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Comment Why is tiered pricing evil? (Score 1) 501

I don't understand why everyone is against metered data costs whether it be on phones or one their home connections. Electricity and other utilities are metered by use and it doesn't seem to provoke the outrage that metering of data connections does. Adding metered data usage could make the iPhone data plan cheaper for light users. The concept of metered usage is not inherently any less fair than unlimited usage plans, it all depends on what price structure they propose. If unlimited data is $30 but 1Gb/month is $15 then the average iPhone user is saving money, on the other hand if instead the pricing was $1/Mb obviously the users would be losing. It's clearly too early to be worried, why don't you wait and see what happens? Why shouldn't the people who use a little data on their iPhone pay less than the people who use a lot?

Comment Re:Freedom is born where oppression reigns (Score 1) 173

This is interesting to me, do you have a link about the illegal groups thing?

Australians do have a "constitutionally upheld" right to free speech according to the High Court, see http://www.aph.gov.au/LIBRARY/Pubs/RN/2001-02/02rn42.htm for details. While the ruling isn't as broad as the the US 1st Amendment it still provides freedom of political communication. With this ruling it would be difficult for any Australian law to outlaw a political party.

Comment Re:This law helps network administrators do their (Score 1) 183

EFA opposes the construction of 'appropriately used' in s 6AAA of the exposure draft. We submit that the definition in s 6AAA ought to be amended to reflect that operators are only entitled to intercept and monitor communications where those communications pose a threat to the security of the network itself.

Personally, I'd want the ammendment to be clear that it applies to network troubleshooting as well as network security so that network administrators can definitely use tools like Wireshark to fix their network.

Government

DOJ Report On NSA Wiretaps Finally Released 174

oliphaunt writes "As regular readers will recall, after the 2004 elections the New York Times revealed that the NSA had been conducting illegal wiretaps of American citizens since early 2001. Over the course of the next four years, more information about the illegal program trickled out, leading to several lawsuits against the government and various officials involved in its implementation. This week several of these matters are coming to a head: Yesterday, the lawyers for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation filed a motion for summary judgment in their lawsuit against the Obama DOJ. The motion begins by quoting a statement made by Candidate Obama in 2007, acknowledging that the warrantless wiretap program was illegal. US District Judge Vaughn Walker has given indications that he is increasingly skeptical of the government's arguments in this case. In what might just be a coincidence of timing, today the long-awaited report from the DOJ inspector general to the US Congress about the wiretapping program was declassified and released. Emptywheel has the beginnings of a working thread going here."
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Submission + - Emergent AI in an indie RTS game. (blogspot.com)

x4000 writes: "My recent RTS game uses a new style of AI that hybridizes rules-based AI with emergent AI logic. As a disclaimer, I'm really not an AI programmer at all — my background is in databases, financial modeling, etc. But it just so happens that database experience, which often involved distilling data points from multiple sources and then combining them into suggested decisions for executives, also makes a great foundation for certain styles of AI. The approach I came up with leans heavily on my database background, and what concepts I am familiar with from reading a bit about AI theory (emergent behavior, fuzzy logic, etc). The results are startlingly good.

Total development time on the AI was less than 3 months, and its use of tactics is some of the best in the RTS genre. I'm very open to talking about anything and everything to do with the design I used, as I think it's a viable new approach to AI to explore in games, and I'd like to see other developers potentially carry it even further. Here's an overview of how the AI in AI War: Fleet Command works."

The Internet

Are Amazon's Web Services Going Open Source? 42

ruphus13 writes "Amazon has been one of the early movers in the cloud computing space, with its AWS offerings, including S3 and EC2. Now, there is a lot of chatter around the imminent open sourcing of all its APIs and services and the impact that will have on the other 'clouds' out there — public or private. From the article, 'Amazon faces significant threats from open source cloud computing efforts if it pursues a purely proprietary path [...] Amazon can't ignore the cost advantages and diversity of product offerings that open source players are already offering in the cloud computing space. The company's best move is to open source its tools, which will end up diversifying them, play on a level field in terms of cost with the open source alternatives, and charge for services. Absent these moves, the company will lose potential customers to free, open source alternatives [...] Word is Amazon's legal team is currently 'investigating' open sourcing their various web services API's including EC2, S3, etc.', although these have not been confirmed by Amazon."

Comment Re:Wrong defense (Score 1) 207

The argument is that a few BT packets do not constitute proof of copyright infringement. The individual packets do not breach copyright so the ISP or copyright holder would require a record of a whole session before you could start reasonably making copyright infringement assertions.

Comment Not as dumb as the summary makes out (Score 1) 207

From the article:

They also claimed that, because files are broken up into tiny "packets" before being sent over BitTorrent, this may not be enough to suggest a "substantial portion" of a copyrighted file was distributed.

iiNet are suggesting that observing a couple of bittorrent packets is not enough to infer a breach of copyright because each packet does not contain a substantial amount of the original work. Much more data would be required before you could assume a copyright breach.

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