Slashdot Mirror

So Canonical are trying something different, for better or worse.

They tried different wallpapers before (calender wallpapers introduced with Breezy), just to prove that brown can indeed be beautiful. Alas, some prudish afterthoughts caused them to be discontinued (removed from Hoary).
http://hacktolive.org/w/images/Ubuntu-calendar-november-ws.jpg
http://hacktolive.org/w/images/Ubuntu-calendar-december-ws.jpg
http://hacktolive.org/w/images/Ubuntu-calendar-march-ws.jpg

Body painting was used to promote Linux at a show, but as far as I recall, Ubuntu was never brave enough to make a wallpaper on the theme: http://linuxologist.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/linux_body_painting_kl-300x278.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_jLaEIqL6T8Y/SNwXz548U6I/AAAAAAAABcU/SDCXCNMXVmE/s400/Linux_Body_Art.jpg

Keep that spirit going, you!

---

No Advert Today

Unfortunately, that's not always the case. There was a recent nasty episode when this guy was falsely accused of abusing and murdering his stepdaughter. It turned out in a previous hospital visit doctors had ignored evidence of severe injuries from a playground accident from which she ultimately died. Of course, nobody dared mention the negligent doctors' names, but the stepfather's face and full name were front page of some major newspapers. Truly disgusting in many ways. I'm glad at least sometimes they behave correctly.

Oh yes, it is possible to change this, and I'm going to do it, in my spare time, and without quitting my day job.

Get a union.

Seriously!

Hollywood actors, screenwriters and directors all have strong unions. And when they strike (as the writers did in 2007), they are not easily replaced. If Joss Whedon walks off the set you can't just grab some random schmuck off the street to replace him.

Game developers are creative people too. They have just as much leverage as the showbiz creatives in New York and LA do. All they need to do to stop being treated like crap is to exercise it.

As I recall, when the writers struck, they were supported by agents, actors, politicians, and many other unions. This gave the other side incentive to negotiate.

Who would go out on a financial limb to support striking game creators?

How about the custies who love the game? Oh.. NVM... they live in Mommie's basement and smoke cloves.... they are worthless...
NOT....

If you love your entertainment creators then be prepared to defend them when that-bad-old-puddy-tat musses them up.

Dude, the largest IT company in India with over 100,000 employees switched from MS Office to Openoffice overnight without any warning and they just told the employees to get used to it.

So it can indeed happen!

Thank you! Finally someone explains the fundamental difference, which seems to have been missed by not only the Wired article, but also every other commenter so far. This blog post also helped.

I still don't understand how this works, but at least now I understand why it might!

Dumbass!

Yeah, why can't there be one way to do it like on Windows.

Get a union.

Seriously!

Hollywood actors, screenwriters and directors all have strong unions. And when they strike (as the writers did in 2007), they are not easily replaced. If Joss Whedon walks off the set you can't just grab some random schmuck off the street to replace him.

Game developers are creative people too. They have just as much leverage as the showbiz creatives in New York and LA do. All they need to do to stop being treated like crap is to exercise it.

As I recall, when the writers struck, they were supported by agents, actors, politicians, and many other unions. This gave the other side incentive to negotiate.

Who would go out on a financial limb to support striking game creators?

Back up your wild assertions with some links, or everyone will be forced to conclude you just made that up. Here's one rebuttal to the assertion: http://immorallogic.blogspot.com/2007/01/liberal-vs-conservative-giving.html

Basically, if you don't count donations to churches, the gap disappears. And why should you? Even when a church does charitable work, it comes with a sermon which is basically a sales pitch to join something very like an MLM scheme. It isn't charity, it's marketing.

The idea that liberals give away 'other people's money' is ludicrous on the face of it. Liberals don't pay taxes? We're putting our money towards charity, too, but charity is a public good, and we demand that you pay your fair share of this shared good. When I give to a charity, you benefit. because the charity makes society a better place. Charities make the hungry and homeless less desperate, and less likely to steal your stuff. They make the useless and uneducated into productive citizens who grow the economy. Charities do all kinds of beneficial things, and everyone benefits, which is why everyone should pay.

Get a union.

Seriously!

Hollywood actors, screenwriters and directors all have strong unions. And when they strike (as the writers did in 2007), they are not easily replaced. If Joss Whedon walks off the set you can't just grab some random schmuck off the street to replace him.

