Slashdot

Torodung writes "In a recent move, Comcast has proposed a 'P2P Bill of Rights,' joining the ranks of every great monopoly when threatened by government regulation for alleged misbehavior. They have instead proposed comprehensive industry self-regulation and cooperation with major P2P software vendors as a lesser evil: 'Comcast is looking to further position itself as proactively — and responsibly — addressing the issue of managing peer-to-peer traffic that traverses its network, announcing Tuesday it will lead an industry-wide effort to create a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for users and Internet service providers.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Engineers' focus and attention to details, along with their perceived lack of social skills, make them ideal targets to be recruited as terrorists, according to EETimes. Planning skills make engineers good 'field operatives' was written up by Raphael Perl, who heads the Action against Terrorism Unit of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He offers that 'Engineers ideally make excellent strategic planners, and they make excellent field operatives. They think differently from how other people think.' That may sound like a stereotype, but Perl claims that 'because of those traits, terrorist groups actively recruit engineers.' He says that Al-Qaeda has widely acknowledged that a significant number of the group's top leadership had engineering backgrounds." This is the second time in just a few months that engineers have been likened to terrorists.

Ian Lamont writes "The chair of Yale's CS department and Connecticut's former consumer protection commissioner are calling for the creation of a robust biometric authentication system on a national scale. They say the system would safeguard privacy and people's personal data far more effectively than paper-based IDs. They also reference the troubled Real ID program, saying that the debate has centered around forms of ID rather than the central issue of authentication. The authors further suggest that the debate has led to confusion between anonymity and privacy: 'Outside our homes, we have always lived in a public space where our open acts are no longer private. Anonymity has not changed that, but has provided an illusion of privacy and security. ... In public space, we engage in open acts where we have no expectation of privacy, as well as private acts that cannot take place within our homes and therefore require authenticating identity to carve a sphere of privacy.' The authors do not provide any suggestions for specific biometric technologies, nor do they discuss the role of the government in such a system. What do you think of a national or international biometrics-based authentication scheme? Is it feasible? How would it work? What safeguards need to be put in place?"

BlueMonk writes "After 2 years of development and testing, version 2 of the Scrolling Game Development Kit, rewritten from the ground up in C#, has been released. The program is an IDE to assist newcomers and experienced developers to relatively easily create resources and assemble them into functional scrolling games based on DirectX. The new version is highly customizable in that almost all the runtime code is embedded in the project data file and can be edited and saved with the project. No runtime other than .NET and DirectX is required to play the compiled games."
http://sgdk2.sourceforge.net/release/

giorgist writes "I have a lot of computers at work, and they sit idle for most of the time. Is it possible to muster them all together and get them cracking on some problem of our own choosing ? We have a cluster doing computations and time on it is limited. Maybe I can setup another were I can run packets on idle computers. People from work can join in and take "packets" home and run them on their computers at home while they work. G"

Google tells Computerworld that Google Apps has "millions of active users", though only a small fraction of businesses and groups — "several thousand" according to Google Apps senior product manager Rajen Sheth — are paying the $50/user annual subscription today. While its collaboration features still trump Microsoft's in-beta Office Live Workspace, some analysts and paying users say Google Apps needs to add more features and apps to be a true Office-killer — features that Sheth hints are just around the corner.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9054120&intsrc=hm_list

Time Slows Down writes "While most people are aware that rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper and paper covers stone, there is a psychological element to the game which many players may have missed. Recent research shows that rock is the most popular of the three possible moves in the game. That means that your opponent is likely to choose paper, because they will expect to you to start the game with stone so by going with scissors, you achieve an early victory. The scissors strategy has proven very successful in the past — in 2005 it secured auction house Christie's a £10 million deal. Rock, paper, scissors is also found in nature. A team of biologists described the curious mating strategies of a species of European lizard where some male lizards (call their type "rock") use force, invade the territory of fellow males to mate with females, others ("paper") favor deception, waiting until females are unguarded and sneaking in, and others ("scissors") work by cooperation, joining together to protect one another's females. Scientists speculate that such games may also describe human behavior in the corporate world, where strategies of force (takeovers), deception (fraud) and cooperation (mergers) also seem to supplant one another in an endless loop."

juct writes "In their yearly top 20 security risks the Internet Storm Center names web applications as top risk for servers: "Every week hundreds of vulnerabilities are reported in commercially available and open source web applications, and are actively exploited." The number one problem they list is "PHP Remote File Include". So why not spend a little time to secure your web server now. heise Security has a writeup on Basic PHP security with practical examples."
http://www.heise-security.co.uk/articles/97299

Anonymous Coward writes "The human penis is comparatively larger than that of the other great apes because of our comparatively larger brains, gynecologist Edwin A. Bowman explains in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Through millions of years evolution the infant babies' skulls became larger in order to accommodate bigger brains, explained Dr. Bowman. This in turn led to a female pelvis become larger to allow women to give birth to children with larger brains, and this led to the female vagina also becoming less tight."
http://pressesc.com/news/2689_27122007_large-human-brain-led-large-penis/

bowman9991 writes "New Line and Peter Jackson have settled their differences over profits for The Fellowship of the Ring and Jackson has signed on for not one but two movies. So how closely will the new Hobbit films follow J.R.R. Tolkien's book? And why two rather than one? What characters are likely to return and how different will the two films be?"
http://sffmedia.com/content/view/161/38/

ultimatemonty writes "I was just tasked with starting a new project at work where I have to design and implement a plug-in based application architecture for a .Net 2.0 application. The basics are the pluggable app is a Windows Service that loads configurable plugins as .dlls. The service does nothing but act as a host application — the .dlls will do all the work. I've been Googling my tail off with very little success in finding some starting points for designing plug-in architectures. The couple of articles I have found are either unavailable or extremely vague in their content. Does the Slashdot community have any good resources/recommendations for developing a plug-in based architecture?"

LetterRip writes "If you had free reign to sculpt Blender into the ideal professional game content creation tool, what sort of features would you like added and what sort of changes would you like to see be made? What features do you think need the most improvement to fit into a professional game developers work flow? The Blender Foundations game project team Apricot wants to know."

IBM DeveloperWorks (registration required) has a tutorial on developing Python activities for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computers. It covers the XO laptop architecture, internals, and talks about its application environment with the Sugar UI written in Python , accessible to everyone (including kids). Explore the APIs and learn how to develop and debug a graphical activity using Python, and platform emulation with QEMU (for those /. ers that did not order their own). The G1G1 program is running through 31 December.

1sockchuck writes "Facebook is adding 2 million new users a week, and recently maxed out the data center space at its California facilities. The load on the company's servers "continues to increase at a pretty astounding rate," says Facebook engineer Jason Sobel, who said the fast-growing social networking service has added a data center in Virginia, which is now serving 30 percent of its traffic. Sobel also discusses how Facebook sorts out which data gets stored on the East Coast and West Coast, which has meant some fine-tuning of its MySQL code to properly update Memcached."
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7899307130

desNotes writes "IBM DeveloperWorks (registration required) has a tutorial on developing Python activities for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computers. It covers the XO laptop architecture, internals, and talks about its application environment with the Sugar UI written in Python , accessible to everyone (including kids). The tutorial explores the APIs and shows how to develop and debug a graphical activity using Python, and platform emulation with QEMU (for those /. ers who did not order their own). The G1G1 program is running through 31 December."