janestarz | Entries tagged with slashdot

Anonymous Vows To Destroy Facebook

DarkOx sends this snippet from BusinessInsider:
"Anonymous has vowed to destroy Facebook on November 5th (which should ring a bell). Citing privacy concerns and the difficulty involved in deleting a Facebook account, Anonymous hopes to 'kill Facebook,' the 'medium of communication [we] all so dearly adore.' They continued, 'It is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It is a battle for choice and informed consent. ... Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely false. It gives users the illusion of and hides the details away from them "for their own good" while they then make millions off of you. When a service is "free," it really means they're making money off of you and your information.'"

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Can't say I blame 'em....

Current Mood: dorky
Current Location: Rotterdam, the Netherlands

You probably know I read Ursula Vernon, who is into permaculture bigtime and got me hooked on the idea as well (Hey, if the Inca people did it....). I've read up on Permaculture myself and am trying to implement it on the modest balcony we have, but it's rather difficult when the concrete fries anything not heat-resistant when it's a good summer and the rain drowns anything but swamp plants in bad summers.

The fact is, my balcony isn’t a perfect breeding ground for food, but it’s all I got and I probably should use it accordingly.

Slashdot wrote about the World's Food Shortage Problem today, mainly asking us the question: how are we to feed everyone? (The prognosis is that this earth will be inhabited by 9 billion humans by 2050.)

Slashdot linked to a well-written story highlighting some well-known problems on Ars Technica.
The main problem we have with feeding the current population isn't that there isn't enough food (because there is¹), because it is just a transport and lifestyle issue. We choose to eat more than is strictly speaking necessary to keep us alive and healthy. And we have food surpluses in parts of the world and food shortages in other parts of the world.
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) estimates that a total of 925 million people are undernourished in 2010². That sounds like a lot of hungry people.

Perhaps what it boils down to is: the way we produce food is flawed, and the way we handle food is flawed as well. Let’s start with the latter.

Obesitas is a disease of the developed world, while people are starving from malnutrition in other parts of the world. We over-eat, because there's an abundance of food anyway. It's a lifestyle issue: we have an unwritten rule that says we share food with our friends when they come over on a social visit. Cake, nuts, crisps, cheese, all to show how rich we are, how well we do.
From a historical point of view, this is understandable: in order to score a rich political ally you needed to feed him and give him your most beautiful daughter in marriage, and if you raised the wench well you might gain some on-hands influence. Very, very simply put, of course.

Hunger is also a political issue. I'm not saying governments should force people to eat less, but they can encourage people to live a healthy lifestyle. And we can and should invest into feeding those people that are now dying of malnutrition. It starts with the schools people, if we invest in the kids we will get there in the end... (also: breed less!)
It’s also a political issue because in the developing world, politicians are very often corrupt, and cannot be bothered to care about the dying people as long as they remain in power. The aid we sent might be snatched up by corrupt politicians in stead of going to the people we need it most. A fundamental problem, because if financial aid is not coming, then neither are the agricultural development, fresh water pumps, etc.

Another issue is genetic modification. The article touched upon genetically modified plants working their way into the ecosystem. Biodiversity suffers because the plants we cultivate are more fungus/disease resistant than their natural counterparts -- and this has its influence on the biosphere. I personally would rather eat a tiny, wild strawberry (a taste explosion!) than one of those cultivated water-bombs. Diversity is a good thing, because it’ll reduce chances of wiping out an entire strain of plants with one disease. Also: biological seeds!
Ursula took it a step further. She’s mad for native plants (i.e. non-imported things that would grow in her region if people didn’t live there) and she posted about this semi-rare plant she found at a gardening center that was probably just stolen from its natural habitat, cultivated in a greenhouse for a year so it would earn the “nursery grown” tag, and then sold at a bargain (for the type of plant) and a profit (because it doesn’t cost much to rip up plants and keep’em in a plastic greenhouse for a year). Imagine the problems for the local ecosystem on that one...

And speaking of usurping the ecosystem, let’s consider the term ‘bycatch’. It’s what you get out of the sea, but aren’t fishing for. Shrimp bycatch is between 3 and 15 tonnes per tonne of shrimp³. And shrimp fishers aren’t the only ones that produce bycatch, of course, but they account for 30% of all bycatch.

In warm summers, I have a serious water issue on my little patch of balcony garden. The concrete and bricks heat up so well that any earth I have in any pots will lose much of their moisture. I can’t collect rain from the roof (rental apartment!) so I’m stuck with a bucket to catch the rain and tap water to fuel my garden with. The article says that 70% of water usage goes to agriculture. How will we cope when we have more mouths to feed⁴?

Another disturbing factoid is the producing of biofuel. Why do we rip valuable farmland off by producing corn that will be used to create biofuel -- when normal vegetable waste can be used instead⁵? The fertilizers used in producing biofuel also have a tremendous impact on river ecosystems and marine life, as the surplus is washed out to sea where the algae feast.