Game developers are creative people too. They have just as much leverage as the showbiz creatives in New York and LA do. All they need to do to stop being treated like crap is to exercise it.

The /. headline and the Wired article do tend to misrepresent Compressed Sensing as some kind of noise-remover, despeckler, or image enhancer. This is simply not the case. In Compressed Sensing, we are intentionally sampling a signal in an incoherent domain so that each measurement evaluates the entire image globally. In other words, each sample has as much weight as any other, so when we hold on to fewer of them, we may obtain more information about the original signal than if we sub-sampled the signal in the original domain. When we reconstruct the original image from our compressed/sub-sampled measurements in an incoherent domain, we are trying to find the most sparse signal that matches the measurements we observed (solving an ill-posed inverse problem via constrained optimization). The signal sparsity can be thought of the orderedness or "structured-ness" of the signal. In other words, the most ordered image that matches our compressed measurements is correct solution with high degree of probability. For a technical primer, check out this paper ( http://dsp.rice.edu/sites/dsp.rice.edu/files/cs/CSintro.pdf ).

Okay, yes, that might be a little bit weighty if you aren't in the field, but I would suggest you check out Nuit Blanche ( http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/ ) for a description of what exactly CS is, how it works, and what it is useful for. Today's article is especially interesting in this regard.

I just wrote a post why compressed sensing is not CSI technology (yet!) http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/2010/03/why-compressed-sensing-is-not-csi.html

Just three words, folks. Three words: It is orgasmic. Nothing else to say. I didn't even have a key until earlier today, when I posted on some blog claiming to have a ton of invites for free. I figured it was a scam, but posted a comment requesting an invite since I was hopeless and desitute. Lo and behold, three hours later, I actually had an invite. Go figure dude... Anyway, not sure if they have any invites left, but who knows, here's the link to the free starcraft 2 beta invites blog I found: http://starcraft2betainvites.blogspot.com/ Good luck! And one more thing... Battlecruisers Operational!!!

Both CPU and GPU Are Doomed

Why was I downvoted as flamebait? Who did I flamebait? Are some moderators on Slashdot working for Intel, AMD or Nvidia?

http://javadong.blogspot.com/2010/03/ftl-not-faster-than-light.html

Both CPU and GPU Are Doomed

Unless those big dogs wake up soon from their stupor, an unknown startup will sneak behind them and steal their pot of gold.

Make them correctly solve a simple math problem in order to enable the "OK" button. My favorite is the captcha from the Moscow institute of physics and technology; http://lib.mipt.ru/?spage=reg_user

You have to determine the total resistance of a very simple resistor network (a wheatstone bridge). Sounds easy, right? Better dust off your knowlege of Kirchoff's law.

Several solutions can be found here; http://yaroslavvb.blogspot.com/2008/01/russian-captcha-revisited.html

There's a reason relatively little manufacturing is done in the US anymore,

The US, with a third of China's population, still does more manufacturing than China. US manufacturing output is still over twice that of China. US manufacturing employment, though, continues to drop. Manufacturing automation works very well today.

Crime - Is the crime actually bad in comparison to, say, an American city? Here's a re-print of a newspaper editorial from The Harvard Crimson - Urban Poverty and Crime: Contrasting Boston and Mumbai, India:

"With over 18 million inhabitants, Mumbai has a population density four times that of New York City, and fully half of these inhabitants are homeless... Yet as of March 31, only 133 murders had been registered in all of Mumbai since New Years. This means that there has been one murder for roughly every 136,000 people this year, whereas Boston has had 16 murders in a city of under 600,000–roughly one murder for every 37,000 people."

I often see Boston get singled out in comparisons of this sort, most likely due to the unfortunate fact that the limits of the actual legally defined "City of Boston" are quite small compared with the metro area, and that the area contains a couple predominantly black neighborhoods that have been in a constant state of gang warfare since time immemorial. It takes a great statistical leap of faith to extrapolate that anomaly into how "safe" or "unsafe" the entire city of Boston is- if one were so inclined one could take the entire Boston Metro area into account and the per capita muder rate would drop through the floor. Don't expect anyone at the Harvard Crimson to acknowledge that detail, but they'll certainly use the statistics as an argument to get more gun control legislation passed -- as if anyone in Roxbury gives a fuck.

