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Comment It is unnatural (Score -1, Troll) 1036

Normal ('straight') employees are now penalized for not acting unnaturally. (For the obtuse: for doing the same work & hours & etc, the normal employee will get less income). It would be far more wise to spend the funds towards therapy for these poor things, to rather help them to live closer to natural normal standards.

Comment ONLY applies to commercial OS'es (Score 1) 569

We who use opensource software, and by that I mean mostly Linux users, do not need to 'pirate' any software. We usually have better free equivalents readily at hand, an apt-get, yum, or rpm away. The FA looks more like an attempt at FUD by (Microsoft - to avoid lying) commercial interrests - it's just another bought blogger/journalist.

Comment The OS-independence you want.. (Score 1) 310

There is a very stable C++ IDE in Ultimate++.

Quoting from the site:
"U++ is a C++ cross-platform rapid application development framework focused on programmers productivity. It includes a set of libraries (GUI, SQL, etc..), and an integrated development environment.
...
TheIDE can work with GCC, MinGW and Visual C++ 9.0 as contained in free Windows Vista SDK and contains a full featured debugger. TheIDE can also be used to develop non-U++ applications."

Comment An algae nightmare? (Score 1) 134

As a botanist, I worry about some of the new genetically engineered or the kind of super plant getting out of control. In the same manner, I guess I should worry about an enhanced high yield algae escaping some sort of super algae farm. Would it have the same effect on the environment as other specialized "plants"? Would it be some kind of fairly fragile monoculture type algae that would not do well in the wild? Algae is already a major problem in the Mediterranean and along the west coast of the US recently. I wonder if anyone has examined of this critter might be a problem? A high yield algae would certainly find it's way back into the oceans and lakes.

Comment Re:We need to take care of our privacy. (Score 1) 126

NoScript is completely ineffectual against even passably mediocre tracking technologies. I mean, I can think of at least a couple of ways to bypass NoScript without breaking a mental sweat.

Let's see...

Request comes to web server. Web server gets IP address, referrer (or referer if you're the W3C). That immediately goes into a database, along with a unique GUID that then gets appended as a variable to every link on my page. This can either be done GET-style as a URL parameter...

http://slashdot.org/~Civil_Disobedient/?12345 ...or, I can just put it as part of the actual link, like this:

http://slashdot.org/12345/~Civil_Disobedient/ ...and then mod_rewrite it to the first form. Or I could do this just as easily:

http://slashdot.org/12345~Civil_Disobedient/

There's really nothing that can be done to stop it, but this shouldn't make you any more paranoid than saying there's nothing you can do to stop store owners from memorizing faces and purchases.

Science

Reflected Gravitational Waves 329

WSOGMM sends in an arXiv blog post about reflecting gravity waves. The speculation is that reflected gravity could go some ways toward explaining the odd readings being returned by Gravity Probe B. "In the couple of weeks since he introduced the idea that superconducting sheets can reflect gravity waves, Raymond Chiao from the University of California, Merced, has been busy with a couple of buddies working out how big this effect is... Chiao and co. ask how big the effect of a gravitational wave on a thin superconducting sheet is compared to the effect on an ordinary conducting sheet. The answer? 42 orders of magnitude bigger."

Comment Same as Service vs Commodity problem (Score 2, Interesting) 708

We have not yet sorted out if software is a service or a commodity: if it is the latter then the '==physical key"-conjecture might hold; if a service then it is all in the mind...

It seems the judge did not ask for, nor got sufficient evidence, which points to ($#@$ stupid) lawyers/barristers representing the cases.

My gut feel is, apart from this miscarriage of justice, that the issue can only be resolved by investigating the intentions for encryption: if that intention was to protect the data from perusal by others, then this falls clearly under the gambit of "the privilege against self incrimination".
Math

Towards a Wiki For Formally Verified Mathematics 299

An anonymous reader writes "Cameron Freer, an instructor in pure mathematics at MIT, is working on an intriguing project called vdash.org (video from O'Reilly Ignite Boston 4): a math wiki which only allows true theorems to be added! Based on Isabelle, a free-software theorem prover, the wiki will state all of known mathematics in a machine-readable language and verify all theorems for correctness, thus providing a knowledge base for interactive proof assistants. In addition to its benefits for education and research, such a project could reveal undiscovered connections between fields of mathematics, thus advancing some fields with no further work being necessary."
Programming

Non-Programming Jobs For a Computer Science Major? 936

An anonymous reader writes "I recently graduated from a 'major' university in America with a BS degree in Computer Science. I unfortunately must admit that I am not very skilled with programming. I finished with the degree, and I've spent much of my college career working a job doing technical support (fixing laptops, troubleshooting Windows problems, etc). What jobs can I get with a computer science degree that are NOT mainly programming jobs? A little programming wouldn't be bad, but none would be preferred. And what kind of salaries do these jobs typically fetch?"

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