And while we’re on the subject of farmland: why do we eat so much meat? A balanced diet doesn’t require much meat, and to create meat we have to feed the animal in question a lot of vegetable matter that we can (usually) eat as well. Never mind the hormones and antibiotics they also put into the meat.

I don’t mean to come off as a sudden reformed person, or as a health freak, but the fact is that if the population will grow to 9 billion or maybe 15 billion... how will we feed these people?
Also: I’m pretty damned sure I only quoted sources that support my post here so I dare you to find sources that disprove my assumptions and join the debate!

-----
1) From: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations's (FAO) FAQ on hunger
2) Source: http://www.fao.org/docrep/012/al390e/al390e00.pdf
3) Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bycatch
4) Please don’t say “Brawndo!”
5) Source: http://www.energyfuturecoalition.org/biofuels/fact_ethanol_cellulose.htm

Current Mood: impressed
Current Location: Den Haag, the Netherlands

Just a gentle reminder on how to use my pictures.

Copyright
"Copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted by the law of a jurisdiction to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work." (From: Wikipedia)

Or, in Dutch:
Auteursrecht (ook bekend als copyright) is het recht van de maker of een eventuele rechtverkrijgende van een werk van literatuur, wetenschap of kunst om te bepalen hoe, waar en wanneer zijn werk wordt openbaar gemaakt of verveelvoudigd. Het auteursrecht ontstaat van rechtswege. Men hoeft niets te deponeren of te registreren. (From: Wikipedia)

That means: If I take a picture, create an artwork or write a book, I am the one who gets to decide who can copy and distribute the work. I made it, so I've got copyright. I can file a lawsuit against anyone who decides they don't have to take care with my work. And win it.

Portrait Rights
In the Netherlands, we also know a law on protecting one's portrait. It allows a person depicted in a portrait or picture to object to publishing the image.
"Het portretrecht is een beperking van het auteursrecht. Het geeft geportretteerde personen het recht zich te verzetten tegen publicatie van hun portret." (From: Wikipedia)

As a photographer, you can also choose to waive (a part) of these rights. I like Open Source and Creative Commons, so I usually give all my photo's a Creative Commons license. An Attribution, Non-commercial, no-derivatives license to be exact.
That means: you are free to share the work, as long as you don't alter it in any way and tell people I was the one who made it. Unless you want to use it commercially, because Commercial use is not allowed.

I find that most larpers I photograph are not so worried about having their pictures taken and shared. It's a comfortable position to be in as a photographer as well. People trust you to take pictures and shift through them so the best are published and the blurry worst aren't. They trust you to take care with the images so they can't be used for other means.
And this one of the reasons I dislike Photobucket and like Flickr.

Photobucket takes your images and takes your rights:
"By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Photobucket Services, you hereby grant to Photobucket and other users a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content marked "private" will not be distributed outside the Photobucket Services." (From: The Photobucket Terms of Use, emphasis mine)

Flickr allows you to choose what kind of license your images will have. The default setting is "all rights reserved".

The reason I'm blogging about this? It's because I'm pissed off. I'm pissed off at Facebook and I'm pissed off at Photobucket and all those other sites who think that portraits and photographs are theirs just because their Terms of Use tell you they are. You see, Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilites" tells me this:

"You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:
1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it." (emphasis mine)

And I read on Slashdot today that Facebook now has the means to add any of your profile pictures to adds on other people's profiles. It's linked to Facebook Places, and if you 'check in' to your local Starbucks, Facebook will display a Starbuck's add with your profile photo on your friend's Facebook pages. "Hey look!" they will say, "Your friend likes us too!"
(Original article on Slashdot, here)

And I know for a fact that some people use my photographs in their Facebook.
And they can't.

'They can't?' you might ask me? That's right. They can't. Not because I am stopping them! I've got Creative Commons License on my images.
If I've taken a picture of you, you have a right to that portrait, because it's your face on it - That's Portrait right. But by uploading it to Facebook, you say to Facebook that it's YOUR image. That YOU own it. And you don't.
But because you've uploaded it to Facebook, you've just given away your rights to the image, and mine, because of their Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. But you can't give my rights away, because they're not yours to give away in the first place!

It would be like me uploading your book's contents to Facebook and Facebook selling your book, because I've uploaded it. Or me uploading your artwork to Facebook and Facebook selling it to a museum. Facebook can do anything it bloody well wants with the image, because you've just handed it to them.
And that's my image! I took that photo! I spend a thousand euro's on that bloody camera! I kneeled in the dirt for that picture! Can you see how this pisses me off?!

*breathes deeply*

Alright, there's no use ranting about this. Facebook is, as a social experiment, interesting to observe from the side lines, and there's not a lot I can do to change it.
What I can and will do is the following:

1) Ask anyone who is using photographs of mine on their Facebook, to please take it down.
2) Add a watermark to all of my images I publish in the future.

Please, people. This is a big deal. It is not a "why do you worry about this" subject. It's your face they are using for their profit. They are trampling your rights, and you won't see a dime in return.