You are missing the point.

Why do all people living in the slum leave it at the earliest possible convenience if they can afford it?

Of course they do, nobody is arguing that is not the case. But the opposite question also points out a truth - why do countryside dwellers move into the city slums at the earliest possible convenience if they can afford it? From TFA:

"Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city."

Cities encourage growth. The slums are a hive of economic activity, providing jobs, income, and increased standard of living. Not for you or I, but for the tens of millions of people in the third world who made the choice to move from the countryside to the city.

Why do all people living outside the slum vote to demolish these settlements as soon as a political opportunity opens up?

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch". Middle and upper class residents don't want to live next to the lower classes. So where should the lower classes live?

If it is ecological wonderland, why do they have no sewage system, not even septic tanks?
If it is ecological wonderland, why do people die of disease, crime and poverty there?

TFA is discussing slums in third world nations and contrasting them with the countryside in those nations. Villages in the countryside in India and China generally do not have sewage systems. People also die of disease, crime and poverty in the countryside. Cities "promote new forms of income generation" - i.e. people move to cities because there are jobs and an opportunity to earn more than living in the countryside. In the third world (and even sometimes in the first), people do die of disease, crime and poverty, regardless of whether they live in a city slum or countryside. The comparison point here is not Vienna to a Mumbai slum - it is the Mumbai slum to the Maharashtra countryside that surrounds it.

Crime - Is the crime actually bad in comparison to, say, an American city? Here's a re-print of a newspaper editorial from The Harvard Crimson - Urban Poverty and Crime: Contrasting Boston and Mumbai, India:

"With over 18 million inhabitants, Mumbai has a population density four times that of New York City, and fully half of these inhabitants are homeless... Yet as of March 31, only 133 murders had been registered in all of Mumbai since New Years. This means that there has been one murder for roughly every 136,000 people this year, whereas Boston has had 16 murders in a city of under 600,000–roughly one murder for every 37,000 people."

does it tell us something about the slum, - or does it rather tell us something about The Greens that rave and dream about living in a human-made hellhole?

You are talking about Dark Greens and trying to ascribe their views to the rest of society. The Green Party takes about 10% of the vote in German, but I can assure you that they do not aim to turn Germany into a "hellhole".

I always suspected the Ecological Stalinists want us to go back into the caves.

Again you project your fears about Dark Greens onto anyone who shows any concern for the environment.

Maybe you should consider some Libertarian benefits of the slums:

• Dynamic and growing economy with practically no oversight, regulation or taxation by government
• Entrepreneurs generally use private security in preference to the (somewhat corrupt) police
• High density living means services can be p

Publicly available game save server? Glutton for punishment. Vulnerable and breakable. Details: http://drums-of-peace.blogspot.com/2010/02/awful-anti-pirate-system-that-will.html

This is especially important for all you who manage a SAN. Learn it, love it, live it.

To learn why disk partition alignment can be important, please reference the following blog post: http://clariionblogs.blogspot.com/2008/02/disk-alignment.html
Instructions for Stripe Alignment/Partition Alignment within a Windows Operating Systems
Reference the following link for info on DiskPart, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415
1 - At a command prompt on a windows host type diskpart
2 -Type select disk X (X being the numbered disk within disk management that you want to align)
3 -Type create partition primary align=64
4 -You can then format the drive and assign a drive letter to it

It’s very easy to prove that time is abstract. Time cannot change because changing time is self-referential. Why? Because velocity in time would have to be expressed as v = dt/dt, which is nonsensical. It’s that simple, folks. But I am tilting at windmills, I know.

The abstract nature of time is the reason that a time dimension is bunk and that nothing can move in spacetime, a revelation that always comes as a surprise to most relativists. But here it is from the mouth of a relativist:

“There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as “moving through” space-time, or as “following along” their world-lines. Rather, particles are just “in” space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle.”

From Relativity from A to B by Prof. Robert Geroch, U. of Chicago

By the way, physics is about to enter a revolutionary phase because Aristotle was right about motion.

Ah, you must be one of the evil funfems who are destroying the feminist movement. Pleased to meet you!

(If you don't get the reference, try reading some radical feminist blogs or listening to them. Alternatively, don't - they're nuts. Dangerous, religious fundamentalist class nuts, but still nuts.)

