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Forbes is reporting that the New Zealand government has banned patents on software. "In doing this, New Zealand is essentially taking the position that existing laws provides enough protection to software as it is; patents only serve to stifle innovation because of the ever-looming threat of being sued by so-called patent troll companies. [...] During its consideration of the bill, the committee received many submissions opposing the granting of patents for computer programs on the grounds it would stifle innovation and restrict competition. Internet New Zealand said [Commerce Minister Craig] Foss' decision to amend the Patents Bill drew to a close 'years of wrangling between software developers, ICT players and multinational heavyweights over the vexed issue of patentability of software'."

In an overdue but welcome move, President Obama today issued an executive order mandating "open and machine-readable data" for government-published information. Also, kodiaktau writes "In a move to make data more readily available, the United States of America has announced the Project Open Data and has chosen GitHub to host the content." Ars has a great article on the announced policy, but as you might expect, it comes with caveats, exceptions, sub-goals and committees; don't expect too much change per day, or assume you have a right to open data, exactly, in the eyes of the government, but — "subject to appropriations" — it sounds good on paper. (I'd like the next step to be requiring that all file formats used by the government be open source.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

vejam aqui a fonte:
http://noticias.uol.com.br/ultimas-noticias/efe/2013/05/09/maduro-chega-a-brasilia-para-reunir-se-com-dilma.htm

Wired has published a book review of sorts of a freely downloadable book called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research. If that title came from O'Reilly, Apress, or other big name in tech-publishing, it might be perfectly nice but less interesting. Instead, it was prepared as an internal guide for the NSA, and came to public attention through a FOIA request by MuckRock. (See this video interview with MuckRock's Michael Morisy at this year's SXSW.) The version that's been released is several years old. From Wired's report: "Although the author's name is redacted in the version released by the NSA, Muckrock's FOIA indicates it was written by Robyn Winder and Charlie Speight. A note the NSA added to the book before releasing it under FOIA says that the opinions expressed in it are the authors', and not the agency's. ... Lest you think that none of this is new, that Johnny Long has been talking about this for years at hacker conferences and in his book Google Hacking, you’d be right. In fact, the authors of the NSA book give a shoutout to Johnny, but with the caveat that Johnny’s tips are designed for cracking — breaking into websites and servers. 'That is not something I encourage or advocate,' the author writes." (Hat tip to ThinkGeek's Jacob Rose.)

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crookedvulture writes "Seagate and Toshiba both offer hybrid hard drives that manage their built-in flash caches entirely in firmware. WD has taken a different approach with its Black SSHD, which instead uses driver software to govern its NAND cache. The driver works with the operating system to determine what to store in the flash. Unfortunately, it's Windows-only. You can choose between two drivers, though. WD has developed one of its own, and Intel will offer a separate driver attached to its upcoming Haswell platform. While WD remains tight-lipped on the speed of the Black's mechanical portion, it's confirmed that the flash is provided by a customized SanDisk iSSD embedded on the drive. The iSSD and mechanical drive connect to each other and to the host system through a Serial ATA bridge chip, making the SSHD look more like a highly integrated dual-drive solution than a single, standalone device. With Intel supporting this approach, the next generation of hybrid drives appears destined to be software-based."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2013/05/1275250-apos-acordo-professores-da-unb-devolverao-r-112-milhao-a-universidade.shtml

Não é só na UnB não...

With little comment from conservative media, President Obama last week appointed James Dobbins as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, the high-profile job long occupied by the late Richard Holbrooke.

Dobbins is a prominent exponent of the idea that America can live with a nuclear Iran, as well as an opponent of the use of military force against Iran’s nuclear program under any conditions. Whatever the White House might be thinking, the appointment sent a signal to Iran that the military option is pure bluff.

“Obama’s AfPak envoy may embrace Iran” is the lead of today’s Asia Times Online under the byline of MK Bhadrakumar, a former Indian ambassador to Turkey. Writes Bhadrakumar:

The probability is that the United States President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry got around to reading the congressional testimony titled “Negotiating with Iran” given by Ambassador James Dobbins on the Hill on November 7, 2007, while deciding to name him as the new U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The appointment seems odd, the former Indian diplomat explains, because:

Dobbins has been an inveterate critic of Obama’s plan to reduce the US military footprint in Afghanistan. He voiced enthusiastic support for the counterinsurgency strategy [COIN] carried out by General David Petraeus and was sharply critical that the COIN was reduced to mere counterterrorist operation.

