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The Mathletes and the Miley Photoshop 555

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton's essay this week is about "A Tennessee man is arrested for possessing a picture of Miley Cyrus's face superimposed on a nude woman's body. In a survey that I posted on the Web, a majority of respondents said the man violated the law -- except for respondents who say they were good at math in school, who as a group answered the survey differently from everyone else." Continue on to see how.

Comment Re:am i missing something? (Score 1) 511

The problem is that most games are too long. Content creation is where the money is spent. Many games seem to feel the need to provide 100+ hours of play. Give us 10 hours of gameplay and charge less, not more, and the majority of people who never finish today's epic games will come flocking to your door.

Or the summary -- fewer Oblivions, more Portals.

Comment But is this really bad for publishers? (Score 1) 242

People like Bruce on Games rabbit on and on about how used game sales take money away from developers, leading to lower profits, and lower re-investment in new games.

I've never bought this argument. Surely people are more likely to buy new games if they believe they can get a few bucks back on resale. And people who want the game right now are going to prefer to pay the new game price over waiting to get it second hand.

Does anyone have real evidence that the used game industry really harms developers?

United States

Submission + - U.S. Navy, Dolphins, and Fricken LASER Beams

WED Fan writes: "The U.S. Navy is getting ready to deploy Anti-Terrorism Dolphins and Seals.

Dozens of dolphins and sea lions trained to detect and apprehend waterborne attackers could be sent to patrol a military base in Washington state, the Navy said Monday. In a notice published in this week's Federal Register, the Navy said it needs to bolster security at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, on the Puget Sound close to Seattle.


Those of us living in the area know this could be a problem for certain types of criminals, proving a problem for anyone who shoots sea mammals in the area."
Education

Submission + - Technology Enabled Study Rooms

esparhawk writes: "I work as a network administrator at an engineering college. We are in the process of expanding our campus housing, and have been asked to design study rooms incorporating educational aiding technologies. One idea so far, is to have electronic blackboards, which will print what has been written. How would you design the study rooms of the future?"
Censorship

Submission + - YouTube bans Nick Gisburne again

Da_Weasel writes: "Following up on Two Ways Not To Handle Free Speech it appears that YouTube has yet again censored Nick Gisburne. After creating a new account and posting the video again, over 50 other YouTube users downloaded a copy from his website and uploaded it to their account.

A very large group of active and outspoken atheist on YouTube are concerned that their videos are now at risk of being flagged to death by the religious fundamentalist.

Has this set a new precedences for freedom of speech on YouTube when it comes to religion? What other books might it be a violation of YouTube's TOS to quote from?"
Linux Business

Submission + - Linspire moves to Ubuntu with Canonical deal

Rob writes: Linux distributors Linspire and Canonical have announced a partnership through which Canonical's Ubuntu will become the platform for Linspire operating systems while Linspire will port its CNR service to Ubuntu. By teaming with Ubuntu, Linspire has effectively handed responsibility for one of its building blocks to Ubuntu, reducing its own development requirements and building on a popular and established community of developers and users.
Security

Submission + - OpenSSL revalidated following suspension

lisah writes: "Despite what looks like an organized effort to prevent it, OpenSSL, an open source program used for secure data exchange, has been revalidated by an independent testing agency for its ability to securely manage sensitive data and is ready for use by governmental agencies like the Department of Defense. According to the Open Source Software Institute, who has been overseeing the validation process for the last five years (something that typically only takes a few months), it seems that the idea of an open source SSL toolkit didn't sit right with proprietary vendors of similar products. A FUD campaign was launched against OpenSSL that resulted in a temporary suspension of its validation but developers and volunteers refused to give up the ghost until the validation was reinstated."
AMD

Submission + - AMD plans an absolute GPGPU monster

socram writes: ATI is preparing something really, really special. If it manages to pull it off, it will be a breakthrough even Captain Hook couldn't have dreamt of. We are talking about a GPGPU product, the FireStream/Stream Processor board with no less than four (4) Gigabytes of local video memory. Did we mention real purpose of GPGPU? — annihilating the importance of CPU and server CPU margins, which cannot compare with R600 or G80 in terms of pure processing power. Of course, this comparison is valid only in GPGPU-friendly case scenarios, so we're talking about streamlined computing only. Engineers at PeakStream and Stanford Uni are already having wet-dreams about the possibilities that a single-GPU configuration will do, yet alone multi-GPU one. www.GPGPU.org
Announcements

Submission + - Doomsday seed vault design unveiled

in2mind writes: "The BBC News is reporting that "The final design for a "doomsday" vault that will house seeds from all known varieties of food crops has been unveiled by the Norwegian government.The vault aims to safeguard the world's agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change.The Svalbard International Seed Vault will be built into a mountainside on a remote island near the North Pole.Inside the vault, the samples will be stored at -18C (0F).""
Mozilla

Submission + - serious flaw in Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9.1

crazylittlebear writes: "Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9.1 have serious bug, which allows to read disc data (e.g. directory listing, contents of text files) from any computer. If you download HTML file do disc and open it from your computer, with JavaScript turned on, your disc can be scanned by someone else. As described on http://bragoszewski.com/?page_id=36, the flaw is not present in Internet Explorer 6 or 7. It is not only possible to send a file o directory listing from computer. The exploit or backdoor that uses this bug is extremely easy to write. With more complicated code an attacker can establish a full connection to a computer and can browse victim's disc nearly as easy as with local file manager..."
Music

Submission + - Warner rejects Jobs on DRM.

massivefoot writes: "Warner Music has rejected the suggestion from Steve Jobs that DRM should be removed from music downloads. In an open letter this week, the Apple boss had said that removing such software would also allow greater usability for customers, as any online music store would be able to sell songs that would work on all players. "This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat." said Mr Jobs. Warner Music, the world's fourth largest record company, seems far from convinced."
Music

Submission + - Steve Jobs 'Apple would drop DRM in a heartbeat'

Dhrakar writes: "Apple has posted a truly fascinating open letter from Steve jobs on its website: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic In it Apple lists the reasons why the cannot license FairPlay and also calls on folks who do not like DRM to take it up with the music companies "Convincing [music companies] to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly"."
Music

Ogg Vorbis Gaining Industry Support 235

An anonymous reader writes "While Ogg Vorbis format has not gained much adoption in music sales and portable players, it is not an unsupported format in the industry. Toy manufacturers (e.g. speaking dolls), voice warning systems, and reactive audio devices exploit Ogg Vorbis for its good quality at small bit-rates. As a sign of this, VLSI Solution Oy has just announced VS1000, the first 16 bits DSP device for playing Ogg Vorbis on low-power and high-volume products. Earlier Ogg Vorbis chips use 32 bits for decoding, which consumes more energy than a 16-bit device does. See the Xiph wiki page for a list of Ogg Vorbis chips."

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