When someone says they are a hacker, what do they mean? Are they just big computer geeks? Are they doing illegal criminal things, breaking in and stealing passwords? Mitch Altman, inventor of the TV-B-Gone, tells us hacking is about thinking differently about the world around you. Featuring the folks at the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco, who show off their projects with bikes, toys, clothes, food, electricity, and even outer space!

Das deutsche Immaterialgüterrecht ist so veraltet, dass eigentlich nur totale Technikverweigerer unter Schweigegelübde nicht mit ihm in Konflikt kommen können. Manche Politiker fordern deshalb eine Liberalisierung - andere dagegen eine Verschärfung. Allerdings sind auch Urheberrechtsextremisten keineswegs vor versehentlichen Verletzungshandlungen gefeit, wie das Wiki Netend zeigt. Dort werden Immaterialgüterrechtsverstöße von Politikern gesammelt, die durch besonderen Einsatz für mehr Monopol- und Verbotsrechte für die Rechteverwerterindustrie auf sich aufmerksam machten.

Easy enough to avoid government dots; just don't buy printers from Canon, Brother, Casio, HP, Konica, Minolta, Mita, Ricoh, Sharp, or Xerox.

An international team of scientists have created the world's first biological computer that is made from biological molecules and can decode images stored and encrypted within DNA.

Built by U.S. and Israeli researchers from the Scripps Research Institute in California and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have created a computing system from a mixture of DNA molecules, enzymes and ATP, the substance that gives energy for human cells. The computer was able to decrypt information from a DNA chip.

Tomorrow's computers will constantly improve their understanding of the data they work with, which in turn will help them provide users with more appropriate information, predicted the software mastermind behind IBM's Watson system.

Computers in the future "will learn through interacting with us. They will not necessarily require us to sit down and explicitly program them, but through continuous interaction with humans they will start to understand the kind of data and the kind of computation we need," said IBM Fellow David Ferrucci, who was IBM's principal investigator for Watson technologies. Ferrucci spoke at the IBM Smarter Computing Executive Forum, held Wednesday in New York.

If you’re a fan of tower defense games, you’re going to love Doodle Defense – at least I think you will. Played with a whiteboard, a Kinect, a projector, and a Mac computer, Doodle Defense takes drawing games and tower defense to a whole new level. While the concept of the gameplay is the same (prevent units from travelling from the entrance to the exit), how the game is played is very different to what we’re normally used to.

Instead of dragging and dropping buildings and towers on our computers, Doodle Defense is played with a marker on a white board. Players use a marker pen to draw mazes in order to slow down the invaders, and towers to destroy them – however, they’ll have a finite supply of ink so they’ll have to use it wisely in order to win the game.

Google has become the largest public DNS service in the world, an event that might either please or frighten you, depending on your view of Google.

The company launched Google Public DNS in December 2009 and on Tuesday said its service is handling more than 70 billion requests a day.

Sonar, an Open Source dashboard for managing code quality, also tries to calculate a technical debt cost for a code base, again using static analysis findings like code coverage of automated tests, code complexity, duplication, violations of coding practices, comment density.

Thinking of technical debt in this way is interesting, but let’s stop pretending that these are hard numbers that we can use to make trade-off decisions. Although the numbers appear precise, they’re arbitrary, guesses. And they assume that technical debt can be calculated by a tool looking at the structure of the code. Unfortunately, dealing with technical debt is not that straightforward.

But if debt is too fuzzy to be measured in detailed cost terms, how do you know what kind of debt is hurting you the most, how do you know when you have too much? Let’s look at different kinds of technical debt, and how much they might cost you, using a fuzzier approach.

Eric Pickup from Youporn.com posted on a news group that Youporn is now 100% Redis based and will soon be revealing more about their architecture at the ConFoo conference. Some stunning, but not surprising numbers were revealed:

100 million page views per day
A cluster of Redis slaves are handling over 300k queries per second.

Vorbei sind die Zeiten, in denen eine gute Geschichte ohne Redundanzen auf 200 Seiten erzählt wird. Verleger wollen dicke Bücher, weil sie einen höheren Verkaufpreis erzielen, und Autoren betreiben das Seitenschinden bis zum Exzess und schreiben Endlos-Serien, weil ihre Verleger es wünschen. Einen Kontrollmechanismus gegen diese selbstverliebte Aufgeblähtheit, wie einen rigiden Lektor, gibt es schon lange nicht mehr.

