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+ - Valve's Economist Yanis Varoufakis Appointed Greece's Finance Minister->

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn (898314) writes "A turnover in the Greek government resulted from recent snap elections placing SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) in power — just shy of an outright majority by two seats. Atheist and youngest Prime Minister in Greek history since 1865 Alexis Tsipras has been appointed the new prime minister and begun taking immediate drastic steps against the recent austerity laws put in place by prior administrations. One such step has been to appoint Valve's economist Yanis Varoufakis to position of Finance Minister of Greece. For the past three years Varoufakis has been working at Steam to analyze and improve the Steam Market but now has the opportunity to improve one of the most troubled economies in the world."
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+ - Ubisoft revokes digital keys for games purchased via unauthorised retailers->

Submitted by RogueyWon
RogueyWon (735973) writes "For the last several days, some users of Ubisoft's uPlay system have been complaining that copies of games they purchased have been revoked from their libraries. According to a statement issued to a number of gaming websites, Ubisoft believes that the digital keys revoked have been "fraudulently obtained". What this means in practice is unclear; while some of the keys may have been obtained using stolen credit card details, others appear to have been purchased from unofficial third-party resellers, who often undercut official stores by purchasing cheaper boxed retail copies of games and selling their key-codes online, or by exploiting regional price differences, buying codes in regions where games are cheaper to sell them elsewhere in the world. The latest round of revocations appears to have triggered an overdue debate into the fragility of customer rights in respect of digital games stores."
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+ - Is the time over the code websites from scratch?

Submitted by thomawack
thomawack (3990089) writes "As a designer I always do webdesign from scratch and put them into CMSMS. Frameworks are too complicated to work into, their code usually too bloated and adaptable online solutions are/were limited in options. Also despite I know my way around html/css, I am not a programmer. My problem is, always starting from scratch create menus, forms and now everything responsive too, it has become too expensive for most customers. I see more and more online adaptive solutions that seem to be more flexible nowadays, but I am a bit overwhelmed in checking everything out because there are so many solutions around. Is there someting your readers can recommend? Be it an online adaptive website or a CMS that works similar, which are very flexible but bring a good basis / templates?"

+ - The Blue Book is Open

Submitted by argStyopa
argStyopa (232550) writes "130,000 pages of declassified files from Project Blue Book (and its predecessors) has been posted online at http://www.theblackvault.com/ the result of decades of FOIA requests. Previously the National Archive has had these available in microfilm, but this is the first posting of the full collection online. Somehow, there is no mention of Roswell 1947 in the documents, leaving conspiracy theorists something to chew on as well."

+ - Ansel Adams Act Would Allow Photographs in Public Spaces-> 1

Submitted by davidannis
davidannis (939047) writes "Photographers have been harassed for taking pictures in public places since 9/11. One was arrested for participating in an Amtrak contest. The park service is charging fees. Representative Steve Stockman (R, Texas) addresses the problem with the Ansel Adams Act which he introduced today. It says "It is contrary to the public policy of the United States to prohibit or restrict photography in public spaces, whether for private, news media, or commercial use." The act prohibits government agencies from prohibiting photography for National Security Reasons without a court order, from charging photographers fees, and prohibits equipment from being confiscated.

Federal law enforcement officers or private contractors shall not seize any photographic equipment or their contents or memory cards or film, and shall not order a photographer to erase the contents of a camera or memory card or film.

"
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Comment: Re:What the hell (Score 2) 168

by damacus (#48312195) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Single Sign-On To Link Google Apps and Active Directory?

The OP is using GAFE, Google Apps for Education. It's basically the same as the commercial offering. Students don't create their own accounts, the district likely has a process in place that automatically provisions the new accounts using something like Google Apps Directory Sync or a 3rd party app that uses the Google Accounts APIs. Kids / employees go to sign in and it Just Works. (TM).

(Source: I've implemented GAFE / GADS at a K-12.)

+ - Google Owes A Woman Money After Photos Of Her Cleavage Appeared In Street View

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi (2955715) writes "A judge has ruled in favor of a Montreal woman who says Google invaded her privacy after a photo of her sitting outside of her house with part of her breast exposed appeared on Google Street View. Now Google must pay up to the tune of $2,250. According to a 17-page decision, Maria Pia Grillo suffered shock and embarrassment when she looked up her house using Google Maps' Street View feature in 2009 and discovered an image that shows her leaning forward and exposing cleavage. Even though the original image, which was snapped by one of Google’s camera-equipped cars, blurred out her face, the rest of the picture provided enough information to identify her."

+ - Ask Slashdot: Is large scale video for entertainment a wise use of the internet? 1

Submitted by LessThanObvious
LessThanObvious (3671949) writes "In today's world services like Netflix, Youtube, Hulu and Amazon Instant Video are ubiquitous and generate a large amount of real time video traffic on the web. The question I put to you is whether or not this activity is a reasonable and healthy use of internet resources and is it a healthy social trend for the evolution of the internet? Is the internet to become a national or global replacement for broadcast television? Do massive video providers have any social obligation to cache content close to the users the serve to save WAN bandwidth? Do you believe the internet is prepared to absorb exponential growth in real time video along with traditional data traffic? Does there ever come a point when the internet has to split into functional zones whatever those may be (i.e. Business, Entertainment, Public, Government, Domestic, International, etc)? I do not mean for this to be a discussion of Net Neutrality, please set that aside in as much as it is possible in such a debate."

