ElGanzoLoco - Slashdot User

Apple Patents "Enforceable" Ad Viewing On Devices 439

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday November 16, 2009 @10:39AM from the touch-the-lizard dept.

Rexdude writes "Apple has filed a patent that forces users to interact with an ad. FTFA: 'Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn't simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.'" We've been following this story for awhile now but it seems to have broken into the mainstream.

Comment Rise in paid downloading? (Score 1) 251

by ElGanzoLoco on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @03:44AM (#29271121) Attached to: Drop in P2P Traffic Attributed to Traffic Shaping

Or could it also be that paid-for downloads and streaming audio and video have increased, thus decreasing the share of P2P traffic in the total?

(No I didn't RTFA, it's way too early for that)

Delete Data On Netbook If Stolen? 459

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @02:18AM from the grab-brick-smash-window dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I have just moved overseas on a 2-year working holiday visa and so I picked up a netbook for the interim, an MSI Wind U100 Plus running WinXP. I love it to bits. But as I am traveling around I am somewhat worried about theft. Most of my important stuff is in Gmail and Google Docs; however, I don't always have Net access and find it useful to gear up the offline versions for both. Ideally I would like to securely delete all the offline data from the hard drive if it were stolen. Since it is backed up in the cloud, and the netbook is so cheap I don't really care about recovery, a solution that bricks it would be fine — and indeed would give me a warm glow knowing a prospective thief would have wasted their time. But it's not good if they can extract the HD and get at the data some other way. All thief-foiling suggestions are welcome, be they software, hardware, or other."

Eye In the Sky For City Crime Fighting 389

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 10, 2009 @09:33AM from the lawn-forcement-panopticon dept.

Tiger4 writes "The mayor of the City of Lancaster in the Antelope Valley of southern California is considering a high-definition video flying platform to aid in crime fighting. The aircraft, would circle the city constantly, able to zoom in on activity spots instantly. 'You never know when you are being watched or followed. It would be stupid to commit a crime. You see it with such detail,' said Mayor R. Rex Parris, who took a ride last week in a camera-equipped airplane with pilot Dick Rutan. 'I have every hope that Lancaster will be the first city to deploy it. I've never been so excited about anything.' Dick Rutan is the same pilot who flew around the world non-stop in the Voyager, custom built by his brother Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites in Mojave." The aircraft is nothing special, a garden-variety Cessna or the like, but "the camera is an example of technology developed for and used by the military making a transition to civilian applications, Rutan said."

Emigrating To a Freer Country? 1359

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday June 27, 2009 @12:09AM from the all-my-recommendations-require-time-machines dept.

puroresu writes "I currently reside in the UK. In recent years I've seen privacy, free expression and civil liberties steadily eroded, and I can't see anything changing for the better any time soon. With people being banned from the UK for expressing (admittedly reprehensible) opinions, the continuing efforts to implement mandatory ID cards and the prospect of a Conservative government in the near future, I'm seriously considering emigrating to a less restrictive country. Which countries would you recommend in terms of freedom and privacy? Distance is not an issue, though a reasonable level of stability and provision of public services would be a bonus."

The Broken Design of Microsoft's "Fix it" Tool 165

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 06, 2009 @12:52PM from the teething-problems dept.

$luggo writes "Curious about MS Fix It, I recently went hunting in the MS knowledge base for articles that provide the new EZ-button. After locating on few, I decided to click the button to download the Microsoft Installer package containing the executable and/or files that automatically enable the DVD Library feature in Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate — on my XP Media Center. 'Surely, MS will use some scripting, HTTP User-Agent sniffing, or even Genuine Windows validation to verify that I am running Vista,' I thought. It did not and I canceled the download when I received the prompt to save the file. So, I wonder: is there a Fix-it for Fix it? Because I can easily imagine someone doing what I did without scrolling to the bottom of the KB article and verifying that the article applies to their OS/version. This is a great example poor design. Why not simply use the download approach that other articles / fixes / service packs use, whereby the user must select the appropriate OS?"

Why the Mediterranean Is the Net's Achilles' Heel 195

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @03:56PM from the raise-plow-blade dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A spate of broken cables has brought disruption for many of the world's Web users in 2008 — and the Med has been at the center of the problems. For political reasons, the Mediterranean Sea is an Internet bottleneck through which the majority of traffic between Europe and Asia is squeezed. That traffic must run the gauntlet of earthquakes and heavy maritime traffic to reach its destination. Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages."

Comment Re:eh hum.... (Score 5, Insightful) 287

by ElGanzoLoco on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @07:16PM (#26273477) Attached to: HP Accused of Illegal Exportation To Iran

I can't imagine that the Iran market is big enough to justify the risk of getting caught. But that's just me.

Yeah, that's just you. An oil-rich country with 70 million inhabitants, many of them middle-class, urbanized, literate, and under 30, is a gold mine.

Don't think Iran is anything like Afghanistan or Iraq. It is among the most developed countries in the Middle-East and Central Asia, and definitely the one with the best-educated population.

