Slashdot Mirror

Israel, not Turkey, deserves to be a member of the European Union (EU).

The Turks have long attacked human rights. In Turkey, suppressing free speech on and off the Internet is almost a national sport. You can be arrested and imprisoned for claiming that the Turks are responsible for the Armenian genocide.

After a Congressional committee approved a resolution ascribing responsibility for the genocide to the Turks, the Turks withdrew their ambassador from the USA.

This sort of behavior is not what we Westerners want to see in the European Union. The Israelis act more like Europeans than the Turks and deserve EU membership far more than the Turks.

I think you'll find that the Guardian will be secretly hoping that Murdoch leads the way. As this Henry Porter article demonstrates (and which was reflected elsewhere in the paper last year) there is a lot of unhappiness with the way people like Google can repackage their content.

But unless Bing, Yahoo, or Google pay Murdoch money, his stories will never appear in the search engines. Don't believe me? Murdoch's British papers will no longer be indexed by Lexis/Nexis.

Thankfully, the Guardian, which has far superior journalism and doesn't seek to ram politics down everyone's throats in "news" stories like News International's papers do

Erm, I think this statement belies your own politics. The guardian is staunchly "New Labour" and I find the vast majority of its reporting to be extremely politically biased. This shouldn't surprise anyone who considers the volume of public sector advertising in this paper.

A lot of very vocal voices on the Internet hate Murdoch, and that's fine. But the reality is, his newspapers and cable channels are wildly popular -- WILDLY popular, at least in the US. They typically trounce their competition by silly-wide margins.

That's true in the UK newspaper business, too. But his outlet that's doing that is The Sun (circ. ~2.9 million), not The Times (circ. ~600 thousand). You will note that he's not messing with his best-selling daily title, he's messing with his worst-selling daily title.

Thankfully, the Guardian, which has far superior journalism and doesn't seek to ram politics down everyone's throats in "news" stories like News International's papers do (people often talk of the paper being liberal, which on its comments pages is largely true, but they do a good job of keeping it out of their news reporting), remains free for everyone with an extensive back archive. And of course the BBC exists too... thank God.

I can only echo the poster above who said he hopes Murdoch puts up more paywalls. Murdoch's shitty reporting and deliberately biased and bigoted publications have ruined political discourse in this country.

What about deaf? Apparently, there are some parents who would deliberately wish to have a deaf child.
'We celebrated when we found out about Molly's deafness,' says Lichy. 'Being deaf is not about being disabled, or medically incomplete - it's about being part of a linguistic minority. We're proud, not of the medical aspect of deafness, but of the language we use and the community we live in.'

Now the couple are hoping to have a second child, one they also wish to be deaf
Not that I know anything about it, but they are out there. I hope those in the know will chime in here.

They're also greenhouse gas emitters now, and they can easily shoot foamy substances at the ocean from those giant deodorant guns.

Wrong.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/series/tax-gap

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance_and_tax_evasion

And a plethora of other results.

They "pay all their taxes" but thru tax avoidance techniques no where close to what they should be paying.

It would be helpful to know that although those tv stations were directly linked to the 2002 coup Chavez had not gone after them at the time.

I would also like to inform me about another dictator that has gained 70% of the votes at the elections that the US said that were 100% legitimate,or another dictator that has eliminated iliteracy in his country, that has brought cheap sate food shops to the starving from free market people thus eliminating hunger, and has provided the poorest with free quality healthcare.

Just so people know, the arrest of that Rio Tinto executive happened days after the Chinese government company Baosteel failed in a bid to take over the Australian Rio Tinto company.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/dec/04/riotinto.china
Essentially the message is, if you move your company to China you agree to everything they want, takeover offers, cheaper pricing etc. Otherwise you will be arrested.

Here's an article in the local press of March 19th:

http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/2010/03/19/syphilis-cases-rise-400-on-teesside-84229-26067098/

No mention of Facebook.

There was then an article on the 24th in The Daily Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7508945/Facebook-linked-to-rise-in-syphilis.html

Again, no direct claim that Facebook was responsible, just an unsubstantiated paragraph stating that

Case have increased fourfold in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside, the areas of Britain where Facebook is most popular.
[sic]

There was another instance recently where Facebook are threatening to sue the Daily Mail

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/mar/11/facebook-daily-mail

after the Mail took some general research into unnamed social networking sites and attributed the dangers specifically to Facebook.