One wonders if the Republican establishment declined to object to Dobbins’ appointment because of his COIN credentials.

But there’s an explanation for Obama’s selection, Bhadrakumar adds:

Dobbins’ real credentials lie quite somewhere else than on the kinetic battlefield. Kerry made this clear while announcing the appointment. He said, “He [Dobbins] has deep and longstanding relationships in the region, … Jim will continue building on diplomatic efforts to bring the conflict to a peaceful conclusion, actively engaging with states in the region and the international community.”

Secretary Kerry was referring, evidently, to Dobbins’ “deep and longstanding relationship” with Iran.

theodp writes "Remember New Coke? Twenty-eight years ago, Coca-Cola replaced the secret formula of its flagship brand, only to announce the return of the "classic" formula just 79 days later. Had it launched in 2013, Coke's Jay Moye suspects a social media backlash would have prompted it to reverse itself even sooner. In a timely follow-up, ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols points out that Microsoft is facing its own New Coke moment with Windows 8. 'Does Ballmer have the guts to admit he made a mistake and give users what they clearly want?' Vaughan-Nichols asks. 'While it's too late for Windows 8, Blue might give us back our Start button and an Aero-like interface. We don't know.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Snaking the Scotch

Ethnocentrism is the snake in Christianity’s garden, and last week it slithered into the Church of Scotland. It took the form of a screed denying the special claim of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.

By no coincidence, the most successful Christian communities embrace the State of Israel, while the least successful ones abhor it. Almost four-fifths of Americans identify themselves as Christians, for example and two out of five worship every week. Less than two-fifths of Britons say they believe in God, by contrast, and only one out of eight attends weekly services. More than half of Britons never go to church, against only 18% of Americans.
This division is mirrored in attitudes towards the State of Israel. By a margin of nearly five to one, Americans say their sympathies are more with Israel than with the Palestinians, and the proportion is at an all-time high. Britons view Israel negatively by a margin of 65 to 17, and the numbers are similar across the European continent, according to a BBC poll.

We observe eruptions of unabashed Jew-hatred in the European nations most likely to become extinct, notably in Hungary, where the ethnic Hungarian total fertility rate is just 0.83 per female, barely a third of the replacement rate. The third-largest party in the Hungarian parliament, Jobbik, wants to list all Jewish officials of Jewish origin as a national security risk and blames the country’s economic problems on a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy”. The party demonstrated on May 5 in Budapest to denounce the World Jewish Congress, which held its annual meeting in the Hungarian capital.

Hungary’s demographic disaster and Jobbik’s Jew-hatred are extreme cases, to be sure, but existentially challenged nationalities elsewhere in Europe evince a special animus against Jews and the Jewish State. Last week the Church of Scotland issued a report rejecting the notion that the Jewish people had any special claim on the Land of Israel, excoriating Zionism in general and the actions of past and present Israeli governments.

Both the Church of Scotland, the bearer of the Scots Calvinist tradition, and the country itself are a shadow of their former selves. The number of births per year has fallen by half since 1950 (and the number of births to married couples has fallen by four-fifths).

The Church of Scotland is shrinking; it had just 446,000 members in 2010, down from 1,319,000 in 1956. Its numbers shrunk by a quarter between 2001 and 2010, and are now shrinking even faster, by about 5% a year. At this rate its membership will fall by three-quarters in a generation.

Live Births Per Year in Scotland

UK Statistics Office

If we had some Scots, we would still have Scots Presbyterians, if we had some Presbyterians. That is a sad end to a great religious tradition that, among other things, fostered Christian Zionism. It may well have been a Kirk minister, notes the Church of Scotland report, who coined the phrase “a land without people, for a people without land”, referring to Jewish settlement of the then-sparsely populated Land of Israel at the end of the 19th century.

With the specter of disappearance visible at the horizon of a single generation, why is the Church of Scotland so concerned about the Jews’ claim on their historic homeland? One would think it had more urgent concerns. Its report, “The Inheritance of Abraham?,” is a junkyard dog’s assemblage of arguments against a special Jewish claim to the land.

