Comment Re:Breaking no laws? Maybe yes, maybe no. (Score 1) 1188
Even if there are copyrights on the structures, that doesn't prevent taking photos, only publishing them.
Comment Re:Controller Button Count (Score 1) 192
There is a typo above. Actually the chatpad has 47 buttons, not 37.
Comment Controller Button Count (Score 1) 192
Xbox 360 has 18 buttons (a, b, x, y, left-bumper, right-bumper, back, start, left thumb stick, right thumb stick, 8-way D-Pad) and six analog axes (two 2-axis thumb sticks and two analog triggers).
The xbox chatpad accessory adds 37 buttons to the controller, but I don't think that they can be used for anything other than text entry. Additionally, you can plug in any USB keyboard and use it for text entry.
Comment Re:This is awful (Score 1) 300
They already sold it. In 2005.
Comment Re:Read-to-me (Score 1) 451
Look at it this way. Text to speech is cheap to implement and gives them another feature to market. Some may find it useful.
I think it would be great if they had hybrid audiobook / normal books which would use a narrator instead of a robotic text to speech. That would save the hassle of having to track down an audiobook version. Of course, the audiobook would have to have page number metadata to allow seemless swtiching between print and audio modes.
Comment Re:Too much of a burden on Wikipedia (Score 2, Insightful) 141
Videos can be especially helpful when used to describe motions and processes. Things like engine cycles, swarming behavior, and traffic patterns would be good subjects for videos.
Comment Re:Move to Arizona (Score 1) 755
I also used to think that GMT might be sufficient, but, really, it is not.
Local time is useful when knowing when something occurs in relation to apparent position of the sun, which is still how most people order their days. It helps us know when businesses are likely to be open, when it is rude to call people, and helps to deal with countless other cultural expectations.
Microsoft Designed UAC to Annoy Users 571
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "At the 2008 RSA security conference, Microsoft's David Cross was quoted as saying, 'The reason we put UAC into the platform was 'to annoy users. I'm serious.' The logic behind this statement is that it should encourage application vendors to eliminate as many unnecessary privilege escalations as possible by causing users to complain about all the UAC 'Cancel or Allow' prompts. Of course, they probably didn't expect that Microsoft would instead get most of the complaints for training users to ignore meaningless security warnings."
Email In the 18th Century 279
morphovar forwards a writeup in Low-tech Magazine recounting an almost-forgotten predecessor to email and packet-switched messaging: the optical telegraph. The article maps out some of the European networks but provides no details of those built in North America in the early 1800s. Man-in-the-middle attacks were dead easy. "More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an airplane — wireless and without need for electricity. The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers ... placed 5 to 20 kilometers apart from each other. Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through a telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. A message could be transmitted from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour's time. A few years before, a messenger on a horse would have needed at least a month's time to do the same."
Alabama Schools to be First in US to Get XO Laptop 334
CountryGeek passed us a link to a story in the Birmingham News, saying that schools in the Alabama city will be the first US students to make use of the XO laptop. The piece touches on a bit of the project's history, and seems to indicate the Birmingham school district is ready to make a serious commitment to these devices. "Langford has asked the City Council to approve $7 million for the laptops and a scholarship program that would give Birmingham students with a C average or above a scholarship to college or tech school of their choice. The City Council has not yet approved the funding. The rugged, waterproof computers will be distributed to students on April 15, Langford said, and children will be allowed to take them home. If a computer is lost, the school system can disable it, rendering it useless, Langford said. Students will turn in their computers at the end of their eighth-grade year."
FCC Chairman Tries For More Media Consolidation 182
An anonymous reader writes "FCC chairman Kevin Martin wants to relax rules on how many media outlets one company can own in one market. Democratic commissioner Copps wants to rally the public to stop media consolidation. He says he's 'blowing a loud trumpet' for a 'call to battle' to stop the FCC from giving big media a generous Christmas present."
Security in Ten Years 154
Schneier has posted a conversation between himself and Marcus Ranum, Chief Security Officer for Tenable Network Security, Inc. looking at where security is headed. "[...] at a meta-level, the problems are going to stay the same. What's shocking and disappointing to me is that our responses to those problems also remain the same, in spite of the obvious fact that they aren't effective."
Peru Orders 260K OLPCs, Mexico to Get 50K 271
eldavojohn writes "Perhaps in response to recent news that the lawsuit against the OLPC may be a scam, Peru's government has announced they want 260,000 OLPCs and a Mexican billionaire by the name of Carlos Slim has also asked for 50,000 that he wishes to distribute in Mexico. Things are looking good for the OLPC."
GPL Lawsuit May Not Settle 285
A number of readers wrote in to inform us that contrary to earlier indications, it's no sure thing that the lawsuit alleging GPL violation by Monsoon Multimedia will get settled out of court. Linux.com now reports that the SFLC's legal director Daniel Ravicher has stressed that no agreement has been reached: "Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient to settle the matter, because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught, because the only punishment would be to come into compliance." (Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of Sourceforge, Inc.)
New Algorithms Improve Image Search 111
bc90021 writes "Electrical engineers from UC San Diego are making progress on an image search engine that analyzes the images themselves. At the core of this Supervised Multiclass Labeling system is a set of simple yet powerful algorithms developed at UCSD. Once you train the system (the 'supervised' part), you can set it loose on a database of unlabeled images. The system calculates the probability that various objects it has been trained to recognize are present, and labels the images accordingly. After labeling, images can be retrieved via keyword searches. Accuracy of the UCSD system has outpaced that of other content-based image labeling and retrieval systems in the literature. One of the co-authors works at Google, where the researchers have access to image collections at the largest of scales."
