Comment: Re:Censorship? (Score 1, Troll) 420
Ah, the "both sides do it" defense. So that makes it OK, then?
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Comment: Re:1984 is not an instruction manual, David (Score 1) 329
Where's a "-1 Pedantic" when you need one?
Comment: Re:Hope! (Score 1) 522
Great! Thanks for the advice.
Comment: Re:Hope! (Score 5, Interesting) 522
> In my mind, this comes down to whether we want a better functioning OS or an OS that adheres to the mindset that I think attracted many of us to Linux in the first place.
I'm not even convinced that it makes for a better-functioning OS. I've been a Debian user for 12 years, mostly running 'testing' distributions. When systemd first turned up, I let it run for a couple of weeks, but switched back to sysV after half of my startup daemons didn't. Tried it again a month or two later, but when it had trouble stopping Samba (and, worse, claiming that it would wait *five* *minutes* before killing the processes, I decided enough was enough, and now I'm in the process of switching all five of my Debian boxes to Gentoo. Now, granted, the testing distribution is for just that purpose -- testing -- but if I'm dealing with the kind of idiot that would claim that systemd results in faster startups, but thinks that a five-minute wait to shut down a process is acceptable, then I want no part of it.
Debian should listen to what its users want, rather than just its developers. We're not all technically ignorant.
Comment: None of the above (Score 1) 151
No skycar. At all. I have enough trouble dealing with nitwits on the road in 2-D.
Comment: Re:Python is eating Perls lunch (Score 1) 387
> Python 3 is the first break in backward compatibility this century!
Yep. And why is that not backward compatible too? Why don't they aim to get it right the first time? And if they don't get it right, why change it when that breaks previous uses?
I'd also remind you that we're not very far into this century yet. If that was supposed to be sarcasm, it fell short.
> Python 2.x up to 2.9 is and will be backwardly compatible with python 1.6
Then how come my Debian system needed 2.6, 2.7 _and_ 2.8 all installed at one point? Why do Pythin apps and libraries keep breaking because somebody introduced a subtle change somewhere?
Whatever Python is, it's not very robust.
I still say it's the new shiny-shiny. Nothing more.
Comment: Re:Python is eating Perls lunch (Score 3, Insightful) 387
Uh-huh. And when the Python people learn something about backward compatibility and make up their minds (so we all don't have to keep half-a-dozen different versions of it lying around), then it might actually get somewhere. Until then, it's just the new shiny-shiny.
+ - Buzz Aldrin wants President Obama to announce new space exploration initiative->
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MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington (1084047) writes "While he has initiated the social media campaign, #Apollo45, to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the first moon landing, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin is also using the occasion to campaign for an expansion of American space exploration. According to a Tuesday story in the Washington Post, Aldrin has expressed the wish that President Obama make some sort of announcement along those lines this July 20. The idea has a certain aspect of déjà vu.
Aldrin believes that the American civil space program is adrift and that some new space exploration, he prefers to Mars, would be just the thing to set it back on course. There is only one problem, however. President Obama has already made the big space exploration announcement. Aldrin knows this because he was there.
President Obama flew to the Kennedy Space Center on April 15, 2010, with Aldrin accompanying as a photo op prop, and made the announcement that America would no longer be headed back to the moon, as was the plan under his predecessor George W. Bush. Instead American astronauts would visit an Earth approaching asteroid and then, decades hence, would land on Mars."
Link to Original Source
Aldrin believes that the American civil space program is adrift and that some new space exploration, he prefers to Mars, would be just the thing to set it back on course. There is only one problem, however. President Obama has already made the big space exploration announcement. Aldrin knows this because he was there.
President Obama flew to the Kennedy Space Center on April 15, 2010, with Aldrin accompanying as a photo op prop, and made the announcement that America would no longer be headed back to the moon, as was the plan under his predecessor George W. Bush. Instead American astronauts would visit an Earth approaching asteroid and then, decades hence, would land on Mars."
Link to Original Source
+ - Japan's Missing Plutonium: How dangerous material falls through the cracks-> 1
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Lasrick
Lasrick (2629253) writes "Japan's missing plutonium has been found, but the larger point of this article remains: 'Most people would agree that keeping track of dangerous material is generally a good idea. So it may come as a surprise to some that the arrangements that are supposed to account for weapon-grade fissile materials—plutonium and highly enriched uranium—are sketchy at best. The most recent example involves several hundreds kilograms of plutonium that appear to have fallen through the cracks in various reporting arrangements.'"
