WebHostingGuy - Slashdot User

Submission + - Ads Displayed in Google are Free Speech Issue

Submitted by

WebHostingGuy

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @09:23PM

WebHostingGuy writes: "In a recent ruling from a U.S. Federal Court ads displayed by search engines are protected as free speech". In the court ruling Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft were sued by an individual demanding under the 14th Admendment that the search engines display his advertisements concerning fraud in North Carolina. The Court flatly said the search engines were exercising their 1st Admendent right of free speech in deciding what ads they want to display."

Submission + - Firefox 3.0 Opens Door to Web Apps, Mozilla Says

Submitted by MilwaukeeCharlie on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @09:01PM

MilwaukeeCharlie writes: CIO Magazine is reporting some buzz about Firefox 3.0, due to be released later this year.

Some of the likely new features include:

Offline support for web apps

New paradigm for "bookmarks" and "history"

Built-in database (SQL Lite), used for full-text indexing of the cache

Support for Javascript 2

Submission + - Stock Market Drop Blamed on Computer Error

Submitted by

WebHostingGuy

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @08:51PM

WebHostingGuy writes: "Today the Dow Jones Industrial Index dropped a little over 3% in value. Stock market swings come and go but it is interesting that the sudden drop in the stock market is the result of a computer glitch. According to MSNBC, the computers running were not properly calculating trades. This led to the switch to a backup system which led to several seconds delay which impacted the Dow. Even now after the close of the market spokesmen for the NYSE Group Inc. could not confirm if all closing share prices were even valid."

Submission + - Google Maps for the Brain

Submitted by

azonips

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @07:06PM

azonips writes: "From EurekAlert: Explore your brain, literally, at the largest online atlast of the brain! BrainMaps.org features the highest resolution whole-brain atlases ever constructed, with over 50 terabytes of brain image data directly accessible online. Users can explore the brains of humans and a variety of other species at an unprecedented level of detail, from a broad view of the brain to the fine details of nerves and connections. The website also includes a suite of free, downloadable tools for navigating and analyzing brain data. The high-resolution maps will enable researchers to use "virtual microscopy" to compare healthy brains with others, looking at structure, gene expression and the distribution of different proteins. They will enable better understanding of the organization of normal brains, and could help researchers in identifying fine morphological and chemical abnormalities underlying Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurological diseases."

Submission + - VMware blasts Microsoft virtualization licensing

Submitted by

Jane Walker

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @06:53PM

Jane Walker writes: "VMware contends that Microsoft is stalling the spread of virtualization with its licenses, but analysts said Microsoft isn't the only vendor whose licenses need to be overhauled."

Submission + - Comcast challenges FCC over subscriber limits

Submitted by illeism on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @06:21PM

illeism writes: Ars Technica is reporting that Comcast is challenging the FCC over subscriber limits.
FTA — Comcast has decided to challenge the Federal Communications Commission's "unofficial" cap on cable system ownership. In a filing earlier this month, Comcast criticized the FCC's 30 percent horizontal ownership cap, saying that limits on how many subscribers a given cable operator can service are no longer necessary.

Submission + - Keith Henson Jailed after Pickets, Usenet Posts

Submitted by on Saturday February 03, 2007 @04:37PM

An anonymous reader writes: Keith Henson was arrested on Friday, Feb. 2 in Prescott, Arizona. He faces extradition to California to serve one year in jail.

Henson was convicted of "interfering with a religion" in 2001 after he picketed Scientology's base in the California desert. The jury was misled into thinking he had posted jokes about "Cruise missiles" (as in Tom Cruise) to the internet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology; the posts in question were not made by him, but even if they had been, that does not constitute a credible threat as required by law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a press release after his conviction expressing grave concern that he had been convicted for exercising his free speech rights.

There were numerous anomalies during his trial (including a summons that was never mailed to him, which would have left him in contempt of court if he hadn't found out about the hearing another way).

Henson has a medical condition requiring regular medication; he has also received death threats and has grave fears for his safety, given Scientology's reach into many prison systems.

Latest news at the Wikipedia entry on Keith Henson; more may appear at Who is Keith Henson?.

Submission + - Is Your Domain Registrar Free Speech Friendly?

