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The Internet

Amazon Web Services Launches DNS Service 146

Posted by CmdrTaco from the welcome-to-the-holiday-dolldrums dept.
wiredmikey writes "Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced a highly available and scalable Domain Name System service designed to give developers and businesses a reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications. The service, 'Route 53,' effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS — such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon Simple Storage Service bucket — and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS."

Comment Re:hate speech is NOT protected anywhere. (Score 1) 273

by UnCivil Liberty (#34277968) Attached to: A Single Re-Tweet Lands Chinese Woman in Labor Camp

"A Place of Assembly Certificate of Operation (PA) is required for premises where 75 or more members of the public gather indoors or 200 or more gather outdoors, for religious, recreational, educational, political or social purposes, or to consume food or drink." - http://www.nyc.gov/html/dob/html/applications_and_permits/pa.shtml

Comment Re:How does this happen? (Score 2, Interesting) 313

by UnCivil Liberty (#34020566) Attached to: Inside a Full-Body-Scanning X-Ray Van

Obama is as bad as Bush? Are you cracked?

Obama voted against war. Bush started two wars.

Citation Needed

Then Senator Obama served from January 3, 2005 – November 16, 2008, the Iraq resolution was enacted enacted October 16, 2002, the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists September 18th, 2001. When did Obama "vote against war", when he was in the Illinois State Senate?

Comment Re:No predator(s)? (Score 2, Funny) 293

by UnCivil Liberty (#33672262) Attached to: Plants Near Chernobyl Adapt To Contaminated Soil

Could it be that whatever fauna that survived, adapted and/or now thrives might do so under conditions perhaps harsher due to radiation, yet plausibly improved by a potentially reduced presence of any predator species, whom may not have fared as well, or may have been displaced?

The deer got superpowers, but the bears glow in the dark

Comment Re:Patriotism Is the Last Refuge of a Scoundrel (Score 2, Insightful) 650

by UnCivil Liberty (#33401374) Attached to: Just Where Is The Lincoln Memorial, Anyhow?

The .fortune at the bottom of the page showing this story say:

It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.

Slashdot has achieved artificial intelligence. Or it's another part of the same conspiracy hiding the Lincoln Memorial from Beck's zombie army. Or both, since "reality has a well-known liberal bias" (- Stephen Colbert).

My .fortune offers a retort: "Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches... -- Percy Bysshe Shelley"

Comment Re:Gambling leaves a trail of victims (Score 1) 296

by UnCivil Liberty (#31758018) Attached to: Mass. Gambling Bill Would Criminalize Online Poker

To give your comment some context, it's also worth noting that in the UK 0.6% percent of the population struggle with problem gambling, 68% of the population had participated in some form of gambling, and only 3% gambled online.

Source: British Gambling Prevalence Survey 2007 - http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/pdf/british%20gambling%20prevalence%20survey%202007.pdf

Additional arguments can be be made regarding poker vs. other casino games, but I'll leave those for other posters.
Games

Ubisoft Working On a New Anti-Piracy Tool 377

Posted by Soulskill from the surely-to-be-welcomed-with-open-arms dept.
Ubisoft recently revealed that their game sales have seen a 50% drop over the past quarter, blaming the overall market slowdown and piracy (particularly on the DS) for the low numbers. They also announced that four of their games, including Splinter Cell: Conviction and Red Steel 2, would be delayed until 2010. The company's CEO, Yves Guillemot, now says they are working on a new anti-piracy tool that should be ready by the end of 2009. He didn't offer any details about how it would be implemented.
Microsoft

Microsoft Uses Human Computing Game To Tune Bing 119

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the wtb-better-rewards dept.
Al writes "Microsoft researchers have come up with a novel way to fine-tune the algorithms behind the company's new search engine, Bing: a game that harnesses human computing power to improve the results. Called Page Hunt, the game (which of course requires Silverlight to run) shows users a web page and asks them to figure out a search query that should produce the page within the first five results. The idea is to better understand user behavior and expectations and ultimately improve its search algorithms. Other human-computing projects have sought to digitize out-of-print text (reCAPTCHA) and image labeling (Google Image Labeler). Can Microsoft use a similar approach to gain the edge over its rival? Or does Google already have the edge with SearchWiki, which lets searchers re-rank its results?"
Games

