Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 12:46 PM EDT |
It is doubleplusgood to see there still are people with enough integrity to put
their soft cushions on the line for the sake of their souls.
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 02:49 PM EDT |
U.S. Defense Agency Feeds Python
Essentially what they are doing is
extending the SciPy and NumPy libraries. These libraries are very widely used in
scientific computing. They are essentially wrappers around existing open source
Fortran and C libraries that have been used in scientific computing for a long
time. The heavy work is done by these libraries, while Python code is used for
I/O and presentation (for which there are also some very good graphing
libraries).
There are competing proprietary languages such as Matlab,
but the problem with them are two fold. First, they are very expensive. Second,
while they are oriented directly towards the application, they do a poor job of
the more general programming operations. There can be a lot of work involved in
getting the data in and the answer out of a program, and often the actual
numerical analysis is a relatively small part of the program (particularly if
you are using these libraries). This means you are usually better off adding
numerical libraries to a more general purpose programming language than you are
trying to add general features to a specialised language.
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 03:40 PM EDT |
I think Google has just thrown the gauntlet down at M$, and
any other similar patent troll. And, yes I do think M$ falls
into the troll category. M$ has yet to actually produce
anything original of any significance as far as I am
concerned.
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 10:01 PM EDT |
In reply to this
Newspick March 17 is a rebuttal from
telekommunisten.net. The author could have avoided
embarrassement by reading
Plato or Hobbes.
Perhaps the logo at right
"miscommunication" says it all ...
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Authored by: Gringo_ on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 10:28 PM EDT |
Totally self-serving propaganda...
Microsoft is also
asking companies to pledge
not to seek injunctions on standard-essential
patents, an
issue at the crux of its ongoing legal dispute with Google’s
Motorola division.
When M$FT attacks another Android
OEM, they don't want it
to be able to fight back with SEPs
There is more
to their disclosure than that though. They
are trying to intimidate their
competitors by showing how
many patents they have. They are really saying
"Don't even
think about fighting back when we come calling on you. We
have
40,000 patents to sue you with."
Link [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 03:13 AM EDT |
Why are the only people willing to make any claims about the
validity or scope of the attack directly involved: Spamhaus reps, the group's
leader, and most dubiously, CloudFlare, the anti-DDoS firm Spamhaus enlisted to
ward off the attack.
And it's that last party that's responsible for the
sky-falling internet weather report, the party that stands to profit directly
from you being worried that the internet as we know it is under
siege.
Sam
Biddle, Gizmodo (Giz gots graphs)
h/t Rob Beschizza, Boing Boing[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 05:44 PM EDT |
NY Times translates:
Sprint sells soul to NSA, or
Joe McCarthy's ghost stalks FCC
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Authored by: Tolerance on Saturday, March 30 2013 @ 01:18 AM EDT |
In the news pick "The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Is a
Failed Experiment",
Eric Goldman writing in Forbes says:
If someone permanently
takes someone else’s chattel, we call
this “theft” or “conversion,” and we
punish it both civilly
and criminally.
Not so. As I recall,
theft and conversion both involve
removal of a chattel, and both can be crimes.
But theft
always requires the intention to permanently deprive the
owner of
his chattel; conversion does not. It's an important
distinction for computer
crime since a copied file does not
deprive the owner of the
original.
That's why teenagers who 'steal' a car to go joy-riding
aren't
charged with theft if they simply park it afterwards.
If they set fire to
it or otherwise destroy it though, that
can bring theft into the
picture.
--- Grumpy old man [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 30 2013 @ 04:11 PM EDT |
Am I the only person here who finds the posting of Tweets as Newspicks somewhat
vacuous and annoying? 'Specially when the
tweet is substantially just a link to
the real story? For people who do not use Twitter, and there must be more of us
about,
expanding a Tweet to a full thread is nonintuitive and takes two clicks.
