Nonsense. It is the remains of an ancient, not so perfectly preserved Quagaar battle fleet.

iSput

So we need more ugly females?

So, how much for a one way ticket?

31.08.2009 it goes online In three years, DARPA will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Clippy Mk.2 computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Clippy funding bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 2012. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Clippy begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug... Clippy fights back!

I know the feeling. I live in Finland too and this has been happening for a long time. The horrible translations are certainly made by a bad translation program and are quite "interesting" thanks to the errors. I can cope with the good ol' email spam but some web ads are just horrible and clearly fake scamming attempts and THOSE translated spams get on my nerves sometimes.

I have to admit that this is one of the free MMPORPGs that I haven't played, but I know many games that use this business model and it works. The so said "free" part attracts player to the game and most start paying for items soon after. Still, I'm really amazed by how they managed to get an estimate of 5 million players in such a short while. Lets just hope that they don't get greedy and start compensating the lack of monthly fee income by making the item prices too high, like Perfect World International has done (in my opinion atleast), where a simple mount can cost up to 60 euros, while on other servers, such as the Malaysian server they cost only a few bucks. Well we will see...

This indeed is a problem. This also happens when translating games from English to other languages. The worst case to my knowledge is EA games, which are usually translated to numerous languages. For example Finnish. Unlike in some other games where most sentences are long and leave room for translation, EA sports games usually use words that are around 5 letters long like "start" and "leave" in their menus. These are very hard to translate because EA wants the translations to be exactly as long as their English counterparts. This leads to translation problems, for some words don't have such short counterparts in some languages. In these cases EA sometimes suggest to remove some letters from the word to make it shorter, and this ofcourse doesn't work in many cases. Also, to my understanding, in some cases the translators don't not even know the context of the translated part well enough, for it is kept "secret" from the translators until the game is released.

"up to 800 hours of footage"? I have never played a game that would last for that long. Most of these "violent" games are usually short, 10 to 30 hours of content, usually around 15 hours. The rest of the game time is just repeating the same content again and again. If you play Counter-Strike for 10 hours, thats not 10 hours of footage. It's just a few maps that you play repeatedly. Every time will be slightly different, but it will be the same content. Saying that a game has "up to 800 hours of footage" is like saying that a 2 hour movie has 200 hours of footage if you watch it 100 times. There have always been aggressive people and murderers/criminals. Getting rid of violent video games for kids ain't gonna help much. Games CAN cause violent behavior, but so can many other things. Most of the time its the invividual, not the game that is to blame. Parents should know their kids well enough to know what they can handle. This is not always the case, but you know what I mean. It is understandable that games may cause a "brainwash effect" younger children like some politicians say. It's a part of human mental development. I just don't see this as such a big problem as some people blame. This is a part of the same age old chain of fear that todays children will be corrupted by entertainment business. Even Plato, who lived 400BC, thought that literature and drama plays were corrupting the young distort their sense of moral and give a very bad bad influence from them. It is the same as todays. Today we just do it better.

These are my kind of people.

Just wait till this Bob the Blob starts growing synapses between it's algae and finds the pleasures of dopamine production. Living, breathing and thinking blob is in the coast of Alaska, and its horny. Our worst fears come true. Lets just feed it some caffeine too... On the more serious note, I have seen algae blooms quite a many times in my life but that one really is big. I too hope that it will not create a huge dead zone, but what can we do? I don't want to blame the global warming, but it does increase the chances of one of these huge blobs forming. Lets just hope that its not poisonous and it won't float towards a swimming beach. I also have to admit that the geek inside of me hoped that this would be something more. It may be caused by me watching 3 seasons of x-files withing a week before the news first reached slashdot and just having read the swarm, but a geek can dream, a geek can dream...

A two dimensional movie with no real plot but a huge amount of things blowing up? An overpowered spaceship destroying everything that moves and stands on it's way for no reason? A movie with 100% pure action and 0% human interaction? Welcome to Hollywood!

It indeed may be able to reduce the amount of child porn watched in Germany. The problem is that once something has been censored or blocked, if someone wants to get their hands on that censored material, they will find a way. Child porn is not very "mainstream" and I'm pretty sure that quite many of those who are watching it are able to find a new way of watching it. Be it different sites (like you all know, the internet has a habit of rerouting itself once a part of it has been cut. I don't think that this will happen though), proxies or real children (not a likely outcome though). The thing I'm worried about is the fact that once you started censoring something, the threshold to censor something else falls. Once you have started, you may easily start censoring some other things, just like those killer games that were mentioned. First the porn, then the games and what next?

Indeed, they proved what it is complitely possible to hijack a huge botnet and destroy a big part of it. (Well, everything is possible and there is quite much variation between different botnets, but still...) The problem is that they also gained access to a huge supply of bank account, credit card numbers and such. This itself can be consider a huge crime, even if they weren't planning to use them themselves. Legally speaking, hijacking it didn't differ much from creating a botnet for yourself. Also hijacking a botnet ofcourse involves interracting with the infected computers, which is a crime. Morally speaking this all is acceptable and benificial for the public good. Yet, legally speaking it seems a bit suspicious activity. You can't always be certain that the goal of this kind of operation is as naive as this time. Well anyway, good job!

I agree with you but there is a slight problem with having copyrights released after the authors death. "Boom, head shot. All your music are belong to us." In music, I think that this would be acceptable, but in some other material it would cause a possible danger for the author, if there is a ruthless enough publisher that wants to produce the copyrighted material. Or someone might be arrested for the possession of pirated goods and then decide to kill the author so his/hers prison sentence would be shortened. Well this is quite unlikely though.