I would think it far more likely that AdultFriendFinder or GetItOn would be responsible for any increase in STDs, and that it's bad journalists seeking to sensationalise stories, by trying to make them more familiar and relevant to their readers, who are using Facebook as a synonym for any social networking site.

There's already a rebuttal here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/mar/25/sun-dailytelegraph.

"For a start it used a truly elegant programming hack to create over 200 different worlds to explore while using 32kb of memory"

(1) IIRC, there were 1024 worlds in Elite. (2) Not particularly elegant or innovative, if you ask me, using a PRNG to generate random worlds. Things very much like it had been done time and time before. We've largely stopped doing it this way, but only because we don't have to any more...

Eight galaxies, with 256 stars in each; from an extract from "Backroom Boys" (well worth picking up):

Obviously, Bell and Braben couldn't have an infinity of other galaxies. That would just be silly. But they could, they agreed, have a coolly huge number of galaxies, as they explained to Acorn, showing off the feature. In fact, they said, they planned to have... 2 to the power of 48 of them, approximately 282,000,000,000,000 - two hundred and eighty-two million million galaxies. It was one of the few moments when Acornsoft put its foot down. Acornsoft could see that having 282,000,000,000,000 galaxies would rub the player's nose in the artificiality of what they were enjoying. A number that gigantic made it inescapably clear that some sort of mathematical concoction was involved. And it exposed the underlying sameness of all the star systems, generated as they were from only a handful of varying qualities. The pink volcanoes would come round again and again. It would be better to be more modest. Somewhere between the unimpressed response to a small game universe and the disbelieving response to a ridiculously large one lay a zone of awe. That was where they should be aiming, and eight galaxies containing 256 stars each seemed like a reasonable guess at its whereabouts.

Not sure anything like that had been done "time and time before", and certainly not combined with real time 3D graphics.

There's another side to this isn't there? Hong Kong tax rates are notoriously low. And knowing how Google avoids paying tax at any costs in some countries (they paid no tax in the UK last year on UK ad revenues of almost $2bn - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/20/google-uk-tax-avoidance) what's to say they aren't doing exactly the same here, still milking the Chinese market whilst enjoying the tax breaks of locating/serving from Hong Kong. This has never been about ethics or morals and has always been only about 'business'.

Exactly, there's Sony, B&N and others. I think par tof Amazon's success is that the press talks about no one else

I think Amazon's success is based on how easy it is to use, and get books on it. The Apple mantra, "it just works", sure applies there. Go to Amazon, purchase and a minute or two later, it's on your Kindle. Many others providing this hardware don't have as integrated a solution as Amazon does - other than B&N, probably none. Also, their hardware is good.

Now we have Apple who has, imo, a very half-assed device and they're unfortunately getting more attention then superior competition which means they'll probably get more sales than they deserve.

"Half-assed"? Apple does a lot of things, but "half-assing" is not one of them. They do, however, have evil lockdown schemes - even to the point of trying to censure publications in app form. Europe doesn't have the weird American "violence good, boobies very bad" attitude, so there have been cases of German magazines being censured by Apple. Other than the worrysome censoring and lockdown, I'm sure it's going to be a very good general purpose device. The Kindle is a specialized device - with e-ink, it'll last a lot longer and be a lot better when reading text books.

I deleted my Facebook. Everyone asks me why, here's why:

• Privacy: I do not like the fact my photographs are available and indexed by my own name. Someone could find out everywhere I have been based on the album, the photo and the dates.
• Shallowness

• The quality of communication on Facebook is poor. The most indepth conversation you can have is what someone is doing and what they have done. You are not promoted to have an intellectual debate (Read: Why the hell am I on Slashdot then?) I much prefer to use email although If my email clients were more like how you send messages to people on Facebook it would make me very happy.

• Trendy

• The people on Facebook for me are the wannabe trendy people. One or two years ago I tried to get my friends to join Multiply, it focused on contribution of blog postings, news, links, pictures and videos. It was difficult to get people to contribute things that were worthwhile.

