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Comment Re:Paper and pencil (Score 1) 320

by fatduck (#25520653) Attached to: US Army Sees Twitter As Possible Terrorist "Operation Tool"
Except the article says nothing about "outlawing Twitter," nor was the report intended to warn the public of the dangers of evil Twitter. It was an internal report suggesting that intelligence analysts should look at social networking tools like Twitter as possible venues for terrorist communication. Is it somewhat obvious? Sure. That doesn't justify your knee-jerk response which, in my opinion, is a lot more "fear-mongering" than the government you're criticizing for no reason.
Role Playing (Games)

Knights of the Old Republic MMO Confirmed 179

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the long-time-coming dept.
Zafsk writes to tell us Gamespot is reporting that in a surprise move from E3 2008, EA's CEO John Riccitello announced that the long debated BioWare MMORPG is going to be a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic sequel of sorts. Currently the KOTOR MMO is slated for a 2009 release. "BioWare's first Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game was released in 2003 for the original Xbox and PC, and was named the year's top RPG by GameSpot. An Obsidian Entertainment-developed sequel was released in 2004 and 2005 on the same two respective platforms. Both critically acclaimed games are set several thousand years before the events of the Star Wars films, and cast players as adventurers who eventually become powerful Jedi Knights."
Space

Ancient Star Found, Estimated at 13.2 Billion Years Old 377

Posted by Zonk from the insert-your-mom-joke-here dept.
raguirre writes "An article on Physorg.org reports that a newly found star may be as old as the universe itself. Recent studies have concluded that the Big Bang occurred somewhere in the neighborhood of 13.7 Billion years ago. The star, a heavy-elements laden fossil labeled HE 1523-0901 on charts was probably born right around the same time; approximately 13.2 Billion years ago. 'Today, astronomer Anna Frebel of the the University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory and her colleagues have deduced the star's age based on the amounts of radioactive elements it contains compared to certain other "anchor" elements, specifically europium, osmium and iridium.'"

Feed NASA releases movie-style trailer (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
NASA was created by man. There were many missions. And they have a plan.

Clearly influenced by the styles of modern sci-fi, NASA has released a movie-style trailer promoting the next Moon missions.
Security

A Foolproof Way To End Bank Account Phishing? 436

Posted by kdawson from the worth-a-try dept.
tcd004 writes "F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen proposes an elegant solution to the problem of bank account phishing in the latest Foreign Policy magazine. Hypponen thinks banks should have exclusive use of a new top-level domain: .bank. 'Registering new domains under such a top-level domain could then be restricted to bona fide financial organizations. And the price for the domain wouldn't be just a few dollars: it could be something like $50,000 — making it prohibitively expensive to most copycats. Banks would love this. They would move their existing online banks under a more secure domain in no time."
Operating Systems

Are End Users to Blame for OS Flaws? 278

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the end-users-are-always-to-blame dept.
tomsHH writes to mention OSWeekly author Brandon Watts claims that really it is end users who should be blamed for many OS flaws. "Believe it or not, as users, we also have a large role to play in the evolution of an operating system. We use what's been created, and this means that we're the best people to turn to for judging what works and what doesn't. Passionate communities that are supportive aid development, and when users join their efforts to make their voices heard, this benefits everyone. Have you ever thought that if you wanted something to be improved, then maybe you should just speak up and offer a solution instead of quietly or publicly venting without offering any input? Nothing changes by staying the same. Companies are listening, and as taboo as it may seem, most of them want to make their users happy, so if you shout loud enough, you're bound to be heard. If you need proof of this, then just look at how Linux has progressed in its development."
GNU is Not Unix

You Can't Oppose Copyright and Support Open Source 550

Posted by kdawson from the baby-with-the-bathwater dept.
Reader gbulmash sends us to his essay on the fallacy of those who would abolish copyright. The argument is that without copyright granting an author the right to set licensing terms for his/her work, the GPL could not be enforced. The essay concludes that if you support the GPL or any open source license (other than public domain), your fight should be not about how to abolish copyright, but how to reform copyright.
Privacy