Please take down any of my images you've got on Facebook. If you do, I'll get you a print of that image to hang on your wall in your home instead as a thank you.
Just e-mail me at starz [a] janestarz [.] com if you want a print.

Current Mood: pissed off
Current Location: Den Haag, the Netherlands

Your daily dose of Slashdot:

The Unstoppable 'Tech Support' Scam

Posted by timothy on Tuesday July 06, @12:04PM
from the all-your-base-are-c-o-d dept.

"A pernicious new type of scam is targeting British computer owners, reports PC Pro. The con is both fiendishly clever and ridiculously simple. The fraudster cold-calls the customer and tells them that Microsoft has detected a virus on their PC, then invites them to download a piece of remote-assistance software. No doubt reassured by the lines of indecipherable code flitting across their screen, the caller assures the customer they can make the virus vanish – but first, of course, they want payment. £185 to be precise. The spoof site behind the scam is approved by McAfee's Site Advisor and bears Microsoft logos, something which both companies have failed to act upon. Meanwhile, an assortment of British regulators have said there is nothing they can do to stop it."

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Scams such as these are at once scary and infuriating. So many people haven't the foggiest idea how their computer works, or how the internet works, and will be easy prey from these assholes. Some might argue that that's why they shouldn't be using the internet, but these days you can hardly go without. Who still reads a hand-written job application?

Some might learn, some will be scammed out of a lot of money. It's just scary.
Would it be a solution to convert them all to Linux? Ubuntu is pretty low-threshold....

In other news:

Parasite Correlated With World Cup Success

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 06, @05:56PM
from the yeah-yeah-not-causation dept.

"A parasite commonly found in cats, Toxoplasma gondii, has an unnerving relation to World Cup victories by country. (..) Toxo can be found in almost every type of mammal, from rats to humans. The overall goal of the parasite is to end up in a feline stomach, which is the only place it can reproduce. In other mammals, humans for example, the parasite heads for the brain. It is estimated that nearly 1/3 of the human population has a latent Toxo infection, with individual countries having infection rates varying from 6% (Korea) to 92% (Ghana). Countries with greater incidence of this parasitic infection in their populations tend to win more World Cups than those without. The article, written by a Stanford University neuroscientist, goes on to try out various rationales for such a correlation, ranging from increased testosterone to increased dissent of authority — all symptoms of a Toxo infection. Now we just need to find a parasite that causes an inability to referee properly, and we'll have this whole World Cup business all sorted out."

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Current Mood: aggravated
Current Location: Amsterdam Bijlmer ArenA, the Netherlands
Current Music: Muse - Time Is Running Out

February 13th, UNIX Time Will Reach 1234567890
Posted by timothy on Sunday February 08, @04:26PM
from the less-often-than-a-stopped-clock-is-right dept.
mikesd81 writes: "Over at Linux Magazine Online, Jon maddog Hall writes that on Friday the 13th, 2009 at 11:31:30pm UTC UNIX time will reach 1,234,567,890. This will be Friday, February 13th at 1831 and 30 seconds EST. Matias Palomec has a perl script you an use to see what time that will be for you: perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";' Now, while this is not the UNIX epoch, Alan Cox does assure us that Linux is now working on 64-bit time, and the UNIX epoch 'roll-over' would happen about the time that the sun burnt out."
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Comment by beav007: "Don't forget to party like it's 915148769" XD

Or you could just surf here to see the actual UNIX time.
(I feel so geek now. And so very Procrastinatorrrrrr.)

Is it time for chocolate?
Damn right it is!

Current Mood: lazy
Current Location: Vianen, the Netherlands
Current Music: some music the guys here are playing. It's poppy.

Three days. Actually, it was a little less than that, as yesterday the craving for some caffeine reached a red line and I threw the idea of green tea out the window. I took care to drink four cups of black (Pickwick) tea, loaded with suger, to at least get rid of the detox feeling I was experiencing.
This morning I got up at seven, the ungodly hour when I have no need for caffeine yet and my body is protesting against the very idea of coffee. A cup of black tea with milk took care of that, and when I finally left the house at eight-thirty the needle was nearing the red line again. Caffeine, and lots of it, would be appreciated.

It's not that the coffee at Sogeti is bad. It's abominably lousy. Someone must configure those machines, right? So how come they've got the tastebuds of a hippopotamus? What in their twisted minds went "Okay, right, so let's take half the amount of coffee needed for one cup, right? And we make the coffee with that. And then afterwards we can re-use that coffee for the next five cups! It will be marvellous!"
Someone get me that guys address, so I can make my displeasure known to him.

As I was riding my bike towards Sogeti, I was pondering the idea of kicking the habit. Caffeine is no less a drug than alcohol, and I don't want to take drugs. However, like alcohol, it is one of few drugs I would actually take, and do take. Well, let's be honest about that. At home I drink decaf, and at work there's hardly any actual coffee involved. But still, my daily fix of coffee is -as my mind thinks- necessary. It's definitely a habit, whereas I only drink alcohol when in good company, never before dinner, and only very rarely when I have to work the next day.

