Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: Last night Larry Wall unveiled the first development release of Perl 6, joking that now a top priority was fixing bugs that could be mistaken for features. The new language features meta-programming — the ability to define new bits of syntax on your own to extend the language, and even new infix operators. Larry also previewed what one reviewer called "exotic and new" features, including the sequence operator and new control structures like "react" and "gather and take" lists. "We don't want their language to run out of steam," Larry told the audience. "It might be a 30- or 40-year language. I think it's good enough."

An anonymous reader writes "Some excellent Pigdog investigative journalism: Apparently, The state department is trying to block international support of OSS and Free (Libre) Software. See also this InfoWorld article." Contrast that with this NewsForge report of a switch from Windows 2000 to Linux+Oracle at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. They picked a good week for it.

Siduri writes "We at Pigdog Journal conducted an interview with SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, and I think it's pretty interesting. He talks about the technical details behind what SETI and SETI@home do (the two programs are very different), and he speculates about the nature of alien intelligence. He's also quite funny."

Siduri writes "We at Pigdog Journal conducted an interview with SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, and I think it's pretty interesting. He talks about the technical details behind what SETI and SETI@home do (the two programs are very different), and he speculates about the nature of alien intelligence. He's also quite funny."

Let's go over the Sklyarov situation. Sklyarov is still in jail. In fact, he's still in Las Vegas, where he is being held without even a bail hearing, much less bail. The excuse given for not having a bail hearing when he was arrested on July 16 was that he was being immediately transferred to San Jose and would get a hearing there. Anyway, a recap of the protests: San Jose, more San Jose, New York, Seattle, Chicago writeup and Chicago pictures, Moscow writeup and Moscow photo and news coverage: New York Times, Business2.com. Wired has Washington's viewpoint - Representative Coble says "there have been very few complaints from intellectual property holders". Well, duh. Linuxplanet has an opinion piece exploring the Digital Millennium Rape Act. Finally EFF has written a letter to U.S. Attorney Mueller, asking for the U.S. to drop the charges against Sklyarov. It seems pretty doubtful that he will, since he won't want to be seen as soft on crime during his Senate confirmation hearings.

LuserOnFire writes: "There is a PigDog article talking about the Bell Labs Text-to-Speech Synthesis. The amazing thing is not the technology itself, but that fact that Bell-Labs has a checkbox next to it that says 'If you plan to enter text which our system might consider to be obscene, check here to certify that you are old enough to hear the resulting output.'?!?! Like if you are old enough to spell a swear, you don't know what the word sounds like?" More fun than a TI-99/4A with speech-synthesis card. Those wouldn't say the bad words at all.

MisterBad writes: "Once again the USPTO is taking open submissions for its advisory board. This group helps to set patent and trademark policy for the future. Having a friend of software freedom on this board is just too important to ignore. Don Marti of Linux Journal has the details on how to submit a name for consideration. Don't YOU want Lawrence Lessig or RMS helping to make patent policy?"

This guy has written a fairly amusing program called DeCSS and is asking people to distribute and link it in an effort to make things more difficult for the legal boys trying to track down the other DeCSS. The page has a lot to say, and this is definitely an interesting way to show support.

El Snatcher writes "Check out this story that the BBC is running about a recent study by the University of Hertfordshire that found that women are more likely to become addicted to the Internet, rather than the stereotypical, male, teenage geek. It also says that today 38.7% of Internet users are women, up from %5 in 1994." Maybe it's time to rerun the Sex poll on Slashdot?