Comment Re:I have it. (Score 5, Informative) 440
I have the option on an account that is about 18 months old and another one that is about a month old. So, it doesn't seem to be related to when accounts were created.
Submission + - Verizon bans pro choice texting
fermion writes: The NYT is reporting that Verizon has banned text ads based on controversial content. While many would agree that, as a private carrier, Verizon have every right to so do, there are other concerns. For instance, from the article, "The dispute over the Naral messages is a skirmish in the larger battle over the question of "net neutrality" — whether carriers or Internet service providers should have a voice in the content they provide to customers." What makes this more interesting is these are not push messages, but messages requested for one time delivery by the customer. If Verizon is going to play Big Brother and censor customers content, perhaps that is one more reason to move to AT&T, even if it does not provide equal service.
Submission + - New Zealand Police Act wiki lets you write the law 1
AT&T Announces Plans to Filter Copyright Content 436
An anonymous reader writes "The LA Times reports that AT&T has announced plans to work with the Hollywood movie studios and major recording labels to implement new content filtering systems on their network. The plans raise many troubling legal issues including privacy concerns, false positive filtering, and liability for failure to filter."
Submission + - Europe unveils new space plane for tourist market (space.com)
mrminator writes: "Space.com is reporting that EADS's Astrium division, prime contractor for Ariane 5 rockets and for Europe's contribution to the international space station, announced just a few hours ago that a group of its engineers has spent two years quietly designing a space tourism vehicle that looks like a business jet with exceptionally long wings and a rocket engine. The round trip would last about 90 minutes and carry four passengers and a pilot, with the passengers each paying about 200,000 euros ($267,000) for the experience."
Submission + - CNBC Software Flaw Worth $1 Million?
Strudelkugel writes: In the past few months, Jim Kraber became more than a little obsessed with CNBC's "Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge." At the peak, the 42-year-old was spending 12 hours a day on the contest, using three computers in his Greenwich Village apartment to trade 1,600 different portfolios, all in an effort to win the $1 million grand prize. He even dropped his studies for the chartered financial analyst (CFA) exam, given once a year, so he could have more time for the financial news channel's game. He made it into the group of 20 finalists, but in mid-May, as the last round of trading opened, he noticed an unusual pattern in the picks of other contestants. One trader had a stream of near-perfect picks, consistently placing huge bets on shares that soared in after-hours trading. Kraber suspected the trader and perhaps others were getting help from someone who was changing their picks after the stocks' increases — and he quickly notified CNBC. "I went back and looked at his trades and thought, 'This is pretty much statistically impossible,'" says Kraber, who holds master's degrees in business and statistics from New York University. Kraber says CNBC rebuffed him at the time, but now it looks like he may have been right. Several contest participants have told BusinessWeek that there was a flaw in the design of the CNBC game that allowed certain players an unfair advantage. As many as four of the top contestants in the million-dollar contest may have exploited the flaw, according to the participants interviewed by BusinessWeek.
Submission + - Which ISPs Are Spying on You? (wired.com)
firesquirt writes: In an article from WIRED
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/20 07/05/isp_privacy
The few souls that attempt to read and understand website privacy policies know they are almost universally unintelligible and shot through with clever loopholes. But one of the most important policies to know is your internet service provider's — the company that ferries all your traffic to and from the internet, from search queries to BitTorrent uploads, flirty IMs to porn.
Submission + - Jailed Chinese Reporter Joins Yahoo Suit
taoman1 writes: "The Associated Press reports that 'Shi Tao, who was sentenced in 2005 to 10 years in prison, is seeking compensation from the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Internet company, claiming Yahoo Hong Kong and Yahoo China provided information to the Chinese authorities that led to his arrest.'"
Some Journals Rejecting Office 2007 Format 474
hormiga writes "Some scholarly journals are rejecting submissions made using new Office 2007 formats. Science and Nature are among publishers unwilling to deal with incompatibilities in the new formats, and recommend using older versions of Office or converting to older formats before submission. The new equation editor is cited as a specific problem. Rob Wier recommends that those publishers consider using ODF instead."
Submission + - Subversion is pointles - Linus said (blogspot.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A few weeks ago Linus Torvalds gave a speech at Google, talking about Source Code Management and GIT. Despite of the big number of Subversion developers hired by G$ (some of them were even present at the speech) Linus made really strong assertion: "Subversion has been the most pointless project ever started".
