Comment Hmmm (Score 3, Funny) 141
For example, when a user has a bad day, he's likely to look up acquaintances who have it worse off, and feel a bit better that way.
That sounds automatable. Schadenfreude, the browser extension.
Comment Re:You made this? (Score 1) 306
And to be fair to Sony, this is almost certainly the result of an automated scanning system that identified what it thought was Sony content, and blocked it per Sony's policy on their own content. Whether or not that should be a valid way of protecting one's IP is a separate question, but I'm 99% certain there's no malice on Sony's part here, and it will likely be resolved within a day or two.
Comment You made this? (Score 1) 306
I made this.
Comment And I'll still be running MATE (Score 1) 241
So get off my lawn!
Comment Tassimo Did It (Score 1) 769
This has been done. Tassimo has barcodes on their 'pods' that tell the system how to brew that particular pod. It lets the system have greater variety, e.g. there are latte, cappuccino, cocoa pods.
It was quickly reverse engineered on the internet.
Moral: Unless this thing has a mandatory internet connection, it's not going to stop anything.
Comment Re: "Not Reproduclibe" (Score 4, Insightful) 618
That's the point. I bet the open access requirement is also harder to reach than it seems.
Another bill that looks helpful on the surface but really just supports their agenda.
Is Earth Weighed Down By Dark Matter? 247
Nerval's Lobster writes "There may be a giant ring of dark matter invisibly encircling the Earth, increasing its mass and pulling much harder on orbiting satellites than anything invisible should pull, according to preliminary research from a scientist specializing the physics of GPS signaling and satellite engineering. The dark-matter belt around the Earth could represent the beginning of a radically new understanding of how dark matter works and how it affects the human universe, or it could be something perfectly valid but less exciting despite having been written up by New Scientist and spreading to the rest of the geek universe on the basis of a single oral presentation of preliminary research at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December. The presentation came from telecom- and GPS satellite expert Ben Harris, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Texas- Arlington, who based his conclusion on nine months' worth of data that could indicate Earth's gravity was pulling harder on its ring of geostationary GPS satellites than the accepted mass of the Earth would normally allow. Since planets can't gain weight over the holidays like the rest of us, Harris' conclusion was that something else was adding to the mass and gravitational power of Earth – something that would have to be pretty massive but almost completely undetectable, which would sound crazy if predominant theories about the composition of the universe didn't assume 80 percent of it was made up of invisible dark matter. Harris calculated that the increase in gravity could have come from dark matter, but would have had to be an unexpectedly thick collection of it – one ringing the earth in a band 120 miles thick and 45,000 miles wide. Making elaborate claims in oral presentations, without nailing down all the variables that could keep a set of results from being twisted into something more interesting than the truth is a red flag for any scientific presentation, let alone one making audacious claims about the way dark matter behaves or weight of the Earth, according to an exasperated counterargument from Matthew R. Francis, who earned a Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from Rutgers in 2005, held visiting and assistant professorships at several Northeastern universities and whose science writing has appeared in Ars Technica, The New Yorker, Nautilus, BBC Future and others including his own science blog at Galileo's Pendulum."
Comment Re:I like the idea (Score 1, Troll) 165
Ah, the pyramid scheme delusion. Good luck with that, sucker.
Comment Re:And how is (Score 1) 124
Spies.
CryptoLocker Gang Earns $30 Million In Just 100 Days 202
DavidGilbert99 writes "A report from Dell Secureworks earlier this week reported that up to 250,000 systems have been infected with the pernicious ransomware known as CryptoLocker. Digging a little deeper, David Gilbert at IBTimes UK found that the average ransom being paid was $300, and than on a very conservative basis just 0.4% of people paid the ransom. What does this all add up to? $30 million for the gang controlling CryptoLocker — and this could be 'many times bigger.'"
Comment Re:I accept your surrender (Score 1) 214
Ah, Americans talking about Canadian healthcare. It's like hearing from an old, crazy friend.
(For the record, Canadian healthcare is awesome. Consider any metrics from Americans who haven't lived there to be very likely cherry-picked to support their ideology.)
Comment Can we just have single payer yet? (Score 2, Insightful) 214
Please? How much more complicated do we have to make it before we do what the rest of the civilized world is doing?
I know Americans like to be different but it's gone too far.
Comment Re:Externalizing the cost of maintenance (Score 1) 296
the company not only gets to bill it as a perk of the job
Until you need to leave during peak time and find your battery depleted.
Comment Officially (Score 3, Insightful) 75
Officially the problem was lack of space in Hong Kong
...but let's just ignore that and come up with conspiracy theories.
Comment The hardest part will be breaking the encryption (Score 1) 227
Games, both downloaded and on optical media, are likely to be encrypted eight ways to Sunday on modern systems. Before you can even begin to emulate games from a modern console, you need the unencrypted binaries, or you need to resign yourself to running community-developed homebrew. This means extracting the console key from a console, which is not likely to be a trivial matter.