I took a little detour to the trainstation, where my favorite UFO Coffeemaker is located. I inserted three 50 cent pieces into the machine, located the largest cup, and pressed the small silver button, around which a blue ring of light began to blink. And, carefully holding my golden cappuccino, I cycled to work.

I already drink a lot less coffee. It's like house-breaking your dog. If he's bad, you punish him. If I want coffee (=bad) I get bad coffee, which is a punishment. It's going to work, I'm sure. Meanwhile, I've got my first fix, and can switch back to my green tea in a moment. The Oriental Lipton green tea is really nice (Steelweaver gave that to me), it's got a little kick which makes it all the more enjoyable. And whenever I feel the need for some real coffee I can get some from the shady dealer at the trainstation. You see, it's no different than drugs after all!

And once I'm off the habit, I can get right back on it to get me some of those hallucinations this study promises.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: Rotterdam, the Netherlands

From Your Daily Dose Of Slashdot, today I present the following. This article will be an interesting read for many people who are worried about their online security, who are interested in learning more about adware in order to avoid getting infected by it, and everyone who knows a little bit about computers. This interview might seem very complicated, but I assure you that you will be able to follow it easily.

Interview With an Adware Author
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 13, @04:26PM
from the warming-up-for-the-botnet-era dept.
rye writes in to recommend a Sherri Davidoff interview with Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, who talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) "So we've progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that's encrypted — really more just obfuscated — to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. ... There was one further step that we were going to take but didn't end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers. It turns out that in Windows, you can get access to the interrupt handler pretty easily. ... It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network."

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From the interview:
S: "How private is people’s information today?"
M: "Not at all."

I really recommend you read this interview. It will certainly make you think about what you do with your computer.

Current Mood: smart
Current Location: Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Het is toch wel erg als je op Slashdot moet lezen dat Nederland niet meer met electronische stemmachines gaat werken. Ik kan me voorstellen dat er een hoop ander nieuws is wat ook belangrijk is de aarbeving in China bijvoorbeeld. Maar dat Maxima's verjaardag wel, en dit nieuws niet op Nu.nl staat vind ik wel een beetje triest.

Dutch Voting Machines De-Certified
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday May 16, @08:01PM
from the going-the-wrong-way dept.

Peer writes "The dutch government has officially decided that it will no longer use voting machines (Babel Fish Translation) for elections. So it's pencil and paper from now on. Activists have been campaigning against the use of voting machines for some time."

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Het artikel is natuurlijk ook in het Nederlands te lezen.

Current Mood: baffled
Current Location: Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Though I am unsure whether it is wise to go into detail and worry about the message a movie might make, it is interesting to take a step back and observe what are things that people worry about.
This all was brought on by the lack of D&D yesterday. We popped on a movie, Juno, which many of my friends really liked.

While I don't watch movies like Not another teen movie, I also realised just now that I can't for the life of me think that people take American Pie seriously. Though it is entertaining to many, it hardly comes to mind that people might think of the characters from that movie might be rolemodels to today's youth.

Though Juno was entertaining and had humour -- the quips and jokes were funny and witty -- I was shocked at the overall concept of the movie. Here's a sixteen year old girl, who gets herself knocked up, can't stand to face an abortion, decides to put up the baby for adoption even despite the fact that the adoptive parents' marriage falls apart....and everyone is okay with it.

Whatever happened to being hormonal? When you're pregnant, your entire body changes, you're as large as a whale, you have to pee all the time and the last trimester is supposedly hell because you're getting really tired of it all. Not Juno, she just breezes on through. The only thing that bothers her is the fact that the boy she likes takes a different girl to the prom after she encourages him to do so.

I'm scared that this movie gives off the image that having (unprotected) sex at sixteen is a-okay, that if you do get knocked up it's really nothing to worry about, that you can always get rid of the baby, and that it's fine to dump a newly-born into a broken marriage.

This in contrast to the view on teenage pregnancy from Dangerous Minds[imdb]:

Carla: "But, Louanne, once these girls have babies, very few of them come back to school anyway."
Louanne: "I see. So you make them think they have to leave. You just push 'em out a little earlier, make it a little harder, make it a little more hopeless."
Carla: "I do what I have to do because it is dangerous to have a pregnant girl in a classroom. It's not a warning, Louanne. I-lt's prestige, it's stardom, it's attention. You know, not all these girls become pregnant by accident. Pregnancy is contagious."
From: Dangerous Minds, 1995

Well, what am I worrying about. I am scared to death of being pregnant because I don't want to have any children. It's been that way for most of my life - it just never entered into the equasion and I'd probably be a bad mother anyway. And Juno was entertaining.

So, what should I be worried about? Ads with my name on it? [Slashdot]. Who becomes the next president of the United States? The differences between nationalities and countries?

