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Censorship

Submission + - China censors 5000 porn sites, 5000 arrested (domaincensorship.com)

lothos writes: China has shut down more than 60,000 pornographic websites this year and arrested 5,000 people as it steps up a campaign against obscene material. Beijing has run a highly publicized drive against lewd online content which it claims is overwhelming the country’s internet and mobile phones and threatening the emotional health of children. Critics have accused the Chinese government of deepening the crackdown, launched last December, and said censorship had blocked many sites with politically sensitive or even user-generated content.
Businesses

Submission + - "I Just Need a Programmer"

theodp writes: As head of the CS Department at the University of Northern Iowa, Eugene Wallingford often receives e-mail and phone calls from eager entrepreneurs with The Next Great Idea. They want to change the world, and they want Prof. Wallingford to help them. They just need a programmer. 'Many idea people,' observes Wallingford, 'tend to think most or all of the value [of a product] inheres to having the idea. Programmers are a commodity, pulled off the shelf to clean up the details. It's just a small matter of programming, right?' Wrong. 'Writing the program is the ingredient the idea people are missing,' he adds. 'They are doing the right thing to seek it out. I wonder what it would be like if more people could implement their own ideas.'
Education

Submission + - Using the Web to Turn Kids into Autodidacts

theodp writes: Autodidacticism — self-education or self-directed learning — is nothing new, but the Internet holds the promise of taking it to the masses. Sugata Mitra, an Indian physicist whose earlier educational experiments inspired the film 'Slumdog Millionaire,' is convinced that, with the Internet, kids can learn by themselves so long as they are in small groups and have well-posed questions to answer. And now, Mitra's Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) are going global, with testing in schools in Australia, Colombia, England and India. On their own, children can get about 30% of the knowledge required to pass exams, so to go further, Dr. Mitra supplements SOLE with e-mediators, amateur volunteers who use Skype to help kids learn online. While the U.S. has been slow to embrace SOLE, America does its autodidacticism evangelists. Dr. Yung Tae Kim (another physicist) similarly espouses setting up smaller high school and college classes as 'problem solving workshops' where students can work together in groups, with the teacher acting less as an instructor and more as a troubleshooter, helping students if and when they get stuck.
Google

Submission + - "My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement" (nytimes.com) 3

otter42 writes: It's a bit of a moral dilema to post this to slashdot, giving the bastard what he wants, but even if DecorMyEyes is right and it's true that all bad publicity is good publicity in Google land, the story still needs to come out. The NYTimes has an 8-page exposé on how an online business is thriving because of giant amounts of negative reviews. It seems that if you directly google the company you have no problem discerning the true nature; but if you instead only google the brand names it sells, the company is at the top of the rankings. Turns out that all the negative advertisement he generates from reputable sites gives him countless links that inflate his pagerank.

Submission + - USCG Sues Copyright Defense Lawyer (escapistmagazine.com)

ESRB writes: The US Copyright Group has sued Graham Syfert, an attorney that created a packet of self-representation paperwork for individuals sued for P2P sharing of certain movies and moved to have sanctions placed against the defense attorney. Syfert sells these packets for $20, and the USCG claims the 19 individuals that have used it have costed them over $5000.

Comment why the editorial? (Score 3, Insightful) 34

I'm not trying to be a troll or anything, honestly I'm new to Slashdot, but why would they report a court ruling as "unfortunate"? I honestly don't know enough about the issue yet to have an informed opinion, but it seems the poster or Slashdot wants for me to have the preconception that this is not a good thing.

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