But Linus folk didn't stop there he continued with really "nice" sentences like:
- "Subversion used to say CVS done right: with that slogan there is nowhere you can go. There is no way to do cvs right"
- "If you like using cvs, you should be in some kind of mental institution or somewhere else"
- "Get rid of perforce, it is sad, but it is so, so true"
He just talked wonders about his great version control system (GIT), which he said he "wrote in a couple of weeks". Well, I believe it is true: we wrote it in two weeks, and it only took two years to make it usable for the rest of the world...
But it seems Linus was all about strong opinions that day: "not everybody can write something right the first time, just me".
Well, if you want to watch Linus being more rude than ever, find the whole story here
Submission + - Tivo Says It Could Suffer Under GPLv3
Preedit writes: InformationWeek is reporting that Novell and Microsoft aren't the only ones concerned about certain provisions contained within the final draft of GPLv3.
"If the currently proposed version of GPLv3 is widely adopted, we may be unable to incorporate future enhancements to the GNU/Linux operating system into our software, which could adversely affect our business," TiVo warns in a regulatory filing cited by InformationWeek.
The problem: Tivo boxes are Linux-based. They're also designed to shut down if the software is hacked by users trying to circumvent digital rights management features.
But GPLv3 would prohibit Tivo's no-tamper setup.
Submission + - A Windows-Based Packaging Mechanism
FishWithAHammer writes: "As part of my Google Summer of Code project, I'm working with WinLibre to develop a vaguely Debian-esque software download system for Free/open source software on the Windows platform. My reasoning is that open-source software suffers from poor presentation. Most computer laymen, even those aware of open source software, often don't have any idea how to go looking for it — their Google-fu is lacking — but would use it were it easier to access. What I have proposed is both a Debian-style packaging mechanism (capable of using Windows Installer MSIs or not, as the user wishes) and a software "catalog" that takes the best aspects of Synaptic and Linspire's Click-N-Run system. Seamless, simple installation and removal of programs in as straightforward a way as apt-get (there will be a command-line tool as well). I'm posting to Slashdot to get the ideas of you lot who, while you may not be the target audience, can certainly provide insights that can be of value.
There are areas that I'm personally not familiar with, and while I have done some research I would like the opinions of Slashdotters on some others. While at first I intend to set it up so that WinLibre (and I) run only one repository, I am curious as to how this sort of tool could be most useful to network administrators. Customizable repositories will be available; the code will be under the GPL, after all, so it'd be a little hard for them not to be available.
I'm also interested in the ideas of those who might be in a position to roll together packages. I intend to package a number of open-source language interpreters with the core software to allow special pre- and post-install scripts, as well as removal scripts. C#Script, Perl, and Python are definites, as is a Cygwin sh interpreter. We will have some program requirements — chief among them that no registry changes may be made by the program — but some of them, I fear, will require some flexibility; some programs really do require a way to edit the registry, for example, and I am considering offering some sort of tracked way to make registry changes so they can be rolled back on uninstallation of the program.
I'd love to hear what Slashdotters think of this. Think of it as a wishlist, but you don't get any damn ponies.
Ed Ropple (FishWithAHammer)"
There are areas that I'm personally not familiar with, and while I have done some research I would like the opinions of Slashdotters on some others. While at first I intend to set it up so that WinLibre (and I) run only one repository, I am curious as to how this sort of tool could be most useful to network administrators. Customizable repositories will be available; the code will be under the GPL, after all, so it'd be a little hard for them not to be available.
I'm also interested in the ideas of those who might be in a position to roll together packages. I intend to package a number of open-source language interpreters with the core software to allow special pre- and post-install scripts, as well as removal scripts. C#Script, Perl, and Python are definites, as is a Cygwin sh interpreter. We will have some program requirements — chief among them that no registry changes may be made by the program — but some of them, I fear, will require some flexibility; some programs really do require a way to edit the registry, for example, and I am considering offering some sort of tracked way to make registry changes so they can be rolled back on uninstallation of the program.
I'd love to hear what Slashdotters think of this. Think of it as a wishlist, but you don't get any damn ponies.
Ed Ropple (FishWithAHammer)"