The borders specified by the Bible are not the exact borders of the present state; even if they were, “The lack of detailed archaeological evidence supports the view that the range of scriptural material makes it inappropriate to try to use the Hebrew scriptures to determine an area of land meant exclusively for the Jewish people”; even if there were such evidence, the biblical grant of the land is conditional on a standard of behavior which the Church of Scotland doesn’t think Israel meets; even if the original Zionist concept was valid, it called for equal treatment of all of Israel’s citizens, and the Church of Scotland thinks Palestinian Arabs are badly treated, and so forth. It reads as if the presbyters had conducted a contest for the best excuse to turn the Jews out of Israel, and printed all the responses.

Christian friends from the Reformed tradition in America point to a specific bee in the Church of Scotland’s bonnet, namely the autumnal resurgence of Scots nationalism. The Scottish National Party, the region’s largest, launched a campaign for Scots independence from the United Kingdom in May 2012, with prominent support from Sean Connery and other celebrities. Patriotism might not be the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Dr Johnson said, but tribalism surely is the last refuge of an existentially challenged ethnicity.

As a regional entity clamoring for national status, Scotland imagines itself in a position similar to the Palestinian Arabs and identifies with them. The Irish tend to sympathize with the Palestinians out of the same misplaced nostalgia. Some Catholics conflate the problems of the poor with the misery of the Palestinians, for example Honduras’ Cardinal Andres Rodriguez Murcielago.

There is a great deal of wisdom in this observation: each nation views the other nations through the carnival-mirror of its own preoccupations. But there may be something deeper to the Church of Scotland’s newfound obsession with repudiating the Jews’ claim to the Land of Israel. It denounces Christian Zionism, which it defines (quoting an Arab Christian) as “a movement within Protestant fundamentalism that understands the modern state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and thus deserving of political, financial and religious support.”

That is a canard, for many Christians who could not possibly be characterized as fundamentalists understand Israel in biblical terms.

“Hardly anybody will dispute that the foundation of this state had something to do with the biblical prophecy,” the principal author of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Christoph Cardinal Schonborn said in 1996. No-one would characterize Cardinal Schonborn as a Protestant fundamentalist.

Like so many other European nations, the Scots are failing as Christians while they fail as a people. Failing Christians cling all the more passionately to their national identity. Writing at the end of World War I, the great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig depicted this tragic frame of mind as follows:

Just as every individual must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for their own peoplehood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customers have lost their living power.

Nationalism is the mortal enemy of Christian faith. Michael Wyschogrod, one of Orthodox Judaism’s great theologians, explained it as follows:

As understood by Christianity, a model of dual loyalty develops. The individual belongs both to a nation and to a religion. He is a Frenchman and a Christian or a German and a Christian. As Frenchman or German, he is a member of a national community with territorial and linguistic boundaries. But he is also a member of the supra-national church which has no national boundaries. … The church is a spiritual fellowship into which men bring their national identities because they possess these identities but not because such identities play a role in the church. The church thus understands itself as having universalized the national election of Israel by opening it to all men who, in entering the church, enter a spiritualized, universalized new Israel.

In one sense, Israel is beyond the “laws” of history. It is not subject to the rise and fall of all other peoples and empires, a fact which causes angry philosophers of history whose schemes Israel undermines to refer to it as a fossil not subject to historic destruction.

But at the same time, Israel does not abandon the domain of history. It refuses to exchange its historical and national messianism for a doctrine of individual salvation. Israel refuses to invent the idea of a church which forces men to live in two jurisdictions and to assume two identities: a member of a nation and a member of a church. When such a bifurcated existence is decreed for human life, European wars in which Christian fights Christian, not as Christian but as German, Frenchman or Pole, become possible. That such a church-sanctioned conflict was the rule rather than the exception in the history of Europe was not simply the result of a failure of Christianity. Once religion and nationality are separated, the historical order in which national destinies are realized is almost inevitably de-Christianized.

The nations of Europe stopped having children because they lost their Christian faith (as Mary Eberstadt argues in a brilliant new book, How the West Really Lost God, they also lost their faith because they stopped having children). As Christianity sloughs off the declining peoples of the West, some of them cling instead to ethnic identity. Rosenzweig wrote that once Christianity taught the Gentiles the Hebrew promise of eternal life, they abandoned their ancient fatalism about the inevitable extinction of their tribe.

“Salvation is of the Jews,” said St John: the God of Israel first offers eternal life to humankind. But the newly converted never abandoned their predilection for their own ethnicity. After Christianity taught them about the election of Israel, the Gentiles wanted the same kind election for themselves. In some cases that can lead to philo-Semitism – for example, among the Scots Calvinists of the past century. In other cases it leads to what one might call Election envy, Jew-hatred inspired by jealousy.

