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Submission + - Einstein letter calling Bible "pretty childish" to be auctioned on eBay (theatlantic.com)

cheesecake23 writes: In an admirably concise piece in The Atlantic, Rebecca J. Rosen summarizes Einstein's subtle views on religion and profound respect for the inexplicable, along with the news that a letter handwritten by the legendary scientist that describes the Bible as a 'collection of honorable, but still primitive legends' and 'pretty childish' will be auctioned off on eBay over the next two weeks. Bidding will begin at $3 million.
Government

Submission + - French government outlines plans for free software adoption (news.idg.no)

An anonymous reader writes: French government outlines plans for free software adoption
o Peter Sayer
24.09.2012 kl 15:44 | IDG News Service\Paris Bureau

French government agencies could become more active participants in free software projects, under an action plan sent by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in a letter to ministers, while software giants Microsoft and Oracle might lose out as the government pushes free software such as LibreOffice or PostgreSQL in some areas.
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French government agencies could become more active participants in free software projects, under an action plan sent by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in a letter to ministers, while software giants Microsoft and Oracle might lose out as the government pushes free software such as LibreOffice or PostgreSQL in some areas.

Ayrault wants different branches of the French administration to use the same free software as one another when possible, so as to share experience and cut support costs. Until now, each ministry or agency has been left to pursue its own strategy.

He also wants them to reinvest between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save through not paying for proprietary software licenses, spending it instead on contributing to the development of the free software. The administration already submits patches and bug fixes for the applications it uses, but Ayrault wants to go beyond that, contributing to or paying for the addition of new functionality to the software.

Software support is another area where Ayrault wants concerted action, suggesting they might profit from a support contract already negotiated by the Interior Ministry, which includes a provision for discounts if other agencies need support for the same code base.

The action plan was outlined in a report prepared by the Interministerial Directorate for Communication and IT Systems, which the prime minister asked his ministers to put into effect.

That report shies away for the most part from recommending specific applications or operating systems, but does say that existing projects to adopt the LibreOffice desktop productivity suite and the PostgreSQL database engine are "essential."

On the desktop, the report highlights areas for study, including whether to use the Trustedbird mail client or Thunderbird, and whether to choose Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. It also suggests creating a system for converting existing documents into free formats, and participating in the development of a grammar checker to integrate with other software.

While the report clearly favors PostgreSQL for database applications, it recommends watching the future evolution of MySQL, MariaDB, SkySQL and the various "NoSQL" code bases.

The French administration favors no particular operating system for now, although choosing a distribution of Linux to standardize on is another of the report's recommendations.

Ayrault followed the report in its choice of terminology, avoiding the general term open source software and writing specifically of free software, referring to the freedoms to use the software for any purpose, to study the code and adapt it, to redistribute copies of it, and to improve the software and distribute the improvements.

French free software user group April said on Monday that it hoped the plan would lead to a new government policy prioritizing the use and development of free software, inspired by recent changes in Italy's public procurement laws.

Another lobby group, the National Council for Free Software (CNLL), said that while the state had long been a user of free software, it had rarely taken such a clear stance in favor of it, nor proposed such concrete actions.

Among the advantages of free software, Ayrault wrote, were its lower cost, its flexibility in use, and the leverage it provides in discussions with other software publishers.

There are other advantages, said CNLL, including the contribution it can make to industrial growth. It can cut the costs, and increase the competitivity, of existing businesses, but can also contribute to the economy more directly, CNLL said: 30,000 already work in the free software ecosystem in France, and it is growing at 30 percent annually.

The report conceded that free software isn't for everyone. Applications used by a small number of people, or only one or two groups of users, are unlikely to provide the necessary economies of scale in development and support, it said, while complex systems can be difficult to break down into modules that can easily be replaced with existing free software projects, it said.

Peter Sayer covers open source software, European intellectual property legislation and general technology breaking news for IDG News Service. Send comments and news tips to Peter at peter_sayer@idg.com.

