Comment Re:Its really (Score 1) 760
you have respect for CNN? Body proves Bigfoot no myth, hunters say
Comment Re:Its really (Score 1) 760
anyone who travels much and sees the world through their own eyes will quickly realize that most of what we are told on the "news" is highly filtered and twisted to make it palatable to the sheep !
I'm from Rio de Janeiro, and I jog at the beach with a USD5000 watch. Now when I travel to Sydney or Hiroshima or Jordan or Fountainbleau, and I get to tell the local bartender/cab driver that I'm from Rio, first thing they tell me is to watch my back and that they'd never come here because of the crime. *sigh* Yes there's crime (around twice the homicide rate of Chicago). But since the media can only concentrate on the extreme examples and reinforce the stereotype, there is no way to convince people that it's vastly concentrated on pockets of violence here and there, and if you know how to avoid them (which is easy, btw), you'll be just fine.
Submission + - Nature publisher launches PLoS ONE competitor (nature.com) 1
linhares writes: Nature's Publishing Group is launching a new journal, "Scientific Reports", announced earlier this month. The press release makes it clear that it is molded after PLoS ONE:
Scientific Reports will publish original research papers of interest to specialists within a given field in the natural sciences. It will not set a threshold of perceived importance for the papers that it publishes; rather, Scientific Reports will publish all papers that are judged to be technically valid and original. To enable the community to evaluate the importance of papers post-peer review, the Scientific Reports website will include most-downloaded, most-emailed, and most-blogged lists. All research papers will benefit from rapid peer review and publication, and will be deposited in PubMed Central.
Perhaps readers may find it ironic that PLoS ONE, first dismissed by Nature as an "online database" "relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals" seems to be setting the standards for "a new era in publishing".
Why Sony Cannot Stop PS3 Pirates 378
Sam writes "A former Ubisoft exec believes that Sony will not be able to combat piracy on the PlayStation 3, which was recently hacked. Martin Walfisz, former CEO of Ubisoft subsidiary Ubisoft Massive, was a key player in developing Ubisoft's new DRM technologies. Since playing pirated games doesn't require a modchip, his argument is that Sony won't be able to easily detect hacked consoles. Sony's only possible solution is to revise the PS3 hardware itself, which would be a very costly process. Changing the hardware could possibly work for new console sales, though there would be the problem of backwards compatibility with the already-released games. Furthermore, current users would still be able to run pirated copies on current hardware."
An anonymous reader adds commentary from PS3 hacker Mathieu Hervais about Sony's legal posturing.
Comment Re:This is going to be an interesting case (Score 2) 508
No he cant. He threw out that claim when he took his PS3 onto PSN and agreed to their terms of use.
Sorry, citation fucking needed here. Did he ever sign into PSN? Did he state that? I for one bought a PS3 after the jailbreak and decided to never access the web with it. I would like OtherOS.
Comment Re:This is going to be an interesting case (Score 1) 508
Any device Sony sells comes with a little document stating you really just purchased a licence to use the device, revokable at any time. I last saw this in a package for crappy Sony headphones.
So perhaps he should start by buying these headphones and telling the court that they can only be used if sony doesn't revoke the license. I surely hope this goes to court.
Comment Re:Wait, you mean THIS key? (Score 1) 508
erk: C0 CE FE 84 C2 27 F7 5B D0 7A 7E B8 46 50 9F 93 B2 38 E7 70 DA CB 9F F4 A3 88 F8 12 48 2B E2 1B riv: 47 EE 74 54 E4 77 4C C9 B8 96 0C 7B 59 F4 C1 4D pub: C2 D4 AA F3 19 35 50 19 AF 99 D4 4E 2B 58 CA 29 25 2C 89 12 3D 11 D6 21 8F 40 B1 38 CA B2 9B 71 01 F3 AE B7 2A 97 50 19 R: 80 6E 07 8F A1 52 97 90 CE 1A AE 02 BA DD 6F AA A6 AF 74 17 n: E1 3A 7E BC 3A CC EB 1C B5 6C C8 60 FC AB DB 6A 04 8C 55 E1 K: BA 90 55 91 68 61 B9 77 ED CB ED 92 00 50 92 F6 6C 7A 3D 8D Da: C5 B2 BF A1 A4 13 DD 16 F2 6D 31 C0 F2 ED 47 20 DC FB 06 70 Sorry Sony, don't know how that happened. My cat jumped on the keyboard. http://pastebin.com/R3vqSbEC -- The real list of keys....
wat? I don't understand this. I guess I should blog about it so that someone can enlighten me.
Sony Closing 18M CD/Month Plant 318
coondoggie writes "Sony this week said it was shuttering one of its largest CD manufacturing plants — citing the impact of digital downloads and other economic issues. The plant, which has been in operation for some 50 years, first producing vinyl records, will close on March 31 and about 300 people will lose their jobs. The 500,000-square-foot warehouse began producing vinyl LPs in 1960 and moved to CD manufacturing in 1988. At its capacity, the plant was making 18 million CDs per month, according to its website."
Comment Re:May I introduce the 'blue collar' POV?.... (Score 1) 140
Son, I told you now, stop it with the video games and get back to your damn homework!
Comment As a univ prof (Score 1) 804
As a univ prof, I leave students free to use laptops. It is of course annoying, to me and to some other students, when somethings funny comes up (which is bound to happen given time), or simply when something offtopic deserves more attention than the class (in the student's perspective). On the other hand, many students use laptops very well, mixing their own notes with stuff from wikipedia and with my own slides, so I feel very ambivalent about this issue. If I were a student, I would like to be able to use them, so my take is that people should not be banned, or at least not with a clear history of bad behavior.
Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 534
If you get a woman with the right 733ts, you won't care about what other women have
for 24 months, give or take
Comment Re:Just Making Themselves Look Worse (Score 1) 249
happy 2011 to you too, buddy
Comment Re:Cut YouCut (Score 1) 760
ironically, that sort of research may be used to measure the quality of each congresscritter
Comment Re:So, the system works? (Score 1) 725
I read you, and think you are on target. Yet, because there seems to be only downsides to the opening of a WallMart, I believe these studies might have some sort of bias. So poverty grows? Here's an alternative explanation: perhaps poor people in the vicinity try to move closer to WallMart, and so their lives improve. At any rate, my point is that this whole negative scenarion cannot be as simple as it looks like. We should always look for alternative explanations and interpretations.
Australian Stats Agency Goes Open Source 51
jimboh2k writes "The Australian Bureau of Statistics will use the 2011 Census of Population and Housing as a dry run for XML-based open source standards DDI and SDMX in a bid to make for easier machine-to-machine data, allowing users to better search for and access census datasets. The census will become the first time the open standards are used by an Australian Federal Government agency."