At first, I thought this would just be a rant about Juno, but it is really more interesting to think about the different things people worry about. Did you know, there's this guy who wrote an essay [Slashdot] on his typewriter in 1978 about how to charge interest for goods that move at nearly the speed of light for interstellar commerce?

Current Mood: pensive

Slashdot reports that

U.S. House Says the Internet is Terrorist Threat

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 28, @10:18AM
from the so-is-my-chilli dept.

GayBliss writes
"The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill (H.R. 1955) last month, by a vote of 404 to 6, that says the Internet is a terrorist tool and that Congress needs to develop and implement methods to combat it."
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Think this is bad? Follow the link to the actual bill and take the time to read it. As KingSkippus said in the first comment on Slashdot:

Sensationalist FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
by KingSkippus (799657) * on Wednesday November 28, @10:19AM (#21504717)
Holy crap, that title and summary is misleading.

I just read the bill ([link removed] it's not that long), and the Internet is mentioned only once:

The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.
That's it, nothing else. The bill's purpose is to establish a committee to study violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism, and to assist federal officials in training and education efforts to prevent such things.

If you disagree with spending tax dollars to do that, then I don't have a problem with that. If the committee comes up with some outlandish plan to regulate the Internet as a result of their research, then I agree we need to get worked up about it. But the bill does not say that the Internet is a "terrorist threat," and it sure as hell does not define the Internet as a "terrorist tool that Congress needs to develop and implement methods to combat."

Still, any bill giving Homeland Security more free reign...wellllll...you make up your mind about whether that is a good thing.

^*) YDDOS is short for Your Daily Dose Of Slashdot, so I can include what the post is about in the future.

Current Location: Den Haag, the Netherlands

Today, in Your Daily Dose Of Slashdot, we feature Bugs from outer space:

Germs Taken Into Space May Come Back Deadlier
Posted by Zonk on Tuesday September 25, @08:43AM
from the just-what-we-need-down-here dept.
westlake writes: "Sounds like the plot for a B-movie, doesn't it? Germs go into space and come back stronger and deadlier than ever. Except, it really happened. In a medical experiment, salmonella carried about the space shuttle in the fall of 2006 proved far more lethal to lab mice than their earth-bound source. 90% dead vs. 60% dead in twenty-six days, with half the mice dying at 1/3 the oral dose. Apparently 167 genes in the space-evolved strain had changed. The likely cause: In microgravity the force of fluids passing over the cells is low, similar to conditions in the gastrointestinal tract, and the cells adapted quickly to the new environment."

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Comments include:
"What would happen if bacteria was on a satellite for years and then came back to the Earth? Everybody has always assumed that it was meteors or bioweapons lab leaks that were causing zombie outbreaks, but it could just as easily be supergerms that are so highly evolved that they can control the dead!" - by an Anonymous

"So most likely the germs had their little hill turned upside down in micro-gravity and were forced to climb up to the top of a new one. Their landscape got turned upside down again when they came back down to Earth, and they ended up finding a bigger hill than the one they started on." - by s_p_oneil

"This was first documented in 1988 [imdb.com], but they don't want you to know about it." - by PixelScuba

"Another thing to consider: germs in space will be able to mutate repeatedly before re-introduction to the general population. This means that the defensive systems that normally adapt to handle them as the mutations arise (think: each strain of the common cold that ends up "going around" your local school/business) don't get a chance until the germ population is sizeable and has the mutated traits spread throughout.
What's the policy for de-bugging astronauts, anyway?" - by PlatyPaul

"It works the other way too. The outer-space-bacteria has lived and mutated in an environment without or with very few defensive system, to which it normally needs to adapt to handle them and manage to survive and proliferate. Thus the bacteria doesn't get a chance to keep it's knowledge in surviving when it come back to earth.
It's most likely to get pwnd by the first antibody or marcophage it encounters." - by DrYak

So, will we all be eaten by Spacebugs? Anyone remember that meteorite crash that caused a whole Mexican village to projectile-vomit?

Fantasy Author Robert Jordan Passes Away
Posted by Zonk on Monday September 17, @01:22AM
from the doff-our-helms dept.
willith writes
"James Oliver Rigney Jr, author of the long-running fantasy series The Wheel of Time and better known to millions of fans by the pen name Robert Jordan, died on 16 Sept 2007 from cardiac amyloidosis. Jordan announced he had been diagnosed with the disease in March 2006 and vowed to beat the odds, but determination and gumption sometimes just aren't enough in the face of a disease with a median survival time of just over two years. Jordan was in the process of writing the twelfth and final book in the Wheel of Time series, A Memory of Light, but the book was not slated for release until 2009 and is still incomplete. While there is hope that the book will still be finished from Jordan's notes, this is devastating news to all of us who have been reading the series since 1990."

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From: Slashdot.