More seriously, though, have you been paying attention? You seem to have missed how male masturbation aids supposedly objectify women by turning their genitals into an object for male use.

IIRC, there's not much objection to actual male masturbation - so long as you're not looking at images of women when doing it (or even thinking about images of women). Which is quite a big "but"...

[ Also, the Feministing commentary on this Apple ban my be interesting - and bear in mind that Feministing is a really relaxed, beginner-level site that's fairly sex positive and is often criticised for not taking things seriously enough... ]

Oh boy, yourself.

Your post displays all the hallmarks of pseudoscience: elevated language to bamboozle the layman, accusations of censorship from the media, bald assertion of "common sense" causal connections, and a complete lack of rigorous data. A simple search-and-replace on your post could turn it into a defense of intelligent design, magnetic healing, or homeopathy: the thought process is the same. You adopt all the trappings of science without the rigor that makes the exercise worthwhile. You're no better than an alchemist.

You're not being censored by the media. Get over yourself. The mainstream media is more than happy to report on harmful substances when there's a modicum of evidence attached: see asbestos, tobacco, trans-fats, etc. That stuff sells like hotcakes! If it were discovered that cell phones were carcinogenic the media frenzy would make the Toyota debacle look like a slow news day.

There's simply no credible evidence in support of your worldview. You're the one making the outrageous claim that electromagnetic waves we've lived with for over a hundred years are actually harmful despite all the research to the contrary. Therefore, the burden falls on you to provide evidence, and your shameless unfounded assertions are seriously wanting.

Oh, and before you link to some minor study that purports to find a weak effect: your evidence needs to be strong enough to outweigh the "null hypothesis" of there being no connection. Perform enough studies and you'll get a few that show a positive result just by chance. Any study that purports to show a connection between cell phone use and cancer needs to:

• Rigorously control for other risks. (Oh, look! Cell phones are correlated with cancer in our study! Never mind that all our cell phone users worked in PCB plants and our control group was a class of toddlers.)
• Have a large enough sample size that its statistical power is significant. If cell phones are harmful, clearly the effect is weak and gradual. A very large study is required to reliably detect weak and gradual effects.
• Be performed by a credible, disinterested party like a university or government lab. Would you trust a Philip Morris study on the effects of smoking, a Trojan study on the reliability of condoms, or a PETA study on the health effects of red meat? I thought not.
• Be confirmed by an independent organization

Show me one of those and I might concede you're onto something. It wouldn't be the first time in history of science that a fringe group happened to be right. But the vast majority of these fringe groups are utterly incompetent if not downright fraudulent. That's why we ask for real evidence. If we were cro-magnons, I'm sure you'd be spreading FUD about the evil spirits that would be awakened if we kept using "fire" to cook our food.

Provide strong evidence. Put up or shut up.

Much hardware design starts in simulation, which is essentially software.

As the OpenVirgle page says, most of that activity has moved to the "open manufacturing" idea, where there is more current activity towards that sort of "clanking" thing, but in a more general way:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing

Artemis had always struck me as focusing on proprietary things, so is a non-starter in that sense (unless they have changed recently). I prefer what LUF is up to, like with what Eric Hunting is up to with "The Millennial Project 2":
http://tmp2.wikia.com/
http://theluf.blogspot.com/

And then there is the newer "OpenLuna":
http://www.openluna.org/

Twenty years before that I tried to do a PhD in this at Princeton (which fizzled painfully, after a similar attempt fizzled even more quickly essentially before it started at NCSU):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
"I'm posting this stuff here for archival purposes and in case they give others some ideas or encouragement for their own efforts. It's part of my scanning my own old paper archives. This was my proposal for graduate studies at Princeton University twenty years ago (and in some ways includes a proposal for creating a mini-Google and a mini-World-Wide-Web. :-). ... The good news is that now, twenty years later, all or most of the hurdles have fallen that otherwise needed leaping before being able to comprehensively design self-replicating space habitats, and all the computer and informational resources I thought I needed then are now available for cheap or free. For example, for only a few thousand dollars, I have the equivalent of an early 1990s supercomputer in my office with terabytes of storage and a high speed color scanner and a network connection and access to Google and Wikipedia and so on. So, what I outlined in the 20th century is more and more doable in the 21st century for less and less cost. So, item 13 (the major goal) is now approachable without needing to do much on the other prerequisite items listed. ..."