Music

Submission + - 52 Ways to Cheat an Artist by Warner Records (digitalmusicnews.com)

Hodejo1 writes: In 2007, James Taylor initiated an audit of his royalty payments dating back to 2004. In that three-year span, Taylor and his accounting firm, Gelfand, Rennert & Feldman, LLC, found underpayments totaling $1,692,726. His label, Warner Brothers deftly accomplished this via 52 alleged ways all listed here. This includes such dubious tactics as applying royalty rates lower than the contract stipulates and charging manufacturing costs as 'recording costs' so they can be applied against royalties. Taylor's auditors also found a 'suspense account' at Warner Music that held an unspecified amount of Taylor's royalties. When pressed for its purpose, Warner denied the account existed, and declined to offer any details on which products or payments were included in this alleged account. As one reader posted on Digital Music News "Wow, what are the chances they didn't do exactly the same thing to all their artists?" Of course, labels still continue to claim they serve the artists when they call every new technical innovation in music theft.

Submission + - There can be only none. Are there any survivors left on the RIA battlefield?

An anonymous reader writes: There can be only none. 5 years ago there was a fierce battle between Flex, Silverlight, Java and Web 2.0. are there any survivors left on the RIA battlefield?

A few years back, as a software engineer, I had to take a decision about which platform to use for a web distributed application. Not an app, not a game, not a personal project but an application intended to map a complicated business process and as such expected to grow and have a very long life-cycle (more than 10 years). It is an iterative process to analyze, specify, develop and finally implement such an application and with each implementation this process repeats in a smaller fashion as many of you know. And it takes years. I should admit that I had to push a bit for a web application but beside the obvious reasons I also had my personal reason of wanting to be able to do all the development on linux. Multiplatform might be correct argument, but not in corporate environments (some of which might still use IE6 today). I decided then for the now blamed Flex and for a few years it kept its promises and the project grew easily.

I am facing the same decision today and I still think that a web distributed solution is the correct answer for a great number of reasons but I find the choices to be much more limited. Flex is dead (by suicide), Java is still in its zombie state, Silverlight was also killed before much fuss and the browser world lacks standardisation as ever. If we consider the mobile variants there are now more browsers than at any time before and a promised future standard (html5) will probably, come too late to change much in the existing implementations as neither the browser developers nor the application developers can afford to wait.

So I ask: based on your experience is there any RIA platform that provides: the technical ease (browser abstraction, easy developement), the interface (simple and yet rich, native like but with stylish potential) and the potential (as much as it can be found in the marketing, sales or opensource battlefield) to be still alive in 5 years? Or I should turn the clock a decade and start developing a native interface?
Education

Submission + - Udacity Statistics is Awful (angrymath.com)

dcollins writes: "As a college instructor specializing in statistics, I felt compelled to survey one of the massive-enrollment online education courses that are all the rage these days. This summer, it seemed a perfect opportunity when Udacity unveiled Introduction to Statistics by founder Sebastian Thrun (of Google autonomous car fame). Having taken the entire course through to the final exam, my overall assessment is: It's amazingly, shockingly awful. Some nights I got seriously depressed at the notion that this might be standard fare for college lectures encountered by many students during their academic careers. I've tried to pick out the Top 10 problems with the course structure and address them in detail."
Education

Submission + - Chicago Teachers Union to Go On Strike 1

theodp writes: Less than a week after classes began for most school children, Chicago's 25,000 unionized public school teachers are expected to walk off the job Monday for the first time in 25 years. Citing the city's latest offer, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel called it a 'strike of choice' on the part of the teachers' union. Andrew Broy, president of the Bill Gates-backed Illinois Network of Charter Schools, said he expects uncertainty over a teachers strike to boost charter enrollment, pushing it to more than 50,000 students. The city's 118 charter schools — some of which are bankrolled by tech billionaires — are not affected by a strike, which is likely to exacerbate the battle of the Chicago Teachers Union vs. Astroturf Billionaires.

