eldavojohn writes "The Best American Comics of 2008 was a book I purchased on impulse. Not being a graphic novel or even political cartoon fan, I read the introduction at a bookstore (which was, itself, a comic strip) and decided to give it a try. I expected to find humor. What I found was not only humor but sadness, anxiety, insight, happiness, remorse and a gamut of human emotions. I expected black ink on white paper. What I found was water color, wood cuts, cubism and even a comic about the start of cubism. In short, I was pleasantly surprised to find the Americana here that I had previously relegated only to historical novels." Read on for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his idea for mass adoption of anti-virus software: "If the US government did more to encourage people to keep their computers secure — by buying TV ads to publicize free private-sector anti-virus programs, or subsidizing the purchase of anti-virus software — we'd all be better off, on average. That's not just idealistic nanny-statism, but something you can argue mathematically, to the point where even some libertarians would agree." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

Elektroschock writes "The project by 27 Russian parties to develop a National Operating System for Russia has not taken off, yet (Russian). Ilya Ponomarev, the responsible technology committee chair in the Duma, received a negative response from the government. The government argues that the project and Open Standards would not impact the society and economy. Parliament members regret the setback for Russia's digital independence. Ponomarev wants to find other interested partners in the Government now." The Google translation makes it tough to tell whether this project is actually dead, or just shelved for the moment. Any Russian speakers out there who can parse it with greater clarity?

coondoggie writes to tell us that the Federal Trade Commission has yet again backed off of the new Red Flag Rule designed to protect consumer information. Complaining about cost of implementation, the enforcement date of the rule has been pushed back to August 1, 2009 to give businesses and institutions time to implement identity theft-prevention programs. "The FTC, federal bank regulatory agencies, and the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) issued the Red Flags Rules as part of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions (FACT) Act of 2003. The final rules require financial and credit institutions that hold any consumer account, or other account for which there is a reasonably foreseeable risk of identity theft, to develop and implement an Identity Theft Prevention Program for combating identity theft in connection with new and existing accounts, the FTC said."

A wave of new companies are springing up to offer such things as virtual cemeteries, alerts to remind loved ones about the anniversary of your death, and even email services that send an alert to your sinful relatives in danger of being left behind when the Rapture carries you away. "People have a desire to perpetuate not only for themselves, but for their loved ones, the story of their lives, and technology has all these new great ways of doing that," said John McQueen, owner of the Anderson McQueen funeral home.

tobiasly writes "I administer several Ubuntu desktops and numerous CentOS servers. One of the biggest headaches is keeping them up-to-date with each distro's latest bugfix and security patches. I currently have to log in to each system, run the appropriate apt-get or yum command to list available updates, determine which ones I need, then run the appropriate install commands. I'd love to have a distro-independent equivalent of the Red Hat Network where I could do all of this remotely using a web-based interface. PackageKit seems to have solved some of the issues regarding cross-distro package maintenance, but their FAQ explicitly states that remote administration is not a goal of their project. Has anyone put together such a system?"

Red Leader. writes "MAYA Design just released an excerpt from one of their forthcoming books as a white paper. The paper offers a different perspective on cloud computing. Their view is that cloud computing, as currently described, is not that far off from the sort of thinking that drove the economic downturn. In effect, both situations allowed radical experiments to be performed by gigantic, non-redundant entities (PDF). This is dangerous, and the paper argues that we should insist on decentralized, massively-parallel venues until we understand a domain very, very well. In the information economy, this means net equality, information liquidity, and radically distributed services (and that's pretty much the opposite of 'cloud computing' as described today). While there is still hope for computing in the cloud, it's hard not to wonder if short-term profits, a lack of architectural thinking about security and resilience, and long-term myopia aren't leading us in the wrong direction."

GameSetWatch is running an opinion piece (sparked by a lecture at NYU by Deus Ex developer Warren Spector) about the difference between game experiences that are specifically planned by the game's creators and experiences that are either constructed by players or arise unexpectedly. Quoting: "One thing Spector said during the NYU discussion was that he feels multiplayer games are 'lazy.' This is the designer in him talking, of course — his theory that in letting players build stories via Left 4 Dead-style happy accidents in open worlds, the designer doesn't have to tackle complex challenges like making choices meaningful, or making characters believable. Spector wants to take on those challenges, and he doesn't like the idea that user-driven play, from his standpoint, effectively allows game design to bypass them. It's actually an idea I relate to a lot as a writer — I was raised in an era of authoritative media, when individual voices drove culture, opinion and information. The internet's changed everything, of course; the authoritative voice has evolved into a conversation between writer and audience, and the writer now leads the community discussion rather than acting as a single determiner, a unilateral judge."

Mike writes "It's official: Yahoo is pulling the plug, and GeoCities is dead. GeoCities had suffered a long and drawn-out battle with its health over the past decade. An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle. An official cause of death, however, has yet to be determined. Awful, eye-punishing graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are believed to have contributed to its demise. GeoCities was 15 years old." There is doubtless a lot of funny and informative stuff on there that's worth saving (not just Jesux, which pudge has now migrated). If some of it belongs to you, perhaps you should move it sometime in the next few months. Update: 04/24 18:10 GMT by T : And if you know some GeoCities page owners who aren't especially computer savvy, you could point out to them how easy it is to slurp down their pages for re-hosting elsewhere.

surpeis writes "This snub is an attempt to point the finger at something I feel has been widely ignored in the ever-lasting debate surrounding (illegal) filesharing, now again brought in the spotlight by the Pirate Bay trial. I should state that I am slightly biased, as I have been running my own indie label for some years, spanning about 30 releases. It's now history, but it was not filesharing that got the best of us, just for the record." (surpeis's argument continues below.)

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