• Cloud storage

• All your messages and photographs are stored remotely. Facebook also converts your photographs downward in quality and makes them easier to share with people so most people only ever see the low quality pictures. In other words, it's not a lossless backup medium. At least with email, my email may be hosted but I can still download my own copies.

• Excessive Openness
• : You could set your privacy settings very high but your friends will give you away. At least one of your friends will have settings that expose their list of friends, including you. This means people can deduce your whereabouts and who you know quite easily. Another thing is that if public search results are enabled by your friends, you can still be exposed through Google search there! If I were an employment agency, it would be trivial to make friends with one of your application or request happy friends (such as a distant young relative) who accept any request that comes their way. If your privacy settings are set to 'Friends of Friends', I see practically everything. Anyone in the same network has the 'right' to see everything about you.
• Keyboard unfriendly

• I may be a Windows user but I love keyboard control, I write this in VIM and my mail client is ALPINE.

• Slow

• On all the browsers I have used Facebook is slow. I underclock my laptop and it's annoying to have to return to normal speed just to use a website.

• Developers

• Mark Zuckerburg is not very nice. I do not believe in software patents but apparently he stole ideas from his fellow classmates. You can understand if you had an idea and someone stole it, without giving you credit. Zuckerberg sued by classmates. When some of the Facebook PHP code was leaked (Revealing Errors, Facebook source, it was rather disturbing what was written: 'put hotties there'. Also the news that the master password was once 'Chuck Norris' (master password) is rather disturbing. I do not think the developers are competetent. Especially something as privacy critical.

• Abuse

• The potential for abuse in Facebook is huge. Law enforcements can request practically all data about you see this Cryptome leaked document. The amount of marketing information they can collect on you is more than anywhere else, they have your profiles, your fan pages, browsing habits and internet usage patterns.

• Applications

• The applications are ins

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

That was a little lame, there was a much better Jedi story last year: a Jedi master against the Tesco empire

Tesco said: "He hasn't been banned. Jedis are very welcome to shop in our stores although we would ask them to remove their hoods.

"Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and Luke Skywalker all appeared hoodless without ever going over to the Dark Side and we are only aware of the Emperor as one who never removed his hood.

"If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they'll miss lots of special offers."

We're still struggling to link London and Birmingham. e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/18/high-speed-rail-route

Maybe you can inform us of how you 'change' to accomodate [sic] the fact that people are takuing [sic] your output for free and not paying a single penny

Except you're a troll, because:

1. The music industry has seen record profits despite the recession, according to their own figures.
2. People who download media illicitly are the exactly the same people who spend the most money on media, as has been shown repeatedly by studies.

Some good changes that the industry could make would be to, firstly, stop lying, and secondly, to stop trying to criminalise their own best customers

Unfortunately, this story is already out-of-date. The Government denied the Liberal Democrat peers the ability to amend the amendment, saying that they'd sort it out themselves during "washing-up", the period just before the General Election when ministers and last-term backbenchers rush through last-minute legislation with minimal debate while the majority of MPs return to their constituencies to campaign.

See this Guardian article for more information.

Like here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/oct/03/world.guantanamo

Or a nice writeup here: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/01/kiriakou_retracts_claims_on_wa.php

Or here: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/04/about_that_library_tower_plot.php

Etc.

There's really not a single shred of evidence that torture helped to prevent a single attack.

Of course, it might be classified, but I'm certain that neocons would have cried on every corner about their success if they had a single case to tell us about.

Taco, you motherfucking tool, you are pushing your own people to yet another unwinnable war for oil onto innocent people!

shame on you, fuck!

Oh yeah, the Iranians themselves are the embodiment of innocence... (I strongly recommend you to check the TLDs again.)

Taco, you motherfucking tool, you are pushing your own people to yet another unwinnable war for oil onto innocent people!

shame on you, fuck!

Which is why they "harvest" them from murdered Palestinian children.

"Doctor admits Israeli pathologists harvested organs without consent"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/21/israeli-pathologists-harvested-organs

""It was the middle of the night. The soldiers caused an electrical power outage in the entire village. Bilal was returned in a black bag; he had no teeth. The body was stitched from the neck all the way down to the abdomen," the Swedish newspaper quoted the mother as saying."