Submission + - Mobile Trojans Rear Their Head, Repressive Governments Go For Their Checkbooks (vice.com)

blando writes: Between February and March of 2011, at the height of Egypt’s tumultuous revolution, protesters stormed the offices of their feared State Security Investigations Service in Alexandria and Sixth of October city, on the edge of Cairo. It was there, amongst evidence of detentions, torture and surveillance at SSIS’s headquarters, that information first came to light regarding a sales pitch by UK-based Gamma Group to Egypt’s security agency for their FinFisher spyware.
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Three years in jail for receiving an image of fisting? 1

wwwrench writes: "In the UK, it may be illegal to receive an emailed image of legal and consensual sex. The Crown Prosecutation Service is currently trying a man for receiving an image of two people fisting. Under the U.K.'s 2008 obsenity law it is illegal to view a pornographic image of extreme sex, even if the image depicts a legal act. Questions have been raised about the motives for the case, as the defendent is openly gay, and used to prosecute corrupt police officers. Although the case has been virtually ignored by the media, this is also the first trail in the U.K. where one of the lawyers has been allowed to tweet during the trial (under the hashtag #porntrial).""
Businesses

Submission + - The Googlefication of Yahoo

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Kara Swisher writes that since coming to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has added a weekly Friday afternoon all-hands meeting, just like at Google; she announced that henceforth the food in Yahoo’s URLs Cafe will be free, just like at Google; and she has begun prepping major changes to the layout of the work spaces and buildings of Yahoo to make it feel more collaborative and cool, just like, well, you get the idea. Such focus on improving cultural issues is an interesting initial move by the neophyte CEO, since the care and feeding and, most of all, cosseting of employees has been a critical element to Google’s success at creating an always sunny work environment. But Mayer has been up to much more serious business, said several sources, especially product innovation as the savior for Yahoo: Better email! Better search! Better ad-serving! And a special plea to make Flickr awesome again! In other words, better every product Yahoo has to offer. “This is the sound of Yahoo becoming a technology company again,” says one source. “It will be all about platforms and products.” Sources say that will likely mean a big splashy tech or product deal in the days ahead, perhaps via an acquisition to signal the new direction, perhaps with the acquisition of a sexy product like Flipboard. In the meantime many at Yahoo are bracing for a pack of current and former Googlers — Mayer had a lot of loyal staffers — to come on board writes Swisher. "And, by the looks of all the Googley changes at Yahoo, they’ll feel right at home when they get there.""

Comment Re:This isn't nearly as bad as the division bug (Score 1) 292

While this is true, it is only useful in trivial cases. The point is that when using floating point to calculate things, in practice you can rarely assume exact results, only close ones. That it is exact sometimes is irrelevant. For example with a valid value x, (1.0/x)*x will not result in exactly 1.0 in many cases. The situation gets worse with more complex calculations.

Comment Re:So, to translate: (Score 5, Insightful) 1303

One of the telling point about this is that this is recounted by Apple executives as a good thing. This demonstrates how a large part of a certain class of people view the rest of humanity as chattel. They have become so removed from their own humanity that they do not even see anything wrong in stating this fact openly as a good reason for their actions.

Comment Re:Yeah, yeah...everything enjoyable is bad for yo (Score 1) 283

This is incorrect. Living a healthy lifestyle will not only increases lifespan, but also increases the quality of life as the body ages.

Most people who do not quit smoking do not quit because they don't want to, but because that it is extremely difficult. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances and can take up to five years to completely (or nearly) break the addiction cycle.

Smoking is also very good thing to do if you want to increase your chances of having early heart disease.

It is important to note that while nicotine is the culprit in the addiction cycle, it is not the main cause (and possibly not at all) of heart disease, lung disease or cancer.

If you consider any of the addiction of smoking, the addiction of junk food (and I don't know that this applies to you), and being a chronic couch potato as a high quality of life, then don't worry about your choices regarding health.

If you must have nicotine, get it another way. Breaking the cycle of eating junk food will allow the far greater pleasure in quality food. Running is not necessary, but moderate exercise is, i.e. a good amount of walking (hint: we evolved to do lots of this, not lots of running) with perhaps occasional weight training or whatever other moderate physical activity you prefer.

Being healthy usually means a lot less pain and suffering as we age.

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