The comments on the article are somewhat morbid. There are a lot of people who were irritated by the fact that after book 5 the plotlines were stretched out. I could hardly make heads or tails from all the political schemes, but I loved the Wheel of Time, and especially the characters and the Aes Sedai.
I don't know what I have hoped -- showing him pictures of my ring and Accepted Dress is not something I had hoped for it is a fool's hope -- but I would have liked for him to spend some more healthy years amongst the living, writing or not. It is something we all wish for the good people.

Let us hope he reincarnates in the next Age.

Current Mood: sad

I just read a fascinating article that was linked from Slashdot today. You guys probably know I'm a fan of radio that really says stuff, like the BBC World channel. Slashdot had a story that linked to a transcript of a radio program of Australia's (?) ABC Radio. The program is called Health Report.
The program was about a new villain in the battle against obesity. I'm interested in this stuff, because of obvious reasons. When I weighed myself this morning I did notice I'm back to 95 kilo's and my America-gained pounds have disappeared again (huzzah!); however, I'm still nowhere near my 80 kilogrammes perfect weight.

The program spoke of, as Slashdot puts it, "Fructose As Culprit In the Obesity Epidemic". Now don't start screaming "fruit is good for you"...there's other stuff that fructose is used in. Most American foods have corn syrup added to them. Guess what that's mostly made of?

Anyway, if you've got a spare moment to read this, I can wholeheartily recommend it (link at bottom of blockquote). Here's some interesting bits.
(Leptin is a hormone that is being produced when insulin levels are high (more fat, more leptin) and prods the brain to eat less and exercise more. It's explained in the transcript, but I thought this was enough info to bore you with for the moment.)

Robert Lustig: We took these kids who developed massive obesity after brain tumours; these kids have a tumour in the area of the brain which controls energy balance, the most common of which is called a cranial pharyngioma, and once these kids are treated, that area of the brain is now dead, it cannot see leptin. When you can't see leptin your brain is starving, and so what it does is it increases your food intake because you need to eat more -- even though there's plenty of leptin, you can't see it, so it's like it wasn't there -- and it also reduces your sympathetic nervous system in order to actually make you feel lousy and to burn less energy.
[...] So we see these children with brain tumours who can't see their leptin and we asked the question -- could we somehow influence this disastrous feedback cycle? What we did is we gave a drug called Octreotide and we knocked down their insulin levels with this medicine and all of a sudden, not only did these kids stop eating, they started exercising spontaneously, they just did it. Two kids started lifting weights at home, one kid became a competitive swimmer, one kid became a manager of his high school basketball team, running around collecting all the basket balls.

Norman Swan: So you're postulating that insulin was having an influence on the brain itself.

Robert Lustig: Right, by getting the insulin down instead of the energy that they were eating being forced to fat, the energy that they were eating could now be burned by muscle, could now be burned by the rest of the body, made them feel better.

[...]

Norman Swan: One way of proving this would be to put you on a fructose free diet, has anybody done that?

Robert Lustig: Well no one's done it yet. In fact we're trying to do that, in fact we're actually going to be working with the Atkins Foundation here in America to actually do a fructose withdrawal experiment to try to actually answer that question directly.

[...]

Robert Lustig: If you look at the Atkins diet, the Atkins diet was no-carb, high-fat, no-carb and it worked. We look at the Japanese diet, high-carb, no-fat, it also worked. When you put them together you get something called McDonalds and clearly that doesn't work. So the question is what is it about the Japanese diet, even though they eat all of this white rice, that still allows this phenomenon to be OK? And the answer is very simple -- it's called fructose, because fructose is really not a carbohydrate. [...] So a Japanese diet yes, they're eating a lot of white rice but they are also eating a lot of fibre in all of their vegetables and they are not consuming any fructose. There is no fructose in the Japanese diet whatsoever, but there is now, and childhood obesity has doubled in Japan in the last ten years whereas adult obesity hasn't moved.

From: ABC's 'The Health Report' - presented by Norman Swan. Transcript here
Dr Robert Lustig is Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Current Location: Den Haag, the Netherlands

Bad news! Microsoft wants your money! You knew that, ofcourse. But if you cheated them out of 'their' money by running an alternative operating system (like Linux) or using free software, available on the internet, they wants their preciousss.

Microsoft Says Free Software Violates 235 Patents
Posted by Zonk on Monday May 14, @01:26AM
from the rut-roh-raggy dept.

prostoalex writes "Microsoft told Fortune magazine that various free software products violate at least 235 patents, and it's time to expect users of this software to pay up patent licensing royalties: 'Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez sat down with Fortune recently to map out their strategy for getting FOSS users to pay royalties. Revealing the precise figure for the first time, they state that FOSS infringes on no fewer than 235 Microsoft patents.'"
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I love the way the second link in the article, the one to CNN, displays Steve Ballmer as the corporate prick waving his hands around, while the founder of the free software association looks like a bum.

And I wonder when we're going to have to buy a subscription in order to see sites. Because, you know, Microsoft invented the internets. (No they didn't).