"Swedish daily publishes second article on 'IDF organ harvesting' "
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3765992,00.html

Only the devil dares not to speak the name of God - which invokes the grace of divine presence.

I hear they're full of organs, you fascist Semites! Oh, I forgot, you already do it... http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/21/israeli-pathologists-harvested-organs

...permission: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/21/israeli-pathologists-harvested-organs

Quote from Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in the Guardian newspaper in England, 21 September 2003: "We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force."

This is apparently a more reputable source, the Guardian newspaper in England, but from 21 September 2003.

Quote from Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: "We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force."

Moreover, proprietary is inherently wrong when concerning such important pieces of infrastructure that we rely on for our freedoms as the Internet.

Inherently.

Proof is simple, look at this /. story about Chavez wanting to limit freedoms of Venezuela Internet users.

He is not doing it because it is just the Internet, he is doing it because Internet is the Greatest tool for freedoms of general public and it threatens his regime. I laugh at Sean Penn, who says that any journalist who calls Chavez a dictator should be jailed. I laugh at him, but it is scary what his views are, isn't it?

Why is this story relevant? Because Chavez wants to control the Internet and the best way to go to control such an environment is to lock down the tools that make the Internet work. The open protocols, the open standards, the open applications that make the Internet chug away, those are the reasons why the Internet is still open and it is what it is.

If all protocols and tools were not open but proprietary, how ridiculously easy would it have been for such control freaks and dictators (too bad I am not a journalist, I would have had fun with Penn there), how easy it would have been to stop the Internet cold. Killing something that is proprietary is ridiculously easy.

Open is the way to go, even if majority does not realize it, openness is the key.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/11/sean-penn-hugo-chavez-venezuela

Wonder who is classified a dictator in his mind...

Since I don't think Chavez is a dictator, and I can't speak for Penn, let me show you an example of someone I think of as a dictator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pervez_Musharraf#Emergency_declared_in_Pakistan
Emergency declared in Pakistan
On 3 November 2007 Musharraf declared emergency rule across Pakistan. He suspended the Constitution, imposed State of Emergency, and fired the chief justice of the Supreme Court.[87] While addressing the nation on State Television, Musharraf declared that the state of emergency was imposed in the country. In Islamabad, troops entered the Supreme Court building, arrested the judges and kept them under detention in their homes. Troops were deployed inside state-run TV and radio stations, while independent channels went off air.

Bush More Emphatic In Backing Musharraf
President Bush yesterday offered his strongest support of embattled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying the general "hasn't crossed the line" and "truly is somebody who believes in democracy."
Bush spoke nearly three weeks after Musharraf declared emergency rule, sacked members of the Supreme Court and began a roundup of journalists, lawyers and human rights activists.

The headline states "Chavez to limit internet freedom" as if he has just instituted a Great Firewall of Venezuela. He has done nothing of the sort. All he has done is make a public call for more regulation of the internet to prevent false and defamatory information. Clueless politicians across the globe make similar calls all the time, even in the land of the free. Much more worrying is the planned Australian censorship of the internet.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/11/sean-penn-hugo-chavez-venezuela

Wonder who is classified a dictator in his mind...

I actually wonder the same thing about your mind. How is a person democratically elected... a dictator? Do you even know what a dictatorship is?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/11/sean-penn-hugo-chavez-venezuela

Wonder who is classified a dictator in his mind...

Google has built quite an empire on making people believe that they are the defacto standard for search. They should be commended for the quality of their applications but sadly the marketing has led people astray. I actually took a trip to my local University to do some research. A day login gave me access to thousands of Scientific papers that I would otherwise have to pay hundreds of pounds for. Doing real research takes footwork and hardwork. The web can do a lot but you have to know where to look. See http://narconews.com/Issue64/article4073.html , http://deepwebresearch.blogspot.com/ , http://society.guardian.co.uk/e-public/story/0,13927,1195901,00.html

Mystery solved.

Well, it doesn't explain autism exactly but it explains why rates are going up. People having kids at an older age.

Well, quite. The article tries to pin it on the Wii, on the controller manufacturer, and on Ebay for selling the controller. Wasn't there some way they coulf blame it on Facebook too?