What makes America unique, an “almost-chosen people” in Abraham Lincoln’s quip, is the absence of ethnicity. As a nation founded on a covenant rather than an ethnicity it absorbs folk from every ethnicity, and despite the sin of slavery and ugly episodes of racism and xenophobia, America remains less polluted by the original sin of ethnic hatred than any land on earth. That helps explain why Americans instinctively sympathize with the State of Israel.

Asked why they support Israel, most devout American Christians will cite Genesis 12:3: “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Many will add that the perseverance of the Jewish people despite persecution and hardship shows that the God of the Bible is a God of kept promises, and that God’s faithfulness to the Jews stands surety for His promises to the Christians as well.

As a Jew, I do not tell my Christian friends how to read the Bible (although it is always instructive to compare notes). But there is something else on which we can agree. Every Christian knows that each day, battle is joined afresh against an inner pagan. That is what Christians mean when they say that they must renew their conversion each day.

The inner pagan is not an abstract entity: it is the residual of the nation out of which the Christians believe they were called to theEkklesia/I>, what Eusebius (quoted by Henri de Lubac) called “the tribe of Christians.”

For Christians to acknowledge the special status of the Jewish people is to attest that no other nation may be chosen in the flesh, for God did that at Mount Sinai once and never again. Other nations can aspire to be Children of Abraham of the spirit, as Paul wrote, but not children of the flesh. I elaborated on this in a 2008 essay for the monthly First Things.

The national life of the Jewish people in its historic homeland stands guard as it were on the flanks of Christianity. The Election of Israel keeps the snake out of Christianity’s garden. Christians who tire of the demands of Christianity and prefer to worship their own ethnicity will rage against the Jewish people as an obstacle to idolatry, while the most devout and self-confident Christians view the continued presence of God’s people as a blessing.

Guppy writes "Does Tylenol reduce existential distress? Acetaminophen (Paracetamol) has been used to relieve mild-to-moderate physical pain for over a century, yet its actual mechanism of action continues to be debated; modern research has demonstrated an intriguing connection with the body's endocannabinoid system, raising the question of whether it may also have subtle psychological effects as well. A recent paper claims Acetaminophen can alter our response to existential challenge; previous findings have suggested that it may blunt the pain of social rejection as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Everyone knows of the Tragedy of the Otaku. It goes like this. Nerdy McNerd is unpopular in school. He doesn’t know it, but some of his people elsewhere are fated to discover fantasy, or sci-fi, or RPG games, and take refuge in them; but Nerdy, by chance, discovers Japanese pop culture instead. It speaks to him. It takes him to worlds where everyone has true friends; the bookworm and the jock, weird people who speak in outrageous ways, samurai who fail to bathe, black people and gay people, aliens and robots and Frankenstein experiments gone wrong—no matter how abnormal and flawed they are, everyone can drink from the same oasis of camaderie; in these worlds, all you gotta do is to work hard and sincerely, and you’ll have the support of comrades and together achieve success.

So Nerdy, dreamily, starts calling himself Nerudo Otakumoto, buys anything with an anime character painted on it, majors in Japanese, and eventually goes to Japan.

But what Nerdy didn’t know is that his people have it even worse in Japan. That’s why their fantasies could speak to him so deeply; because the Japanese geeks needed an escape even more than him; faced with a society known for “hammering the nail that sticks out”, they had to invent better worlds; that’s why visiting those worlds felt like therapy. Now Nerdy is expecting Tokyo-3 but he’ll only find its opposite, Really Existing Tokyo. It’s not just a disappointment, it’s the ultimate reality crash, as terrible as when the devout loses their religion; Nerdy becomes a bitter atheist, and spends the rest of his days posing as the veteran cynical gaijin who knows how bad it really goes, man.

⁂

Now that I’m finally going to Japan, the warnings people always say keep surfacing back. It’s not like that at all. You like tea ceremony and architecture and poetry, but that Japan doesn’t exist anymore; today it’s all gray buildings, business suits, beer and McDonalds. It’s just the same as any other place, you know. You can study everything at home anyway; Prof. X has two post-docs and has never even been there. I don’t want to sound negative but you’re bound to be so disappointed.

