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Comment Re:Remember kids... (Score 1) 262

by halo1982 (#32796912) Attached to: BBC Web Slip-Up Insults Facebook Fans

The problem with Lorem Ipsum is the stupid questions from clients.

" Is it French? What the fuck is this? Don't you speak english? How is anyone supposed to read it?"

MOD PARENT WAY THE FUCK UP!!!!

Yeah, I get this all the time.

Even once from my old boss when I was working at a newspaper...*sigh*
Space

Weird Exoplanet Orbits Could Screw Up Alien Life 161

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stupid-newton dept.
astroengine writes "Life is good in the Solar System. We have Jupiter to thank for that. However, if the gas giant's orbit were a little more elliptical, there's every chance that Earth would become rather uncomfortable very quickly. Researchers looking at the zoo of exoplanets orbiting distant stars have simulated several scenarios of differing exoplanet orbits and find that many don't resemble our cozy Solar System. In fact, weird exoplanet orbits may be the deciding factor as to whether extraterrestrial life can form or not."
Image

Wells Fargo Bank Sues Itself 445

Posted by samzenpus from the so-crazy-it-just-might-work dept.
Extreme economic problems require extreme solutions, and Wells Fargo Bank has come up with a good one. They have decided to sue themselves. Wells Fargo holds the first and second mortgages on a condominium that is going into foreclosure. As holder of the first, they are suing all other lien holders, including the holder of the second, which is Wells Fargo. It gets better. The company has hired a lawyer to defend itself against its own lawsuit. The defense lawyer even filed this answer to the complaint, "Defendant admits that it is the owner and holder of a mortgage encumbering the subject real property. All other allegations of the complaint are denied." On the website The Consumer Warning Network, Angie Moreschi wrote: "We've apparently reached the perfect storm for complete and utter idiocy by some banks trying to foreclose on homes."
Security

Submission + - Sony in new root kit investigation (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by szlwzl
szlwzl writes: Looks like sony's rootkit is still causing problems, some of their fingerprint scanning usb drives are installing the same rootkit as featured on their cds last year.
Microsoft

If This Was a Month Ago, OOXML Would Be Over 230

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the games-of-corporate-chess dept.
Andy Updegrove writes "Public announcements of how Participating members of ISO have voted on OOXML are now rolling in one at a time, and the trend thus far is meaningfully weighted towards 'No with comments.' By my count, there are now four announced Yes votes, with comments, two abstentions, and seven public No with comments votes for OOXML in ISO/IEC JT1. Korea has reportedly voted no as well, and I expect at least Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom to announce 'No with comments' today or tomorrow. There will be more no votes on the roster when the final results are announced in a day or two. But even if the 11 votes I know of now were the only votes, the vote would now have failed — but for the 11 countries that upgraded their status from Observer to Participating member status in the last few weeks. Without those extra 11 'P' countries, it would only require 10 votes to block OOXML from immediate approval. If most or all of those additional 'P' members vote 'yes' as expected, it will confirm suspicions that Microsoft has promoted extra votes in favor of OOXML not only within National Bodies, but within ISO itself."
United States

Submission + - Court ends ban on navy sonar tests (reuters.com)

Submitted by
mikesd81
mikesd81 writes: "Over at Reuters there's an article that states the U.S. appeals court has put on hold a lower court injunction blocking the U.S. Navy from using a type of sonar that wildlife supporters say harms whales in exercises off the California coast. The Natural Resources Defense Council won a federal court's preliminary injunction against Navy tests using mid-frequency active sonar to detect underwater objects like submarines. However, a split three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the lower court had considered only the fate of the whales while ignoring American defense needs. Judge Andrew Kleinfeld wrote, "The district court did not explain why a broad, absolute injunction against the use of the medium frequency active sonar in these complex training exercises for two years was necessary to avoid irreparable harm to the environment.""
The Internet

Submission + - Google grows into a target (internet.co.ba)

