Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Good day sir...I SAID GOOD DAY SIR! (Score 1) 192

by sonic_assault (#31699660) Attached to: Slashdot Discussions Now Include Roulette Video Chat
I don't think I like it. It's more of a distraction for me than anything else. As far as promoting better posting habits, I think it might actually promote judging someone on how they look instead of the content of their post. Also, it introduces the opportunity for annoying advertisements. I never thought I would be disabling flash content on Slashdot...
Science

Submission + - World's smallest superconductor discovered (thinq.co.uk)

Submitted by arcticstoat
arcticstoat writes: One of the barriers to the development of nanoscale electronics has potentially been eliminated, as scientists have discovered the world's smallest superconductor. Made up of four pairs of molecules, and measuring just 0.87nm, the superconductor could potentially be used as a nanoscale interconnect in electronic devices, but without the heat and power disspiation problems associated with standard metal conductors.
The Internet

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 Passes Senate Panel 367

Posted by CmdrTaco from the this-won't-end-well dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 passed a Senate panel, giving the president unprecedented power to issue a nation-wide blackout or restriction on websites without congressional approval. The bill, written by Sen. Jay Rockefeller [D-WV] and revised by Sen. Olympia Snow [R-ME], was drafted in an attempt to thwart internet-based terrorist threats, and gives the president this 'kill switch' without oversight or explanation. The bill is up for Senate vote."
The Internet

Submission + - The State of the Internet Operating System (oreilly.com)

Submitted by macslocum
macslocum writes: Tim O'Reilly: "I've been talking for years about "the internet operating system", but I realized I've never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post. Here you will see the underlying beliefs about the future that are guiding my publishing program as well as the rationale behind conferences I organize."

Submission + - BBC adds DRM to its iPlayer content (linuxcentre.net)

Submitted by oik
oik writes: The BBC has quietly added DRM to its iPlayer content. This breaks support for things like the XBMC plugin as well as other non-approved third party players. The get-iplaye download page has a good summary of what happened including links to The Rge articles and th BBC's response to users' complaints.

Submission + - Will ACTA be Unconstitutional? (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by DustyShadow
DustyShadow writes: Harvard’s Jack Goldsmith and Lawrence Lessig have an interesting op-ed in today’s Washington Post arguing that it would be constitutionally dubious for President Obama to adopt the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) as an executive agreement. "[T]he Obama administration has suggested it will adopt the pact as a "sole executive agreement" that requires only the president's approval." "Joining ACTA by sole executive agreement would far exceed these precedents. The president has no independent constitutional authority over intellectual property or communications policy, and there is no long historical practice of making sole executive agreements in this area. To the contrary, the Constitution gives primary authority over these matters to Congress, which is charged with making laws that regulate foreign commerce and intellectual property."

Comment Re:So (Score 1) 94

by sonic_assault (#31625156) Attached to: 20 Years For Gonzalez In TJX Hacker Case
The crime is that he did something that is blatantly illegal. He illegally breeched that companies systems. The consequences of people's actions aren't so simple. There may be no 'visible' harm, but you don't hear the story of their IT staff having to work overtime to resolve that breech and the money that company spent to do it. You can justify it by saying the man was helping further their security by showing them a weakness, but that justification fails when he did it to take advantage of them.

Comment Re:Maybe it's cart horse... (Score 1) 609

by Ihlosi (#31624742) Attached to: Math Skills For Programmers — Necessary Or Not?
In my 12 year career my math comes down to some percent calculations for some basic stats.

And if you don't know enough mathematics to know about the peculiarities of integer, fixed-point and floating-point arithmetics, your program will screw up some of those calculations in the most horrible way, and be somewhat less-than-accurate in others.

Slashdot Top Deals

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so." -- Artemus Ward aka Charles Farrar Brown

Close