Now William, Earl of Dartmouth, has been asked to leave a debate for saying that for hot countries such as Greece and Cyprus to have an "Arctic policy" was "as bizarre as the appointment of Baroness Ashton as the EU's high representative".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/27/doodling-doodles-boring-meetings-concentration

Eclipse has an open source Data Tools Platform

For an extremely laid-back Zen-like stream-of-consciousness definition of "has". My stream of consciousness experience trying to grok this thing was extremely irritating.

From Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) Project

"Data Tools" is a vast domain, yet there are a fairly small number of foundational requirements when developing with or managing data-centric systems. (What does it do?) A developer is interested in an environment that is easy to configure (what does it do?), one in which the challenges of application development are due to the problem domain (what does it do?), not the complexity of the tools employed. (What does it do?) Data management, whether by a developer working on an application (what does it do?), or an administrator maintaining or monitoring a production system (what does it do?), should also provide a consistent (what does it do?), highly usable environment that works well with associated technologies. (What does it do?)

Three rules plucked from Ten rules for writing fiction by Elmore Leonard

Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader^H^H^H^H^H^Hgeek is apt to leaf ahead looking for people^H^H^H^H^H^Hpurpose.

Don't go into great detail describing places and things (or meta framework), unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

I generally get along well with Eclipse, but for the love of God:

What does DTP do?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

The IOP has issued a clarification: "We regret that our submission has been seized upon by some individuals to imply that IOP does not support the scientific evidence that the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is contributing to global warming.

IOP's position on global warming is clear: the basic science is well established and there is no doubt that climate change is happening and that we should be taking action to address it now. "

You going to be spreading that statement around whatever forums you post on also? After all, you seem to care so strongly about what the IOP has to say, after all.

It may also interest you to know that IOP members weren't made aware of the original statement, and in fact it was a single subcomittee of anonymous individuals who made it in the IOP's name. The Energy subcommittee at that, not the Environmental Physics subcommittee. And does anyone else find the irony delicious that the IOP is refusing to disclose who was on the committee that made the statement while demanding more openness?

He isn't exactly known to believe in privacy in the first place, after all:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy
The rise of social networking online means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy, according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Talking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco this weekend, the 25-year-old chief executive of the world's most popular social network said that privacy was no longer a "social norm".

There are currently no Freesat cards on the market, but I'll grab one when they become available.

http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/products/data_novahds2.html

I bought one about 6 months ago but never got around to installing it (no dish).

Freesat is unencrypted so I don't have to worry about that.

I think the BBC is planning to encrypt their HD broadcasts. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/29/bbc-hd-encryption

He certainly tries to influence things the way he learned how to, however I don't think he's having that much success. Here's an excellent article on how Murdoch got Myspace wrong for example.

I'm not defending Woss, but his annual salary before the sacking^Wnon-renewal was around £6m. The £18m figure was for a three-year deal.

See (for example) http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/17/jonathan-ross-bbc-pay-deal

Oh, I agree. Just citing an example where the police deliberately cast the net hugely with the primary purpose of catching someone rather nasty, but with the secondary effect of profiling a large part of the city - despite a large proportion of those being questioned not being anywhere near under suspicion.

Saying that, looking at the data(source), there doesn't seem to be that much of a spike in the merseyside data, so I guess not that many folks complied

In the paper he cites Ethiopia's national IQ of 63, the world's lowest, and the fact that men and women are only expected to live until their mid-40s as an example of his finding that intelligence is the main determinant of someone's health.

Having examined the effects of economic development and income inequality on health, he was 'surprised' to find that IQ had a much more important impact, he said. 'Poverty, lack of sanitation, clean water, education and healthcare do not increase health and longevity, and nor does economic development.'

He also seems to be a fan of nuclear war?

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost. Yes, we need a woman in the White House, but not the one who’s running.

-Satoshi Kanazawa (source) This guy seems to make a habit out of making crazy claims to get attention. Move along, nothing to see here.

In light of this article I contest my modding as Troll. It only makes sense to question how likely anything scientific comes from the state, and make light of the fact that opinions have also come from the state that had a right wing/religious bias.

The problem is when the legistlature of the state has recently released an opinion that completely goes against commonly accepted scientific principle, it is reasonable to question the likelihood of anything scientific coming from the state.