Current Mood: predatory

Harrison Ford Turned Down Han Solo Role
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday January 12, @04:21AM
from the call-him-doctor-jones dept.

eldavojohn writes "It's being widely reported that Harrison Ford turned down a £20 million deal to play Han Solo once again in a George Lucas spin off of Star Wars. The source of this information seems to be a tabloid called bangshowbiz. Harrison was approached by Lucas with two roles but instead opted for the same amount to play Indiana Jones for the fourth time. Could the spin off centered on the rugged Han Solo save the Star Wars franchise from its prequels or would it have been another mediocre release disappointing demanding fans?"

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From TFA (The Fucking Article):
"Hollywood legend Ford, 64, snubbed director George Lucas' big bucks offer in favour of playing heroic archaeologist Indiana Jones again. However, Lucas wasn't too disappointed with Ford's decision as he was already developing an idea for a fourth Indiana Jones movie with Steven Spielberg."

I loved the /. comments, especially this one from Mr.Roadkill:

Gonna light a bonfire, fuel it with my karma... (Score:5, Funny)
by Mr. Roadkill (731328) on Friday January 12, @05:40AM

Okay, here's the REAL deal.
Harrison Ford took the Indiana Jones role over the Han Solo one because it's going to be a much better movie.
The rumour that it takes place in the sixties is true, and fits in nicely with the Mr Ford's present age.
What hasn't been widely revealed is that Sean Connory *will* be in the movie, although the role will probably surprise many people.

Since Satan owns the pink slip for the soul of pretty much everyone who has ever worked in motion pictures, he can shuffle the deck however he sees fit... and some interesting studio mergers mean that Sean Connory will play an elderly James Bond who fell through a temporal rift as the result of Xindi interference with Earth history - the theory being that if they could get all the kids hooked on beer and acid and dope then warp drive would never be invented. Little did they realise that Optimus Prime would ride in on My Little Pony and save the day by assassinating Kennedy and illegitimately fathering Rosie ODonnell with, you guessed it, Rosie ODonnell - who fell through the same temporal rift James Bond fell through. Pygmies re-discover left-over gou'auld technology that permits them to build hypersonic blow-dart weapons, which are capable of destroying ICBMs and thereby save the USA from the tyranny of total destruction when they decide to make the Ukraine glow in the dark...which happens two-thirds of the way through the movie, because the Ark of the Covenant (which was stolen from Area 51 by the Xindi) has been given to the Russians, who are using it to try to re-animate a cut-n-shunt SuperPolitician they've made from the cryogenically preserved remains of Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin and Walt Disney - but exposure to nuclear fallout causes this re-animated monstrosity to sprout wings and fly to Tokyo, where as Mothra it does battle with Godzilla until Indiana Jones...

Sorry, I've given too much away already. You'll just have to buy a ticket like everybody else.

I wish I could come up with stuff like that, my writing career would be made!
Anyway, I'll be off to work 12 hours in a bit of a jiffy, so dream on this.

Current Music: #19: Aerosmith - Dream On

If you're out there this weekend, and I know I will be, don't forget to look up at the sky. Especially when you're in a very dark patch of the forest where you can just see the sky. From Slashdot:

Here Come the Leonids 2006
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday November 17, @04:22AM
from the eye-in-the-sky dept.

yukk writes "The nights and early morning hours of November 17-19 mark the return of the Leonid meteor shower to the skies of Earth. Viewers along the northeastern coast of the United States and Canada, as well as people in Europe and western Africa might get to see a possible 'outburst' of as many as 100-600 meteors per hour. This spike in activity is predicted for 11:45 p.m. — 1:33 a.m. EST on November 18-19 (4:45 — 6:33 UT on November 19)."

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Make a wish.

Current Mood: peaceful

From Slashdot

IT: MySpace Predator Caught By Code
Posted by kdawson on Monday October 16, @11:02PM
from the true-names dept.

An anonymous reader writes, "Wired News editor and former hacker Kevin Poulsen wrote a 1,000-line Perl script that checked MySpace for registered sex offenders. Sifting through the results, he manually confirmed over 700 offenders, including a serial child molester in New York actively trying to hook up with underage boys on the site, and who has now been arrested as a result. MySpace told Congress last June that it didn't have this capability." Wired News says they will publish Poulsen's code under an open-source license later this week.

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Okay, two things. 1000-lines of Perl script. ONE THOUSAND LINES.
Jeez.
But go you, Poulsen-you!

And also "they will publish Poulsen's code under an open-source license"
Which means, basically, that other networking and meeting sites can use the code to apprehend other culprits too. For Free..

Today, the internet has become a bit safer.

Current Mood: enthusiastic

From Slashdot:

French Scientists Link Higher BMI with Lower IQ
Posted by timothy on Sunday October 15, @10:21PM
from the hey-I-resemble-that-remark dept.

Xemu writes "French scientists have linked obesity to lower IQ reports the Telegraph. In a new five-year study of more than 2,200 adults, people with a low body mass index (BMI) could recall 30% more words in a vocabulary test than those who were obese. The fatter subjects also showed a higher rate of cognitive decline when they were retested five years later. In the United States, 30% of the population is obese according to OECD. That's the highest rate of obesity anywhere. Do these high obesity rates affect the average IQ of the population?" (Of course, this sidesteps discussion of whether IQ tests measure anything significant at all.)

