Comment Re:To be so lucky... (Score 1) 757
you always have to assume some basic level competence on the part of the user (eg. knowing to type man to get program info)
[insert howling-laughing smiley here]
Comment Barrelfishes evading red-light cameras (Score 2, Informative) 366
Well, that's odd.
But anyway, concerning Corona, CA, it should be noted that some blogger linked to by TechDirt is no better a legal scholar than... anyone else, apparently. There's no Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial to "shred" for traffic violations, or any misdemeanor involving less than six months or so of jail.
Watching the IPRED Watchers In Sweden 88
digithed writes "In response to Sweden's recent introduction of new laws (discussed here recently) implementing the European IPRED directive, a new Swedish Web site has been launched allowing users to check if their IP address is currently under investigation. The site also allows users to subscribe for email updates alerting them if their IP address comes under investigation in the future, or to report IP addresses known to be under investigation. This interesting use of people power 'watching the watchers' is possible because the new Swedish laws implementing the IPRED directive require a public request to the courts in order to get ISPs to forcibly disclose potentially sensitive private information. Since all court records are public in Sweden, it will be easy to compile a list of addresses currently being investigated."
Nvidia 480-Core Graphics Card Approaches 2 Teraflops 261
An anonymous reader writes "At CES, Nvidia has announced a graphics card with 480 cores that can crank up performance to reach close to 2 teraflops. The company's GTX 295 graphics cards has two GPUs with 240 cores each that can execute graphics and other computing tasks like video processing. The card delivers 1.788 teraflops of performance, which Nvidia claims is the fastest single graphics card in the market."
Spiraling Magnetic Signal Shows Up In the Cosmic Background 168
pln2bz writes "Astronomers looking for confirmation for emissions from early stellar formation in the cosmic microwave background radiation instead found a signal indicating large amounts of unaccounted-for spiraling magnetic fields in space, but without any accompanying infrared emissions. The discovery possibly dredges up the claims of plasma cosmologists like Eric Lerner, who claim that the intergalactic medium is a strong absorber of the CMB with the absorption occurring in a fog of narrow filaments. These filaments are the result of plasma's natural tendency, as observed within the plasma laboratory and in novelty plasma globes, to form braided, ropelike structures which are collimated by coiled magnetic fields."
A Look At the Growth of MMOs In 2008 122
Zonk writes with news of a collaboration between Massively and GamerDNA to analyze the state of MMO player bases for 2008. Sifting through the data brought out several interesting trends. For example, Age of Conan took a substantial hit when Warhammer arrived on the scene, but none of the other major MMOs were significantly affected. Also, it seems Lord of the Rings: Online got a big shot in the arm from its Mines of Moria expansion — even moreso than World of Warcraft from Wrath of the Lich King, relatively speaking. The article also asserts the following about the recently-canceled Tabula Rasa: "... until the cancellation announcement in November, numbers were trending in the right direction, however slightly. Players were growing more interested in the sci fi MMO shooter, and logins were on the rise. If its development had not been so long, so expensive, and so vastly overhyped and mismarketed, this title could have been left alone to find its legs and found some small measure of success in a long tail environment akin to the Sony Station Pass."
Comment Re:Looks like anchor drag to me. (Score 1) 329
Cables going to very close shore landing points between similar destinations tend to be pretty close together, saves significantly on the survey costs.
The article's timing of the outages (SeaMeWe 3&4 within minutes, FLAG half an hour later) and the relative proximity of the cable courses suggests either anchor drag or someone who cares enough to make it look that way.
Chalk up another victory for geographically dispersed redundancy.{/quote>
Are you trying to say David Hasselhoff was involved?!?
