spazzm - Slashdot User

EU Sues Sweden, Demands ISP Data Retention 315

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday May 28, 2009 @03:05AM from the save-it-or-else dept.

Death Metal writes "The EU passed the Data Retention Directive years ago, a law that demands ISPs and search engines hold onto data long enough to help the cops (but not long enough to cause privacy problems). But Sweden never passed it into national law, and the European Commission has now sued the country to make sure a bill appears."

MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX 674

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @11:12AM from the math-journals-won't-be-switching-anytime-soon dept.

alphabetsoup writes "Office 2010 Technology preview was leaked a few days back. With its leak, a feature which was rumored to be present can now be confirmed. Office 2010 finally adds support for Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates, etc.) of OpenType, allowing one to create documents so far possible only in TeX or InDesign. Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?"

GPS Accuracy Could Start Dropping In 2010 210

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 14, 2009 @05:50PM from the how-to-blackmail-for-tax-dollars dept.

adamengst writes "A US Government Accountability Office report raises concerns about the Air Force's ability to modernize and maintain the constellation of satellites necessary to provide GPS services to military and civilian users. TidBITS looks at the situation and possible solutions."

Judge In Pirate Bay Trial Biased 415

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday April 23, 2009 @07:48AM from the aren't-we-all dept.

maglo writes "The judge who handed down the harsh sentence to the four accused in the The Pirate Bay trial was biased, writes Sveriges Radio (Sweden Public Radio): sr.se (swedish). Google translation. The judge is member of two copyright lobby organizations, something he shares with several of the prosecutor attorneys (Monique Wadsted, Henrik Pontén and Peter Danowsky). The organizations in question are Svenska Föreningen för Upphovsrätt (SFU) and Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (SFIR)."

Why Is Connectivity So Cheap In Stockholm? 443

Posted by timothy on Saturday April 18, 2009 @02:30PM from the umlauts-defy-gravity dept.

lpress writes "Symmetric, 100 Mbps service in Stockholm, costs $11/month. Conditions in every city are different, but part of the explanation for the low cost is that the city owns a municipal fiber network reaching every block. They lease network access to anyone who would like to offer service. The ISPs, including incumbent telephone and cable companies, compete on an equal footing."

Sun's Phipps Slams App Engine's Java Support 186

Posted by samzenpus on Monday April 13, 2009 @04:46PM from the you're-both-pretty dept.

narramissic writes "Sun Microsystems' chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, said in an April 11 blog post that Google committed a major transgression by only including support for a subset of Java classes in its App Engine development platform. 'Whether you agree with Sun policing it or not, Java compatibility has served us all very well for over a decade,' Phipps wrote. 'That includes being sure as a developer that all core classes are present on all platforms. Creating subsets of the core classes in the Java platform was forbidden for a really good reason, and it's wanton and irresponsible to casually flaunt the rules.' Phipps characterized his remarks as non-official, saying: 'This isn't something I could comment on on Sun's behalf. My personal comments come purely from my long association with Java topics.'"

Worst Working Conditions You Had To Write Code In? 1127

Posted by samzenpus on Monday April 13, 2009 @12:35PM from the 150-of-us-in-a-shoebox-in-the-middle-of-the-road dept.

sausaw writes "I recently had to write code in a hot dusty room for 20 days with temperatures near 107F (~41C); having nothing to sit on; a 64 Kbps inconsistent internet connection; warm water for drinking and a lot of distractions and interruptions. I am sure many people have been in similar situations and would like to know your experiences."

Comment Re:Error in story (Score 1) 330

by spazzm on Thursday March 19, 2009 @12:32AM (#27252005) Attached to: Activists Use Wikipedia To Test Aussie Net Censors

>Link at the bottom of the page was removed 15 minutes after inital the protection by the same administrator who protected the page.

Nope, the protection was applied by SoWhy here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Australian_Communications_and_Media_Authority&diff=278062010&oldid=278060875

The link was removed by VirtualSteve approximately one and a half hour later. VirtualSteve also removes and re-applies the protection. Scarian then re-inserts the link nearly seven hours later.

Comment Re:Error in story (Score 1) 330

by spazzm on Thursday March 19, 2009 @12:12AM (#27251905) Attached to: Activists Use Wikipedia To Test Aussie Net Censors

Nope, the link has was there when the page was protected, immediately after and when I checked a few seconds ago.
Maybe you're confusing the link we're talking about (at the bottom of the WP page) with the one that keeps being added and removed from within the WP text?

