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  Your Rights Online: EU Data-Retention Laws Stricter Than Many People Realized on Monday April 06, @04:52AM

Posted by timothy on Monday April 06, @04:52AM
from the you-mean-like-a-12-month-year? dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a snippet from the Telegraph: "A European Union directive, which Britain was instrumental in devising, comes into force which will require all internet service providers to retain a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105
Read More... 56 comments
internet privacy learntolink probleminsummary preview yro privacy story
Comments: 56
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  Games: EVE Online Developers Help Player Make Fan Movie on Monday April 06, @03:14AM

Posted by Soulskill on Monday April 06, @03:14AM
from the somebody-forgot-to-collect-their-souls dept.
PC Games (Games)
Enfors writes "CCP, developers of the sci-fi MMOG EVE Online, continue to impress with their open attitude towards players. In a thread on the EVE forums, an EVE Online player named Dire Lauthris describes difficulties he was having while making a fan movie that would illustrate a portion of EVE Online's background story. To make it 'historically correct,' he contacted CCP, the developers, to check on some facts. Instead of threatening to sue him for infringing on their intellectual property, they ended up inviting him to their offices to set him up with better movie-making software than the one he was using. Also, they had an employee record the narrator voice for his movie. The movie is now finished and available online. Massively is running a related article about storytelling in EVE."
Read More... 15 comments
games pcgames news games pcgames story
Comments: 15
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  News: Antarctic Ice Bridge Finally Breaks Off on Monday April 06, @01:50AM

Posted by timothy on Monday April 06, @01:50AM
from the invest-in-arizona-beaches dept.
GreennMann writes "An ice bridge linking a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica to two islands in Antarctica has snapped. Scientists say the collapse could mean the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of breaking away, and provides further evidence of rapid change in the region. Sited on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Wilkins shelf has been retreating since the 1990s. Researchers regarded the ice bridge as an important barrier, holding the remnant shelf structure in place. Its removal will allow ice to move more freely between Charcot and Latady islands, into the open ocean."
Read More... 140 comments
earth globalwarming manbearpig news news earth story
Comments: 140
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  Games: Strange Glitches In Games on Monday April 06, @12:31AM

Posted by Soulskill on Monday April 06, @12:31AM
from the where-did-the-walls-go dept.
Parz writes "Even the best of game developers can leave a big dirty glitch buried within its products that can turn a gameplay experience on its head (sometimes literally). Gameplayer has trawled through the web to locate video footage of some of the more amazing and hilarious examples of glitches in games. It acts as an interesting insight into the bugs that some games — especially today — ship with. What interesting bugs have you encountered?"
Read More... 103 comments
games programming bug badwebsite games programming story
Comments: 103
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  Your Rights Online: Thai Gov't Sets Up Site For Snitching On Royals' Critics on Sunday April 05, @10:41PM

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 05, @10:41PM
from the yes-yes-the-king-is-good dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In a move that would make the old eastern German Stasi green with envy, the Thai government has modernized a system that allows citizens to snitch on fellow citizens. 'Internet users are being urged to show their loyalty to the king by contributing to a new website called protecttheking.net, which has been set up by a parliamentary committee. On the site's front page it is described as a means for Thai people to show their loyalty to the king by protecting him from what it calls misunderstandings about him. It calls on all citizens to inform on anyone suspected of insulting or criticising the monarchy.' An large unknown population of political prisoners are currently being held for 3 to 15 years in Thai prisons for being interpreted as insulting the monarchy."
Read More... 154 comments
censorship government ididntdoit protectionracket canttakeajoke yro censorship story
Comments: 154
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  Technology: North Korea Missile Launch Fails on Sunday April 05, @08:47PM

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 05, @08:47PM
from the one-of-the-strings-must-have-broken dept.
The Military
An anonymous reader writes "Remember the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile launch by the North Koreans last night? You know, the one that went over Japan and supposedly put a 'communications satellite' into orbit. Well, according to the US Northern Command and NORAD it has been a complete and utter failure, with the second stage and payload 'falling in the Pacific.'"
Read More... 399 comments
icbm government military epicfail tech military story
Comments: 399
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  News: IBM Withdraws $7B Offer For Sun Microsystems, Says NYT on Sunday April 05, @07:43PM