Submission + - US to pass bill outlawing genetic discrimination

Submitted by
fatduck
fatduck writes: "NewScientist reports that, "On 25 April, the House of Representatives voted 420 to 3 to pass the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). The Senate is expected to endorse the act within a few weeks, which is also supported by President Bush." "There is no gene for the human spirit.""
Space

Astronomers Again Baffled by Solar Observations 299

Posted by CowboyNeal from the back-to-the-drawing-board dept.
SteakNShake writes "Once again professional astronomers are struggling to understand observations of the sun. ScienceDaily reports that a team from Saint Andrew's University announced that the sun's magnetic fields dominate the behavior of the corona via a mechanism dubbed the 'solar skeleton.' Computer models continue to be built to mimic the observed behavior of the sun in terms of magnetic fields but apparently the ball is still being dropped; no mention in the announcement is made of the electric fields that must be the cause of the observed magnetic fields. Also conspicuously absent from the press releases is the conclusion that the sun's corona is so-dominated by electric and magnetic fields because it is a plasma. In light of past and present research revealing the electrical nature of the universe, this kind of crippling ignorance among professional astrophysicists is astonishing."
Education

Why Are Students Liable for School Insecurity? 480

Posted by Cliff from the punishing-them-for-the-mistakes-of-others dept.
yamamushi asks: "Within the past few weeks, students across Boerne ISD were being called into offices to discuss the use of proxies to circumvent the schools websense system. The problem is that some of these students are being suspended from school for up to 3 months at a time. Shouldn't the school district be liable for their own insecurity? Why are they punishing so many students for something that should be handled from the district's end? I know at the time I was going to school there, I was punished for using a Linux LiveCD to login to their computers without using a password, even after I told the admins how to disable booting from CD-ROMs. They refused to update any of the computers and as such I was using the same tactic till the day I graduated." While security breaches by students are something to take seriously, should school administrations continue with their knee-jerk mentality to something like this, especially at the times when its obvious that no malicious intent was involved?
Mars

Half of Mars May Have Ice 66

Posted by kdawson from the submerged-oceans dept.
Ixlr8 sends in a BBC story suggesting that up to half of Mars may have ice at varying depths below the surface. Quoting: "Up until now, scientists had been able to search for water deposits using a spectrometer fixed to the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft. However, only readings that are accurate to within several hundred kilometers can be obtained. By comparing seasonal changes in thermal infrared patterns, detected by the same Odyssey spacecraft, [scientists] can make readings accurate to within just hundreds of meters."
Censorship

Censoring a Number 1046

Posted by kdawson from the you-can't-copyright-that dept.
Rudd-O writes "Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" How long before the magic 16-hex-pairs number shows up in a comment here?
Music

Submission + - Court rules playlist customization not interactive

Submitted by
prostoalex
prostoalex writes: "Is music played via customized playlist delivered interactively (i.e., via user participation) or non-interactive (i.e., decisions are made on the server side)? The question does seem metaphysical, but it took Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Yahoo! six years to figure it out. User-driven playlists are bucketed with on-demand music services, while server-driven playlists are equaled to broadcasts, thereby causing different licensing mechanisms to take place. Yahoo! inherited the legal wrangle when it purchased a music startup Launch, which built a music recommendation feature. Court decision determined that recommendation algorithms that rely on usage data to build playlists server-side are still eligible for broadcast license, thereby substantially lowering the costs of operating a music recommendation site."
Data Storage

Disk Drives Face Challenge From Chips 235

Posted by Hemos from the the-growth-of-hard-storage dept.
WSJdpatton writes "Researchers are reporting significant progress in perfecting a different way to store data in semiconductors, which could replace one widely used type of memory chip and possibly become a credible competitor to disk drives. The researchers, in a paper being delivered at a technical conference in San Francisco, say they used a novel combination of materials to create prototype phase-change components that are more than 500 times as fast as flash chips, while requiring less than half of the electrical power to record data."

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