Slashdot

They say a girl should always dress for the man she wants
so why am I laying here thin and bare and gaunt?
It's all because some hacker came and murdered me
So now I'm being dug up so he can cop a plea

I should have gone to free credit report dot com
I could have seen him comin at me like an atom bomb
They monitor your credit and send you email alearts
So you don't end up being used as wormfood in the dirt.

Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding websites with meaningless traffic (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now). Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots.

aahmad writes "If you are like most developers, you believe that although recursive solutions to problems are elegant, they neither perform nor scale as well as their iterative cousins. In the expose, "Quantifying Recursion on the Java Platform", Amin Ahmad blows the pants off this fallacy: all other things being equal, recursive solutions run a factor of 2x-3x faster than iterative ones on Java 6.

That said, the article acknowledges that recursive solutions do not scale well which greatly limits their applicability. I'm curious to hear about other slashdotters experiences with recursion, in particular on the Java platform."

Bushido Hacks writes "His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI gave lapsed Catholics one more reason to skip Church on Sunday by condemning violence in cartoons and video games according to Marcus Yam of Daily Tech. If saving the Princess by slaying a few demons is wrong, then I don't want to be right."

MediaCow.tv writes "Author Jim Hightower just released a humorous piece: What Color Is Your Steak? about the FDA's approval of carbon monoxide gassing of meat to make it more red (a practice outlawed in the EU). According to FDA filings, U.S. retailers failed to capture at least one billion dollars of revenue annually from fresh beef sales, due to product discoloration."

Anonymous Coward writes "We've all heard the jokes about what our colleagues who work from home are wearing — or not. For Tom Mulhall, though, telecommuting naked is no joke. Rather, it's good business. The owner of The Terra Cotta Inn clothing-optional resort and spa in Palm Springs, Calif., says 80% of his guests bring laptops and work nude poolside. He also talks about where guests stash their BlackBerries and offers advice to those looking to give naked telecommuting a whirl. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/012607-bare- facts.html"

greenrom writes "On Sony's PSP connect site there's an ad for Sony's new Gran Turismo HD trailer. Only the image Sony used for the ad is actually this one from Project Gotham Racing 3 — an exclusive title for the Xbox 360. It appears that Sony has corrected the mistake, but the original images can be found on Flickr. Xbox360fanboy has details of the screw-up."

James Haley writes "An organization of Doom community and game industry members have unveiled an open letter to Raven Software and Activision, Inc. requesting that the already-released source code of the games Heretic and Hexen be placed under the GNU GPL. This effort comes after several years of failed discussions via email and an online petition. The open letter can be found online at http://www.doomworld.com/eternity/letter.html."