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The Courts

Submission + - German bloke trademarks "STFU", sues geek-shop (getdigital.de)

An anonymous reader writes: E-Bay seller Thorsten Hermes (link), from Germany, successfully trademarked the well-known abbreviation "STFU" and has now--without prior warning--sent a cease-and-desist letter to the German geek-store getDigital.de (i.e. the German equivalent of thinkgeek.com), forbidding them to sell STFU-T-shirts. Being a small business the store has removed the T-shirts from their assortment. However they are now looking for "moral and financial" support to get the trademark deleted. They also posted the original cease-and-desist letter on their website (in German). RFC

Comment OpenHatch, and the "Teaching Open Source" Wiki (Score 2, Informative) 151

OpenHatch was mentioned previously, but I'll mention it again for completeness sake. I'm now getting a "500 Internal Server Error from it." (Slashdot effect). Also, there's a list of projects with mentors on the "Teaching Open Source" wiki. Furthermore, as people noted, most open source projects could use some help and you can approach those that interest you.

Finally, touting my own horn, I'd like to note that I'm willing to mentor people with their first steps in my own open source projects. Hack on!

Open Source

Submission + - Announcing Freecell Solver Enterprise Edition (blogspot.com)

Shlomi Fish writes: "Freecell Solver Enterprises Inc., on behalf of the Freecell Solver development team, is glad to announce the upcoming availability of Freecell Solver Enterprise Edition. In its Enterprise Edition, Freecell Solver will be enhanced to solve generalised Freecell, in which there can be an arbitrary number of card ranks. Since generalised Freecell is NP-complete. This will allow using Freecell Solver's ingenious, cutting-edge algorithms to solve the previously hard, provably NP-Complete problems of the Travelling Salesman problem, Subset sum, Sudoku and Enterprise content management.

Read more on the announcement to learn more about this and upcoming exciting developments."

Comment I'm glad to see that apology (Score 4, Informative) 576

I'm glad to see an apology for Turing's treatment being set straight. Alan Turing definitely didn't deserve the bad treatment that was inflicted upon him for his sexual orientation. He certainly deserves this apology.

One historical note is that several models of computers (or actual computers) preceded the more formal computer science, but naturally, the theoretical work of Turing (and related early CS pioneers such as Alonzo Church), and their rigour should also be highly regarded.

Software

Submission + - Open Source Licenses Wars (shlomifish.org)

Shlomi Fish writes: "There is a new article on my site titled "FOSS Licenses Wars", explaining the features and differences between various the various categories of open-source licenses, and some popular individual one, and that gives some recommendations for which licenses to avoid. I also touch on the aspect of whether use of permissive open-source licenses constitutes a risk to software freedom."
Google

Submission + - Slashdotted Feature Causes AdSense Termination (livejournal.com)

Shlomi Fish writes: "Shortly after the publication of the Slashdotted April Fools' Day feature on my site, Google suspended my AdSense account claiming it posed a "significant risk to advertisers". Read my the link for more information on what I tried to regain access to my lost account, how I was not successful, and how bad Google's AdSense support is. Apparently Google ignores their customers just like most other big corporations."

Comment Yes, you should learn a Different Language (Score 1) 1021

By all means - you should learn a different language. To quote John Searle: "You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.". I personally feel that knowing several languages has expanded my understanding of all of them, made it easier for me to communicate in any of them, and made me a better person (including a much better programmer).

I personally am not sure I can recommend any language. Hebrew is my mother language (being an Israeli Jew), but it's kinda useless except for Biblical/Mishnathic/etc. research, because most Hebrew-speaking Israelis have working English. I like Hebrew a lot, and find it a wonderful language, but it is kinda hard and as you know, not many people know it (yet).

I've also studied Literary Arabic (or Written Arabic) for 6 years. It's a beautiful language, but very difficult, and counter-intuitive, even for a Hebrew speaker, and Arabic suffers from a very severe diglossia, and most Arabs are not literate. I've spoken with two Arab Israelis who've studied both Literary Arabic and Hebrew, and they both said learning how to read and write Hebrew was easier for them than learning Literary Arabic. Since then I've lost most of my vocabulary.

I also studied French for 3 years in Junior High School. It seemed likeable and nice, but I was told it gets much worse as you study more of it, because there are much more exceptions than words that follow the rules. French is naturally very useful.

Spanish is also very useful, and arguably the easiest language to learn, and I don't know it very well. I was told that it makes learning other languages much harder after one learns it.

See also what I wrote about why Chinese may not become the next international language

Censorship

Submission + - Israeli Censorship Law Rolls On

Shlomi Fish writes: "A New Internet Censorship Law Proposal has been passed in a pre-voting process, despite many objections, including some from the Israeli Ministry of Treasury and the Ministry of Law. This law proposal aims to prevent minors from accessing questionable sites, and would require grown-ups to identify using bio-metric identfication for a non-restricted access to the Internet."

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