ECMAScript 5 introduced strict mode to JavaScript. The intent is to allow developers to opt-in to a “better” version of JavaScript, where some of the most common and egregious errors are handled differently. For a while, I was skeptical, especially with only one browser (Firefox) initially supporting strict mode. Fast forward to today, every major browser supports strict mode in their latest version, including Internet Explorer 10 and Opera 12. It’s time to start using strict mode.

For decades a thunderous roar rose from the bowels of IBM keyboards like the animus of angry and forgotten gods. These keyboards have fallen silent of late, due only to incompatibility with newer hardware. Now, Model Ms have been given a reprieve from landfills or recycling centers because of the work of [wulax] of geekhack and his Model M Bluetooth controller board.

[wulax] got around all these problems by taking the Bluetooth controller out of a cheap mini keyboard and mapping the Model M rows and columns to it. A PCB was made and a rather large battery t stuffed inside the Model M. Now a keyboard from 1984 is wireless and able to interface with just about every computer made in the last few years.

The Pirate Bay has announced that it is turning to the skies to house its servers and is looking into sending a drone into low orbit, so that the only way someone can shut down its operations is by aeroplane.

In a blog post which wouldn't look out of place on 1 April, the folks behind the Pirate Bay are fed up with the heat they are getting on the ground so they have decided to make use of the latest technology – namely Raspberry Pi – and literally take flight.

"With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air," explained the post.

"This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war."

ntroduced with IBM Sametime version 8.5, the Sametime Proxy Server is a Web-based application server allowing applications to securely integrate with IBM Sametime and benefit from its real-time collaborative features, using a simple HTTP-based Representational State Transfer (REST) API and the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data format.

The main integration targets are rich Internet applications written in JavaTMScript, but thanks to its powerful and language-agnostic REST API, the Sametime Proxy Server can be used to provide real-time collaborative capabilities to any applications.
In this article, we specifically demonstrate how it can be used to integrate IBM Sametime with Java desktop applications. To get the most from the article, you should have a general understanding of HTTP and the REST architecture, and a feature-level knowledge of IBM Sametime.

While IBM Docs will have to compete directly with more popular and competitively priced products like Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365 and a number of other online office suites, IBM is betting on ”enterprise-grade security” and its “collective” offering to draw customers. The same is true for most of IBM’s cloud offerings, i.e. they all individually have a number of competitors, but there is no other company that offers all of the them collectively. This could turn out to be huge strategic advantage for IBM.

In this intensely competitive market where every player is mindlessly adding services and solutions to its cloud portfolio, a more strategic approach is what will determine who makes the most out of this mammoth opportunity. From the looks of it, IBM might just be doing that.

The real stunner, though, may be the one in which IBM discloses that improvements to the Washington, D.C., sewer system were "built off analytics that predict traffic in Singapore and helped prepare for flooding emergencies in Rio." Beat that, Facebook.

Outside of Apple, it's hard to think of another tech company that celebrates itself with as much skill as IBM. Just a few years ago, IBM peddled PCs, disk drives and other basic building blocks of computing. Now it sells itself as a kind of tech visionary able to reshape cities in a single bound through analytics software and the brainiest consultants on the planet.

On some level, the Smarter Planet pitch, unveiled in November 2008, appears to resonate with the public. IBM has an ethos that speaks to the future, while rivals such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Oracle often seem like they're doing the same old, same old.

This may just be the best TED Talk video I've seen: listen.com/Rhapsody founder and extremely funny person (and soon-to-be debut science fiction author) Rob Reid examines the math behind the claims made by the copyright lobby and explains the mindbending awesomeness of the sums used to justify SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and the like.

Da gibt es Zweitklässler, die über Skype und Jappy reden wollen, Viertklässler, die bereits etwas von Cookies und eBay verstehen und Fünftklässler, die sich auf Filesharingplattformen herumtreiben.

Riesige Neugier
Kai Biermann
Kai Biermann
© ZEIT ONLINE

Kai Biermann ist Redakteur im Ressort Digital bei ZEIT ONLINE. Seine Profilseite finden Sie hier.

Die Lehrer sitzen daneben und wundern sich. Sie wundern sich, was ihre Schüler alles wissen, wo sie sich bereits auskennen und wie souverän sie Dienste und Angebote teilweise nutzen. "Manche sagen den ganzen Tag nicht Muh und nicht Mäh, aber wo die alles Mitglied sind, das hat mich selbst erstaunt", sagt die Lehrerin einer fünften Klasse.

Es geht nicht um diffuse Überwachungsparanoia, sondern um eine Abkehr von einem Grundrechtsverständnis. Das zeigt das „Pornokassetten-Erkenntnis“ des Verfassungsgerichtshofs aus 1991. Damals mussten die Betreiber von Wiener Videotheken aufzeichnen, welcher Bürger sich welchen Film ausgeborgt hatte.

Die Verfassungsrichter untersagten diese Videodatenbank. „In einer von der Achtung der Freiheit geprägten Gesellschaft“, schrieben sie, „braucht der Bürger ohne triftigen Grund niemandem Einblick zu gewähren, welchem Zeitvertreib er nachgeht, welche Bücher er kauft, welche Zeitungen er abonniert, was er isst und trinkt und wo er die Nacht verbringt“. Es sei „Sache des Betroffenen zu entscheiden, ob und was er darüber welchen anderen wissen lässt“.