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--------------------------------------------------------

New Stephen Hawking Movie in the Works
Posted by timothy on Sunday October 15, @09:38PM
from the reinvention-to-best-bono-or-tom-jones dept.

Simon Behler writes "The Sunday Times is reporting that Stephen Hawking is making a new movie. FTA: 'Professor Stephen Hawking, Britain's world-renowned physicist, is to switch from theories of multidimensional space to the three dimensions of the Imax cinema by starring in a film that sets out his ideas on the origins and fate of the universe. The film, Beyond the Horizon, will tackle some of the most daunting theories espoused by Hawking and other cosmologists, from the idea that space has up to 11 dimensions to the cause of the big bang itself.'"

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The weekend's over! Get off your lazy asses and get to work!
(I should too.)

Today on Slashdot:

Get Buff While Geeking Out
Posted by kdawson on Monday October 09, @11:05PM
from the just-keep-moving dept.

Two different devices intended to slow the nerd obesity epidemic just came to our attention. PoconoPCDoctor writes about the Geek-A-Cycle, which is a workstation with built-on exercise bike that you have to pedal to run the computer. And several readers pointed out the FP Gamerunner (mirror), reviewed here: think treadmill meets Quake 4. Again, you have to keep moving to stay in the game.

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Something I've been thinking about lately is that a lot of people are overweight, but they're only prepared to do so much to lose weight. They're sometimes willing to let go of their munchies and stay off the chips and crisps, but don't touch their beers! Or, an example that is much closer to my personal experience: they're willing to change their eating habits, but not to go out and exercise.
Until I found something I wanted to accomplish, and really really wanted to accomplish, I couldn't make myself go out and exercise either.

Doing a diet isn't going to work - you have to change your eating habits, because chances are that they are fundementally wrong. You don't get fat because you don't move; you get fat because you consume too much. Your body doesn't need all the energy you shove into your mouth, so it stores it as fat. When you have a desk job there's really no reason you need to eat like you're a construction worker. Rather, do the Hacker's diet (although I already read arguments why that is not such a good diet, but anything's better than getting fat, right?).

I'm trying hard to not judge people, although it's hard. I know a lot of people who could be so fit and (aha! Here it comes!) healthy but instead they just get fatter. You do realize you're denying yourself a healthy old age, and you're more likely to die young, don't you?
Anyway, maybe I'm just looking for people who can keep me exercising, but now that I've been through the first week of agony and I'm just doing the whole 'areeeughghhghghghg' of not having any breath left, I'm not going to quit.

Current Mood: annoyingly cheerful
Current Music: #1134: Youp van 't Hek - Barbie

Terwijl de hele wereld om me heen gillend gek aan het worden is van alle terroristische dreigingen blijf ik er verschrikkelijk stoicijns onder. Ja, ach, mensen met bommen. Als we nou allemaal eens normaal zouden doen, was het allemaal niet zo'n probleem. Tijd voor de 2e jaren zestig...dudeeee. Relaaaax.

Naast natuurlijk de mensen die in paniek raakten omdat mede-passagiers hun moedertaal spraken en het vliegtuig terstond om lieten keren omdat het wel om terroristen zou gaan, is er natuurlijk ook nog ...de manie om de doorgespoelde iPod

Your daily dose of Slashdot:

Do Not Flush Your iPod
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday August 27, @03:27PM
from the ipods-on-the-mother-fing-plane dept.

realjordanna writes "Clearly the bar for what is deemed as a security threat has had to be lowered — but should it be this low? When a rather embarrassed passenger loses his iPod in the lavatory — even admits to the crew his mistake, the plane is diverted to Ottawa and a bomb squad is brought in to investigate. Read the iPod owner's story and take one lesson from this kid's plight — clearly the iPod is not flushable."

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Dit in de "It's funny. Laugh." catagorie. Het is natuurlijk om te schateren, maar eigenlijk is het toch wel zielig.

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Jane's Journal

It's Life Happening

Entries tagged with slashdot

YDDOS: Anonymous vows to destroy Facebook

How to feed the world

Concerning copyright, Creative Commons and photographs

YDDOS: The Unstoppable 'Tech Support' Scam

YDDOS: Why the world will end this Friday

Kicking the habit

YDDOS: A Look Inside How Adware Works

Niet nieuwswaardig genoeg?

Juno, and other stuff to worry about

YDDOS* - The internet is a terrorist threat

Slashdot: Bugs from outer space

Slashdot: Robert Jordan passes away.

Your daily dose of Slashdot

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Take a look at the sky: Leonids

Your daily Slashdot

Your daily dose of Slashdot

Your Daily Dose of Slashdot - Geeks and their Weight

Iedereen is gek geworden en vindt alles maar normaal

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