Submitted by
webalizator
webalizator writes: "Google's historic IPO took place three years ago, and the Mountain View, Calif., search giant has an anniversary present for its founders: Not only did Larry Page and Sergey Brin beat Bill Gates in developing a better search engine, the young technologists also can boast of bringing shareholders a bigger reward. Since Google went public Aug. 19, 2004, at $85 a share, its market value has grown nearly 500 percent to $156 billion. In comparison, Microsoft's value had not quite quadrupled on its third anniversary way back in March 1989. But Google's precocious performance has come at a price: Antitrust regulators in the United States are probing its proposed $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick, an Internet advertising company, and European regulators are poised to follow suit. Meanwhile, open-source activists are developing alternatives to Google's popular search engine. It's a position that Google's top rival, Microsoft, knows all too well. Less than a decade ago, the same combination of colorless bureaucrats and colorful coders helped end the software giant's spectacular growth spurt, sending its stock into a seven-year slump. Industry experts say there are cautionary lessons to be drawn in comparing the two companies. "There's clearly a strong parallel on the antitrust front. You can draw a line from IBM through Microsoft to Google," said Tom Eisenmann, a Harvard Business School professor who has written a case study on Google. But Eisenmann noted that Google's market share in Internet search — about 50 percent in the United States — is significantly less than the 70 percent share of the computer mainframe market IBM enjoyed before regulators cracked down, or Microsoft's share of the personal-computer software market, which was more than 90 percent. "I don't think that is going to be the comeuppance of Google," Eisenmann said of current antitrust review. Others say trouble appears to be brewing. "Just as concerns about Microsoft gradually increased until they reached critical mass, I think that is starting to happen with Google," said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility. "We are starting to approach a tipping point in all this, where the risks to Google are becoming greater and greater." Microsoft antitrust Microsoft faced its first antitrust probe four years after it went public. That investigation ended in July 1994 after the software giant agreed it would not use its dominance in computer-operating systems to undercut competitors. However, Microsoft's antitrust problems continued. An order from a federal judge to break up the company was replaced by a settlement in 2002. A European Commission ruling against the Redmond company is on appeal and is expected to be decided this month. In Google's case, opponents in the United States and Europe are already citing Microsoft's dominance of office applications to bolster their arguments. They contend Google's acquisition of DoubleClick could help it dominate the rapidly growing market for Internet advertising, combining Google's leadership in search-related ads with DoubleClick's strength in display ads. They also warn that the vast amount of data about people's behavior on the Internet held by the combined company could threaten privacy. Google said it is "confident that this acquisition poses no risk to competition and respects consumer privacy." But Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, one of several consumer groups that asked the Federal Trade Commission to review the acquisition, said it would eliminate meaningful competition, and not only because the new entity would control so much of the market. Chester said also that publishers might fear that if they did not deal with Google, their ranking in Google's search engine might be affected, making their content harder to find. "There's more at stake here than just control of online advertising and privacy," Chester said. "I believe the future of online content will be determined by the shape of the market" for Internet advertising. Open-source effort Similar concerns are driving the effort to develop an open-source search engine. "Search should be transparent, open and participatory," said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written by volunteers, who is organizing the effort. When Wales talks about Wikia Search, he consciously echoes the same concerns voiced by the developers who took on Microsoft in the 1990s as a way of rebelling against the control Microsoft was exerting over applications for personal computers. Wales says Internet search is plagued by the same problems that bedeviled proprietary software: lack of accountability, transparency and freedom. Top-secret formula Google closely guards its top-secret formula for ranking Web sites, making it impossible for a publisher to know why a site might enjoy front-page ranking one day in the search results and drop to Page 100 the next. Just as open-source developers openly published the software code behind alternatives to the Windows operating system and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Wales' programmers will publicly disclose their algorithms for ranking results in the Wikia Search project. Still, open-source software could be far less of a challenge for Google than it was for Microsoft. Google already makes liberal use of open-source software, including Linux, GNU tools, OpenSSL, MySQL and computer languages like Python and C. Hundreds of Googlers have worked on improving Linux. And Google has published more than a million lines of code under open-source licenses, according to a company representative. "Open source benefits Google in many ways and it creates commercial challenges for Google in many ways," said Paul Saffo, a respected technology forecaster. One test could come from Openads, a London company whose free ad-server software competes with DoubleClick. Openads is headed by James Bilefield, a veteran of Skype and Yahoo, and backed by Index Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, which also backed Skype, as well as First Round Capital and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Unlike DoubleClick, Openads does not collect consumer information from the publishers who use its software. While its 20,000 customers are primarily small publishers, larger players who are concerned that DoubleClick could end up sharing information with Google are looking at Openads as an alternative. Rather than hurt Google, however, Openads' very existence could help Google persuade regulators to approve the DoubleClick merger. Validation of defense Microsoft's defense to regulators — that competition would inevitably emerge — has been validated, in part, by the success of open source. "There was really a lot of justice to the complaints against Microsoft," said tech publisher Tim O'Reilly. "They did have a monopoly position and they appeared to abuse it, but they were also right in saying that the market would correct, their monopoly wouldn't be forever." Despite widespread admiration of Google's success, O'Reilly said, there is growing animosity against the company, especially in Silicon Valley, where Google's growth has made it increasingly hard for other companies to compete for talented employees. "They are powerful, they are arrogant, but I don't think they are winner-take-all competitors in the way Microsoft was," he said. "People got burned so bad by Microsoft they are kind of overreacting.""
Space