And then I worked toward a non-profit and then a company that both also fizzled:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html

I did get a masters as a consolation prize from an Ecology and Evolution PhD program when later my PhD studies towards this end at SUNY SB also fizzled...

Anyway, I tried to get NASA interested in this stuff over a decade ago but I was not successful; my attempt there:
"Open Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm

This is not to blame NASA entirely, other than being kind of bureaucratic like most government agencies, and I'm not that great a promoter. As is pointed out in many places, including by someone here:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1
the general problem with grants and things is that almost invariably the people best at getting grants are often the people least likely to do much innovative stuff with the money. :-) That is, grant getting skills and product creation skills are rarely found in the same person, or even in the same organization. And in this case of OSCOMAK, it also went against the very idea of tight managerial control that is a hallmark of NASA. But, could I ha

Thanks for that comment. It inspired me to post a snippet of a similar conversation I had months ago, with your links and some others added:

Is it right, however, to lump together those who are skeptical of evolution with those who are skeptical of AGW, particularly CO2-driven AGW ?

Creationists confuse religious faith with falsifiable science. Among the general public, climate-change contrarians (and your average Greenpeace/PETA loony) confuse political affiliation with falsifiable science. In both cases, scientists are much less likely to agree with either claim, and that likelihood decreases with increasing relevance of the scientist's field. That's probably why both groups tend to accuse the scientific community of conspiracy and/or widespread incompetence.

At my blog, the following statement is both legible and has popup titles describing why that link was chosen. Here it is without the links first: "And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational levels."

And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational lev els.

I've never heard of it before, but I don't doubt that the journal is legit, just that I don't recall seeing any meaningful peer review process for that particular piece (although I could be wrong here). However, the only things I've read about if from others (such as the French High Council of Biotechnology, European Food Safety Authority, and the Food Standards Australia New Zealand, among some moderately well known individuals) had nothing good to say. Bad stuff does wind up in good journals (as I said, the Wakefield study is a prime example). What they propose is plausible, that the chemicals used cause damage, however, the study still wasn't too hot. I can accept Round-Up causing the problems, I can even accept certain GMOs causing problems (here's two that did), but it won't be this study that convinces me of either. Comparing the Monsanto corn with regular corn, not much of a difference. It reminds me of the Failure to Yield report, which based it's premise (that GMOs have lower yield than non-GMO counterparts) on data showing an increase in yield!

To be fair, apparently the guys who did the study had to fight and claw to get the data they used for it from Monsanto, and that does highlight a lack of transparency which is not very desirable at all, but nonetheless, that doesn't mean that there is enough information to support their premise, and as you say, there certainty isn't justification to have this applied to all the other genetically engineered rice, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes, alfalfa, soybeans, papayas, ect. out there, which it undoubtedly will be.

This is a highly politicized issue (alas), and these things seem to come and go. I know I've seen the 'proof' that GMOs are dangerous before that study, and I don't doubt I'll see it again. When one of them sticks, when the WHO takes notice, when there is some really good strong evidence, when my horticulture professors are running around going "Holy moly look at this!" I'll give it more heed. In the mean time, I remain unimpressed.

I've never heard of it before, but I don't doubt that the journal is legit, just that I don't recall seeing any meaningful peer review process for that particular piece (although I could be wrong here). However, the only things I've read about if from others (such as the French High Council of Biotechnology, European Food Safety Authority, and the Food Standards Australia New Zealand, among some moderately well known individuals) had nothing good to say. Bad stuff does wind up in good journals (as I said, the Wakefield study is a prime example). What they propose is plausible, that the chemicals used cause damage, however, the study still wasn't too hot. I can accept Round-Up causing the problems, I can even accept certain GMOs causing problems (here's two that did), but it won't be this study that convinces me of either. Comparing the Monsanto corn with regular corn, not much of a difference. It reminds me of the Failure to Yield report, which based it's premise (that GMOs have lower yield than non-GMO counterparts) on data showing an increase in yield!