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - President of UT Austin declines chancellor's request to resign-> 2
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lfp98
lfp98 (740073) writes "President Bill Powers has long been in conflict with Governor Rick Perry over the direction and goals of the University of Texas' flagship Austin campus. This week, news leaked that the Chancellor requested Powers' resignation before this Thursday's meeting of the Regents (who are all Perry appointees), under threat of being fired at that meeting if he did not resign. So far Powers has refused, while expressing an openness to leaving after the end of the current academic year [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/06/bill-powers-ut-resign_n_5562317.html]. Powers is highly regarded by UT students, faculty, alumni [http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/college-sports/texas-longhorns/20140706-alumni-letter-calls-university-of-texas-president-s-forced-resignation-a-travesty.ece] and the larger academic community, but has been criticized by Perry and other conservatives for not being sufficiently focused on providing educational services at the lowest possible cost. Powers' supporters view the forced dismissal as brazen political interference with University governance, primarily for the purpose of allowing Perry to influence the choice of a new president before he leaves office in December [http://chronicle.com/article/As-Fight-Over-U-of-Texas/147535/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en]."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - Website Pays Dearly for Fighting Negative Review->
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WubbaDucki
WubbaDucki (548885) writes "An online retailer that threatened to "fine" a couple $3,500 for leaving a negative review online a website has now been ordered to pay $306,750 in compensation and legal fees. John and Jennifer Palmer won the verdict as compensation for KlearGear damaging their credit record with a bogus debt claim.
Back in 2009, Jennifer Palmer left a negative review of the company after it failed to deliver two desk toys ordered by her husband. Three years later, KlearGear demanded that the couple withdraw the review within 72 hours or face a fine of $3,500. The fine is for violating a non-disparagement clause in the company's terms of sale, which says that customers cannot write negative reviews about their products or purchases."
Link to Original Source
Back in 2009, Jennifer Palmer left a negative review of the company after it failed to deliver two desk toys ordered by her husband. Three years later, KlearGear demanded that the couple withdraw the review within 72 hours or face a fine of $3,500. The fine is for violating a non-disparagement clause in the company's terms of sale, which says that customers cannot write negative reviews about their products or purchases."
Link to Original Source
+ - Microsoft's No-IP.com Domain Seizure Causing Outages For SonicWall Customers->
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cgriffin21
cgriffin21 (1880716) writes "Microsoft's recent seizure of 23 domains from No-IP.com, a Reno, Nev.-based company that provides a popular free dynamic DNS service, is causing outages for millions of legitimate users of the service — and apparently, at least one security vendor. The No-IP.com outages are having an impact on some customers of SonicWall, a vendor of network security and content control hardware appliances, Marc Harrison, president of Silicon East, a Manalapan, N.J.-based SonicWall partner, told CRN Tuesday."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - IEEE launches anti-malware services to improve security
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Aryeh Goretsky
Aryeh Goretsky (129230) writes "The IEEE Standards Assocation has launched an Anti-Malware Support Service (AMSS) to help the computer security industry respond more quickly to malware.
The first two services available are a Clean file Metadata Exchange [PDF], to help prevent false positives in anti-malware software, and a Taggant System [PDF] to help prevent software packers from being abused.
Official announcement is here."
The first two services available are a Clean file Metadata Exchange [PDF], to help prevent false positives in anti-malware software, and a Taggant System [PDF] to help prevent software packers from being abused.
Official announcement is here."
+ - Austria dumps provider protection, TOR exit nodes illegal-> 1
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Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Austria: The operation of TOR exit nodes was declared a criminal offense by a regional criminal court. The ruling of the court affects not only TOR Exit nodes but all servers which could be used for fraud."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - More lack of accountability from Congress->
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schwit1
schwit1 (797399) writes "Who says they’re conservatives? The House Ethics committee, run by Republicans, has quietly eliminated the requirement that elected officials list any privately sponsored travel they receive in their annual financial-disclosure forms.
The move, made behind closed doors and without a public announcement by the House Ethics Committee, reverses more than three decades of precedent. Gifts of free travel to lawmakers have appeared on the yearly financial form dating back its creation in the late 1970s, after the Watergate scandal. National Journal uncovered the deleted disclosure requirement when analyzing the most recent batch of yearly filings. “This is such an obvious effort to avoid accountability,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “There’s no legitimate reason. There’s no good reason for it.”
Once again more evidence that we the voters must replace as many of these crooks, from both parties, as we can."
Link to Original Source