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 05, @07:43PM
from the what-color-is-your-trial-balloon? dept.
suraj.sun writes points to a story in the New York Times indicating that the much-rumored merger (or purchase) that would have united Sun with IBM may have dissolved before it began. Excerpting: "I.B.M., after months of negotiations, withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun's board balked at a slightly reduced offer, according to a person close to the talks. The deal's collapse raises questions about Sun's next step, since the I.B.M. offer was far above the value of the Silicon Valley company's shares when news of the I.B.M. offer first surfaced last month. .. Since last year, Sun executives had been meeting with potential buyers. I.B.M. stepped up, seeing an opportunity to add to its large software business, acquire valuable researchers and consolidate the market for larger, so-called server computers that corporations use in their data centers. ... Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Cisco recently entered the market for server computers."
Read More... 200 comments
unix money business sun ibm news business story
Comments: 200
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  Linux: Debian Gets FreeBSD Kernel Support on Sunday April 05, @06:39PM

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 05, @06:39PM
from the types-like-this-kept-me-out-of-good-schools dept.
Debian
mu22le writes "Today Debian gets one step closer to really becoming 'the universal operating system' by adding two architectures based on the FreeBSD kernel to the unstable archive. This does not mean that the Debian project is ditching the Linux kernel; Debian users will be able to choose which kernel they want to install (at least on on the i386 and amd64 architectures) and get more or less the same Debian operating system they are used to. This makes Debian the first distribution, and probably the first large OS, to support two completely different kernels at the same time."
Read More... 255 comments
linux debian story
Comments: 255
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  IT: Flawed Map Says L.A.'s Crime Highest Next to Police HQ on Sunday April 05, @05:31PM

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 05, @05:31PM
from the statistics-are-coming-from-inside-the-station dept.
Bug
CNET briefly describes how a poorly chosen default behavior has led to an online crime map of Los Angeles (on a site designed at a cost of $362,000) that shows that "a location just a block from the department's new headquarters is the most crime-ridden place in the city." I wonder how often this sort of error would completely skew things like real-estate maps that attempt to show whether houses in a certain neighborhood are worth more than those in the one next door.
Read More... 101 comments
graphics bug government simcity it bug story
Comments: 101
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  Ask Slashdot: How Do I Provide a Workstation To Last 15 Years? on Sunday April 05, @04:27PM

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 05, @04:27PM
from the solid-state-prayer dept.
An anonymous reader writes "My father is a veterinarian with a small private practice. He runs all his patient/client/financial administration on two simple workstations, linked with a network cable. The administration application is a simple DOS application backed by a database. Now the current systems, a Pentium 66mhz and a 486, both with 8MB of RAM and 500MB of hard drive space, are getting a bit long in the tooth. The 500MB harddrives are filling up, the installed software (Windows 95) is getting a bit flakey at times. My father has asked me to think about replacing the current setup. I do know a lot about computers, but my father would really like the new setup to last 10-15 years, just like the current one has. I just dont know where to begin thinking about that kind of systems lifetime. Do I buy, or build myself? How many spare parts should I keep in reserve? What will fail first, and how many years down the line will that happen?"
Read More... 480 comments
hardware business upgrades askslashdot business story
Comments: 480
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  Entertainment: Spammers Say the Darndest Things on Sunday April 05, @03:23PM