But I was McNerd ten years ago, and I’ve been courting Japan all this time, waiting for an opportunity. I know lots of people who’ve already been there (everyone except me, it feels like), and I’ve heard all possible tales of disappointment. And this is not how narratives work; if a character knows of a bad thing, and is prepared for it, it can’t actually happen. I know how to experience things, how to acquire new tastes and expand your mental horizons; you just need an spirit of adventure; expecting nothing, accepting everything, convinced that nothing is a right and everything is a gift; being open and impartial as the wide sea. However! As soon as I think this, the situation reverses; because “to expect nothing” really means to expect good things, and again, by narrative causality, this is bound to Tempt Destiny and crash in the concrete wall of reality. So I’m back to the starting point, and the whole thing plays again in my head, and again ever faster, in a dazzling recursive whirlwind; until my processing power overloads and the entire thing breaks down and I don’t know what to think anymore. I’m left with a tiny, quiet thought, or rather a background impulse that never fades: “I want to go to Japan”.

Fantasy is great and all but the interesting thing about reality is that, regardless of what’s going on in your mind, reality is always definitely there. Such unconcerned external stimuli are like spirits who take possession of you, who inject thoughts you’d never have on your own. That’s the true value of traveling, I think, and why I like moving so much (17 times so far). I’m quite anxious to subject my self to Really Existing Osaka, and the prospect of it makes this reality right now, which is undoubtedly here, nevertheless be tinged with a dreamy color; it’s the stage of Preparing to Depart; cities change completely depending on whether you’ve just arrived, is living, or is leaving. Sometimes I can evoke the memory of, say, Unknown São Paulo even though I’m already in Known São Paulo, and the superposition of the two is spooky. In Soon-to-be-Away São Paulo, by contrast, I am the spook, there and not there.

Incidentally, Osaka is, appropriately, a sister city to Sampa. (I still wonder what a sister city is good for, but narratively it doesn’t matter). It’s a shame they’re not perfectly antipodes in the globe—it’s almost there, but the point opposite to São Paulo lies in the Pacific Ocean a bit to the south. Reality has little sense of poetical adequacy… Still, it’s close enough that I can say I’m traveling to the furthest possible place (save if I went to the Moon); it’s the ultimate escapist trip. Again, it’s a shame that we can’t reach Japan by flying West; it would be so satisfying, going from the extreme West to the Far East by reaching for the setting sun… Yes, I know it makes a lot more sense to fly over land so as to be able to refuel or land in an emergency, but it’s still much less romantic. The layout of continents on Earth sucks. It looks like an RPG map where the designer didn’t bother to visualize the world as a globe and worked on a rectangle, so that there’s this huge area full of water next to the borders; west of here lies the End of the World & we can’t sail over it.

I’m technically leaving before the term is over, so I need to finish everything this month—to anticipate all finals, thesis chapters, dayjob tasks, all matters of family & money &c. This extra load leaves little time to dream.

Up front, the new release brings a GNOME 3 front end to the community-driven Linux distribution, but the big changes are behind the scenes with multiple architecture support and cloud-enabling packages

Oi pessoal
Eu cortei as palavras "de cotistas" na imagem acima para mostrar a triste realidade de que nossos graduados estão tendo desempenho PIOR comparando 2008 com 2011. É o resultado do Reuni, que colocou para dentro das salas de aula milhares de alunos que não tinham condições (intelectuais) de entrar.

A ideia desses dados do MEC-do-B era mostrar que a diferença entre cotistas e não-cotistas está cada vez menor. Mas o MEC não se preocupa com o que acontece com a grande maioria dos estudantes, os não-cotistas (mais de 80% deles contanto todas as federais e estuduais - na UnB eles são 20%). É uma obsessão do governo com os cotistas (maior parte é de cotista racial, entre os formados).

Vejam aqui o que saiu na Folha:
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2013/05/1273513-defasagem-de-cotistas-caiu-afirma-mec.shtml

Um trecho:




Da mesma forma que o MEC só quer saber dos cotistas, o CNPq agora obriga que nos idetifiquemos por nossa cor/raça no Lattes. É o MCT-do-B entrando nessa obcessão. Em breve teremos editais de pesquisa apenas para pesquisadores "negros". É o Brasil caminhando para uma divisão entre pretos e brancos que nunca existiu. O governo está querendo nos transformar em uma sociedade racista !

