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Comment Re:What is going one here? (Score 1) 236

by LEMONedIScream (#30295580) Attached to: Google May Limit Free News Access

What I don't understand is why Google has to follow robots.txt at all. Is this part of their "do no evil" slogan?

Imagine Bing does get all the exclusivity deals in the world and Google is left with nothing. What would stop them, from just indexing the site anyway? I can't think of anything as it should be up to the website to block/prevent access.
The Media

Censorship Struggle Underway In Iceland 251

Posted by Soulskill from the information-wants-to-be-free-but-it's-gotta-work-for-it dept.
jon jonson writes "Information from the collapsed Icelandic bank Kaupthing has been leaked to WikiLeaks, revealing billions in insider loans, and the bank has been working day and night to censor the information contained in the document. Last night at 6:55pm GMT, they served an injunction against the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, five minutes before the 7pm news was due to be aired. The TV station just displayed the WikiLeaks URL instead. They've also injuncted Iceland's national radio, banning all discussion about the contents of the document, and they are actively trying to censor the rest of the Icelandic media along with WikiLeaks."
Programming

Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — "I've Had Enough" 909

Posted by timothy from the when-smart-people-clash dept.
The Slashdolt writes "After a stern criticism from Linus, the long-time kernel hacker Alan Cox has decided to walk away as the maintainer of the TTY subsystem of the Linux Kernel, stating '...I've had enough. If you think that problem is easy to fix you fix it. Have fun. I've zapped the tty merge queue so anyone with patches for the tty layer can send them to the new maintainer.'" A response to a subsequent post on the list makes it quite clear that he is serious.
Education

Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished? 349

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the time-for-the-copyright-anarchist-movement-to-start dept.
Dr_Ken writes to mention recent coverage of a Harvard Cyber-Law study on Techdirt that analyzes the uses of copyright in the academic world. Some are claiming that the applications of copyright in academia are stifling and that we should perhaps go so far as to abolish copyright in the academic world entirely. "I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they're forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights. That's bad for everyone."
The Almighty Buck

Apple Dominates "Premium PC" Market 475

Posted by kdawson from the PC-hunters-shy-away dept.
itwbennett writes "Macs made up a whopping 91 percent of the $1,000-and-up computer market in June. Not so long ago, $1,000 got you an entry-level machine. Today the average computer sells for $701, while the average Windows machine sells for only $515. Still, Macs only make up 8.7% of PC sales. But is that really such a bad position to be in? Consider an Apples to Apples, that is, Macs to iPhones comparison: the iPhone takes only a sliver of the phone market but a much larger share of the profits."
Education

HTML Tags For Academic Printing? 338

Posted by timothy from the gedankenexperiment-draws-cries-of-use-ps-or-pdf dept.
meketrefi writes "It's been quite a while since I got interested in the idea of using html (instead of .doc. or .odf) as a standard for saving documents — including the more official ones like academic papers. The problem is using HTML to create pages with a stable size that would deal with bibliographical references, page breaks, different printers, etc. Does anyone think it is possible to develop a decent tag like 'div,' but called 'page,' specially for this? Something that would make no use of CSS? Maybe something with attributes as follows: {page size="A4" borders="2.5cm,2.5cm,2cm,2cm" page_numbering="bottomleft,startfrom0"} — You get the idea... { /page} I guess you would not be able to tell when the page would be full, so the browser would have to be in charge of breaking the content into multiple pages when needed. Bibliographical references would probably need a special tag as well, positioned inside the tag ..." Is this such a crazy idea? What would you advise?

Comment Re:British English (Score 1) 239

by LEMONedIScream (#28166141) Attached to: The Real British X-Files

Actually it's only if you watch TV signals that have been broadcast in the past 3 seconds. That means if you can watch it through your computer (TV card, streaming) you would still need a licence. Also, if you have a TV and there is no cable connected to it (or near it) or a fork in the back so it can't pick up signals you can say you use it exclusively for gaming (which is often the case).

Source: the twenty or so a year TV licence reminders/warnings/death-imminent any student moving into a new house will undoubtedly get. (Don't get me started on those "reminders"... carefully worded scare tactics)

Comment Re:Work Experience (Score 1) 834

by LEMONedIScream (#27904077) Attached to: Go For a Masters, Or Not?

I agree that experience will trump all, but it has to be relevant, useful and challenging. Doing the same thing over and over for a few years won't put you in the same position if you're constantly challenged.

Other than that, the advice I was given was: if you want to do a PhD, don't do a masters; otherwise do a masters.

I figured that I'd rather do a PhD as it is at a higher level and would be something I'd rather achieve and can start in a few years.
Sun Microsystems

What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems? 237

Posted by timothy from the ask-the-oracle dept.
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer. Dismissing server market arguments in favor of Cisco or Dell as suitors, McAllister suggests that MySQL, ZFS, DTrace, and Java make Sun an even better asset to Oracle than to IBM. MySQL as a complement to Oracle's existing database business would make sense, given Oracle's 2005 purchase of Innobase, and with 'the long history of Oracle databases on Solaris servers, it might actually see owning Solaris as an asset,' McAllister writes. But the 'crown jewel' of the deal would be Java. 'It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle. Java has become the backbone of Oracle's middleware strategy,' McAllister contends."

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