AlexNicoll writes "I recently completed a DNSSEC library for the .NET platform (thanks to Wouter @ NLNetLabs for his help!). While writing the library, I encountered the extremely entertaining concept of following the long chain of DNS-related RFCs on the IETF website. Some RFCs were obsoleted, some were updated, some updates were obsoleted by others, and some were never really formally related or linked — so even finding them was a challenge in search-fu. Finally, I think I got the whole picture, but I'm not sure. Then I got to thinking: searching for the relevant RFCs in IETF RFC chains was a lot like trying to figure out how (in the US) local, regional, state, and federal laws interact with themselves and each other. Since I just recently moved, I thought I ought to know the rules of the place I live in. It turns out to be just as non-trivial, if not more so, than parsing RFC chains. So here's the question: given that the processes are somewhat similar, does anyone know of a project that has tried to consolidate all the information in one place, so that it's in one comprehensive and up-to-date document, for either laws or RFCs?" Update: 05/24 14:24 GMT by KD : Ray Bellis from Nominet took up the challenge and compiled dependency graphs for DNS-related RFCs.

Download Squad has a quick review, with video, of Zen Coding (Google Code project page here), an extremely well-thought-out accelerator for anyone who codes HTML. Its syntax is CSS-like. Zen Coding has been around for a while — here's its author Sergey Chikuyonok's introduction in Smashing Magazine from last November — and it has now picked up support for more than a dozen editing environments, including Notepad++ and TextMate.

An anonymous reader writes "MATLAB, an important package of mathematical software heavily used in industry and academia, has had support for 64-bit machines for several years now. However, the MATLAB developers still haven't gotten around to implementing even basic arithmetic operations for 64-bit integers. Attempting to add, divide, subtract, or multiply two 64-bit integers will result in an error message saying that the corresponding method does not exist. As one commentator put it, 'What is the point of having numerical data types that can't be manipulated?'" The post notes that the free MATLAB clone GNU Octave deals with 64-bit integers just fine.

eldavojohn writes "Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has requested receipts and research documents relating to nearly half a million dollars in state taxpayer money used to conduct climate change research at the University of Virginia while under direction of Michael Mann, originator of the famous 2001 IPCC Hockey Stick graph depicting rapid climate change. Mann appears to be a prime target for Cuccinelli — who has also requested hearings with the EPA to contest the grounds of their carbon dioxide studies. Mann's expenditures of taxpayer money may become problematic if Cuccinelli finds violations of Virginia's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. Cuccinelli has been active in pushing conservative views in the past, including an effort to remove the titillating mammary from the beloved Great Seal of Virginia. No end in sight for the politicizing of the science and research surrounding climate change."

crimeandpunishment writes "Every government in the world is dealing with cybercrime, but they're all doing it on their own. In the context of 'cyberwar' saber-rattling on all sides, getting governments to share information is a challenge. But an international security conference this week in Dallas is aimed at doing just that — even if only on an informal basis."

eldavojohn writes "We've had a lot of discussion about what the overturning of FCC v Comcast means for net neutrality, but CommLawBlog argues that net-neut is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the effects of this ruling. In the National Broadband Plan, local TV broadcasters might be forced to give up their spectrum 'voluntarily' to be repurposed for broadband; this decision diminishes the FCC's authority to cut such deals. Another issue at stake is how this will affect the FCC's approval of Comcast's acquisition of NBC."

rollcall writes "A new free and open source tool, OpenDLP, has been released that will help organizations fight data loss caused by stolen laptops, missing HDDs, or compromised systems. OpenDLP is managed from a centralized Web application and it can simultaneously send and control thousands of non-intrusive agents to Microsoft Windows systems over NetBIOS that look for user-defined regular expressions in data at rest. When sensitive data is found, the agents 'phone home' to the Web app with their results. While organizations have continued to lose sensitive data even though many commercial products are available to help prevent this, perhaps the introduction of a free alternative will finally spur organizations to locate their sensitive data proactively before it is lost."