Inside Video Game Localization 90

Posted by Soulskill from the more-than-just-a-babelfish-script dept.
Atlus USA is a company known for their skill at localizing games — that is, adapting the text and speech in a game to a different language or culture. They've written a summary of their timeline for modifying a game, explaining that it's much more complicated than just running everything by a translator. They also have other articles looking at various parts of their work with more detail. When work begins, they take a few weeks to familiarize themselves with the game, giving them the proper context to understand character interactions and names. The actual translation then takes anywhere from a week to a few months, depending on how much material there is and whether they need to bring in new voice actors. Another month or so is allotted to actually implementing the changes and making technical modifications, after which another month or two is dedicated to bug testing. Then the game is submitted back to its original manufacturer for approval, a process that can take two months, and finally the new discs and game boxes are created, which adds another month. Thus, what many gamers see as a "simple" localization process can take six months or more to complete.
Image

Ireland Criminalizes Blasphemy Screenshot-sm 1376

Posted by samzenpus from the who-wants-a-flogging dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Another European country clamps down on free speech. From the article: 'It does seem bizarre that, in 2009, a modern European nation would seek to shield religious belief from criticism — yet that is what is happening in Ireland right now. In repealing the 1961 Defamation Act, the Irish government sought to expunge the worst excesses of Ireland's draconian laws restricting free speech, but in the process it has ended up making offending religious belief a criminal offence. Aside from a 25,000 fine (reduced from the 100,000 originally sought by the government), the new Defamation Act gives the authorities the power to stage raids on publishers: the courts may now issue a warrant authorising the police to enter, using "reasonable force," premises where they have grounds for believing there are copies of "blasphemous statements."'"
The Courts

Australian Website Bans ... Australians 247

Posted by timothy from the only-ones-who-could-in-a-place-like-this dept.
Nazlfrag writes "Earlier this month the blog and discussion forum ZGeek was sued for $42 million AUD over a user's comment. The plaintiffs are aspiring movie producers who claim to have lost a movie deal due to a 9/11 conspiracy discussion thread. Even though the initial lawsuit has been thrown out, and the company complied with lawyers' demands by taking down the offending posts, it is believed the plaintiffs will file suit again. In addition to suing the forum, in an Australian first they have been granted an injunction to force the ISPs to disclose the IP addresses of the two posters involved. Due to the risk of incurring even greater legal costs the company is closing its doors in Australia, and will ban their fellow countrymen from posting there again."
Businesses

Goldman Sachs Trading Source Code In the Wild? 324

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the bunny-ball-ball dept.
Hangtime writes "The world's most valuable source code could be in the wild. According to a report by Reuters, a Russian immigrant and former Goldman Sachs developer named Sergey Aleynikov was picked up at Newark Airport on July 4th by the FBI on charges of industrial espionage. According to the complaint, Sergey, prior to his early June exit from Goldman, copied, encrypted and uploaded source code inferred to be the code used by Goldman Sachs to process in real-time (micro-seconds) trades between multiple equity and commodity platforms. While trying to cover his tracks, the system backed up a series of bash commands so he was unable to erase his history, which would later give him away to Goldman and the authorities. So the question is: where are the 32MB of encrypted files that Sergey uploaded to a German server?
Sci-Fi

The Technology of Neuromancer After 25 Years 203

Posted by timothy from the where-were-you-when-it-came-out dept.
William Gibson's Neuromancer was first published 25 years ago. Dr_Ken writes with an excerpt from an article at MacWorld that delves into the current state of some of the technology that drives the book: "'Neuromancer is important because of its astounding predictive power. Gibson's core idea in the novel is the direct integration of man and computer, with all the possibilities (and horrors) that such a union entails. The book eventually sold more than 160 million copies, but bringing the book to popular attention took a long time and a lot of word-of-mouth. The sci-fi community, however, was acutely aware of the novel's importance when it came out: Neuromancer ran the table on sci-fi's big three awards in 1984, winning the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award.'"

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