O tema do Lattes racialista serviu de editorial de hoje do Estadão.
http://www.estadao.com.br/noticias/impresso,curriculo-racial-,1028634,0.htm

theodp writes " E-mails and other communications between employees,' explains Google in a newly-published patent application for its Policy Violation Checker invention, 'can implicate potential violations of company policy or local, state or federal law that can go unchecked by attorneys or other legal personnel.' So how can you avoid those embarrassing Goldman Sachs and Enron e-mail gaffes? Use Google's 'methods and systems for identifying problematic phrases in an electronic document'! From the patent application: 'Documents may be used as evidence in court, administrative, or other proceedings. It is in a company's best interest to minimize or eliminate policy violations and/or situations that could give rise to legal liability. It is also often in a company's best interest to be able to Pack [?] these situations. Problematic phrases include, but are not limited to, phrases that present policy violations, have legal implications, or are otherwise troublesome to a company, business, or individual.' So, if you can't Do-No-Evil, at least you can Do-No-Discoverable-Evil!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Update (May 6): The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs today published  a detailed account of Iran’s plans to take over Syria.

There’s only one way to cut the Gordian Knot of regional conflict in the Middle East, and that is to de-fang Iran–destroy its capacity to make nuclear weapons and destroy the bases of the Revolutionary Guard.

Israel’s reported strike on a stockpile of Iranian missiles near Damascus overnight highlights the extent of Iran’s military presence in Syria. We do not (and will not) know the details, but the series of fireballs that “turned day into night” around the Syrian capital, as one observer told news media, make clear that an enormous amount of ordnance was in place. It was no secret that the Assad regime now depends on Iran and its cat’s paw Hezbollah. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah declared April 30 that Syria’s civil war had become a regional conflict: “Syria has real friends in the region and the world that will not let Syria fall in the hands of America, Israel or Takfiri (extreme jihadi) groups,” Nasrallah said in a broadcast on Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV channel. “How will this happen? Details will come later. I say this based on information … rather than wishful thinking.”

Israel’s head of military intelligence, Gen. Aviv Kochavi, warned in March that Iran and Hezbollah already had built an army of 50,000 in Syria and planned to double its size. Syria had an estimated 220,000 regular soldiers in 2010, but probably can field less than half that number today; at a prospective strength of 100,000, the Iranian-Hezbollah force would become the dominant military power in Syria, in effect an army of occupation.

The events of the past eighteen hours make clear that Iran intends to use Syria as a base for missile attacks on Israel. The Iranian Fateh-110 missiles can deliver a 1,500 lb. warhead accurately at a distance of 300 km (Tel Aviv is 214 km from Damascus). Iranian Revolutionary Guards launching missiles at Israeli cities from Syria represents a much greater threat to Israel than Hezbollah in southern Lebanon does. Hezbollah is vulnerable to Israeli retaliation; the Iranians don’t care how much Israel might retaliate against their Syrian hosts. Israel had to degrade Iran’s missile capability in Syria. By the end of July 2006, about half of Lebanon’s 1.2 million Shia had fled their homes in the face of Israel’s incursion into the south of the country. Most went to Syria. Things are different now: Syrians are fleeing into Lebanon. A repeat of Israel’s 2006 attack would have catastrophic impact on Hezbollah’s Shia base, which has nowhere to run. And the Israelis, if they are forced back into Lebanon, will not deal with Hezbollah as gingerly as did the Olmert government in 2006.

