Comment Re:A long time ago... (Score 4, Funny) 413
Your English teacher must have been the Soup Nazi.
Correction: Alphabet Soup Nazi.
Comment Re:What about digging too? (Score 1, Insightful) 152
Nope, they failed because the Fed suddenly felt like lowering the interest rate to 1% for about 6 years after 9/11.
It was a 1% for 1 year. That's about 6 years...
The problem is lack of regulation. Let the "free market" do whatever it wants and people will fuck it up. It could be malice or it could be incompetence, either way, oversight is needed.
Bookmark SPAM: Bigfoot Found in Georgia !!!
Submission + - Tata Set to Launch World's Cheapest Car
theodp writes: "Ready for one-automobile-per-child (OAPC)? India's giant Tata Group is on the verge of launching the world's cheapest car. The People's Car, slated to be unveiled January 10th at a New Delhi auto show, will carry a sticker price of 100,000 rupees ($2,500), which some analysts say could revolutionize automobile costs worldwide. The cheap car, a pet project of Cornell-trained architect Ratan Tata that he helped design, is aimed at improving driving safety by getting India's masses off their motorbikes and into cars."
Journal SPAM: Digital Astrophotography - Review
In the 80's there were a series of commercials for Reeses Peanut Butter Cups that revolved around the theme of accidental meetings between chocolate and peanut butter. The individuals would realize that the two tastes that they loved separately were even better together. Two great loves for many card carrying geeks are digital photography and astronomy. "
Submission + - Tens of Thousands of Adult Website Accounts Hacked (www.icwt.us) 3
Keith writes: "Tens of thousands — or maybe more — accounts to adult websites were recently declared compromised and apparently have been that way since sometime in October, 2007. The issue occurred when the NATS software used to track and manage sales and affiliate revenues was accessed by an intruder, who apparently discovered a list of admin passwords residing on an unsecured office server at Too Much Media, which makes and maintains NATS installations for adult companies. It would appear that Too Much Media knew of the exploit back in October, and rather than fixing the issue tried to bury it by threatening to sue anyone in the adult industry who talked about it."
Submission + - Email in the 18th century 2
morphovar writes: More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an aeroplane — wireless and without need for electricity. The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers, each placed 5 to 20 kilometres apart from each other. Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through a telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. A message could be transmitted from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour's time. A few years before, a messenger on a horse would have needed at least a month's time to do the same.
Submission + - China Anti-corruption website crashes on first day
An anonymous reader writes: The website of the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention (NBCP) crashed on Tuesday, just hours after its launch, as droves of people logged on to complain about corruption among officials.
Read more here http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2007-12/20/content_6334248.htm
Submission + - No Right to Privacy When Your Computer Is Repaired (zdnet.com) 3
Billosaur writes: "ZDNet's Police Blotter bring us the interesting story of a Pennsylvania man who brought his computer into Circuit City to have a DVD burner installed on his computer and wound up being arrested for having child pornography on his hard drive. Circuit City employees discovered the child pornography while perusing Kenneth Sodomsky's hard drive for files to test the burner, then proceeded to call the police, who arrested Sodomsky and confiscated the computer. Sodomsky's lawyer argued in court that the Circuit City techs had no right to go rifling through the hard drive, and the trial court agreed, but prosecutors appealed and the appeals court overturned the lower court's decision, based on the fact that Sodomsky had consented to the installation of the DVD drive and the techs "weren't randomly perusing the drive for contraband, but instead were testing its functioning in a 'commercially accepted manner.'""
Submission + - OpenOffice online now available for beta testing
Stony Stevenson writes: In the latest challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the productivity software market, a group of Linux developers has begun testing an online version of a free office applications suite. Developers at online software provider Ulteo said in a message posted on their Web site site that a hosted version of OpenOffice.org 2.3 that they plan to offer is now available for public beta testing. The trial version of the software can be launched from within Ulteo's Online Desktop package, which is itself currently in beta testing. The Ulteo Online Desktop aims to offer users a range of open source, Web-based applications and services. The project is led by Mandriva Linux creator Gael Duval.
Submission + - Linux based phonesystem phones home (trixbox.org) 1
An anonymous reader writes: Users of Trixbox, a PBX based on Asterisk, discovered that the software has been calling home with their usage and statistics.