As a side note, finding common computing equipment and parts there is not a problem, and virtually everything imported to Iran either transits via Dubai or (more often than not) directly bought there to wholesale companies. The goods are then loaded on small wooden boats and shipped to Iran. Most of this trade escapes any sort of control (at least on the Dubai side of things).

In other words, the "US embargo on Iran" is a frigging joke, and a total waste of time.

Comment Re:Similar experience. (Score 1) 855

by ElGanzoLoco on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @05:44PM (#26272383) Attached to: Tales From the Support Crypt

Exactly. Similar story here, but with a twist: we bought a Mac for my grandmother, well into her eighties, and who hadn't ever touched a computer before.

But, being an avid bridge player, she wanted to play bridge online with her friends. Turns out they all use the same, Windows-only, bridge software from the French Federation of Bridge.

So I installed... Parallels and Windows XP on top of OS X. I was of course worried that the setup would be too complicated for her, so I made it as simple as possible (shortcuts in Dock etc). But she's got it mastered now, and I think she's even figured how to install other Windows software!

And seeing this 85 year old granny using a laptop with bleeding-edge virtual machine and 2 operating systems to play bridge online never ceases to amaze me.

Oregon Governor Proposes Vehicle Mileage Tax 713

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @04:38PM from the if-you-have-nothing-to-hide dept.

tiedyejeremy writes "As covered by the Crosscut Blog, the Governor of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski, is proposing a change in the funding of the Oregonian transportation system that drops gasoline taxes and, by way of GPS tracking, taxes the number of miles driven, to the tune of 1.2 cents per mile. The reason for the proposed change is that lower fuel consumption via fuel efficiency will leave the system underfunded. The concerns involve government tracking of the movements of vehicles within the state, though this has been denied by ODOT official, James Whitty. I'm wondering how this affects people using the Interstate System and private roads, and if the outputs can or will be used by law enforcement to check alibis."

Mediterranean Undersea Cables Cut, Again 329

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday December 19, 2008 @04:11PM from the cut-me-twice-shame-on-you dept.

miller60 writes "Three undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea have failed within minutes of each other in an incident that is eerily similar to a series of cable cuts in the region in early 2008. The cable cuts are already causing serious service problems in the Middle East and Asia. See coverage at the Internet Storm Center, Data Center Knowledge and Bloomberg. The February 2008 cable cuts triggered rampant speculation about sabotage, but were later attributed to ships that dropped anchor in the wrong place."

Acorns Disappear Across the Country 474

Posted by kdawson on Monday December 01, 2008 @09:11AM from the curiouser-and-curiouser dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Botanist Rod Simmons thought he was going crazy when couldn't find any acorns near his home in Arlington County, Virginia. 'I'm used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it's something I just didn't believe,' said Simmons. Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill. Simmons and Naturalist Greg Zell began to do some research and found Internet discussion groups, including one on Topix called 'No acorns this year,' reporting the same thing from as far away as the Midwest up through New England and Nova Scotia. 'We live in Glenwood Landing, N.Y., and don't have any acorns this year. Really weird,' wrote one. 'None in Kansas either! Curiouser and curiouser.' The absence of acorns could have something to do with the weather and Simmons has a theory about the wet and dry cycles. But many skeptics say oaks in other regions are producing plenty of acorns, and the acorn bust is nothing more than the extreme of a natural boom-and-bust cycle. But the bottom line is that no one really knows. 'It's sort of a mystery,' Zell said."

Lenovo Service Disables Laptops With a Text Message 257

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 25, 2008 @09:10AM from the say-the-magic-word dept.

narramissic writes "Lenovo plans to announce on Tuesday a service that allows users to remotely disable a PC by sending a text message. A user can send the command from a specified cell phone number — each ThinkPad can be paired with up to 10 cell phones — to kill a PC. The software will be available free from Lenovo's Web site. It will also be available on certain ThinkPad notebooks equipped with mobile broadband starting in the first half of 2009. 'You steal my PC and ... if I can deliver a signal to that PC that turns it off, hey, I'm good now,' said Stacy Cannady, product manager of security at Lenovo. 'The limitation here is that you have to have a WAN card in the PC and you must be paying a data plan for it,' Cannady added."

Comment Military Aircraft? (Score 1) 125

by ElGanzoLoco on Friday November 21, 2008 @04:48AM (#25842999) Attached to: Zapping Contrails With Microwave Emitters

Perhaps the military see it as a possible solution to reduce contrails on fighter jets?

Stealth aircraft aren't any good if they leave a visible contrail behind ;) (Actually I'm not sure if/how they've dealt with that on current stealth aircraft?)

Comment Used games market boosts the new games market (Score 1) 209

by ElGanzoLoco on Tuesday November 18, 2008 @12:03PM (#25802281) Attached to: Game Designer Makes Case For Used Games

Judging from how my little brothers manage their game collection (Wii, DS, PSP) I am pretty convinced that the ability to sell their old games (to a game store) is what allows them to buy the newer ones, usually first-hand.

Otherwise they wouldn't have nearly enough pocket money to buy them.

Restrictions on the second-hand market are silly. It will just push more people on Piratebay, since that other silly restriction pushed by the industry, DRM, has also failed spectacularly.

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