First time accepted submitter anarcat writes "After two years since the last Debian release (6.0, nicknamed "squeeze"), the Debian release team has finally published Debian 7.0 (nicknamed "Wheezy"). A newly created blog has details on the release, which features multi-arch support (e.g. you can now install packages for both i386 and amd64 on the same install), improvements to multimedia support (no need for third party repositories!) and improved security through hardening flags. Debian 7.0 also ships with the controversial Gnome 3 release, and the release notes explicitly mention how to revert to the more familiar 'Gnome classic' interface. Finally, we can also mention the improved support for virtualization infrastructure with pre-built images available for Amazon EC2, Windows Azure and Google Compute Engine. Debian 7.0 also ships with the OpenStack suite and the Xen Cloud Platform. More details on the improvements can be found in the release notes and the Debian wiki." An anonymous reader points out (from the announcement) that "[t]he installation process has been greatly improved: Debian can now be installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the combined efforts of a huge number of translators, the installation system is available in 73 languages, and more than a dozen of them are available for speech synthesis too. In addition, for the first time, Debian supports installation and booting using UEFI for new 64-bit PCs (amd64), although there is no support for Secure Boot yet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Bruce Schneier, security expert (and rational voice in the wilderness), explains in an editorial on CNN why 'Connecting the Dots' is a 'Hindsight Bias.' In heeding calls to increase the amount of surveillance data gathered and shared, agencies like the FBI have impaired their ability to discover actual threats, while guaranteeing erosion of personal and civil freedom. 'Piling more data onto the mix makes it harder, not easier. The best way to think of it is a needle-in-a-haystack problem; the last thing you want to do is increase the amount of hay you have to search through. The television show Person of Interest is fiction, not fact.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "According to Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla and the creator of JavaScript, ORBX.js can decode 1080p HD video and support low latency remote graphics entirely in JavaScript, offering a pure JavaScript alternative to VP8/H.264 native code extensions for HTML5 video. Watermarking is used during encoding process for protected IP, rather than relying on local DRM in the browser. Mozilla is also working with OTOY, Autodesk and USC ICT to support emerging technologies through ORBX.js — including light field displays and VR headsets like the Oculus Rift." Writes reader mikejuk: "The problem with all of this is that orbix.js is just a decoder and there is little information on the coder end of the deal. It could be that OTOY will profit big time from coding videos and watermarking them while serving virtual desktops from their GPU cloud. The decoder might be open source but the situation about the rest of the technology is unclear. In the meantime we have to trust that Mozilla, and Brendan Eich in particular, are not being sold a utopian view of a slightly dystopian future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm in Washington DC at present, squinting at the results of the local government elections in Britain and the damage done to the Tories in particular by the UK Independence Party -- no less of a shock to the political system for having been widely trailed.

First time accepted submitter carlypage3 writes "Benefits claimants in the UK are being forced to use Microsoft's now obsolete Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 software. The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) states that its online forms are not compatible with Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9 and 10, Safari, Google Chrome or Firefox. As if that wasn't unnerving enough, the Gov.UK website says that users cannot submit claims using Mac OS X or Linux operating systems, either." (Note: as we noted not long ago, it's not just the DWP that's stuck using IE6.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter JoeKilner writes "The Turbulenz HTML5 games engine has been released as open source under the MIT license. The engine is a full 3D engine written in TypeScript and using WebGL. To see what the engine is capable off, check out this video of a full 3D FPS running in the browser using the Turbulenz engine and Quake 4 assets. You can see some of the games already developed with the engine at Turbulenz.com. (Note — to try the games without registering, hit the big blue 'Play as Guest' button.) Also, IE doesn't have WebGL support yet, so to play without a plugin try Chrome or FIrefox."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Afinal, qual a importância de um casamento sólido e duradouro para o ministério pastoral? Paulo escreveu que “é necessário que o bispo ... seja esposo de uma só mulher” (1Tm 3.2). Podemos interpretar essa passagem de duas ou três maneiras diferentes, mas todas elas, ao final, falam da necessidade de um casamento exemplar para os líderes cristãos. Creio que há vários pontos que podem ser mencionados aqui.

O primeiro é a paz e o sossego que um casamento estável oferece e que se refletem inevitavelmente na lide pastoral. O segundo ponto é o exemplo, para os filhos, se houver, e para os casais da igreja que pastoreia. Todos esperam que o casamento do pastor seja uma fonte de inspiração e exemplo. Casamentos que dão certo e duram a vida toda funcionam como uma espécie de referencial para os demais casamentos, especialmente se for o casamento do pastor.

Illegal procurement favouring Microsoft killed in Portuguese court

On April 27, the administrative court of Almada, Portugal, declared a 550, 000 Euro contract between Microsoft and the municipality of Almada to be illegal. The technical specifications of the competition launched by the municipality prevented any company other than Microsoft and their partners to submit a proposal.

This ruling is especially significant as it clarifies that a widely used procurement procedure is illegal. The procedure specified the name of Microsoft products instead of their general functional and technical requirements.

Unfair tendering practices in Portugal have been repeatedly denounced by FSFE's Associate Organisation ANSOL and the Portuguese Open Source Business Association ESOP, who brought the case to court. They violate fundamental rules of fair competition and systematically exclude companies that provide services based on Free Software.

FSFE welcome the court's decision, and calls on other European national courts to continue to systematically annul similarly discriminatory contracts.