To be fair, apparently the guys who did the study had to fight and claw to get the data they used for it from Monsanto, and that does highlight a lack of transparency which is not very desirable at all, but nonetheless, that doesn't mean that there is enough information to support their premise, and as you say, there certainty isn't justification to have this applied to all the other genetically engineered rice, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes, alfalfa, soybeans, papayas, ect. out there, which it undoubtedly will be.

This is a highly politicized issue (alas), and these things seem to come and go. I know I've seen the 'proof' that GMOs are dangerous before that study, and I don't doubt I'll see it again. When one of them sticks, when the WHO takes notice, when there is some really good strong evidence, when my horticulture professors are running around going "Holy moly look at this!" I'll give it more heed. In the mean time, I remain unimpressed.

There is a D3D Quake engine that runs great on my netbook, http://mhquake.blogspot.com/ so if you don't have a pixel fetish like some of us, you can still play Quake (plus all those mods and very good maps).

Reminds me of this flash fiction by Mike Swanwick. :D

I find that fairly damning.

Because I know that everything in life is better with a little more of Nic Cage http://niccageaseveryone.blogspot.com/

If [this] is a valid precedent, then in any moment slashdot admins could be convicted in Italy for an AC comment.

I think the safest best is that the slashdot mothership corporation CEO's might be held liable for slashdot posts.

Exactly what do you mean by admins? Sysadmins? Were any Google sysadmins held liable in this case?

Whoever at Slashdot that an italian judge could think that is responsible for that comment to remain visible. Whatever fits better at the role that those convicted google workers had.

Or any of us, if we didnt promoted down that comment when had moderating points.

Were any youtube users held liable in this case?

Yes, is in the 1st paragraph of the google response, the one that posted it online got 10 months of jail.

Exactly what do you base your statements on? I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know Italian law, but I think it could say that CEOs are liable, but not other staff and certainly not users/consumers/customers. How do you know it doesn't?

Well, wasn't convicted Google CEOs for sure, and in fact, the convicted ones arent working at Google since 2 years ago, the charge for allowing the video to be posted online, making possible a privacy violation. Moderating/promoting comments (or promoting stories out of firehose) here make them more visible, more public, maybe would have no sense for us to be liable, but in weirdland they could think it is eventually, just give them enough time.

It's unlikely most countries would adopt the same restrictions China has, but obviously when Europe starts impacting the internet, pants are rightfully bricked. (Not that the U.S. lawmakers haven't had their fair share of calls for net filtering and ISP responsibility in the name of children, privacy, and copyright.)
Just to imagine what the landscape could look like a few years from now, following is *paraphrased* from Google's hearing before congress in 2006.

Some governments impose restrictions that make our mission difficult to achieve, and this is what we have encountered in Italy. In such a situation, we have to add to the balance a third fundamental commitment:

(c) Be responsive to local conditions.

So with that framework in mind, we decided to try a different path, a path rooted in the very pragmatic calculation that we could provide more access to more information to more Italian citizens more reliably by offering a new service – Google.it – that, though subject to Italy's self-censorship requirements, would have some significant advantages. Above all, it would be faster and more reliable, and would provide more and better search results for all but a handful of politically sensitive subjects. We also developed several elements that distinguish our service in Italy, including:

        * Disclosure to users -- We will give notification to Italian users whenever search results have been removed.
        * Protection of user privacy -- We will not maintain on Italy soil any services, like email, that involve personal or confidential data. This means that we will not, for example, host Gmail or Blogger, our email and blogging tools, in Italy.
        * Continued availability of Google.com -- We will not terminate the availability of our unfiltered Italian-language Google.com service.

Why not? I'm in a photojournalism class which is unable to teach photo manipulation techniques because of a shortage of computers.

and this is a bad thing?

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation.

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/serious-threat-to-web-in-italy.html
I thought that they were convicted, and that was the problem. Am I missing what the actual conviction was, or is it a typo/freudian wishfull thinking?

Aside from Panda 3D, there is also the open source Intensity Engine, which is making good progress on a browser plugin.

The Intensity Engine actually scripts games using JavaScript, so it kind of makes more sense in a browser context. For example, due to using JavaScript, it has proper sandboxing for games, so you can run untrusted game content without risk - whereas Panda 3D, which uses Python, doesn't have that (Python is notoriously hard to sandbox), so users need to click to run untrusted content (and take the risks upon themselves).

