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Teacher Asks Students To Plan a Terrorist Attack 412

Posted by samzenpus from the one-heck-of-a-take-home-test dept.
Tired of looking at an endless parade of dioramas, an Australian teacher had her class plan a terrorist attack that would "kill as many innocent Australians as possible." "The teacher, with every best intention, was attempting to have the students think through someone else's eyes about conflict. I think there are better ways to do that. ... This is not what we expect of professional educators," said Sharyn O'Neill, director-general of the state's Department of Education.
Transportation

Submission + - Airlines Get Billions from Unbundled Services

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "In hearings before Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that airlines reported revenue of $7.9 billion from baggage fees and reservation change and cancellation fees in calendar years 2008 and 2009, fees on unbundled services that once were considered part of the ticket price and witnesses from the GAO, the Department of Transportation and associations for air travel and travel agents all urged the government to require uniform pricing information from airlines to help consumers make easy comparisons. "We believe that the proliferation of these fees and the manner in which they are presented to the traveling public can be confusing and in some cases misleading," says Robert Rivkin, the Department of Transportation's general counsel. Published fares used by consumers to choose flights don't "clearly represent the cost of travel when these services are added." However, Spirit Airlines President and CEO Ben Baldanza defended the practice of unbundling, saying it allows his airline to charge lower fares (PDF) and allows the customers the choice to purchase the services or not. "Carrying more than one bag is not necessary for all travelers and we believe it is unfair to charge those customers for extra services they do not use," testified Baldanza adding that bag fees have led customers to pack less reducing total baggage on flights, lowering airline's operating costs and resulting in fewer lost or damaged bags."
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Submission + - StarCraft II cost $100 million to develop (gamepron.com)

Submitted by UgLyPuNk
UgLyPuNk writes: Video game production is in a slump, the world’s struggling with the tail-end of the Global Financial Crisis, and Activision Blizzard has spent more than US$100 million developing StarCraft II.

The sequel’s been 12 years coming, and expectations are understandably high, with analysts predicting several million units will be sold this year alone – comfortably padding Activision‘s wallet.

Comment Re:Getting ready for the MS bash (Score 1) 205

by gauharjk (#32935346) Attached to: Recomputing the Sky
You really hate everything Microsoft, don't you? They are just like any other corporation, super aggressive and ruthless. Their OS monopoly helped businesses by standardizing operating platforms. Imagine a world with hundreds of different OSes and file-systems and incompatible hardware to deal with. Microsoft is not perfect, but has certainly made valuable contributions to the Computer Industry.

Comment Re:Getting ready for the MS bash (Score 1) 205

by gauharjk (#32925616) Attached to: Recomputing the Sky
I agree this is really awesome. Microsoft has done some revolutionary things in the past, like giving away the TCP/IP stack Internet Explorer 4.0 for free when these products were very expensive and would have hampered the growth of Internet. I have silverlight installed, but it it really worth an extra addon? I hope HTML 5 becomes a web standard soon so that people don't have to depend on these innumerable addons and the web becomes truely platform neutral.

Comment Blame AT&T (Score 0) 1

by gauharjk (#32772440) Attached to: iPhone 4 - Apple's OFFICIAL response
The main reason why Apple gets all the hate is its AT&T network, which wrecks the beautiful iPhone. Now Apple says the signal strength on iPhones was fake! Does that imply that AT&T network is worse than we imagined it was? I don't think other phones on the ATT network drop as many calls as the old iPhones did. I suspect Apple is trying to cover-up a defective hardware design.
Open Source

Submission + - Finding Open Source Projects Looking for Help 1

Submitted by aus
aus writes: I've been doing web development for about 10 years now. It's been very good to me, but I want to do more that write HTML, PHP, Javascript and CSS. Since the job market isn't all that great right now in the US, it would seem that volunteering some time on an open source project would give me the satisfaction I'm looking for. The problem is finding a project that wants/needs help that I would also be interested in. I've tried browsing around on sourceforge and freshmeat...is there a site somewhere that I'm not aware of that has classifieds where open source project maintainers post "job" listings?

Submission + - Pirate Party to Run Pirate Bay from Parliament (torrentfreak.com) 2

Submitted by rdnetto
rdnetto writes: After their former hosting provider received an injunction telling it to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the worlds most resilient BitTorrent site switched to a new ISP. That host, the Swedish Pirate Party, made a stand on principle. Now they aim to take things further by running the site from inside the Swedish Parliament.

The party has announced today that they intend to use part of the Swedish Constitution to further these goals, specifically Parliamentary Immunity from prosecution or lawsuit for things done as part of their political mandate. They intend to push the non-commercial sharing part of their manifesto, by running The Pirate Bay from ‘inside’ the Parliament, by Members of Parliament.
Politics

Submission + - Indian Gov threatens BlackBerry, Skype with ban 1

Submitted by gauharjk
gauharjk writes: India's Department of Telecommunications (DOT) has been asked by the government to serve a notice to Skype and Research In Motion (RIM) to ensure that their email and other data services comply with formats that can be read by security and intelligence agencies, or face a ban in India if they do not comply within 15 days. A similar notice is also being sent to Google asking it to provide access to content on Gmail in a readable format.

India has never really grown out of the communist-fascist bureaucratic culture where the government has ultimate power.
Censorship

Submission + - Tunneling Under the Great Firewall? 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am travelling to China sometime in the near future, and needless to say as a Slashdot reader I am going to require access to the internet. The whole, unadulterated, unfiltered internet. Also needless to say, I am very scared of the government there(my lack of a nickname on this submission being testament to that). I will only be there for a few weeks, and will not be using the computer for a large amount of time there, so I don't want to shell out a significant amount of money to a VPN service. However I also do not want to be hindered by extremely slow speeds such as those provided by the Tor network. I have experience implementing web servers and work fairly often with Linux, however many of my friends who also face the same dilemma don't. So Slashdot, what would be the most cost effective(free is best!) method for me to subvert the Great Firewall during my travels while maintaining sufficient anonymity and enjoying sufficient speed?

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