unixluv - Slashdot User

Age of Conan GM Fired For Cybering 11

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday August 13, 2008 @03:33PM

It's common knowledge that the best things in life are to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women. An Age of Conan GM decided to try and add cybering to the list and was fired for his trouble. Funcom, the company behind Age of Conan states, "If the guidelines are broken there are consequences." While I will concede that cybering with players when you're a GM is a breach of etiquette, it's not as serious as a charging Rhinoceros; it doesn't get any more serious than a Rhinoceros about to charge your ass. I put on my robe and wizard hat.

Blogger Successfully Quashes Subpoena 172

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @04:47PM from the oh-and-here's-your-head dept.

Ares writes "In a follow-up to Blogger Subpoenaed for Criticizing Trial Lawyers, Katherine Seidel's blog indicates that not only has she successfully quashed her subpoena, but the lawyer issuing said subpoena is now under orders to appear and explain why the courts shouldn't sanction him for it. This should be interesting, because in addition to Ms. Seidel's subpoena in New Hampshire, the lawyer issued a similar subpoena to a doctor and a Harvard professor under similar circumstances."

Submission + - Sex with Robots?

Submitted by

unixluv

on Sunday December 30, 2007 @04:09PM

unixluv writes: "Are we nearing a future that includes having sex with robots ala Bladerunner? Some seem to think so. David Levy has caused a stir with his book 'Love and Sex with Robots'. More discussions have followed with an interview with the author. Maybe we should find a better term than sex robot or replicant? How about RealDoll? These and these are not your dad's blowup dolls."

Submission + - Is ISP Web Content Filtering Here? 1

Submitted by

unixluv

on Sunday December 09, 2007 @05:12PM

unixluv writes: "An ISP is testing web content filtering and content substitution software, see http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000337.html. While it seems innocent enough, is this the wave of the future? Will your ISP censor your web experience? Now consider it in the context of The MPAA asking for ISP Content Filtering on /. this week. Is the RIAA next? Will this spawn a war of web tools to circumvent ISP tools?"

Submission + - FAA to Use AT&T Cell Towers for GPS Air Travel (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by mattnyc99 on Wednesday November 21, 2007 @01:23PM

mattnyc99 writes: With the inevitable headaches of holiday travel setting in this week, every geek is probably looking forward to the FAA's NextGen air traffic control plan that we've already discussed. But now comes word that ITT Corp. has won the $1.8 billion contract to lay down transceivers between controllers and pilots—largely because it plans to install them in the same telecom towers that get your iPhone ringing. From the article: "One of the reasons for ITT's surprise win — it beat out aviation heavyweights Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — was its partnership with AT&T, which will lend hundreds of cell towers to anchor the new surveillance technology for tracking planes in the air. 'They have an extensive network of towers which provides almost a built-in infrastructure,' says FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto. Piggybacking on an existing system is also keeping the budget down, he acknowledges."

Submission + - SCO's Darl McBride: "It's not the end of the l (linuxinsider.com)

Submitted by oahazmatt on Wednesday November 21, 2007 @12:04PM

oahazmatt writes: In an interview with LinuxInsider, Darl McBride had some interesting things to say about SCO, recent judgements, the future of the company and how it's a rather exciting time to be a SCO employee. "It's like the boxer who has come out of the ring after getting all beaten up, and he comes over to his trainer and says, 'The guy didn't touch me.' And the trainer says, 'Then you better keep your eye on the ref, because somebody's beating the living hell out of you.'"

Submission + - Seagate's new 1TB drive -- costly, but so are SUVs (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

Lucas123

on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @11:04AM

Lucas123 writes: "Tested with Simpli Software's HDTach, the Barracuda 7200.11 series drive posted an 85.5MB/sec average read speed. Compare that with the 57MB/sec recorded from a 250GB Seagate hard drive (ST3250824AS 3.AA), and that's a huge difference for a hard drive. Random-access time was also lower for the 1TB Barracuda at 12.9ms, vs. 15.7ms for the 250GB drive. But the cost of the Barracuda may put you off. On the other hand, hey, it's a terabyte of storage."

Submission + - Does it really make sense? Its year 2007

Submitted by cayfer on Monday October 29, 2007 @05:10PM

cayfer writes: You go to a fine dining restaurant, willing to pay $100 per person. You order some fancy lobster food. While delivering your order, the waiter warns you that it is quite possible that there might be some dirt hidden in the lobster and you need to pay more for the tools to dissect the lobster to search for any dirt in your food.

You're shocked and somehow agree to pay the extras hoping that you wont eat any dirt! Eventually you find some dead flies, a couple of cooked roaches and a little rat dung in your food. When you show these to your waiter he/she says they are sorry, and you need to reorder... Of course the first order of lobsters are already on your bill. Not to mention that you have the choice of ordering hamburgers and fries at the same price; but only if you have been a loyal corporate customer in the past 5 years.

