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Comment Re:3 times? (Score 1) 220

by Majikk (#40130421) Attached to: Patent Troll Now Armed With Thousands of Nortel Patents

How about if you bring a frivolous patent suit and lose, you are put out of business and *all* your assets are transferred.

Same for copyright suits.

Needs a slight modification:

How about if you bring a frivolous patent suit and lose, you are put out of business and "all" your assets are transferred.

There we go!
Books

Teacher Suspended For Reading Ender's Game To Students 1054

Posted by Soulskill from the it's-the-teachers,-they're-the-enemy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Forbes reports that a middle school teacher in South Carolina has been placed on administrative leave for reading sci-fi classic Ender's Game to his students. According to blogger Tod Kelly, '[A parent] reported him to the school district complained that the book was pornographic; that same parent also asked the local police to file criminal charges against the teacher. As of today, the police have not yet decided whether or not to file charges (which is probably a good sign that they won't). The school district, however, appears to agree with the parent, is considering firing the teacher and will be eliminating the book from the school.'"
The Internet

Why the 'Six Strikes' Copyright Alert System Needs Antitrust Scrutiny 159

Posted by Soulskill from the creators-clearly-aren't-familiar-with-baseball dept.
suraj.sun sends this quote from an op-ed at Ars Technica: "Eight months ago, content owners and Internet service providers agreed to the Copyright Alert System, a 'six-strike' plan to reduce copyright infringement by Internet users. Under the system, ISPs will soon send educational alerts, hijack browsers, and perhaps even slow/temporarily block the Internet service of users accused of online infringement (as identified by content owners). At the time it was announced, some speculated that the proposed system might not be legal under the antitrust laws. ... If I had to explain antitrust in a single word, it would not be 'competition' — it would be 'power.' The power to raise prices above a competitive level; the power to punish people who break your rules. Such power is something society usually vests in government. Antitrust law is in part concerned with private industry attempting to assert government-like power. ... The Copyright Alert System represents a raw exercise of concerted private power. Content owners as a group have control over their product. They have leveraged this control to forge this agreement with ISPs, who need to work with content owners in order to offer content to their own users. ISPs, in turn, have power over us as users."
Businesses

Reversing the Loss of Science and Engineering Careers 375

Posted by samzenpus from the hiring-for-the-future dept.
walterbyrd writes "In response to the alleged shortages of qualified American engineers and technology professionals, numerous initiatives have been launched to boost interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) careers and to strengthen STEM education in the United States. Unfortunately, these programs have not proven successful, and many blame the laziness of modern students, the ineptitude of their teachers, poor parenting or, when there are no other excuses remaining, they may even jump to moral decay as a causative agent. However, the failure of STEM is because the very policies that created the shortages continue unabated. This is not a uniquely American problem. The best way to increase interest in STEM degrees is by making certain that STEM careers are actually viable."

Comment Say What? (Score 5, Informative) 235

by Majikk (#35816250) Attached to: Steam Success Holding Up <em>Half-Life</em> Development?

Here is the list of games published by Valve, according to Wikipedia. I have checked each description to make sure everything was done by whom I thought it was done by. Note that Steam gets released in 2002:

1998 Half-Life
1999 Team Fortress Classic
1999 Half-Life: Opposing Force (Not valve!)
2000 Deathmatch Classic
2000 Ricochet
2000 Counter-Strike (Not valve!)
2001 Half-Life: Blue Shift (Not valve!)
2002 Steam
2003 Day of Defeat (Not Valve)
2004 Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (Not Valve)
2004 Counter-Strike: Source
2004 Half-Life 2
2004 Half-Life 2:Deathmatch
2005 Half-Life Deathmatch: Source
2005 Day of Defeat: Source
2005 Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
2006 Half-Life 2: Episode One
2007 Half-Life 2: Episode Two
2007 Portal
2007 Team Fortress 2
2008 Left 4 Dead
2009 Left 4 Dead 2
2010 Alien Swarm
2011 Portal 2 (Coming out Tuesday)
2011 Dota 2 (Not yet released)

First of all, how the hell could you possibly know that game development has changed in any meaningful way since the introduction of Steam? The only thing Valve had really released was Half Life. Everything else was just a mod or a third party expansion they had nothing to do with. Secondly, if anything more games have come from Valve since Steam. They haven't pushed out Half Life 3 yet, but it would be hard to claim some logistical problem when they have released Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal.

