Comment Re:I've got an idea... (Score 1) 294
Happy T-bird user for years. Best there is.
Comment Re:Questioning (Score 1) 416
You are entitled to your own beliefs. You are not entitled to your own facts.
Well said. The article in a nutshell. There is a whole industry out there of consultants and "scientists" trying to create custom-made facts, suitable to any industrial or political interest. This is pretty well-known, but it doesn't hurt to shine some light on it now and again. In my opinion, one of the best works in this regard is "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming" by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes. Good read.
Comment Re:Lack of science in education (Score 2) 416
Damn right. The almost total lack of interest from mainstream media is just flabbergasting. Sports, more sports, lots of local fluff and perhaps one big international story (if it cannot be avoided) is the regular fare here (Norway). It's been pretty much the same in other places I have lived (Americas, Europe). The only real exceptions I can think of is the BBC, the Guardian newspaper and - to a certain extent - Die Zeit (German weekly).
Submission + - The Spread of Ignorance (bbc.com)
Eric Eikrem writes: BBC Future has just published an interesting article on Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University, who studies how people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge. The spread of ignorance follows certain patterns, whether it is about lead in gasoline, tobacco or climate change.
"Proctor found that ignorance spreads when firstly, many people do not understand a concept or fact and secondly, when special interest groups – like a commercial firm or a political group – then work hard to create confusion about an issue. In the case of ignorance about tobacco and climate change, a scientifically illiterate society will probably be more susceptible to the tactics used by those wishing to confuse and cloud the truth."
"Proctor found that ignorance spreads when firstly, many people do not understand a concept or fact and secondly, when special interest groups – like a commercial firm or a political group – then work hard to create confusion about an issue. In the case of ignorance about tobacco and climate change, a scientifically illiterate society will probably be more susceptible to the tactics used by those wishing to confuse and cloud the truth."
Comment Re:Microsoft Might Have Acquired Skype For Free... (Score 1) 259
"Remember that Skype was written by a hard-core group of Romanian programmers..."
Nope, the Skype software was created by three Estonian programmers; Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn. The Skype company was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark.
Comment OpenWRT Router in Nordic Countries (Score 1) 121
There is a Norwegian startup - Domos Labs - that has had quite a lot of success with a combination of a fairly advanced router and OpenWRT. Their way into each country's market is quite original; they gain a foothold by giving away 100 routers to techies that are having trouble with their Wifi. The rest is achieved by word-of-mouth.
Illinois Students Suspected of Cyberbullying Must Provide Social Media Passwords 323
derekmead writes: School districts in Illinois are telling parents that a new law may require school officials to demand the social media passwords of students if they are suspected in cyberbullying cases or are otherwise suspected of breaking school rules. The law (PDF), which went into effect on January 1, defines cyberbullying and makes harassment on Facebook, Twitter, or via other digital means a violation of the state's school code, even if the bullying happens outside of school hours. A letter sent out to parents in the Triad Community Unit School District #2, a district located just over the Missouri-Illinois line near St. Louis, that was obtained by Motherboard says that school officials can demand students give them their passwords.
Submission + - DALER: A bio-inspired robot that can both fly and walk (robohub.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The issue of how to use one robot across multiple terrains is an ongoing question in robotics research. In a paper published in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics today, a team from LIS, EPFL and NCCR Robotics propose a new kind of flying robot that can also walk. Called the DALER (Deployable Air-Land Exploration Robot), the robot uses adaptive morphology inspired by the common vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus, meaning that the wings have been actuated using a foldable skeleton mechanism covered with a soft fabric so that they can be used both as wings and as legs (whegs).
Comment Re:Marketing geniuses (Score 1) 72
These Einsteins sure know their audience!
That also goes for the author of this submission: An Adobe Flash video about a Linux Magazine, when Adobe no longer makes Flash updates for Linux?
Comment Re:I'm surprised ... (Score 1) 79
I totally agree. Kdenlive is a good option.
Comment Re:Pitivi is such a POS (Score 1) 79
Submission + - openSUSE 12.1 released (opensuse.org) 1
MasterPatricko writes: The openSUSE project is proud to present the release of openSUSE 12.1! This release represents more than eight months of work by our international community and brings you the best Free Software has to offer. Improvements include the latest GNOME 3.2 desktop as well as the newest from KDE, XFCE and LXDE; your ownCloud made easy with mirall; Snapper-shots of your file system on btrfs; and much, much more. Other notable changes include moving from sysvinit to systemd, improving the boot process, and being built on GCC 4.6.2 including link-time optimization. More packages than ever are available from the openSUSE instance of the Open Build Service, and soon you'll be able to create customised respins on SUSE Studio.
Bookmark EPiserver, Fox Technologies, Nimsoft and Qliktech (ericeikrem.com)
Submission + - The 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors 1
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Register reports that experts from some 30 organizations worldwide have compiled 2010's list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors along with a novel way to prevent them: by drafting contracts that hold developers responsible when bugs creep into applications. The 25 flaws are the cause of almost every major cyber attack in recent history, including the ones that recently struck Google and 33 other large companies, as well as breaches suffered by military systems and millions of small business and home users. The top 25 entries are prioritized using inputs from over 20 different organizations, who evaluated each weakness based on prevalence and importance. Interestingly enough the classic buffer overflow ranked 3rd in the list while Cross-site Scripting and SQL Injection are considered the 1-2 punch of security weaknesses in 2010. Security experts say business customers have the means to foster safer products by demanding that vendors follow common-sense safety measures such as verifying that all team members successfully clear a background investigation and be trained in secure programming techniques. "As a customer, you have the power to influence vendors to provide more secure products by letting them know that security is important to you," the introduction to the list states and includes a draft contract with the terms customers should request to enable buyers of custom software to make code writers responsible for checking the code and for fixing security flaws before software is delivered."
Submission + - Providing a closed source license upon request?
goruka writes: As a citizen of the open source community, I have written several applications and libraries and released under the BSD license. Because of my license choice, I often run into the situation where a company wants to write software for a closed platform using my code or libraries. Even though there should be no restrictions on usage, companies very often request a different license citing as a valid reason that the creator of such platform has special terms forbidding "open source software" in the contracts forced upon the developer. So my question is, has anyone else run into this situation, and are there examples of such licenses that I can provide? (Please keep in mind that I'm not a US resident and i don't have access or resources to afford a lawyer there)