Submission + - Sharpest images with "Lucky" Telescope (cam.ac.uk) 1

Submitted by igny
igny writes: British astronomers from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a new camera that gives much more detailed pictures of stars and nebula than even the Hubble Space Telescope, and it does all this from the ground. A new technique, called "Lucky imaging", have been used to diminish atmospheric noise in the visible range, creating the most detailed pictures of sky in history.
Space

Submission + - Best Space Photo captured at Mount Palomar (letsgodigital.org)

Submitted by Ilse Jurrien
Ilse Jurrien writes: This is a scoop, check out LetsGoDigital A team of astronomers led by Cambridge University have taken some of the best space photos of the stars that are sharper than anything produced by the Hubble telescope, at 50 thousandths of the cost. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), used a technique called "Lucky Imaging" to take the most detailed space photos of stars and nebulae ever produced — using a camera based on the ground at Mount Palomar. Space Photos from ground based telescopes are usually blurred by the Earth's atmosphere — the same effect that makes the stars appear to twinkle when we look at them with the naked eye. http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/16544/best-space-p hoto-picture/
The Matrix

Submission + - Theory of Everything in One Blog Post (bicameraluniverse.com)

Submitted by
Mike LaSalle
Mike LaSalle writes: "Keywords: Physics, Cosmology, GUT (Grand Unified Theory), Digital Physics, Simulated Reality, Turing Principle, Eschatology, Theology.

This "Theory of Everything" In One Blog Post invokes cosmologist Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point Theory (OPT). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_point_(Tipler)

The OPT suggests that the universe will end with a "Big Crunch" that will be intelligently directed by life in the far future. Tipler's theory has been cited by — among others — Stephen Hawking and David Deutsch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch

Oxford physicist David Deutsch (winner of the Paul Dirac award for being the first person to formulate a specifically quantum computational algorithm), in his critique of the Omega Point Theory, acknowledged that Tipler's science is sound and irrefutable. Most of the final chapter of Deutsch's seminal book THE FABRIC OF REALITY, has to do with Tipler's theory and its enormous impact on the eventual shape of The Final Theory of Everything soon to unfold. Read it for yourself — chapter 14 of Deutsch's book is reproduced here: http://www.geocities.com/theophysics/deutsch-ends- of-the-universe.html

The main problem with Tipler's theory is that the latest observations suggest that the universe will end in a "Heat Death" rather than a "Big Crunch".

The article submitted here to Slashdot — available at http://bicameraluniverse.com/ — offers a solution to the apparent contradiction between Tipler's "three sphere" theory of a closed universe, and the scientific evidence for cosmological inflation."
Programming

Submission + - Why does software continually bloat? (wellingtongrey.net)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Wellington Grey's latest comic shows the path that all software inevitably follows: constant adding of features until the program bloats to the point of uselessness. Then, when all else fails, a new program has to be made. Is there any way that programmers can break this infinite loop?
Programming

Submission + - Are we getting carried away with CSS3? (dave-woods.co.uk)

Submitted by
Dave Woods
Dave Woods writes: "I've been trying to catch up a lot recently with the progress of CSS3 and how it can be used positively to improve code and simplify both the HTML and CSS. CSS.info is a great resource for this kind of information and a lot of the content is useful, but the recent post on "Lists to get more decorative" which contains information on the new lists module got me thinking that some of the modules being talked about may not be all that useful and we might just be getting carried away with the buzz and excitement."
Announcements

Submission + - Polar cap almost half gone in less than a decade (www.hs.fi)

Submitted by
SuurMyy
SuurMyy writes: "Finnish newspaper "Helsingin Sanomat" reports that Danish scientists from their University of Technology have found out from satellite pictures that polar cap has diminished 40 to 45 % after years 1997-2000. If melting goes on at this rate, which is partly caused by sea currents, the polar ice will be gone in 15 — 20 years — very much in the life-time of most of the Slashdot readers.

I'm sure there will be other non-Finnish references shortly, but this was the only one that I was able to find at this very moment."

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