Ein Urteil, das angesichts der Vorratsdatenspeicherung nur noch Makulatur ist. Nun wird das Kommunikationsverhalten aller Bürger für ein halbes Jahr gespeichert – ob sie wollen oder nicht.

Das erzeugt ein Umfeld, in dem so offenbar idiotische Vorschläge gemacht werden, wie zum Beispiel alle Windows-Computer beim nächsten automatischen Windows-Update nach kriminellen Inhalten (in diesem Falle Kinderpornographie) zu scannen. Oder eine Whitelist von Webseiten für das gesamte europäische Internet zu erstellen (zur Bekämpfung der Darstellung sexuellen Missbrauchs im Web). Unglücklicherweise wurden der Iran und China nicht zu dem Treffen eingeladen, um zu erklären, wie man solche Vorhaben am besten und effizientesten umsetzt.

When a work has gone orphan, it means that it is effectively lost until the copyright monopoly expires, 70 years after the creator’s death. You can only hope that somebody has kept a copy illegally and copied it across new forms of storage media as they go in and out of fashion as the decades come and go, or it will be lost forever.

The vote in committee on March 1 was supposed to end that (or, more technically, recommend a course of ending that to the European Parliament as a whole). However, the copyright industry lobby won key points in the voting procedure with 14 votes against reform and 12 in favor of it, according to the just-published protocol.

There’s a problem with this. There are 24 seats in the committee, and one group (non-inscrits) was absent, lacking deputies to fill that person’s vote. So, there should have been 23 votes at the most. But we just counted 12 votes for reform and 14 against. That’s 26.

However, as much as I object to free content, I am even more offended by the online sensibility and its anti-democratic, anti-emotional, even anti-intellectual effect. Devotees of the Internet like to say that the Web is a bottom-up phenomenon that wondrously bypasses the traditional gatekeepers in publishing and politics who allegedly snuff out true debate. But much of what I see is unedited, incoherent babble indicative of a herd mentality, not a true desire for self-government or fairness.

Why would Wired with-hold this critically important information, unless they were actively co-operating with US agents trying to fabricate charges against Assange? Given that Lamo had notified authorities of Manning's alleged actions while still continuing to chat with him, it's logical to assume the Feds would have wanted to censor any published details. Wired appears to have willingly complied.

The full transcripts also destroy whatever shreds remain of Adrian Lamo's tattered reputation. The ex-hacker - who has been described as "the FBI's star witness against WikiLeaks" - deliberately deceived Manning from the beginning, then lied repeatedly to have the public believe that he didn't. He claimed to be both a journalist and a minister, repeatedly assuring Manning that their conversations were "never to be published". Why would Wired redact these portions of the transcripts, expect to maintain the illusion that Lamo is a credible source?

One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data.

Every day—in an effort at “self awareness”—I have automated systems send me a few emails about the day before. But even though I’ve been accumulating data for years—and always meant to analyze it—I’ve never actually gotten around to doing it. But with Mathematica and the automated data analysis capabilities we just released in Wolfram|Alpha Pro, I thought now would be a good time to finally try taking a look—and to use myself as an experimental subject for studying what one might call “personal analytics”.

Call it creative if you want, but this is what economic destruction looks like. Print newspaper ads have fallen by two-thirds from $60 billion in the late-1990s to $20 billion in 2011.

My theory is this: programming is kind of like dancing. The product isn't eternal but the moment is. The feeling isn't lasting but it's worth chasing.

Programming is a state. It's a way of thinking. Like dancers, we're never not programmers. We never turn it off. We sit in front of the computer to shape the world around us. As programmers the moments spent coding are the essence of our lives. Patches of memories stitched together by code and hard work.

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industrial, academic and government communities. Leading researchers present their current work, while special sessions focus on the role of women in today’s technology fields, including computer science, information technology, research and engineering.

I often talk to students that want to contribute to open-source projects, but just don't have an idea what to work on. Here's a tip if you're in a similar situation (e.g. you want to apply for GSOC) :

1 git clone repository_url_of_some_open_source_project target_directory
2 grep -RIn TODO target_directory/*

So, find the URL of the repository project you want to contribute to, checkout the repository using git/mercurial/svn and then find all the TODOs in the source code using grep.

Fractional cascading is a very useful transformation, used in a variety of contexts including layered range trees and 3D orthogonal range searching. In fact, it can be generalized in several ways. The first is that we can cascade some fixed fraction α of elements, rather than the 1/2 we did here. Additionally, we don't have to limit ourselves to cascading up a list of arrays; we can cascade up an arbitrary graph, merging many lists together as long as we pick α to be less than 1/d, where d is the in-degree of the node.

On March 28, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will kick of another one of its highly successful challenges this time looking for teams or individuals to develop unique algorithms to control small satellites on-board the International Space Station.

Specifically DARPA's Zero Robotics Autonomous Space Capture Challenge wants skilled programmers from around the world to develop a fuel-optimal control algorithm. The algorithm must enable a satellite to accomplish a feat that's very difficult to do autonomously: capture a space object that's tumbling, spinning or moving in the opposite direction, the agency stated.