Submitted by

WebHostingGuy

on Friday February 02, 2007 @11:36AM

WebHostingGuy writes: "In an interesting follow up to the recent censorship performed when GoDaddy shut down a site because of a complaint without a court order, CNET interviewed all major domain registrars concerning their policies about shutting down sites. In the survey CNET found that the French registrar Gandi.net and New Orleans-based DirectNIC offered the most extensive guarantees against unnecessary domain name suspension. The rest refused to respond or left much to be desired."

Submission + - Yahoo! to Canada: No more french for you!

Submitted by

Marc Light

on Friday February 02, 2007 @11:32AM

Marc Light writes: "Canada is an official bilingual country, English and French are the two languages. http://fr.yahoo.ca/ was the French Canadian version of Yahoo! This morning I typed the URL to find out that it forwards me to Yahoo! Quebec. No more French Canadian version of Yahoo! Quebec is the only officially French province but New-Brunswick is officially bilingual and there's French communities everywhere in Canada. Did any other community got wiped out?"

Submission + - Orange, Smelly Snow Falling in Siberia

Submitted by

Khakionion

on Friday February 02, 2007 @11:29AM

Khakionion writes: "According to the BBC, Russia's flying in scientists to determine why western Siberia has been getting smelly, orange snow. From the article: "Chemical tests were under way to determine the cause...residents have been advised not to use the snow for household tasks or let animals graze on it.""

Submission + - Help with Linux Backup and Archive Solutions

Submitted by

earlshaw03

on Friday February 02, 2007 @11:27AM

earlshaw03 writes: "I work for a small independent phone company and have a few questions regarding one of our Linux boxes that is our customer email server. We are running Debian and are having some issues backing up every users email. We had about 90GB worth of mail on the server, so we deceided to implement a new policy that all email that was not popped would be deleted after 90 days. We scoured sourceforge, freshmeat, and google to find a good archiving program that would allow us to accomplish this. The only one we could find was archivemail, which worked somewhat well, but we keep getting an error that stops the program about half way through, on the same user. It also stalls on other users as well. We have managed to work around these accounts and get the size down to 55GB worth of email. We are currently using Vembu Technologies StoreGrid product to backup this server. The backup usually took anywhere from 3-4 days for a full backup. So finally I am asking the Slashdot Community what do you use to Backup and archive/delete mail?"

Blackboard's "Pledge" Not to Sue Open Source Software 84

Posted by Zonk on Friday February 02, 2007 @11:22AM from the nice-monster-good-monster-stay-there-monster dept.

Another anonymous reader writes with a link to the Inside Higher Education site. Those folks are reporting on Blackboard's 'pledge' not to sue open source projects used by universities and colleges. The Blackboard patent on educational groupware filed last year has come under a lot of fire, with many organizations simply seeking an open-source alternative. This newest peace offering to higher education groups has the Sakai open source consortium more than a little bit nervous. If Blackboard meant to set people at ease, all it has managed to do was confirm to onlookers that it 'wants to keep its legal options open.' Blackboard insists that this new pledge affords universities a number of legal privileges, and is designed to make educators 'sleep easy at night.' Somehow, very few people seem reassured. Update: 02/02 17:34 GMT by Z : Bad first link fixed.

Submission + - Shout-hacking Vista

Submitted by skinfaxi on Friday February 02, 2007 @11:00AM

skinfaxi writes: Vista supposedly has much-improved voice recognition capabilities — so much improved that in the future you might find yourself being 'shout-hacked!' You'd have to have your speakers and microphone on and not disable voice recognition loading at startup. A malicious MP3 could yell instructions at your PC such as 'copy', 'delete', 'shutdown.' Microsoft says not to worry.

Submission + - Florida wants to scrap touch screen voting

Submitted by

AlHunt

on Thursday February 01, 2007 @10:13PM

AlHunt writes: "Florida Governor Charlie Crist is calling on the Florida Legislature to spend $30M to replace the troublesome touch screen voting machines with an optical scan system that allows a voter to mark an oval next to a candidate's name before slipping a ballot into an electronic reader."

Submission + - NFL won't let church show Sper Bwl

Submitted by bdonalds on Thursday February 01, 2007 @10:12PM

bdonalds writes: INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The NFL has nixed a church's plans to use a wall projector to show the Colts-Bears Super Bowl game, saying it would violate copyright laws.

NFL officials spotted a promotion of Fall Creek Baptist Church's "Super Bowl Bash" on the church Web site last week and overnighted a letter to the pastor demanding the party be canceled, the church said.

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