You try starting an argument but the restaurant owner arrives and tells you that this is how the business is run all over the world. Its the most popular way of eating out.

Now; replace all "food" with "MS Windows OpSys" and reread the above text. When the text is about food; the story is unacceptable; but when the story is about WinX Opsys, it is perfectly acceptable and is worth an amount in the order of $100.

Today I blocked the traffic of about 10 compromised computers on my network and I'm really fed up doing this everyday for Wintel computers seemingly equipped with professional anti-virus and firewall software.

Its been 20+ years since the Windows Opsys has been out there and we are still fighting its bugs. Is this the way it should be? Should we accept this as it is? Is this fate or what?

Submission + - Leopard Hacked to Run on PCs

Submitted by puterTerrorist on Monday October 29, 2007 @05:02PM

puterTerrorist writes: The OSx86 Scene forum is offering full instructions on how to install the newest Mac OS on Windows PCs.

The cat and mouse game between hackers and Apple takes another move, with news that Apple's new Leopard operating system has already been successfully installed on Windows PCs. The OSx86 Scene forum has released details of how Windows users can migrate to Apple's new OS, without investing in new hardware — even though installing Leopard on an PC may be counter to Apple's terms and conditions. Here is the story

Submission + - Verizon sends & profits from text message spam

Submitted by Anonymous Consumer Complaint on Monday October 29, 2007 @03:59PM

Anonymous Consumer Complaint writes: Verizon Wireless charges consumers for every text message they recieve, even if it is spam. Verizon customer support refuses to give refunds for text message spam. And the only options customer service discussed to address this issue are: 1) Cancelling all text messages 2) Changing the customer's phone number These are draconian options. However, what may not be known to many customers, is that there is a Verizon website that allows anonymous users to freely send text messages to Verizon Wireless phone numbers. http://vtext.com/ Thus, Verizon Wireless is enabling the sending of spam with its own website, charging customers for this easily abused service, refusing to give customers refunds, and when they complain, not making them aware that the spam could be coming from their own webservers.

Submission + - Japan to fingerprint all foreign visitors (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by azuredrake on Monday October 29, 2007 @03:55PM

azuredrake writes: According to the BBC, Japan's government is planning to fingerprint and photograph all visiting foreigners beginning on November 20th of this year. As support for the controversial programs, the country's justice minister has said "a friend of a friend" was a member of al-Qaeda who had visited the country illegally several times and had been involved in one of the bombings in Bali. While this seems more like political suicide than a convincing argument to violate the privacy of all visiting foreigners, the program itself is interesting. If it succeeds, other countries would surely follow suit, leading to a vast national database of fingerprints and photographs of travelers.

Feed news.com: FTC: Let us fine spyware operations, already (news.com)

From feed by cnetfeed on Monday October 29, 2007 @03:52PM

Democratic commissioner says agency would be much more effective in halting deceptive spyware makers if Congress allowed it to levy hefty monetary penalties.

Identity Thieves Not Big On Technology 94

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @08:05PM from the not-much-hacking-involved dept.

alphadogg sends us to Network World, as is his wont, for a summary of a new study of identity theft based on the outcomes of more than 500 Secret Service cases from 2000 to 2006. Here is the study report (PDF). The AP has coverage emphasizing other slants on the findings. Among the surprises: just 51% of convicted ID thieves were sent to prison. Only 20% of the cases involved use of the Internet, and such cases may be on the decline. More perpetrators used good old-fashioned dumpster diving and stealing stuff out of mailboxes.

Journal Journal: 6th Circuit strikes down 2257 age verification for pornsites 359

Journal by arbitraryaardvark on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @04:31PM

How Appealing reports that a court has struck down age verification requirements for porn sites, as a First Amendment violation.
While the average slashdot user has never been to such a site, porn has been a driving force in the economics and technology of the net.
The age verification requirements of U.S.C. Title 18, Section 2257 were yet another attempt to regulate to death what the government can't outright prohibit. The re

Feed Engadget: NASA's third Space Elevator challenge falls short (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @09:32AM

Filed under: Robots, Transportation

The third time 'round hasn't brought any luck to the space elevator crowd. The NASA-sponsored challenge is in its third year of running, and while technology is improving at a rapid rate, it's still not quite ready to meet the Space Elevator challenge's demands. Speed requirements have been boosted to 2 meters per second, and this year's contest seems have gone off without the geeky rule disputes of last year. The University of Saskatchewan came closest to claiming the prize with its ground laser-powered bot, and only fell a few seconds short of the required speed. Hopefully next year will see a winner, and we'll all get our shot at being fried by ionizing radiation before the century is up.

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