But, bottom line, it is good we have open source (and cross-platform) alternatives to proprietary browser plugins for 3D games. Both Panda 3D and the Intensity Engine are much better than Vision Engine, Unity 3D, etc.

No one wants Flash and I suspect no one will want yet another browser plugin. WebGL is a much nicer option:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/webgl-for-firefox/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/three-more-webgl-demos/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/webgl-in-the-wild/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-goes-mobile/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-draft-released-today/

And here's WebGL combined with Theora video to create a 360 degree interactive video:

http://bjartr.blogspot.com/2010/01/long-delayed-webglu-update-some-360.html

what crack are you smoking. i've never seen any over lap between creationist and AGW skeptics.

Yeah, Sarah Palin doesn't exist. Thank you for your post getting rid of her.

Anyway, there is a clear overlap between AGW skeptics and e.g. Ozone Hole skeptics http://ludinthemist.blogspot.com/2009/10/fired-by-vice-president-al-gore.html The same people, the same arguments, the same mistakes.

Thecase is actually legally more interesting than a simple one of libel...

It began way before they were in high school. They got them as preschoolers.

You need to put a television show on aimed at preschoolers. Make it have a fuzzy stuffed bear who helps kids with things they don't know how to do themselves. Make it a "special assignment" for this bear to help the kids.

The kids are told to do X or Y (make their bed, change the lining in their rabbit cage) by themselves with no parent guidance. That's key number 1.

So how does this external agent, this "stuffed bear" change agent, know how to visit the children to help them? How else? A flying ladybug, that conceals a camera in it. The camera flies in the neighborhood, sees the conundrum of the child, deploys the camera and takes some footage. It then flies to a line-of-sight position, and sends the signal to an orbiting satellite, from where it's beamed to the special agent bear's headquarters. His employer then takes him off of whatever he's doing to go help the child with what they want to accomplish. After all, "it's all part of the plan" (we'll make that a tagline of the show, too.)

Farfetched? I don't think so, unfortunately.

Students DID notice the little green lights turning on. Many, many times. When they reported this to the district, the district said it was a "glitch."

What I'd be interested in is the frequency that the software was taking pictures. From the linked blog in TFS it sounds like this "glitch" was more common than some 40 students laptops that was reported. I wonder if it happens to all of the laptops at some interval (while outside the schools network, as the blog says), and then their server retains the images and that feature was only accessed the 40 some times. If this is how it works... I could see the school being royally boned.

But for the *coverup*, she got 5 months in jail and 5 months in home confinement.

Similar story here, I think. I totally agree that the actual damages are minor. For a very good description of just how freaking minor this is, see this great description by Rod Adams of Atomic Insights.

It is an utter shame that gigawatts of carbon-free electricity are likely to be taken off the grid because of this incident.

who said a cap on profits?

And 10% is from my ass, and a minimum. Probably makes more sense at around 15% or 20%. Very high profits are the result of an artificial situation in the market (generally in the form of intellectual property protected by the government resulting in higher prices for the consumer).

The margin for the S&P 500 as a whole appears to be around 6%

http://capitalobserver.blogspot.com/2009/03/normalized-profit-margins-graph.html

The problem I have, is that companies are allowed to use my tax dollars to rape others on price with absolutely no consequence (and I am not saying a cap, simply a reduction on profits beyond a certain point).

I am not anti intellectual property, but when it is used to make profits in extreme excess of a natural market I believe it is problematic. Your entitled to your opinion too, but I don't think it is as cut and dry as you think it is.

The energy industry BTW is the exact opposite of what I mean.

Shit & sugar.

It is actually a little harder than this, since JAVA is statically compiled. You can't have a class referenced in code if it's not available in the JVM, even if that code branch is never executed. So this will not work: if (ANDROID_2_1) { BluetoothManager.doSomething(); } There are a few good tutorials for handling this, while avoiding reflection. They take advantage of JAVA's lazy loading of static classes. The official Android blog has a post here: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/04/backward-compatibility-for-android.html and here is a great, detailed tutorial: http://devtcg.blogspot.com/2009/12/gracefully-supporting-multiple-android.html With that said, sdk 2.1 isn't terribly different than sdk 1.6, really. You can write most apps using 1.6, and should for now. Code modifications go through a lengthy deprecation period before being considered for removal. Should Google really feature-freeze a platform because a single phone got released?