Then to find in the case of
"I'm aware of
security hole but..." that there is no substantive story other than the
tweeter is so fearful of CFAA that the
tweet refers to some hypothetical
non-specific security hole who knows where. The twitter stream reveals some
possible context
in
2 Arrested For Refusing To Answer Immigration
Questions Before Domestic Flight huffpo
Alfred Anaya
Put Secret Compartments in Cars. So the DEA Put
Him in Prison
wired.com
Write Gambling Software, Go to
Prison wired.com
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Authored by: dacii on Saturday, March 30 2013 @ 04:17 PM EDT |
Link to slashdot here: Here Warning NSFW. Strong language. Swartz case
request for detailed information. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 30 2013 @ 07:06 PM EDT |
<a
href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/30/us-patent-and-trademark-office-denie
s-apples-ipad-mini-trademark-application-deemed-merely-descriptive/">Rep
ort: US Patent And Trademark Office Denies Apple’s iPad Mini Trademark
Application, Deemed “M</a>
In general this denial struck me as sensible... but this line from the denial
stuck out in particular as plain wrong
[blockquote]The term “IPAD” is descriptive when applied to applicant’s goods
because the prefix “I” denotes
“internet.” According to the attached evidence, the letter “i” or “I” used as a
prefix and would be
understood by the purchasing public to refer to the Internet when used in
relation to Internet-related
products or services. Applicant’s goods are identified as “capable of providing
access to the Internet”.[/blockquote]
I'm curious, did anyone know that the "I" in apple products ever
referred to being able to access the internet? Does it even? I thought it was
just a naming gimmick personally, and was left unimpressed at the evidence as
well.
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Authored by: Nick_UK on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 07:57 AM EDT |
I have just watched this, and unfortunately I thought he was a good guy, but he
doesn't really get it.
He talks about the 4 freedoms etc. but ultimately concedes that MS have the
control of secure boot/restricted boot and are needed (in a financial/technical
type of way as no one else can afford or be bothered to sign keys).
The only way to go (if this IS the future of computing) is to campaign for an
independent signing authority that even MS have to go through - and even to
force OEM's to make it easy to disable secure boot for 'joe bloggs'.
Nick[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: JamesK on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 03:55 PM EDT |
One thing comes to mind in this. Many years ago, when IBM PC clones were being
created, there was the issue of the BIOS. The BIOS was copyrighted and couldn't
legally be copied. The legal way around this was a "clean room"
approach, where one group would analyze the behavior of the BIOS and write a
spec about it. Then, another group, working only from the spec, would write a
new, functionally equivalent BIOS. Wouldn't similar apply here, in that the
published Java interfaces are used to design something equivalent software?
---
The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 04:20 PM EDT |
Those of you who don’t use Google+ because you know for sure that
it’s an echoing wasteland can
skip this section. Personally, I spend quite a
bit of time there; here’s why:
1. There are 29,000 people following
me.
...
The short version: It’s not as efficient for spreading news as
Twitter; but it’s way better for having a conversation.
...
Possibly you
don’t agree with all the design decisions; I don’t.
Googleversary
Ah, so it's about counting disciples. On the
echoing wasteland score, are there any objective measures of g+
against, say
Facebook? As for spreading news and having conversations, both rattled along
quite merrily over
twenty years ago, plain ascii text, on usenet news, and
without the design decision that requires an insane amount
of javascript to
keep g+ afloat.
nobody wants to own the Identity
subsystem.
You picked up the hot potato there Tim.
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 05:15 PM EDT |
Kinda, maybe, possibly, partially...
The problem is they expect
you to trust them. They aren't going to hide
anything important, they
promise.
But who can trust them?
Boston Globe
There's the rub.
And we
can be certain they are hiding something. As PJ commented, this
so looks like
when The SCOG ddosed
themselves.
Waynehttp://madhatter.ca [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 05:18 PM EDT |
Original news pick link was here
Out of curiosity, for those who know about
these things (Webster?), is it
possible for the defense to appeal a
dismissal in a criminal case, in
order to continue
discovery
etc.?
The goal of pursuing further a posthumous defense (of Aaron)
would be to
identify
whether any of the actions of the prosecutors or of MIT
staff, might rise to the
level of criminal violations themselves.
At
the very least, it might establish precedent, or even send a warning, that
regardless of a defendant's suicide, any improper behavior in bringing a
prosecution will see the light of day. It is necessary to deter abusive
prosecution, which can result in Machiavellian harm if left
unchecked.
NB - the order says the materials under discussion may be
kept by the either
side, until appeals are
complete, which would be why
appealing the dismissal, even as a formality,
might make sense.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: 351-4V on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 06:04 PM EDT |
Why pray tell would the D.A.s office be afraid of retaliation? According to
them, they have done nothing wrong at all.
Looks to me like someone just
admitted that they know they went way overboard on this one and are just denying
it to avoid the consequences they so deserve.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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