Comment Error in story (Score 4, Informative) 330

by spazzm on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @11:23PM (#27251663) Attached to: Activists Use Wikipedia To Test Aussie Net Censors

The link has not been removed. It is at the bottom of WikiPedia's ACAM article as "Prohibited link".
The story pretty much describes the opposite of what happened - the page was protected because a minority of users (many of them IP users without a login) kept on removing the link.

Wikileaks Pages Added To Australian Internet Blacklist 437

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @08:41AM from the paging-dr-streisand-dr-streisand dept.

cpudney writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has added several Wikileaks pages to its controversial blacklist. The blacklisted pages contain Denmark's list of banned websites. Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine as the hosts of the popular Australian broadband forum, Whirlpool, discovered last week when they published a forum post that linked to an anti-abortion web-site recently added to ACMA's blacklist. The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian government's proposed mandatory ISP-level Internet censorship legislation. Wikileaks' response to notification of the blacklisting states: 'The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.'" So Australians aren't allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren't allowed to see?

Clear Public Satellite Imagery Tantamount to Yelling Fire 230

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday March 13, 2009 @03:59PM from the daily-dose-of-unbridled-stupidity dept.

TechDirt pointed out a recent bit of foolishness as a followup to California Assemblyman Joel Anderson's push to force Google and other online mapping/satellite companies to blur out schools, churches, and government buildings. When pushed, apparently his justification was that leaving these buildings un-obscured is the same as shouting fire. "News.com ran an interview with Anderson, where he attempts to defend his proposed legislation as a matter of public safety. He claims that there is no good reason why anyone would need to clearly see these buildings online, and that it can only be used for bad purposes. [...] Apparently, Anderson is the final determiner of what good people do and what bad people do with online maps."

Timetable App Developer Gets Nastygram From Transit Sydney 378

Posted by timothy on Friday March 06, 2009 @02:02AM from the didn't-get-the-gift-horse-memo dept.

mikesd81 writes "ZDNet Australia writes that NSW state corporation RailCorp has threatened a Sydney software developer with legal action if he fails to withdraw a train timetable application that is currently the second-most-popular application in its category in Apple's App Store. Alvin Singh created Transit Sydney after he began teaching himself how to program in Cocoa Mobile. Within days of its Feb 18 release, Singh received a cease and desist notice from Rail Corporation NSW, the government body that administers Sydney's CityRail network. The email states: 'I advise that copyright in all CityRail timetables is owned by RailCorp. ... Any use of these timetables in a manner which breaches copyright by a third party can only occur through the grant of a suitable licence by RailCorp.'"

Volt Asks Temps To 'Vote" For Microsoft Pay Cut 412

Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 01, 2009 @03:47PM from the one-contractor-one-vote dept.

theodp writes "In an email sent Friday evening to its Microsoft temp workers, Volt Workforce Solutions asked the techies to 'vote' to agree to a 10% pay cut. From the email: 'We want to support you in continuing your assignment at Microsoft and respectfully ask that you respond by going to the upper left hand corner of this email under the "Vote" response option and select, "Accept'" by close of business Tuesday, March 3, 2009. By accepting you agree to the [-10%] pay adjustment in your pay rate.' Microsoft managed to keep the Feb. 20 email detailing plans to slash rates from leaking while it pitched its Elevate America initiative at the 2009 Winter Meeting of the National Governors Association, touting Microsoft skills as just the ticket to economic recovery."

45nm Phenom II Matches Core 2 Quad, Trails Core i7 234

Posted by kdawson on Friday January 09, 2009 @10:24AM from the still-in-the-game dept.

An anonymous reader writes "AMD recently debuted its 45nm Phenom II processors, and The Tech Report has already run them through a complete suite of benchmarks to see how they perform compared to Intel's latest and greatest. The new 2.8GHz and 3GHz Phenom IIs are in a dead heat with like-priced Core 2 Quads, but they generally fall well behind Intel's new Core i7 chips. TR concludes that AMD's future doesn't look as bleak as some say, and future Phenom IIs could compete favorably with more affordable Core i7 derivatives."

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