Comment In other news... (Score 1) 82
Britons Favour Less-Regulated UK.
Comment Breakthrough everyone's been waiting for? (Score 1) 500
It's always "the breakthrough free software has been waiting for"... free software has been growing over the years, but these sorts of things never seem to make the big global impact that the news reports they will. (Not saying this is a bad thing, though!)
Comment Any colony optimisation (Score 1) 394
Or just use Ant Colony Optimisation, which has been doing this for 18 years.
Cory Doctorow Says DIY Licensing Will Solve Piracy 189
An anonymous reader writes "The founding editor of Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow, has written a report about 'do-it-yourself' digital licensing, which he's touting as the panacea for piracy. Doctorow's solution for content creators is two-fold: get a Creative Commons license and append some basic text requiring those who re-use your work to pay you a percentage of their gross income. Doctorow refers to this as the middle ground between simply acquiring a Creative Commons license and hiring expensive lawyers for negotiations. He calls do-it-yourself licensing 'cheap and easy licensing that would turn yesterday's pirates into tomorrow's partners.'"
Comment Re:Tools exist (Score 1) 209
...and to add to that, all servers have an Apt proxy setting pointing them to a squid proxy, so security.debian.org doesn't get hit hard either - this is something that anyone can do, even without a local mirror.
The whole system was not described in one measly little
Comment Re:Tools exist (Score 1) 209
We're a university - we run a local Debian mirror.
Comment Re:Tools exist (Score 3, Informative) 209
As another "sub 7-digit guy" - there is a reason for this... There is no way I'm going to let over 60 servers automatically install patches without me checking them first! Download, yes. Install, no.
At work we use cfengine to manage the servers, with a home-built script that allows servers to install packages (of a specified version). Package is checked and OK? Add it to the bottom of the text file, GPG sign it, and push it into the repository. cfengine takes care of the rest (our cf system is slightly non-standard, so everything has to be signed and go through subversion to actually work).
Comment 50MP image size (Score 1) 228
So that's about 8165 x 6124 at your standard 4:3, and an image of approx 27" x 20" when printed at 300dpi...
Talk to This Year's Quirkiest Senatorial Candidate 364
Not many candidates for the U.S. Senate are 4'9" tall and only have one hand. But Oregon Democrat Steve Novick qualifies on both counts -- and uses them as pluses in his TV ads. Like this one, where he shows why he's the best beer-drinking partner among all the candidates. Or this one, where it's obvious why he's for "the little guy." Also, as far as we know, he's the only candidate this year for any major office who has his own brand of beer. And his online campaign manager is a major Slashdot junkie, too, which is certainly in his favor. But will humor and oddness get Steve into the Senate? We don't know. So ask him. In fact, ask him anything else you'd like about campaigning and politics. He's promised to respond, and seems like the kind of guy who will give interesting answers, at that. (Please follow Slashdot interview rules, as always.)
Submission + - SCO bankruptcy is "inevitable" and "im
mattaw writes: From analysis by Groklaw it seems that SCO may owe Novell nearly all the SCOSource licensing fees, and has been hiding the fact for 3 years
Imminent. Inevitable. Bankruptcy.
Those are the words from Novell's lawyers. Perhaps the IBM/SCO case could close earlier than planned? Perhaps we can finally be rid of this specter once and for all?
Imminent. Inevitable. Bankruptcy.
Those are the words from Novell's lawyers. Perhaps the IBM/SCO case could close earlier than planned? Perhaps we can finally be rid of this specter once and for all?
Submission + - Brightest comet in decades now visible in sky
mlimber writes: Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1), the brightest comet in decades, is currently visible to the naked eye in the early evening and early morning sky for the northern hemisphere. The northern latitudes have the best view, but it can be seen even in the southern hemisphere during the day with the right equipment. Another image is available as NASA's astronomy picture of the day.
Submission + - The Astronomical Event Search Engine
eldavojohn writes: "Google is currently in collaboration with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) project that will involve putting a powerful telescope in operation in Chile. Google's part will be to "develop a search engine that can process, organize and analyze the voluminous amounts of data coming from the instrument's data streams in real time. The engine will create 'movie-like windows' for scientists to view significant space events." Google's been successful on turning its search technology on several different media & realms. Will they be successful with helping scientists tag and catalog events in our universe?"
Submission + - Germany Searches Credit Cards for Child Porn Pay
narramissic writes: "According to an article on ITworld, police in the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt have teamed with credit card companies to sift through the transactions of over 22 million customers looking for those who may have purchased child pornography online. To date they have identified 322 suspects. From the article:
German data privacy laws allow police to ask financial institutions to provide data about individuals but only if the investigators meet certain conditions, including a concrete suspicion of illegal behavior and narrowly defined search criteria, according to Johann Bizer, deputy director of the Independent Center for Privacy Protection in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein.
"In the case under investigation, police were aware of a child pornography Web site outside of Germany that was attracting users inside the country. And they asked the credit-card companies to conduct a database search narrowed to three criteria: a specific amount of money, a specific time period and a specific receiver account.
Submission + - Open nVidia linux drivers pledge near completion
Ciarán Mooney writes: "The Pledgebank drive to get $10,000 raised for Project Nouvaeu is almost complete and currently only needs 199 people to sign up to finish.
Started by David Nielsen, heres a link to his blog explaining what he hopes will happen.
If it reaches completion then thats a big plus for the Linux community, not just for Project Nouveau but who ever said that you needed big company backing to get money raised?"
Submission + - What does your dead man's switch do?
LqdEngineer writes: "How many of the Slashdot crowd use or have used a Dead Man's Switch designed to perform some action if you don't check in for a certain amount of time? Recently, I decided to put one together using MySQL and some Cron jobs, but I wanted to see what others have their Switches set up to do in the event you fail to check in. E-mails to loved ones? Send encryption keys to friends/family? Hate mail to your boss? Has anyone ever been on the receiving end of a Dead Man's e-mail? I can't even imagine how creepy that would feel."
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