Most software professionals in India are not programmers, they are mere coders,” says a senior executive from a global consultancy firm, who has helped Nasscom in researching its industry reports.

In industry parlance, coders are akin to smart assembly line workers as opposed to programmers who are plant engineers. Programmers are the brains, the glorious visionaries who create things. Large software programmes that often run into billions of lines are designed and developed by a handful of programmers.

Coders follow instructions to write, evaluate and test small components of the large program. As a computer science student in IIT Mumbai puts it if programming requires a post graduate level of knowledge of complex algorithms and programming meth

Mass Effect is epic. It's the product of the best parts of Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and more with a protagonist who could be the love-child of Picard, Skywalker, and Starbuck. It's one of the most important pieces of science fiction narrative of our generation. Mass Effect goes so far beyond other fictional universes in ways that you may not have yet realized. It is cosmic in scope and scale.

Basically, Mass Effect is the most important science fiction universe of our generation. Here's why.

Yahoo! has released its popular Web page performance analysis tool (first developed by Steve Souders) under the BSD license and put it on GitHub to encourage community interaction in its development.

The object of this competition is to create a cool JavaScript "application" no larger than 1k. Starting out as a joke, the first version ended with a serious amount of submissions, prizes and quality.

In this book, we will take a look at a number of popular JavaScript design patterns and explore why certain patterns may be more suitable for your projects than others. Remember that patterns can be applied not just to vanilla JavaScript, but also to abstracted libraries such as jQuery or Dojo as well. Before we begin, let’s look at the exact definition of a ‘pattern’ in software design.

"What was done to our country was wrong and unpatriotic and un-American and nobody has been held to account," he later told the Guardian. "There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism."

The FAA currently estimates that there will be 30,000 drones licensed to operate in US skies by 2020. It's a misleading estimate.

Why?

It only counts large, professional drones (and even that estimate is low). It doesn't count all of the small/micro drones operating below ~400ft and at slower airspeeds. How many micro-drones will there be by 2020?

Tens of millions (tens of billions if there is warfare or repression driving it -- and given the problems we are facing, there will be) ...

How do we get to that number?

Simple. You print them by the sheet.

A remote-controlled aircraft owned by an animal rights group was reportedly shot down near Broxton Bridge Plantation Sunday.

Steve Hindi, president of SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness), said his group was preparing to launch its Mikrokopter drone to video what he called a live pigeon shoot on Sunday when law enforcement officers and an attorney claiming to represent the privately-owned plantation near Ehrhardt tried to stop the aircraft from flying.

"It didn't work; what SHARK was doing was perfectly legal," Hindi said in a news release. "Once they knew nothing was going to stop us, the shooting stopped and the cars lined up to leave."

He said the animal rights group decided to send the drone up anyway.

"Seconds after it hit the air, numerous shots rang out," Hindi said in the release. "As an act of revenge for us shutting down the pigeon slaughter, they had shot down our copter."

There's been a lot of interest in the story of the Secret Service completely shutting down Jotform.com through a request to GoDaddy. It appears that the suspension is now ending, though it hasn't fully propagated. What's amazing is that no one in the US government (or at GoDaddy) seems to be willing to explain what happened. When GoDaddy completely shut down JotForm.com with no notice, the folks at JotForm had to inquire as to what the hell happened to their entire website. They were merely told to contact a Secret Service agent. That agent then told JotForm she was too busy to respond to them and would get back to them within a week.

Think about that for a second. The US government completely takes down a small business' website and then is too busy to explain why.

Der Vertreter Österreichs teilte mit, man erhalte seit der Unterzeichnung eine Flut von Anfragen aus der Netzgemeinde, von Abgeordneten und Ministerien, und bat die EU-Kommission um Unterstützung. Man müsse die Gegner überzeugen und könne nicht einfach deren Argumentation mit dem Hinweis zurückweisen, sie hätten "keine Ahnung". Auch Estland, Ungarn und die Niederlande baten die Kommission um bessere Informationen. Malta erklärte, dass auch dort "erheblicher Druck" auf die Regierung ausgeübt werde. Rumänien bat die Kommission, die Regierungen bei der Ratifikation des Acta-Abkommens zu unterstützen.

Vertreter der Kommission verwiesen auf Informationsmaterial, das zur Verfügung gestellt wurde. Gern sei die Kommission bereit, bei konkreten Fragen auch "weitere Argumentationshilfe" zu leisten.