Comment What. (Score 2, Insightful) 80
The submitter is talking about takedown provisions as "egregious." Considering the alternative to a takedown notice is just opening up with a lawsuit, I'm not sure what about it is so evilly anti-consumer.
Comment re: Gimmick (Score 2, Insightful) 131
In response to the multitude of comments referring to 3D as a gimmick, maybe you should take a step back and realize that pretty much everything about a video game is a "gimmick." Nothing about a video game serves a useful purpose. 3D presentation? gimmick, 2D worked fine. HD graphics? Gimmick, plenty of game showed that SD could give us pretty games.
Everything about video games is a gimmick. I think what you're aiming for is "I'm not interested in this." That's fine, but not a basis for a value judgment.
Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed 306
jamie writes "A post has just gone up on Diaspora's blog revealing what the project actually looks like for the first time. While it's not yet ready to be released to the public, the open-source social networking project is giving the world a glimpse of what it looks like today and also releasing the project code, as promised. At first glance, this preview version of Diaspora looks sparse, but clean. Oddly enough, with its big pictures and stream, it doesn't look unlike Apple's new Ping music social network mixed with yes, Facebook."
Comment Re:That's cute (Score 1) 795
I knew nothing about this company until you mentioned it, and holy crap their stuff looks cool. Pushing 5 games out of a small dev in one year makes me leery of the quality of the end product, however
More research is in order.
Sun Founders' Push For Open Source Education 169
theodp writes "Unfortunately for textbook publishers, Scott McNealy has some extra time on his hands since Oracle acquired Sun and put him out of a job. The Sun co-founder has turned his attention to the problem of math textbooks, the price of which keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. 'Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,' McNealy quips. 'We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks' in the US, he adds. 'It seems to me we could put that all online for free.' McNealy's Curriki is an online hub for free textbooks and other course material. Others hoping to bring elements of the Open Source model to the school textbook world include Vinod Khosla (who co-founded Sun with McNealy), whose wife Neeru heads up the CK-12 Foundation, which has already developed nine of the core textbooks for high school."
Comment Steam (Score 2, Interesting) 427
Hopefully the wine project and Valve are working together on this and that linux version of steam pops up soon. I installed DAO via steam in linux the other day and there was an intermediate step about configuring wine (in the windows version of steam) that gives me some hope.
Comment Re:Well Alrighty Then... (Score 1) 156
You, sir, have done more to help linux gain respect and use than any of those haters have. Bravo!
Comment Re:Does anyone.... (Score 2, Informative) 156
The software management module is just a frontend to zypper, which works pretty much identically to apt.
Comment Re:Does anyone.... (Score 4, Informative) 156
Build your own image with USB as your target. The process is simple and streamlined (and they have videos).
Comment Re:Does anyone.... (Score 4, Insightful) 156
I use openSuSE, as do most of the people I know. It doesn't have the warm fuzzies that people seem to get off Fedora and it doesn't have the nerd chic/new hotness feeling that Ubuntu has (which many, many others have had before, I might add), but it is a very well-maintained and established distro with probably the best configuration/installation (yast is very nice) of the lot, and has benefited from closeness to both the GNOME and KDE projects.
It's a nice distro.
Comment Re:in no other country in the world (Score 1) 150
Not actually true. Many states have crimes for wiretapping or even just recording. These are extremely useful laws, especially as a curb on overly enthusiastic law enforcement.
Comment Reaaally (Score 1) 387
"In a rare outburst of subjectivity . . .
ahahaha what?
Comment The children! (Score 4, Insightful) 833
I like how slashdot commenters love to use "won't somebody think of the children?!" as a device for sarcastic mockery of various Internet policies. Then this happens, and we get a thread full of
"But
Comment Re:I love it ... (Score 1) 288
I don't know where this myth came from (probably people trying to make moral rather than legal or logical arguments about piracy). There are federal criminal laws regarding copyright and trademark infringement. Many, many states have their own versions.
Comment Re:A solution looking for a problem (Score 1) 202
"anyone can put a public key on their homepage and sign everything they write."
You have an interesting definition of "anyone."
