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Comment Re:Probably not the best idea... (Score 1) 285

by jurv!s (#43527635) Attached to: Protesting Animal Testing, Intruders Vandalize Italian Lab
I work in biomedical research IT. SO works as a vet tech in the animal facility. She catches so many scientists violating protocols to the detriment of the animals well-being (esp post-docs from Asia) that we do not have much faith at all in the common sense and compassion of the scientists. I'm so glad my SO is a bleeding-heart animal lover who does a thankless job that bums her out way too often. I'm sure you take great care of your animals, but don't delude yourself that your colleagues do too...
Media

Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac 398

Posted by timothy from the vlc-generally-rocks dept.
plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."
The Courts

CRIA Faces $60 Billion Lawsuit 280

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the turn-about-is-fair-play dept.
jvillain writes "The Canadian Recording Industry Association faces a lawsuit for 60 billion dollars over willful infringement. These numbers may sound outrageous, yet they are based on the same rules that led the recording industry to claim a single file sharer is liable for millions in damages. Since these exact same companies are currently in the middle of trying to force the Canadian government to bring in a DMCA for Canada, it will be interesting to see how they try to spin this."
Security

Maryland Town Tests New Cryptographic Voting System 227

Posted by samzenpus from the super-safe-voting dept.
ceswiedler writes "In Tuesday's election voters in Takoma Park, MD used a new cryptographic voting system designed by David Chaum with researchers from several universities including MIT and the University of Maryland. Voters use a special ink to mark their ballots, which reveals three-digit codes which they can later check against a website to verify their vote was tallied. Additionally, anyone can download election data from a Subversion repository and verify the overall accuracy of the results without seeing the actual choices of any individual voter."
Microsoft

20 Years of MS Word and Why It Should Die a Swift Death 843

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the going-the-way-of-old-yeller dept.
Ars writer Jeremy Reimer takes a stroll down memory lane, recalling over 20 years of (almost) constant Microsoft Word use and why, with current and emerging tech trends, he thinks his relationship with the program may be at an end. "So why don't I need Word any more? To figure this out, I tried to go back to basics and think about what Word was originally designed to do. In the early days, Word's primary purpose was to ready a document so that you could print it out. As a student I needed to print out essays so I could hand them to my instructor. In the office I needed to print out reports so that I could hand them to my supervisor. The end goal was always the same: I printed out something to give to someone more important than me, who would evaluate it and, if I was lucky, give it back to me at some indeterminate time in the future. One didn't question this; it was just the way the world worked. Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much. Maybe it was the rise of office networking. Maybe it was when the printer companies kept raising the price of ink to ridiculous levels. Maybe it was when we realized we couldn't print out the whole Internet. Despite the fact that fewer things were being printed, we kept on using Word to create our documents."

Comment Multitouch trackapad ftw (Score 1) 519

by jurv!s (#27770883) Attached to: Bluetooth Versus Wireless Mice
If you've got a newer MBP with a multitouch trackpad, I can't understand why you'd ever want a mouse. From two-finger scrolling and two-finger clicking to three-finger gestures and beyond, I've never wanted to go back to a mouse. I feel the multitouch trackpad is the best input device improvement since the original mouse.

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