+ - We Gave Away 123 Million Books During World War Two->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Information wants to be free? During the Second World War, it actually was. Publishers took advantage of new printing technologies to sell crates of cheap, paperback books to the military for just six cents a copy, at a time when almost all the other books they printed cost more than two dollars. The army and the navy shipped them to soldiers and sailors around the world, giving away nearly 123 million books for free. Many publishers feared the program would destroy their industry, by flooding the market with free books and destroying the willingness of consumers to pay for content. Instead, it fueled a postwar publishing boom, as millions of GIs got hooked on good books, and proved willing to pay for more. It's a freemium model, more than 70 years ago."
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+ - OpenBSD Works To Emulate systemd-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Through a Google Summer of Code project this year was work to emulate systemd on OpenBSD. Upstream systemd remains uninterested in supporting non-Linux platforms so a student developer has taken to implementing the APIs of important systemd components so that they translate into native systemd calls. The work achieved this summer was developing replacements for the systemd-hostnamed, systemd-localed, systemd-timedated, and systemd-logind utilities. The hope is to allow for systemd-dependent components like more recent versions of GNOME to now run on OpenBSD."
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+ - Did Sundance Vacations Forge A Court Order To Suppress Online Criticism?->

Submitted by IonOtter
IonOtter (629215) writes "Matt Haughey, founder of MetaFilter, has challenged a Cease & Desist letter from Sundance Vacations, a seller of time-shares with a reputation for aggressive sales tactics and suppression of criticism. Only this time, it seems that the plaintiff may have forged court documents ordering Mr. Haughey, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines to remove any and all mentions of the links and posts in question. Legal blog, Popehat has picked this up as well, prompting Ken White to wryly note, "...Sundance Vacations is about to learn about the Streisand Effect." The story is gaining traction, and being picked up by Boing-Boing, as well as hitting the first page of search results on Google."
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+ - Lara Croft explores her players through data mining

Submitted by jtogel
jtogel (840879) writes "Whenever you play a game of Tomb Raider: Underworld, a comprehensive record of your playing activities is collected on servers at Square Enix. Pretty much everything is tracked: from number of deaths, causes of death, requests for help, total and relative play time and rewards collected. Researchers at the University of Bonn, Fraunhofer IAIS and Northeastern University have mined this data to identify how playing behavior evolves throughout the entire game.
Using unsupervised behavioral clustering algorithms on gameplay data from 62,000 players, they identified six archetypes that both offered explanatory strength and representation value difference. Confirming earlier work that clustered players into Runners, Pacifists, Solvers and Veterans, this research found consistent spread of behavior at all levels of the game except when the design of a level enforced defined play attitudes. What’s more, playing styles vary and evolve as you play the game. This research helps game designers identify how players change from one type of behavior to the other, for example move from novice to expert, or from a non-paying user to become a paying user. (So that they can put all their effort into the ones that will eventually pay?)"

+ - Firefox 32 Arrives With New HTTP Cache, Public Key Pinning Support

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 32 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include a new HTTP cache for improved performance, public key pinning support, and easy language switching on Android. Firefox 32 has been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Changelogs are here: desktop and mobile."

+ - Ask Slashdot: When is It Better to Modify the ERP vs. Interfacing It?

Submitted by yeshuawatso
yeshuawatso (1774190) writes "I work for one of the largest HVAC manufacturers in the world. We've currently spent millions of dollars investing in an ERP system from Oracle (via a third-party implementor and distributor) that handles most of our global operations, but it's been a great ordeal getting the thing to work for us across SBUs and even departments without having to constantly go back to the third-party, whom have their hands out asking for more money. What we've also discovered is that the ERP system is being used for inputting and retrieving data but not for managing the data. Managing the data is being handled by systems of spreadsheets and access databases wrought with macros to turn them into functional applications. I'm asking you wise and experienced readers on your take if it's a better idea to continue to hire our third-party to convert these applications into the ERP system or hire internal developers to convert these applications to more scalable and practical applications that interface with the ERP (via API of choice)? We have a ton of spare capacity in data centers that formerly housed mainframes and local servers that now mostly run local Exchange and domain servers. We've consolidated these data centers into our co-location in Atlanta but the old data centers are still running, just empty. We definitely have the space to run commodity servers for an OpenStack, Eucalyptus, or some other private/hybrid cloud solution, but would this be counter productive to the goal of standardizing processes. Our CIO wants to dump everything into the ERP (creating a single point of failure to me) but our accountants are having a tough time chewing the additional costs of re-doing every departmental application. What are your experiences with such implementations?"

+ - You're Paying Comcast's Electric Bill-> 3

Submitted by agizis
agizis (676060) writes "We know Comcast is rolling out a new WiFi network that they're installing in customer’s homes, but most articles glossed over the routers' power usage. So using a Kill-A-Watt power meter, I actually measured and Comcast is saving tens of millions per year on the backs of their customers. Sign my change.org petition asking Comcast to compensate its customers."
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The shortest distance between two points is under construction. -- Noelie Alito

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