Comment Re:Herbal medicine has limited value (Score 1) 713
As someone who suffers from a related problem called Avoidant Personality Disorder, I can tell you that self medicating with drugs and alcohol doesn't solve the problem at all. Oh, sure, you might become a little more sociable, for a while. Eventually, you get to the point where you need the alcohol to function at all, even in non-social situations. Pretty soon, you find yourself stuck in a cycle at the bottom of a bottle and the drugs and alcohol take control, making it even harder to meet other people because by that point, most people actually won't want to be around you and that reinforces the initial problem. I have a lot of family members who buried their problems with drugs and alcohol and they went from being functional addicts to not caring about themselves or pretty much anyone else anymore - all they want is to stay drunk and high. Anything which threatens that state can force them to become aggressive and violent in ways they never were before. Growing up around that, I avoid alcohol and drugs completely.
I don't mean to belittle what I have no reason to believe is not a real disorder - but I'd like to point out that the result of social drinking you apparently assume is inevitable (substance abuse) certainly isn't. Many people do feel more sociable after a drink or two, yet do not move from there to raging alcoholism or drug addiction. Not everyone shy in public has the same disorder you suffer from, so dismissal of the most common (and most commonly effective, I'd guess) solution is irresponsible
Comment Sounds like an ad for Rio Tinto (Score 1) 237
Let's keep in mind that multinational mining conglomerates are easily some of the most corrupt, soul-destroying organizations in the world. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bougainville#Shutting_the_Panguna_mine
The Real Monsters Behind Godzilla 243
eldavojohn writes "A Wired blog looks at the real monsters behind Godzilla: his lawyers. Do you think Godzilla is basically a glorified T. Rex? Guess again, as his lawyers have tirelessly argued: 'He's erect-standing. He's got muscular arms, scaly skin and spines on back and tail and he breathes fire and has a furrowed brow, he's got an anthropomorphic torso. The T. rex has emaciated bird-like arms and stands at a 45-degree angle.' Read on to find out why they targeted the site davezilla.com but not mozilla.org. Another abuse of the American trademark & copyright system? You decide — just don't make a float of him or you'll find yourself paying an undisclosed sum to Toho Co. Ltd."
Comment Re:The Nigerian scam is no more of a scam than... (Score 1) 857
Plane Simple Truth 460
brothke writes "In the TV show House, M.D., a premise that protagonist Dr. Greg House holds dear is that people are liars and stupid. Real life is often not far from House's observation. At the general public level, people are
often misled by their lack of common sense, their deficiency in understanding statistics and basic science, and therefore fall victim to the lies of the myriad
charlatans that claim to have something that fixes everything. A piece I wrote on that issue, New York
News Radio — The voice of bad science, details that.
While it is too broad to call the authors of Fuel efficiency of commercial aircraft: An overview of historical and future trends liars; their mediocre research created the scenario that far too many took their research as
reality. Known as the Peeters report, after lead author P.M. Peeters, the authors of Plane Simple Truth refute the wide-spread belief that the fuel efficiency gains in the commercial aviation sector are erroneous, which is the
principle theme of the Peeters report." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.
Age of Conan's "Kinda" Launch and Massive Pre-Orders 582
While some are already enjoying the joys of Age of Conan via the early launch, many more will soon be enjoying the fruits of Funcom's labor. An amazing 700,000 copies of the game are being shipped to retailers for day one sales and in some locations pre-orders will not be filled due to server limitations. Between this and the new Warhammer game on the way, should Blizzard be worried, or will Wrath of the Lich King continue to hold their competitive edge?
Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison 314
Tree131 writes "The New York Times is reporting that sound recordings pre-dating Edison's made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer, were discovered by American audio historians at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. The archives are on paper and were meant for recording but not playback. Researchers used a high quality scan of the recording and an electronic needle to play back the sounds recorded 150 years ago. 'For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words "Mary had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.'"
Master Diebold Key Copied From Web Site 100
Harrington writes "In another stunning blow to the security and integrity of Diebold's electronic voting machines, someone has made a copy of the key which opens ALL Diebold e-voting machines from a picture on the company's own website. " Update: 02/06 17:40 GMT by Z : We previously discussed this story, early last year.
