Comment I call bull on this (Score 1) 220
This is about as relevant to my driving skills as it is to my jumping-on-turtles skills in real life.
Comment Not the sharpest knife (Score 1) 259
Even if you are unjustly banned from Facebook, you can come back and re-add all those people, at least the "main" ones, and work your way again to having 350 friends, I'm sure he didn't find them all in 2 days the first time around, and I genuinely doubt he kept in touch each and every single one of them. He can't learn their names and make a second account and look them up?
He wasn't smart enough to ask for phone numbers and/or e-mails after contacting far away relatives?
He can't use services like instant messengers?
How did he survive before Facebook existed, suing telecommunication providers because their service fees were too high, thus prohibiting and/or limiting his access to contact loved ones from afar?
Is all this still Facebook's fault?
Comment Re:Bloody Hell (Score 2) 246
Do you remember those days when Google didn't have the fancy-schmancy auto-complete or instant-search? I do, because I never used them, so this doesn't affect me in the slightest.
If you're gonna search for The Red Dragon torrent, you KNOW you're gonna have to type it out, instead of waiting for Google to finish the phrase for you. So basically you are whining that you're gonna have to type search inquiries, are we really this lazy?
Comment Re:not to mention the one-eyed among us (Score 1) 436
This is why I don't think it'll die as fast as some of us want it to, because just as crappy video games are enhanced by good visuals, mediocre movies are likely to draw masses even after bad reviews if they look good.
To me this is not a revolutionary way of looking at movies, just another tool to enhance what's already present, just like 2-speakers turned into 5, then 8, etc. Better sound doesn't make a good movie good, it helps it, but it doesn't define it.
If it dies out, then that's that, we'll see another attempt in 20 years.
Comment Ironic (Score 0) 218
The only people that will actually wait for a religious figure to "approve" anything in order to implement it to their daily life are the people less likely to use the Internet, in this case. All the religious acquaintances I've met/kept in touch with online have used it regardless of this so-called "blessing".
It doesn't matter if you're religious or not, if you're all waiting for someone to tell you "hey, this thing ain't so bad, I used it, so you can use it too!" then you deserve to be mocked.
Comment Re:Prompting the question... (Score 1) 23
The suit claims that Taco Bell's meat-like offering is filled with extenders and other non-meat substances listed in the lawsuit like water, "Isolated Oat Product," wheat oats, soy lecithin, maltodrextrin, anti-dusting agent, autolyzed yeast extract, modified corn starch and sodium phosphate as well as beef and seasonings. Yum!"
Comment Nifty! (Score 1) 70
I can't imagine how this awesome will be with simultaneously-connected rotating Kinects.
Kinect Hack Builds 3D Maps of the Real World 70
Lanxon writes "Noted Kinect-tinkerer Martin Szarski has used a car, a laptop, an Android smartphone and the aforementioned Xbox 360 peripheral to make a DIY-equivalent of Google Street View. The Kinect's multi-camera layout can be used to capture some fuzzy, but astonishingly effortless 3D maps of real world locations and objects. As we saw in Oliver Kreylos' early hack, you can take the data from Kinect's depth-sensitive camera to map out a 3D point-cloud, with real distances. Then use the colour camera's image to see which RGB pixel corresponds to each depth point, and eventually arrive at a coloured, textured model."
Comment 1 of 2 (Score 1) 244
This could be a huge turn for companies that make a living out of the loopholes of the Internet from yesteryear, which can either stop doing their data-mining or change they way they do their data-mining. Quite possibly a more obtrusive way.
OR
This could just be a placebo, so that us semi-geeks (the ones that read these things and are aware of them but aren't really attracted to ACT upon it) can sit back and look at the rest shut up about it for a little while.
Japanese Supreme Court Rules TV Forwarding Illegal 177
eldavojohn writes "If you use anything like a Slingbox in Japan, you may be dismayed to find out that a Japanese maker of a similar service has been successfully sued by Japan Broadcasting Corp. and five Tokyo-based local TV broadcasting firms under copyright violations for empowering users to do similar things. TV forwarding or place shifting is recording and/or moving your normal TV signal from its intended living room box to your home computer or anywhere on the internet. Turns out that Japan's Supreme Court overruled lower court decisions confirming fears that to even facilitate this functionality is a copyright infringement on the work that is being transferred."
The Matrix Re-Reloaded 640
derGoldstein writes "According to Keanu Reeves: ' Matrix 4 and 5 are coming.' At an event that took place at the London International School of Performing Arts, 'Reeves revealed that he met with the Wachowskis around Christmas. They told him that they completed script treatments for two more Matrix installments. They are planning to make the films in 3D and have already met with James Cameron to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the technology. Reeves added that he's excited to return as Neo and promised that the treatments will truly revolutionize the action genre like the first Matrix film did.'"
Comment Meh to the max (Score 1) 113
Alright it's cute but the novelty wears off fast I bet, I'm guessing it's not the lightest thing to have on your, not very cool, especially when you constantly move around and sweat.
Sure, the non-geeks and drug-induced crowd will find it fascinating, I would too depending on the moment, but it's not that great. Maybe I saw the headline and expected a lot more.
Comment Re:News Flash! Water is wet! Spread the word! (Score 1) 393
A conversation with a non-geek on the subject of data privacy tends to go like this:
They sell it to credit card companies, advertisers, marketters, and anyone else who wants to sell you some junk: a) So what? how does that hurt me. I get more targetted advertisments and possibly products that better suit me
They give it to the government: a) If the government wants to know what I did at that party last week.. I would have happily told them
When we revert into some paranoid disutopia the forces of opression will use your twitter comments to identify you as counter to their objectives and have you dragged from your homes and taken to the acid mines where you'll
If we want to convince people that privacy is important, we need better scare statements!
Compared to most people here, I'm hardly a "geek" but in my social circle outside the computer, I certainly am considered one.
And my answers would be "So what? I don't have to buy what they advertise to me." / "I doubt the government would be that interested in me, in anything I would part of some shallow stats report about internet usage." and "Oh, get a life".
The idea of having to to be connected at all times to a server to basically "have a computer" is ridiculous to me, Because of privacy? No. Because I'd have to pay a monthly fee to USE a computer (because, y'know the whole no-internet-no-files-hence-no-computer thing)? Hell yes.
I know an internet-less computer is hardly the way to go about in this day and age, but at least I have the option that if I don't have Internet access, I can at least have all my files right where I want them and still work with them.
Comment Huh? (Score 2, Insightful) 84
I don't get it, aren't video games in Japan a lot more open-minded? It's always in the U.S. that we're stuck with the same type of titles, most of the interesting, oddball, creative games come from Japan (Okami, Katamari, etc.)
Comment Asking for it (Score 1) 366
Obviously someone that dumb shouldn't have had that much money. He deserved losing it.
