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Comment Re:Fawks (Score 1) 188

"I bought your product even though I thought you screwed it up, but if you screw it up again I won't buy it. Honest!"

(plus, bonus "I hated and didn't finish one of your GOTY titles, thus demonstrating I am not your representative customer and can be safely ignored")

Comment Re:hmmm targeted advertising (Score 4, Insightful) 66

Soon: "wear this and we'll give you a discount off your premiums"

Soon after that: "We're jacking up premiums. But don't worry, since many of our customers are wearing 24/7 monitors, they'll cancel out anyway. Don't regulate us!"

Soon after that: "Since almost everyone is willing wear the monitor to avoid paying $texas per month, we're dropping that tiny minority of holdout paranoid privacy-freaks."
Wireless Networking

Has 2.4 GHz Reached Maximum Capacity? 250

An anonymous reader writes "There's been a lot of talk lately about the concept of Personal Area Networks. At CES Intel and Connectify both released software that turns Windows laptops into Access Points for file transfers, wirelessly syncing pictures from cameras, and Internet sharing. This is good, maybe great, if you're a road warrior, but what about the rest of us holed up in apartment buildings and small neighborhoods? We already have to deal with the wireless chatter of the 50 or so other Linksys routers in the vicinity. What will happen when every laptop also acts as a software router? To add fuel to the fire, Intel and Netgear also announced the Push2TV device that allows you to stream your display, including Netflix videos straight to your television. Isn't this going to kill lower powered 2.4 GHz devices, like Bluetooth mice and headsets? When does the 2.4 GHz band collapse completely? Why can't we push all this short range, high bandwidth stuff onto 5 GHz?"

Comment Re:Not good enough (Score 2, Insightful) 45

Then it isn't meant for gamers, any more than wireless mice and keyboards are meant for gamers. For all that, wireless mice and keyboards still sell well to general consumers. Presumably Intel bets that the wireless monitor will, too.

I'm not sure who moves their monitor often, though, and it'll still need AC power anyway...

Comment Quick responses to common /. responses (Score 4, Insightful) 736

Okay, I know nobody RTFAs. But the original paper is here, and it makes the following points:

1) It has nothing to do with technical abilities. Terrorists don't attempt to recruit people by technical ability, they just take whoever they can get.

2) It has nothing to do with ease of immigration as a skilled migrant. The paper cites studies on American religious terrorists (the nominally Christian far-right) and concludes that the unusual tendency of engineers towards right-wing radicalism seems universal.

3) The paper argues that the 'styles of thinking' that predispose people towards engineering, also predispose them towards right-wing radicalism. Engineers are more reliably right-wing than even economists! (who are the second-most reliably right-wing academic group). Likewise, a liberal arts education is correlated with left-wing radicalism (e.g., communist bombing campaigns in postwar Western Europe). But there have been relatively few left-wing bombing terrorist acts after the end of the Soviet Union, while right-wing radicalism is on the rise. Hence mad engineers rather than mad Marx-spewing liberal arts graduates.

Comment Re:Embargo fails. (Score 4, Informative) 400

Purchasing power per person, 2008:

Cuba: $9500

People's Republic of China: $6000

So, the average Cuban is still richer than the average Chinese. In ten years it might be different, though. But all this is irrelevant to the parent's point: dropping an embargo doesn't necessarily lead to political liberalization, even if the people do become better off. You can be very rich and still dictatorial.

Comment from TFA (Score 3, Interesting) 670

The circuit’s ruling came in a case that dates to 2004, when federal prosecutors probing a Northern California steroid ring obtained warrants to seize the results of urine samples of 10 pro baseball players at a Long Beach, California drug-testing facility. The players had been tested as part of a voluntary drug-deterrence program implemented by Major League Baseball.

Federal agents serving the search warrant on the Comprehensive Drug Testing lab wound up making a copy of a directory containing a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with results of every player that was tested in the program. Then, back in the office, they scrolled freely through the spreadsheet, ultimately noting the names of all 104 players who tested positive.

The government argued that the information was lawfully found in “plain sight,” just like marijuana being discovered on a dining room table during a court-authorized weapons search of a home. But the court noted that the agents actively scrolled to the right side of the spreadsheet to peek at all the players test results, when they could easily have selected, copied and pasted only the rows listing the players named in the search warrant.

This... doesn't actually sound that objectionable. Scrolling to the right breaks the Fourth Amendment?

Earth

Swarm of Giant Jellyfish Capsize 10-Ton Trawler 227

Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that the Japanese trawler Diasan Shinsho-maru has capsized off the coast of China, as its three-man crew dragged their net through a swarm of giant jellyfish (which can grow up to six feet in diameter and travel in packs) and tried to haul up a net that was too heavy. The crew was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler. Relatively little is known about Nomura's jellyfish, such as why some years see thousands of the creatures floating across the Sea of Japan on the Tsushima Current, but last year there were virtually no sightings. In 2007, there were 15,500 reports of damage to fishing equipment caused by the creatures. Experts believe that one contributing factor to the jellyfish becoming more frequent visitors to Japanese waters may be a decline in the number of predators, which include sea turtles and certain species of fish. 'Jellies have likely swum and swarmed in our seas for over 600 million years,' says scientist Monty Graham of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. 'When conditions are right, jelly swarms can form quickly. They appear to do this for sexual reproduction.'"

Comment of course they didn't want it (Score 5, Insightful) 144

Think about it this way. The news is public, now. Do you see any frothing outrage, outside of a few fringe activist groups? Outside of Slashdot? No?

There doesn't seem to be any real interest now, so there definitely wouldn't be any then, in the with-us-or-against-us environment in the years immediately after 9/11. So how would a newspaper or media outlet gain by breaking the story? It'll just instantly lose all its government contacts, but not gain any new readership. Why would anyone publish it?

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