Comment: Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs (Score 1) 275
So, Mr oBama would have a Levenshtein distance of 1 with oSama then? Good job there.
And 0 distance with Hussein...
Comment: Re:News!!! Make something and be bashed!!!! (Score 1) 158
I know my English is bad, but your lack of understanding exceeds it.
Do I need "excuses" and am I "lazy" because I don't want to write a script myself and choose to play a game ???????????
Back to the original question: "what's wrong with you guys?"
Answer: I don't know, but I feel something is very wrong from the community perspective. Everybody seems turning to the "dark side".
Comment: Re:News!!! Make something and be bashed!!!! (Score 1) 158
If you are > 40, you should now Time is relative. I have kids. Playing is something I share with them, tinkering (sadly) not. I didn't want to buy them a game console. I like to share with them other values.
Steam doesn't "waste" my time. I decide to waste my time with Steam.
That's the kind of reasoning that harms our community. I'll rephrase it to you (in my very primitive English):
For lost of reasons I decide to waste my time playing instead of tinkering so I wellcome those who make this possible.
If Debian community can't conceive this scenario, then perhaps it's time to move to another distro (or another OS).
Comment: News!!! Make something and be bashed!!!! (Score 1) 158
What happen to you guys? I'm no engineer, but i'm no newbie. I'm a doctor, I don't have time to tinker with everything in my PC. So when I installed steam on one of my Debian machines (I had Ubuntu but for ethical reasons returned to Debian) and it didn't work out I felt disappointed. I DON'T HAVE TIME to make the changes myself. So, when someone does it an shares it I'd say good for us all.
And the one that said "...Ubuntu is an African word that means "I can't configure Debian"...": that's old, boring, false, trollish, etc. I CAN configure lots of things in all of my Debian machines.
Debian could be the acronym of "I can't stand Unity" or "I don't sell myself to corporations".
But, seriously, guys... that attitude is NOT what makes out OS a great one.
So: F'You (quoting Linux). And thanks to the guy doing the real work.
Comment: Right to be deleted (Score 5, Insightful) 104
I tried to get my account deleted: the say they can't (!!!!). There's an option to "deactivate" my account. We need laws enforcing our right to disappear from a service.
+ - International observers could face criminal charges in Texas->
Submitted
by
mescobal
mescobal (1516701) writes "Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott warned international election observers not to come closer than 100 feet from a pollng place; otherwise, they could be subject to criminal prosecution.
The warning was addressed to a group of international observers who intend to monitor polls.
The OCSE (http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections) an UN affiliated organization of observers was concerned about voter ID issues among other things."
Link to Original Source
The warning was addressed to a group of international observers who intend to monitor polls.
The OCSE (http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections) an UN affiliated organization of observers was concerned about voter ID issues among other things."
Link to Original Source
+ - Blackhole's 'point of no return' found-> 1
Submitted
by
dsinc
dsinc (319470) writes "Using a continent-spanning telescope, an international team of astronomers has peered to the edge of a black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. For the first time, they have measured the black hole’s “point of no return” — the closest distance that matter can approach before being irretrievably pulled into the black hole.
According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a black hole’s mass and spin determine how close material can orbit before becoming unstable and falling in toward the event horizon. The team was able to measure this innermost stable orbit and found that it’s only 5.5 times the size of the black hole’s event horizon. This size suggests that the accretion disk is spinning in the same direction as the black hole.
The observations were made by linking together radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, and California to create a virtual telescope called the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT. The EHT is capable of seeing details 2,000 times finer than the Hubble Space Telescope."
Link to Original Source
According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a black hole’s mass and spin determine how close material can orbit before becoming unstable and falling in toward the event horizon. The team was able to measure this innermost stable orbit and found that it’s only 5.5 times the size of the black hole’s event horizon. This size suggests that the accretion disk is spinning in the same direction as the black hole.
The observations were made by linking together radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, and California to create a virtual telescope called the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT. The EHT is capable of seeing details 2,000 times finer than the Hubble Space Telescope."
Link to Original Source
+ - Google's Self-Driving Cars: 300,000 Miles Logged, Not a Single Accident Under Co->
Submitted
by
Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The automated cars are slowly building a driving record that's better than that of your average American."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - NASA Upgrades Mars Curiosity Software ... From 350M Miles Away->
Submitted
by
CWmike
CWmike writes "Picture doing a remote software upgrade. Now picture doing it when the machine you're upgrading is a robotic rover sitting 350 million miles away, on the surface of Mars. That's what a team of programmers and engineers at NASA are dealing with as they get ready to download a new version of the flight software on the Mars rover Curiosity, which landed safely on the Red Planet earlier this week. 'We need to take a whole series of steps to make that software active. You have to imagine that if something goes wrong with this, it could be the last time you hear from the rover,' said Steve Scandore, a senior flight software engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 'It has to work,' he told Computerworld. 'You don't' want to be known as the guy doing the last activity on the rover before you lose contact.'"