More information The court's decision (pt) ESOP's press release about the ruling Open Forum Europe: Discriminatory practices continue to plague IT public procurement across Europe FSFE's Contribution to the European Commission consultation on the modernisation of European Union public procurement policy FSFE's work to improve public procurement in Finland

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gnujoshua writes "In a new article, GNU Project founder Richard M. Stallman speaks out against the proposal to include hooks for DRM in HTML5. While others have been making similar arguments, RMS strikes home the point that while companies can still push Web DRM themselves, the stance taken by the W3C is still — both practically and politically — vitally important: '[...] the W3C cannot prevent companies from grafting DRM onto HTML. They do this through nonfree plug-ins such as Flash, and with nonfree Javascript code, thus showing that we need control over the Javascript code we run and over the C code we run. However, where the W3C stands is tremendously important for the battle to eliminate DRM. On a practical level, standardizing DRM would make it more convenient, in a very shallow sense. This could influence people who think only of short-term convenience to think of DRM as acceptable, which could in turn encourage more sites to use DRM. On the political level, making room for DRM in the specifications of the World Wide Web would constitute an endorsement in principle of DRM by the W3C. Standardization by the W3C could facilitate DRM that is harder for users to break than DRM implemented in Javascript code. If the DRM is implemented in the operating system, this could result in distribution of works that can't be played at all on a free operating system such as GNU/Linux.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1.
Details of my keynote address at the Northern California Oracle User Group Spring 2013 conference is on the SCHEDULE page.

BTW: If you live in San Francisco, attend the conference on 5/22 and can give me rides to and/or from Pleasanton, or know somebody who can, it will be greatly appreciated. Please email me at the address on the ABOUT page.
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2.
The 'Quotes of the Week' were posted on the QUOTES page.

3.
A 'To Laugh or Cry' item was posted on the LAUGH/CRY page.

Carl Hewitt's "response" to Date and McGoveran letter to the editor criticizing  his previous nonsense. Incidentally, somebody Googled "chris date mcgovern [sic] carl hewitt" and here's the blurb that comes up:

Carl Hewitt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Carl Hewitt is Board Chair of the International Society for Inconsistency ... which was developed in the early 1970s by Sussman, Hewitt, Chris Reeve, and David ...

4.
A link to an online exchange I participated in was posted to the FP ONLINE page.

5.
The first installment of my Debunking Corner for the Northern California Oracle User Group Journal Spring 2013 issue has been published. A link to the journal PDF was posted on the FP ONLINE page (scroll down).

6.
The Costly Illusion: Normalization, Integrity and Performance paper has been revised to correct an error (see Understanding Further Normalization: 2NF).

7.
A Bing search that hit my site: "optimal database for complex xml schemas nosql". I don't think that's what the author had in mind.

8.
From a LinkedIn Profile:

Mary Hart
B2B Tech Marketing Copywriter/Professional Liar, Greater Boston Area

I would appreciate the honesty but for for the logical paradox.

Você pode ser considerado especialista no SGBD PostgreSQL se...

...já instalou e configurou o PostgreSQL em pelo menos três plataformas distintas (ex: Linux, Windows, Mac OS, *BSD, Solaris, Mainframe, celular, cafeteira)

...já administrou uma base de dados PostgreSQL de porte razoável (a partir de 500 GB de dados) e agora entende a importância do autovacuum!

...já baixou e analisou os códigos fontes do PostgreSQL e compilou os binários após ter apanhado para encontrar dependências como flex, bison, readline e zlib...

...já desenvolveu funções em pelo menos três das inúmeras linguagens procedurais disponíveis no PostgreSQL (ex: PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Ruby, PL/Java, PL/R, PL/sh, PL/Lua)

...já construiu pelo menos um módulo em C aproveitando a incrível extensibilidade do PostgreSQL (i.e., DLL no Windows, SO no Linux)

...conhece e sabe usar pelo menos dois módulos contidos no contrib ou que já foram incorporados ao core do PostgreSQL

...sabe o que é "pghackers" e já se deparou com inúmeras threads do PostgreSQL que foram finalizadas com um simples "regards, tom lane"...

...entende que pgAdmin ou phpPgAdmin são interessantes para o usuário de PostgreSQL, mas não abre mão do psql e sobrevive tranquilamente na falta de um mouse!

...já implementou "no braço" scripts (em Shell ou batch) que efetuam backups lógicos e físicos e replicação dos dados do PostgreSQL usando tecnologias como pg_dump, PITR, archiving, streaming replication e Warm ou Hot Standby

...sabe a pronúncia correta do PostgreSQL e irrita-se quando escrevem "PostGreSQL" ou soltam um horripilante "Postgrí"... :D