Please remember that Brad Wardell is a business man, and he just sold his own game distribution network to Gamestop. His next action was to badmouth his (former) competition for continuing to be in the business he just got out of. Stay classy.
The Internet

Submission + - FCC May Tweak Broadband Plan

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Despite a recent ruling that said the FCC did not have the right to interfere in Comcast's network management issues, the agency is pushing ahead with its national broadband plan, though there might be some tweaks. Since the case was won on the fact that FCC based its decision on its Internet Policy Principles, a set of guidelines the agency developed internally several years ago regarding broadband Internet service and not actual rules that went through a formal, open rulemaking process, they are invalid as is the enforcement action. In the event of this decision FCC general counsel Austin Schlick acknowledged that the court's decision may affect a significant number of important plan recommendations because of which the commission is assessing the implications of the decision for each one, to ensure that the commission has adequate authority to execute the mission laid out in the plan.
Oracle

Submission + - Brian Aker: Oracle Bought Sun for the Hardware (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: Brian Aker, former Sun MySQL guy, and current proponent of the Drizzle MySQL fork, gave O'Reilly Radar an update on where MySQL is at the moment. During the interview, he was asked to speculate on Oracle's original motives for acquiring Sun. "IBM has been moving their P Series systems into datacenter after datacenter, replacing Sun-based hardware. I believe that Oracle saw this and asked themselves 'What is the next thing that IBM is going to do?' That's easy. IBM is going to start pushing DB2 and the rest of their software stack into those environments. Now whether or not they'll be successful, I don't know. I suspect once Oracle reflected on their own need for hardware to scale up on, they saw a need to dive into the hardware business. I'm betting that they looked at Apple's margins on hardware, and saw potential in doing the same with Sun's hardware business. I'm sure everything else Sun owned looked nice and scrumptious, but Oracle bought Sun for the hardware."
Robotics

Submission + - Underwater Robot Powered by Ocean's Thermal Energy (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by separsons
separsons writes: A team of scientists recently created world's first underwater robotic vehicle powered entirely by renewable, ocean thermal energy. Researchers from NASA, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the US Navy developed Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangrian Observer Thermal RECharging (SOLO-TREC), an autonomous robot that runs on a thermal recharging engine. The engine derives power from the natural temperature differences found at varying ocean depths. SOLO-TREC produces about 1.7 watts of energy each dive, enough to juice the robot's science instruments, GPS receiver, communication device and bouyancy control pump. SOLO-TREC is poised to revolutionize ocean monitoring: Previous robots could only spend a limited amount of time underwater because of depleting power sources. SOLO-TREC can stay beneath the surface of the waves for indefinite amounts of time. Based on SOLO-TREC's success, NASA and the US Navy plan to incorporate thermal recharging engines in next-generation submersibles.

Submission + - France Bans Use of 2.0 (bit.ly)

Submitted by illybilly
illybilly writes: French President Nicholas Sarkozy was mad about what was called a "version 2.0" website redesign for the presidential palace in Paris. So he pushed through legislation that bans the use of the term "2.0" in France.
GNU is Not Unix

Oracle/Sun Enforces Pay-For-Security-Updates Plan 238

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-get-what-you-pay-for dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Recently, the Oracle/Sun conglomerate has denied public download access to all service packs for Solaris unless you have a support contract. Now, paying a premium for gold-class service is nothing new in the industry, but withholding critical security updates smacks of extortion. While this pay-for-play model may be de rigueur for enterprise database systems, it is certainly not the norm for OS manufactures. What may be more interesting is how Oracle/Sun is able to sidestep GNU licensing requirements since several of the Solaris cluster packs contain patches to GNU utilities and applications."

Comment Virtualization? CoLinux? (Score 1) 699

by Majikk (#28235001) Attached to: Solution For College's Bad Network Policy?

That they disable bridging is really the killer, here. The obvious answer is to turn the 'campus facing' machine into nothing more than a gateway, and you can't do that. I'd also like to point out that this stupid program makes it harder for you to run any OS except windows. Are you sure this school is okay?

That said, what about running linux and keeping this program inside of a vmware instance. Alternately, you could do the opposite: Accept that the stupid program will be running on your machine and see if a CoLinux tap would still work, at which point the machine is merely a host for another kernel.

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