Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Privacy

Submission + - Cold War Warrantless Wiretapping (politicsdaily.com)

somanyrobots writes: President Gerald Ford secretly authorized the use of warrantless domestic wiretaps for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes soon after coming into office, according to a declassified document. The Dec. 19, 1974 White House memorandum, marked Top Secret/Exclusively Eyes Only and signed by Ford, gave then-Attorney General William B. Saxbe and his successors in office authorization "to approve, without prior judicial warrants, specific electronic surveillance within the United States which may be requested by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
Medicine

High Fructose Corn Syrup Causes Bigger Weight Gain In Rats 542

krou writes "In an experiment conducted by a Princeton University team, 'Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.' Long-term consumption also 'led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides.' Psychology professor Bart Hoebel commented that 'When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight.'"

Comment Re:Starsiege: Tribes and Possibly Achron (Score 1) 325

Pretty sure the size was 64. And my favorite trivia about tribes was that skiing was entirely unintended by the devs; it's made possible by a bug in the physics engine. But people had so much fun with it, and it became such a core part of gameplay, that when the (disastrous) sequels were written (Tribes 2 and Tribes: Vengeance) it was preserved intentionally.

Comment Re:Freedom of speech .. (Score 2, Interesting) 187

It's ContentID. They do have humans who go through and review (they absolutely refuse to say how many), but ContentID does 90% of it these days. I spoke with one of the developers working on the system last fall, and they essentially consider it to be the Holy Grail of not having to waste time on DMCA notices. What's most likely is that in your case, the owner of the content hasn't asked YouTube to do anything about it, so they're merely flagging it, informing you, and not taking anything down. Compare to the big labels, which have YouTube take down flagged videos or, in some cases, give the labels a cut of the advertising revenue alongside them.

Google

Submission + - Grimmelman on Google Books Summit Fairness Hearing (laboratorium.net)

somanyrobots writes: James Grimmelman's report from the Google Books Summit fairness hearing:

I was at the courthouse from 8:30 onwards, with the team of New York Law School students who’ve been working on the Public Index. We didn’t want to take any chances that we might not make it in. (Last time, we were among the very last people seated.) No worries there; we got great seats in the overflow room, and in the afternoon, in the courtroom itself. I’m very glad I had the student team along with me. Their observations and insights about the arguments and the lawyers were invaluable in helping me write up this post. Other than my conversation with them, I’ve avoided reading the press coverage; I wanted to provide a direct account of how I saw the day’s events, without being influenced by others’ takes.

Comment Re:Monopoly (Score 1) 439

Whoever was quoted on the 12GB storage savings per student was making up information. I would like an explanation of how 2GB email quota per student -- not measured usage -- becomes 12GB of storage; even including tape backups. If this statistic is true, the storage architecture for Yale email has been designed by an incompetent idiot. Explains why Yale has to outsource email.

I can provide you that explanation without compromising my contract; disclaimer, I'm a senior working for Yale ITS. Yale provides 2GB email inboxes, but keeps 7 days worth of daily (I believe midnight) backups. That way when someone goes over their 2GB quota and corrupts their inbox, and loses their mail, they've got 7 days to let us know and we can still restore 95% of their email. Better if our webmail service could simply bounce the excess email rather than corrupting the inbox, but c'est la vie. The 12GB of storage, I'm assuming, is the average; 7 times the average inbox size per student. Uncertain if the number is made up, or was discussed in the one meeting I wasn't present for, but it's a reasonable number either way. I suspect it came from the other meeting, because the people who originally spoke to the news aren't creative or intelligent enough to make it up.

Comment Re:I could have told you that. (Score 1) 938

Just a word of warning, ability-based tracking isn't a good idea without damn good aptitude tests (which don't exist). My girlfriend teaches in a piss-poor, underperforming elementary school, where the students are aggressively tracked (her 3rd-6th graders are all segregated into low- and high-performing classes). The high-aptitude kids benefit, there's no question; but all of the school's measurements for high-performing children heap poorly-behaved kids in with poorly-achieving ones. The result is that all of the unmotivated, bad-behavior students reinforce each other, so all the low-performing classes are behavioral train wrecks, and in a given day, the teacher's liable to waste anywhere between one- and three-quarters of the day on simple classroom management, every day. My girlfriend is one of the few teachers that moves around and sees all the kids, and half the time she gets so frustrated with the low-aptitude classes that she doesn't have the patience to do well with the good ones.

Ability-based education, like most education, only works when the students want to learn. And separating out a child's desire to learn from his ability to learn is damn near impossible, and something that aptitude tests just can't do.

Comment Re:Intervals (Score 1) 395

Agreed. This poll is CLEARLY a nod do the people who've been agitating for more logarithmic polls lately. And I happen to agree with them; if we break it down to a regular interval, we'll just make the problem of accurate figuring out which category you belong to much harder, and make the poll as a whole less informative.

Comment Re:First Question that Comes to Mind (Score 1) 459

Those folks trapped behind

asinine security policies

are almost certainly the ones the Chrome frame is targeted at, though. Only tech-savvy users will actually seek out this plugin, and tech-savvy users who still use IE almost always use it because they're ordered to.

This article is straight-up Microsoft FUD, the same bull they've been feeding us for twenty years now.

Comment Yes in the Ivies (Score 1) 835

I am a student and tech support coordinator at an Ivy League university, and my school, for one, is very Linux friendly. Campus services are mostly platform-agnostic (currently, there's some talk of using Silverlight for some class video supplements, but I had a conversation with the administrator running that and he's promised that if they go with it, they'll also have quicktime and flash options available). The campus network is based on EHA/MAC address whitelisting, and is thus platform-neutral. Getting some site-licensed software is a pain on Linux (MATLAB requires several more hoops to download on Linux than Windows, but it's doable), but any and all required class programs are available in computer clusters (which have Windows and Mac machines, and a couple of specialized clusters have Linux). Our tech support group (the largest in the nation, at ~130 student employees and 3 full-time staff) doesn't totally support Linux machines, but we support it as we can; we keep a group of designated Linux specialists who offer limited tech support to Linux users with computer problems (we don't fully support just because of the difficulty of doing so, especially with a staff that's only 5-15% Linux users).

We have some non-savvy professors who will occasionally require closed solutions, but the average Linux user is smart enough to work around those restrictions, rather than suffer under them. Overall, we're very FOSS-friendly. It's a great place to use Linux.

Comment Actual crime (Score 2, Interesting) 189

Shocking! The charge that sticks is the only one related to what he actually did wrong! I know the "City of San Francisco" is royally pissed, but even if they're throwing the book at him they have an obligation to stay within the bounds of fact.

I hope he's let off the hook, personally. The damage he's done to his career (who'll hire a DBA who would hijack the whole network?) is probably enough punishment even by itself. And the details of the offense (hostage-taking to avoid a pink slip) are sufficient to keep him from being hired in any field, technical or not.

Comment Re:But Sir (Score 1) 229

Wasn't there a "sampling" case where it was ruled that using a certain percentage of a song (a few seconds IIRC) were not considered to be copyright infringement?

No, but there was a famous sampling case in which the judge ruled explicitly "Get a license or do not sample." The issue of sampling hasn't seen any Supreme Court action, but at the moment this is the highest ruling on the matter, and it explicitly outlaws any and all digital sampling.

Here's the actual opinion, it's actually pretty readable.

Slashdot Top Deals

Whoever dies with the most toys wins.

Working...