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 05, @03:23PM
from the missing-the-target-audience dept.
The Narrative Fallacy writes "Bill Sweetman has a tongue-in-cheek post about how a few years ago he started collecting some of the more outlandish and amusing email subject lines from the many thousands of spam emails he received promoting various 'solutions' related to his private parts. Sweetman, a Canadian internet marketeer now working for Tucows gets a guilty pleasure from the copywriting 'skills' of the spammers. 'Sometimes the writing is clever. Sometimes it is accidentally funny. And sometimes it's just plain bizarre.' Sweetman writes that it takes a certain twisted creative genius to make your spam message stand out from the rest. and gives us ten of his favorite spam subject lines as well as his would-be replies to the messages. Favorites spam subject lines include 'Small friend is for hiding, big friend is for showing off' and Sweetman's reply: 'Even if the product they are pitching works as promised, I still don't think I would be walking around the neighborhood showing off the results.'"
Read More... 98 comments
spam humor entertainment humor story
Comments: 98
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  IT: Pinning Down the Spread of Cell Phone Viruses on Sunday April 05, @02:19PM

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 05, @02:19PM
from the promiscuous-mode dept.
walrabbit writes "Wang et al (2009) (from Albert-László Barabási's lab) modeled the spread of mobile phone viruses based on anonymised call and text logs of 6.2 million customers spread over 10,000 towers. Their simulations shows that the spread is dependent on the market share of a particular handset, human mobility and mode of spread: bluetooth or MMS or hybrid. 'We find that while Bluetooth viruses can reach all susceptible handsets with time, they spread slowly due to human mobility, offering ample opportunities to deploy antiviral software. In contrast, viruses utilizing multimedia messaging services could infect all users in hours, but currently a phase transition on the underlying call graph limits them to only a small fraction of the susceptible users. These results explain the lack of a major mobile virus breakout so far and predict that once a mobile operating system's market share reaches the phase transition point, viruses will pose a serious threat to mobile communications.' You can read the full text (PDF) and supporting online information (PDF) (with interesting modelling data and diagrams)." (Also summed up in a short article at CBC.)
Read More... 48 comments
worms security cellphones communications it security story
Comments: 48
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  News: Data.gov To Launch In May on Sunday April 05, @01:05PM

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday April 05, @01:05PM
from the when-did-brent-spiner-get-elected dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In late May, Data.gov will launch, in what US CIO Vivek Kundra calls an attempt to ensure that all government data 'that is not restricted for national security reasons can be made public' through data feeds. This appears to be a tremendous expansion on (and an official form of) third-party products like the Sunlight Labs API. Of course, it is still a far cry from 'open sourcing' the actual decision-making processes of government. Wired has launched a wiki for calling attention to datasets that should be shared as part of the Data.gov plan, and an article on O'Reilly discusses the importance of making this information easily accessible."
Read More... 102 comments
government internet usa abouttime yay news government story
Comments: 102
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  News: Obama Calls For Nuke-Free World on Sunday April 05, @11:44AM

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday April 05, @11:44AM
from the i'll-give-up-mine-if-you-give-up-yours dept.
News
jamie points out news that President Obama has put out a call for a world free of nuclear weapons at a speech in Prague today. He acknowledged that it was a long-term goal, perhaps not something that can be accomplished in his lifetime, but promised to encourage the US Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty. According to the BBC, he also stated his desire to "negotiate a new treaty to end the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons," and to hold a global summit within the next year to work out agreements for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Obama said, "As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it." His speech came less than a day after North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket.
Read More... 604 comments
goodluckwiththat politics news news news story
Comments: 604
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  Linux: Linux Foundation To Host Intel's Moblin Project on Sunday April 05, @10:25AM

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday April 05, @10:25AM
from the degrees-of-openness dept.
Intel
gustavopuy writes with news that Intel will be transferring control of Moblin, its Linux-based OS for mobile devices, to the Linux Foundation. Quoting Ars Technica: "We spoke with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, who told us that the Linux Foundation offers a vendor-neutral setting for advancing the Moblin project. He believes that such an environment will help stimulate third-party involvement in the process of building the platform and could also encourage broader adoption. ... Zemlin explained that the Linux Foundation's stewardship of the project will empower third-party contributors to expand the platform beyond its Intel-specific roots. He assures me that Intel sees value in making Moblin open to everyone — including companies that are leveraging Linux on competing processors, such as those based on the ARM architecture."
Read More... 25 comments
linux intel os linux intel story
Comments: 25
 

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