Director Lynn Kinkaid in a May 9 memo. "Several boxes containing all the wire-bound ballot pages were discarded into a Rumpke dumpster. The dumpster would have been emptied into the local landfill."

"The Hamilton County (Cincinnati) Board of Elections was unable to transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled precinct ballots," wrote John Williams, Hamilton County Director of Elections on May 16, 2007. "To the best if my knowledge, the above ballots were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of '06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system."

"No one could remember the disposition of said ballots," wrote Mike Keeley, of Clermont County's Board of Elections on May 10, 2007, referring to the "unvoted" or unused ballots from the 2004 presidential election.

In Warren County, where county election officials said on Election Day that the FBI had declared a homeland security alert — which they later retracted — ballots were diverted to a warehouse before counting. The local media was not allowed to observe the vote count. According to a letter from the Warren County Board of Election to Brunner's office, the election board cannot find 22,000 unused ballots from the election.

"The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election," said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. "We're in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General's office."

"On the one hand, people will now say you can't prove the fraud," he said, "but the rule of law says that when evidence is destroyed it creates a presumption that the people who destroyed evidence did so because it would have proved the contention of the other side.""
Biotech

Journal: Monsanto Whistleblower Details GM Hazards and Wrongs. 1

Journal by twitter

Those of you who think GM is being done in a careful and precise way need to read this. The author weaves a shocking story of incompetence, corruption, deceit, and ignored warnings of public health dangers. The whistle blower attempted to work with Monsanto to correct problems through practices he learned from other jobs. He was ignored and ostracized.

Data Storage

Cross-OS File System That Sucks Less? 449

Posted by kdawson
from the just-mount-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I recently got an external hard disk with USB 2.0/Firewire/Firewire 800/eSATA to be used for backup and file exchange — my desktop runs Linux (with a Windows partition for games but no data worth saving), and the laptop is a MacBook Pro. So the question popped up: what kind of filesystem is best for this kind of situation? Is there a filesystem that works well under Linux, MacOS X, and Windows? Linux has HFS+ support but apparently doesn't support journaling and there's also an issue with the case-insensitivity of HFS+. Are we stuck with crummy VFAT forever or are there efforts underway to bring a modern filesystem (I'm thinking something like ZFS, BeFS, or XFS) to all platforms? Or are there other clever solutions like storing ISO images and loop-mounting those?"
Windows

Pimp Your XP 272

Posted by kdawson
from the old-dogs dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ezinearticles.com has up an interesting article on how you can improve Windows XP to mimic and even surpass Vista — at least some of its new features. Several of the suggestions cost money and others are free. From improving the user interface with Stardock to mimicking new security features with open source software such as Sudown, the article discusses many ways that die-hard XP users can enhance their environment without moving to Vista."
Science

Vertical Farming 503

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the high-rye's-buildings dept.
SolFire writes "The BBC is running a look at the potential for Vertical Farming in the Big Apple, a concept that promises to reduce the environmental impact of farming and increase the efficiency of food production by building multi-story farm complexes in urban areas. The vertical farm is envisioned as a self sustaining complex of greenhouses stacked on top of each other. More details can be found on the project web site."
Software

Alternatives To Adobe's Creative Suite? 695

Posted by kdawson
from the sure-the-gimp-has-a-plugin dept.
jsepeta writes "I've been using Adobe products for years, and own several older versions of the products from their Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Acrobat Pro, and Dreamweaver. I'd like to teach some graphic design and web production skills to my coworkers in the marketing department, and realize that most of them can't afford $2500 to buy Adobe's premium suite and, frankly, shouldn't need to because there should be competitive products on the market. But I can't seem to locate software for graphic design and printing that outputs CMYK files that printing companies will accept. And I'm not familiar with any products that are better than FrontPage yet still easy to use for Web design. Any suggestions? Our company is notoriously frugal and would certainly entertain the idea of using open source products if we could implement them in a way that doesn't infringe upon our Microsoft-centric hegemony / daily work tasks in XP."
Biotech

The Drive For Altruism Is Hardwired 582

Posted by kdawson
from the good-feels-good dept.
Dekortage writes "The Washington Post is reporting on recent neuroscience research indicating that the brain is pre-wired to enjoy altruism — placing the interests of others ahead of one's own. In studies, '[G]enerosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex... Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.' Such research 'has opened up a new window on what it means to be good,' although many philosophers over recorded history have suggested similar things."
Biotech

Some Soft Drinks May Damage Your DNA 643

Posted by Zonk
from the argh-my-mitochondria dept.
Parallax Blue writes "The Independent is reporting new findings that indicate a common additive called sodium benzoate, found in soft drinks such as Fanta and Pepsi Max among others, has the ability to switch off vital parts of DNA in a cell's mitochondria. From the article: 'The mitochondria consumes the oxygen to give you energy and if you damage it — as happens in a number of diseased states — then the cell starts to malfunction very seriously. And there is a whole array of diseases that are now being tied to damage to this DNA — Parkinson's and quite a lot of neuro-degenerative diseases, but above all the whole process of aging.' European Union MPs are now calling for an urgent investigation in the wake of these alarming new findings."

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."