Lanxon writes "Wired followed US Army Staff Sergeant Kevin Rosner into Afghanistan to see first-hand the tools, tactics, and pressures involved in coordinating military airstrikes. This lengthy piece explores the people and technology involved in high-risk airborne warfare, from their perspective. From the article: 'Strapped to his chest, Rosner carries a handheld video player called a "Rover," built by L3 Communications, a New York-based defense contractor. The device, the size and shape of a PSP game console and costing tens of thousands of dollars, reads signals transmitted by the camera pods strapped to the underside of all NATO fighter aircraft. With his Rover, Rosner can see everything a pilot sees, from the pilot's perspective. On his back he carries a radio programmed with secure frequencies that tie him directly to the pilots overhead and to his unit's headquarters, several miles away. At the headquarters, another JTAC monitors a bigger, more sophisticated video terminal that displays the same video Rosner sees, plus other data.'"

eldavojohn writes "After a lengthy patent case, complete with countersuits, AU Optronics has asked for an injunction against all LCD products made by LG. While this may not sound serious, LG is the number one manufacturer of LCDs used in LCD TVs, laptop PCs and desktop monitors. A quarter of global LCDs shipped in March were LG brand. The bizarre part of the story is that LG Display struck first against AU Optronics way back in 2006 with a patent suit to the tune of $690 million, and in 2009, when the case finally went to court, AUO filed counter-claims of patent infringement that are now coming to fruition. So before you call AUO a patent troll, keep in mind that LGD shot first."

-brazil- writes "Every programmer forum gets a steady stream of novice questions about numbers not 'adding up.' Apart from repetitive explanations, SOP is to link to a paper by David Goldberg which, while very thorough, is not very accessible for novices. To alleviate this, I wrote The Floating-Point Guide, as a floating-point equivalent to Joel Spolsky's excellent introduction to Unicode. In doing so, I learned quite a few things about the intricacies of the IEEE 754 standard, and just how difficult it is to compare floating-point numbers using an epsilon. If you find any errors or omissions, you can suggest corrections."

A recent post up at TechCrunch claims that HP's "Slate" tablet has been canceled. Officials details for the tablet were limited, though a leaked internal presentation indicated it had an 8.9" screen, a 1.6GHz Atom processor, and ran on Windows 7. Some are now speculating that HP may experiment with porting WebOS to a similar device. Quoting: "Will WebOS emerge as a successful operating system for tablet devices? That seems very unlikely given the dominance of the closed Apple OS and the likely success of the open Android and Chrome operating systems from Google. To get traction from third-party developers with WebOS, HP will need to sell a lot of units. And it's not clear what they'd gain from all that effort, anyway. HP knows how to build and sell hardware, not operating systems."

Hugh Pickens writes "The TV series 'Lost' involves a large cast of characters marooned on a tropical island after a plane crash, with episodes that thread lengthy flashbacks of characters' backstories with immediate plots of day-to-day survival and interpersonal relationships, and a larger 'mythos' involving the strange and apparently supernatural (or science-fictional) happenings on the island. Independent scholar Amelia Beamer writes that the series works as an example of a recent cultural creation: that of the hypertext narrative. 'In Lost, the connections between characters form the essential hypertext content, which is emphasized by the structure of flashbacks that give the viewer privileged information about characters,' writes Beamer. 'Paramount are the connections unfolding between characters, ranging from mundane, apparently coincidental meetings in the airport, to more unlikely and in-depth meetings, reaching back through their entire lives and the lives of their families.' Beamer writes that the series also pays tribute to video games, another relatively recent interactive means of storytelling."

jrepin writes in to recommend a piece by Eugenia from OSNews, which explores the depths of the MPEG-LA's lock on video. One part of the problem is that almost all video cameras, including ones that cost more than $12,000, declare in their manuals that they are for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes only. "We've all heard how the h.264 is rolled over on patents and royalties. Even with these facts, I kept supporting the best-performing 'delivery' codec in the market, which is h.264. 'Let the best win,' I kept thinking. But it wasn't until very recently when I was made aware that the problem is way deeper. No, my friends. It's not just a matter of just 'picking Theora' to export a video to Youtube and be clear of any litigation. MPEG-LA's trick runs way deeper!""