SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Richard Branson, Britain’s richest crazy person and founder of Virgin Everything, has joined forces with Paul Allen, America’s richest crazy person and co-founder of Microsoft, in a bid to begin commercial flights to outer space by building spacecraft based on the design of SpaceShipOne by Burt Rutan, the Mojave desert’s richest crazy person and founder of Scaled Composites.

The new company “Virgin Galactic” will complete its first ship, the VSS Enterprise, by 2007 and begin offering tourist flights. Richard will be on the initial flight, which will hopefully go better than the numerous failed attempts he’s made at piloting a balloon around the world (which, one would think, would be much easier).

Matthew writes: In yet another example of SlashNOT prognosticating real news, Google News has actually been accused of bias in its news reporting, by none other than the staid USC Annenberg school for communication.

Don’t forget to read the comments, and the related story from the SlashNOT mailbag.

Matthew writes: A controversial new program funded by the Gates Foundation to teach safe programming practices in high school is meeting resistance from conservative family groups. The program, designed to instill a sense of safety in programming conventions while coders are still in their youth, is being implemented in pilot programs around the country.

“We’re a Python family. They’re teaching safe C++ coding. Frankly, I don’t want my son programming in C++. It’s a dangerous language, fraught with poorly thought out compiler directives, dangling pointers, and unsafe optimizations. The only safe way to code in C++ is not to code in C++.” Says a concerned parent.

“A firewall isn’t always going to protect you.” Says another. “Kids these days have to realize that secure coding is about checking input buffers, avoiding library routines like strcpy() that are known to be insecure, and choosing a safe language in the first place. I’m just not sure that schools are really the right place to talk about code security.”

Kids tended to disagree with their parents, however. “I’m totally excited about this safe programming course.” Say one. “I’ve been wanting to try out gcc, but I was afraid that my code would pick up a virus or a Trojan or something. Now I feel like I’ll be able to program without being afraid of being attacked by some kind of exploit in the wild.”

Michael writes: Failing to follow the lead of the South Korean Subway System, the FAA did not reboot their system on Tuesday, causing a 3-hour shutdown of Southern California airports and a three-hour radio breakdown that left aircraft without guidance.

Apparently the Microsoft-based software had to be rebooted every 30 days, similar to Windows systems, to avoid “data overload”, and a technician failed to do so.

Similar events have occurred in the past in United Kingdom and Prague. SlashNot advises that you exercise extreme caution in any flights to or from California until a system upgrade is complete.

[Stories in the True Stories department are true. Sometimes satire writes itself.]

Matthew writes: The Subway under Seoul, South Korea, was rebooted today in an attempt to fix numerous accumulating problems. Among the problems noted by transportation authorities were an accumulation of unauthorized advertisements cluttering the walls, unexplained slowness of the trains, some stuck automatic doors, and a group of tourists that had accumulated in the lower levels of the subway and had been unable to find their way out.

During the reboot, BIOS messages were visible on automatic signs throughout the subway. The reboot appeared to have solved some of the problems, but the persistent problem of accumulated advertisements has returned, and the trains are beginning to slow down again. Transportation authorities have been asking other governments if they know anybody who knows how to clean up subways permanently or if they should just give up and buy a new subway.

Matthew writes: SCO has sued Kernelthread.com for their port of UNIX (5th Edition ca. 1974) to the Gameboy Advanced.

SCO CEO Daryl McBride had this to say: “Kernelthread.com has taken what we believe is probably our intellectual property and perhaps stolen it, potentially devaluing what might be our valuable potential IP such as source code that may be determined to be ours and the UNIX name, which we might be found to have some trademark interest in. This action dilutes our market position, as our current clientele will become confused in the marketspace and may elect to use this pirate version of UNIX rather than our official, certified corporate version. Therefore it causes us measurable harm, and we demand recompense.”

Amit Singh, speaking on behalf of Kernelthread.com, had this to say: “I don’t respond to idiots.”

In related news, the city of Santa Cruz has sued to have SCO remove both “Santa Cruz” from all of their corporate trademarks, and the S and C from their acronym, which would leave them with the name “O”. Oprah has announced that if they do that, she will sue for trademark infringement.

Yuri writes: Hackers have placed the world’s first dual-bounty on Verizon because they disabled the Bluetooth file transfer and serial port features of the Motorola v710 phone.

“The bounty is for the first person who either: (a) re-enables these features via a software hack, or (b) plants a cream-pie squarely in the face of the CEO of Verizon Wireless for disabling the features in the first place.”

The bounty is currently at $ 1026 dollars, and you can place your donation via paypal.

Tyson writes: Two entirely different worlds collided on August 9th, 2004, when Red Hat Linux held it’s developers convention in the Las Vegas convention center at the same time that the Red Hat Society held its convention in the Sands convention center.

“It was madness” declared Emily Farnsworth, the convention coordinator for RHS. “Our Ladies were requesting to be taken to the Red Hat convention and would wind up wandering around through a bunch of computer nerds giving away decorative reflective coasters. One of our ladies did manage to find a kiosk that purported to have a new version of purl knitting called “Perl”, but frankly, she couldn’t read a word of the instructions.”

“Dude, it was like old lady crazy up in there.” Said M4dn355, of the 312-133t cru3, “The cab dropped me off at the wrong convention center, but tha l8ies were too wild to check for badges. They were wigged out with these giant felt hats and were getting jiggy with the margaritas, yo. So I pulled out my Sharp Linux handheld and scripted up a web cam server and 802.11b’d the madness back to the RHL conference for the 312-133t cru3 homies.”

M4dn355 elected to remain at the Red Hat Society conference after meeting Ms. Edna Maynard, Queen Mother of the 455th Red Hat Chaper of Boise, ID.