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - The Apple vs. Samsung Trial is Already Over
Submitted
by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Jared Newman writes that it seems that the purpose of Apple's trial against Samsung escapes most people — it isn’t about getting compensation for products that were released in 2007, it’s about protecting the products that Apple will release in 2013 and 2015 and beyond — and Apple has already won that fight. Earlier this year, Ron Amadeo of Android Police analyzed the design of Samsung’s Galaxy S III and called it “the first smartphone designed entirely by lawyers,” because it avoids nearly all of Apple’s trade dress claims against earlier products. "Unlike Samsung’s previous Galaxy S phones, the S III doesn’t have a perfectly rectangular shape with uniformly rounded corners, and size of the bezels on each side of the screen are not equal," writes Newman. "Samsung also abandoned the colorful square app icons found in earlier versions of its software and removed the stationary app tray from the phone’s app list." Win or lose, Samsung’s reputation is getting dinged in this trial. That’s why you see Conan O’Brien poking fun at Samsung, and not Apple, in a comedy skit. As Jim Dalrymple notes, $2.5 billion is chump change for Apple and in the big scheme of things, it’s not even that much for Samsung, which made $5.9 billion in profits last quarter alone. The bigger issue in this case is whether Samsung can continue to make its products look like Apple’s. "If Samsung has any pride, it’ll keep producing designs that don’t invite accusations of copying," writes Newman. "Recent products suggest that Samsung has already moved beyond that. The legal pressure has already been applied. In the future, may the best product win.""
+ - Google announces privacy changes, you can't opt-ou 2
Submitted
by
bs0d3
bs0d3 (2439278) writes "Google said Tuesday it will require users to allow the company to follow their activities across e-mail, search, YouTube and other services. The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes. The policy will take effect March 1 and will also impact Android mobile phone users, who are required to log in to Google accounts when they activate their phones. People who wish to search anonymously can use startingpage.com"
Comment: Re:Fragmentation (Score 1) 237
Agree with that. I have an Acer Iconia W500 with Kubuntu in it. You can get a very satisfactory tablet experience using the "Search" desktop and any of the KDE applications. Okular for example (PDF viewer and more) is one of the most finger-friendly applications.
GTK3 based applications on the other hand are NOT finger friendly. One example (among many): the changes they made in the layout of scrollbars (they are nearly invisible until you touch a 3 pixel wide zone).
I tried GS, Unity, XFCE and the only DE that isn't a pain to use with a touch interface is KDE (but it still isn't a touch-ready DE). To have a decent browsing experience you have to install an extension to Firefox (Grab and Drag). I still can't make multitouch work though (no 2-finger zoom).
+ - Microsoft Kills IE6->
Submitted
by
pimpsoftcom
pimpsoftcom writes "Microsoft has finally decided to kill off Internet Explorer 6. In a windows team blog post on the official microsoft owned windows team blog site, they recently posted that they will now be doing silent upgrades of IE world wide "real soon now".
While the option was given to allow IE7 and IE8 to linger if corporate policy required it, no such option was given for IE6.
http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/12/15/ie-to-start-automatic-upgrades-across-windows-xp-windows-vista-and-windows-7.aspx
Could this finally be the end of everybody's favorite browser to hate?
As a web developer, I can't help but hope so."
Link to Original Source
While the option was given to allow IE7 and IE8 to linger if corporate policy required it, no such option was given for IE6.
http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/12/15/ie-to-start-automatic-upgrades-across-windows-xp-windows-vista-and-windows-7.aspx
Could this finally be the end of everybody's favorite browser to hate?
As a web developer, I can't help but hope so."
Link to Original Source
+ - Microsoft's Most Exploitable Vulnerability of 2011->
Submitted
by
darthcamaro
darthcamaro (735685) writes "We all know that Microsoft has spread it's share of FUD over the years, though in this case it was likely un-intended. Microsoft rated the MS11-020 vulnerability as having an exploit index of 1 earlier this year, their highest possible rating. Nine months later and no exploits.
Link to Original Source
""This bug was potentially a wormable remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows SMB stack," Tom Cross, manager of IBM's X-Force research group said. The SMB (Server Message Block) network protocol provides shared access to resources and communication between nodes on Windows networks. Microsoft gave the MS11-020 vulnerability an exploitability score of 1, which meant that they expected public exploitation to happen quickly.
Link to Original Source
+ - White House responds to abolish TSA petition-> 1
Submitted
by
ajclements
ajclements (1529359) writes "The White House has, via John Pistole the head of the TSA, responded to the potion to abolish the TSA with a predictably vague 'no'. Pistole explains lists reasons the TSA exists, and explains some of its 10 roadmap."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source