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.

Before you make the decision to set a date in 2022 to take another look at HTML5, I ask that you read the rest of this article. My goal this month is to give you practical strategies for how you can adopt HTML5 technologies today without ending up with the kind of graceless degradation illustrated in Figure 2. In this article, I’ll cover:

Feature detection versus user agent (UA) sniffing
Polyfilling with JavaScript
Graceful degradation

The jQuery Board, in conjunction with Software Freedom Conservancy, is proud to announce the formation of the jQuery Foundation, Inc., an independent organization that will manage jQuery, the Internet’s number one JavaScript library, and its constituent projects.

The jQuery Board previously administered jQuery under the aegis of the Conservancy, a public charity that acts as a non-profit home for free software projects.

The new jQuery Foundation is a non-profit trade association dedicated to supporting development of the jQuery Core, UI, and Mobile projects; providing jQuery documentation and support; and fostering the jQuery community.

Speaking at QCon London 2012 today, Mozilla Research Fellow Allen Wirfs-Brock laid out what he believes will be the future of the ECMAScript specification. Among the technical details, he included some broader thoughts about the role of JavaScript, predicting that the language will be “the canonical programming language for the next 20+ years.”

Wirfs-Brock began with a familiar division of recent computing history into three stages: the ‘business computing’ era, dominated by mainframe systems from firms such as IBM; the ‘personal computing’ era, which was spearheaded by the grand Wintel alliance; and the ‘ambient computing’ era, a brave new browser-based world that has arisen over the past five-to-ten years. He emphasised the crucial foothold that JavaScript already has, and cited Richard Gabriel’s ‘worse is better’ maxim to explain why any young pretender to JS’s client-side crown (cough-Google Dart-cough) is unlikely to succeed.

"Some examples of these unofficial data flows are USB sticks or other portable data storage devices, MSN Messenger or other online messaging software, Gmail or other online e-mail services, Google Docs or other online document sharing and Skype or other online VOIP software, and also other less straightforward products self-developed Access databases and self-developed Excel spreadsheets and macros."

Are you kidding? Someone using Skype or developing Excel macros is considered Shadow IT!? People have been doing that for years and 99% of them were never considered IT folk..Shadow IT is more sophisticated than a user running a desktop app.

It's more like signing up for cloud services and running what could be considered enterprise software like a database or just about any app you'd find operating entirely inside the enterprise walls

This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is safe (radiation what?) and non-invasive (nude pictures who?). The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort. The TSA has been provided this video in advance of it being made public to give them an opportunity to turn off the scanners and revert to the metal detectors. I personally believe they now have no choice but to turn them off.

Die Nutzung von Kunst- und Kulturgütern durch eine tendenziell unendlich große Anzahl von Konsument_innen zu gegen Null tendierenden zusätzlichen Stückkosten wird durch technische Entwicklungen – vom Buchdruck bis zum Internet – ständig einfacher. Die Gratisnutzung solcher Güter und Leistungen ist daher nur durch staatliche Eingriffe zu verhindern, die notwendigerweise immer aufwändiger werden und immer tiefer in Persönlichkeitsrechte eingreifen. Auf diese Art wird unter Einsatz erheblicher öffentlicher Mittel ein Markt simuliert, der – wie die meisten Märkte – in erster Linie den größten Playern zugute kommt. Steuergeld wird also zum Schutz der Interessen von Konzernen verwendet; der Nutzen für individuelle Künstler_innen ist gering.

Michael R. ist ein Selbstständiger in der IT-Branche. Er interessiert sich für netzpolitische Themen und ist auf Twitter, Facebook und google+ aktiv. Diese Merkmale treffen vermutlich auf einige in Österreich zu.

Am 14.10.2011 macht im Chatforum von AnonAustria der Chat-Teilnehmer „The_Dude“ Äußerungen, die möglicher Weise gegen das Verbotsgesetz verstoßen. Die Einträge können ernst oder – wie SzenekennerInnen erklären – ironisch gemeint sein.

Jetzt beginnt das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und Terrorismusbekämpfung (BVT) nach dem Verbotsgesetz zu ermitteln. Der Zusammenhang mit AnonAustria dürfte das Engagement gegen Rechtsextremismus beflügeln. In geradezu halsbrecherischer Argumentation wird in einem Anlassbericht vom 23.12.2011 der Polizei an die Staatsanwaltschaft – offensichtlich nach Anwendung von Überwachungsmaßnahmen – behauptet, der Selbständige Michael R. wäre mit „The_Dude“ ident.

Das Nachrichtenmagazin NEWS berichtet in seiner am
Donnerstag erscheinenden Ausgabe von einer geplanten Änderung der
Strafprozessordnung mit der das Redaktionsgeheimnis einfach
ausgehebelt werden kann. Betroffen von der Novelle sind auch Anwälte,
Notare, Steuerberater, psychosoziale Dienste und Ärzte.

Wird eine Person aus einer dieser Berufsgruppen künftig als
Beschuldigter deklariert, kann er der Sicherstellung von ihm
vorliegenden Aufzeichnungen oder Daten nicht mehr widersprechen. Die
Sicherheitsbehörden kommen somit in den Besitz des gesamten Akten-
oder Datenbestands einer Redaktion oder Anwaltskanzlei. Anstelle
eines unabhängigen Richters soll künftig der Staatsanwalt selbst
darüber entscheiden, welche Teile dieses Materials zum Akt genommen
werden. Zur Sichtung darf der Staatsanwalt auch "Hilfskräfte" somit
auch ermittelnde Polizeibeamte einsetzen.

Für .at-Domains ist DNSSEC seit dem 29.02.2012 öffentlich aktiviert. Zuvor konnten Registrare in einer umfassenden Testphase das System prüfen und Erfahrungen damit sammeln. Gleichzeitig wurden bei nic.at umfangreiche Tests durchgeführt und Sicherheitsvorkehrungen getroffen, um die Einführung vorzubereiten. Denn bei anderen Registries hatte es beim DNSSEC-Start immer wieder Probleme gegeben.

The world of audits is a reality that more financial companies are learning to live with. One of the things being audited are the texts sent to social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. This tutorial will guide you through how to do Twitter searches from RPG on IBM i and record the results into a DB2 table.