From the article:
"I have just been made aware of a file '/var/adm/bin/registry.pl' that contain the following commented lines describing the program:
# This file is design to be executed regularly by an external controller such as cron.
# It retrieves a list of commands to be executed from the specified URI and executes them, saving the output
# and returning it to the webserver as an encrypted string."
Trixbox is owned by Fonality, which makes customised PBXs (again based on asterisk) for paying customers and this is not the first time that Fonality has been called out for their data collection.
See http://voxilla.com/component/option,...emid,107/p,27/
From the article:
"I have just been made aware of a file '/var/adm/bin/registry.pl' that contain the following commented lines describing the program:
# This file is design to be executed regularly by an external controller such as cron.
# It retrieves a list of commands to be executed from the specified URI and executes them, saving the output
# and returning it to the webserver as an encrypted string."
Trixbox is owned by Fonality, which makes customised PBXs (again based on asterisk) for paying customers and this is not the first time that Fonality has been called out for their data collection.
See http://voxilla.com/component/option,...emid,107/p,27/
Submission + - Facebook caves to privacy protests over Beacon (computerworld.com)
jcatcw writes: After weeks of privacy protests over its advertising system, Facebook CEO announced that users now can turn the system off completely. CEO Zuckerberg said "We simply did a bad job with this release." Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, called the announcement from Zuckerberg "a step in the right direction."
Submission + - Users, Web developers vent over IE7
Spinlock_1977 writes: "ComputerWorld is running a story about developers frustration with IE 7, and Microsoft's upcoming plans (or lack thereof) for it. From the article:
But the most pointed comment came from someone labeled only as dk. "You all continue to underestimate the dramatic spillover effect this poor developer experience has had and will continue to have on your other products and services. Let me drive this point home. I am a front-end programmer and a co-founder of a start-up. I can tell you categorically that my team won't download and play with Silverlight ... won't build a Live widget ... won't consider any Microsoft search or ad products in the future."
But the most pointed comment came from someone labeled only as dk. "You all continue to underestimate the dramatic spillover effect this poor developer experience has had and will continue to have on your other products and services. Let me drive this point home. I am a front-end programmer and a co-founder of a start-up. I can tell you categorically that my team won't download and play with Silverlight
Submission + - Chinese Moon Photo Doctored, Craters Moved (msn.com) 1
mytrip writes: "A controversy over last week's photo of the lunar surface, allegedly from China's lunar spacecraft Chang'e, appears to be resolved. It's real but it isn't. An expert says the photo's resolution shows that it is of recent origin. However, for some inexplicable reason, someone on Earth edited the photo and moved a crater to a different location.
Some dogged sleuthing by a fellow space blogger has tracked down the truth behind the controversial first photo from China's moon orbiter.
In the week since the picture was released amid much fanfare in Beijing, there have been widespread rumors that the photo was a fake, copied from an old picture collected by a U.S. space probe.
The photo from China's Chang'e 1 orbiter is clearly a higher-resolution view, with sunlight streaming from the northwest rather than the north.
The mission's chief scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, told the Beijing News that a new crater had been spotted on the Chang'e imagery — a crater that didn't appear on the U.S. imagery. Lakdawalla determined that crater in question it wasn't exactly new — instead, it appeared to be a crater that had been moved from one spot on the picture to another spot slightly south."
Some dogged sleuthing by a fellow space blogger has tracked down the truth behind the controversial first photo from China's moon orbiter.
In the week since the picture was released amid much fanfare in Beijing, there have been widespread rumors that the photo was a fake, copied from an old picture collected by a U.S. space probe.
The photo from China's Chang'e 1 orbiter is clearly a higher-resolution view, with sunlight streaming from the northwest rather than the north.
The mission's chief scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, told the Beijing News that a new crater had been spotted on the Chang'e imagery — a crater that didn't appear on the U.S. imagery. Lakdawalla determined that crater in question it wasn't exactly new — instead, it appeared to be a crater that had been moved from one spot on the picture to another spot slightly south."
Submission + - Wal-Mart forcing Warner & Sony BMG to provide (billboard.biz)
PoliTech writes: "Acording to Billboard, Wal-Mart is alerting WMG and Sony BMG that it will pull their music files in the Windows Media Audio format from walmart.com some time between mid-December and mid-January, if the labels haven't yet provided the music in MP3 format."
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