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Censorship

Calif. Petitions Supreme Court On Violent Video Game Bill 204

eldavojohn writes "You know the drill, violent video game bill struck down because: "We hold that the Act, as presumptively invalid content-based restriction on speech, is subject to strict scrutiny and not the 'variable obscenity' standard from Ginsberg v. New York. Applying strict scrutiny, we hold that the Act violates rights protected by the First Amendment." Well, that didn't satisfy a PhD child psychologist turned Democratic California State Senator named Leland Yee who states in his press release that "California's violent video game law properly seeks to protect children from the harmful effects of excessively violent, interactive video games. I am hopeful that the Supreme Court — which has never heard a case dealing with violent video games — will accept our appeal and assist parents in keeping these harmful video games out of the hands of children. I believe the high court will uphold this law as Constitutional. In fact in Roper v. Simmons, the court agreed we need to treat children differently in the eyes of the law due to brain development." His appeal (in PDF) is here and you can find some industry reactions to the Supreme Court hearing at GamePolitics. Unfortunately Yee seems to be a bit more competent than old Jack Thompson, who is pushing a bill in Louisiana today."

Comment Baltimore (Score 1) 70

As I sit in my 130 year old studio apartment, I can safely say that I'll only consider Baltimore a city of the future when I get more than 200kb/s upload speeds and less than 130ms ISP gateway pings on my city-wide, 4G, futuristic-looking Xohm modem.

Comment Re:This is an easy one. (Score 4, Informative) 264

You are referring to what is known as "Split Tunneling;" which is a legitimate, albeit less secure, VPN configuration. Basically when split tunneling is enabled the client workstation's default gateway is still it's local gateway and DNS requests get routed by the client to the appropriate DNS server, whereas in a non-split tunnel the default gateway is the remote gateway (which obviously has no way of routing to the local network) and all DNS requests go encrypted through that. There are several reasons someone would want to do this:
  • You need people to access their local printers/network resources and don't have some kind of pass-through ability
  • You have limited bandwidth at your remote site and cannot handle the Internet usage that would be NATed through
  • Your gateway does not support NAT on VPN tunnels and your clients need Internet access
  • You don't realize what you're doing

Either way, what I do when I have some kind of weird situation where a user needs to change their TCP/IP config routinely is just put a couple shortcuts with pretty icons on their desktop that point to batch scripts that run a netsh script. You should be able to completely change an IP configuration on a Windows box with this utility, the user just runs "home.bat" when they're home and then "office.bat" when in the office. A Google for "netsh exec" should give enough info to get started.

The Courts

Adult Website Use At Work Leads To Hacker Conviction 361

safesorry notes that several sources are talking about a recent tale of woe about Richard Wolf, a lonely guy looking for love in all the wrong places. Wolf used his work computer to visit the Adult Friend Finder website and upload personal nudes to prospective "friends." Now he's been convicted under a "hacker" law targeted at employees who steal data or access information they shouldn't. "Richard Wolf acknowledged that his behavior was inappropriate when he used his work computer to upload nude photos of himself to an adult web site and view other photos on porn sites, but he didn't think he should be convicted of hacking for doing so."
Data Storage

All Solid State Drives Suffer Performance Drop-off 150

Lucas123 writes "The recent revelation that Intel's consumer X25-M solid state drive had a firmware bug that drastically affected its performance led Computerworld to question whether all SSDs can suffer performance degradation due to fragmentation issues. It seems vendors are well aware that the specifications they list on drive packaging represent burst speeds when only sequential writes are being recorded, but after use performance drops markedly over time. The drives with better controllers tend to level out, but others appear to be able to suffer performance problems. Still not fully baked are benchmarking standards that are expected out later this year from several industry organizations that will eventually compel manufacturers to list actual performance with regard to sequential and random reads and writes as well as the drive's expected lifespan under typical conditions."

Comment Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score 2, Insightful) 821

In 1999 he didn't know what an mp3 was either. I'm not implying that somehow ISOs are going to become as popular as mp3s, however once the OS know what they are, the user doesn't even see .iso, he just sees Ubuntu_Live_CD and when he clicks it it says "Please insert a blank CD." The original comment was talking about someone not going back to XP, then below was the same poster saying a user's never going to jump to Linux. I'm just saying that with Windows 7, saying that the user does not know what or how to use an ISO file is entirely irrelevant - they click download and when it's done Windows asks them to insert a blank CD. I would hate to work with you guys, sure some users really don't care and make a point to not learn a single thing about computers, but most would find your attitude insulting and demeaning.

Comment Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score 1) 821

Windows 7 does burn ISOs out of the box, just click on a .iso file and it will open a wizard. If you don't have Windows 7 there are pretty detailed instructions with links on the Ubuntu website at the download page, which I'm pretty sure you can reach with a single click at the top of their homepage. We're talking about Joe User, not Joe Illiteratemonkey, right?
First Person Shooters (Games)

Duke Nukem For Never 565

PLSQL Guy writes "Duke Nukem Forever developer 3D Realms is shutting down, according to Shacknews. They cite 'a reliable source close to the company,' who said the developer is finished and employees have already been let go. It looks like all of the Duke Nukem Forever jokes are turning into reality; DNF might turn out to be the ultimate vaporware after all." 3D Realms' webmaster, Joe Siegler, confirmed the closing, saying that he didn't know about it even a day beforehand. Apogee and Deep Silver, who are working on a different set of Duke Nukem games (referred to as the Duke Nukem Trilogy) say they are not affected by the problems at 3D Realms.

Comment Re:But what about the sidebar? (Score 4, Informative) 435

Mouse to the bottom right-hand corner of the screen -> click once to show all gadgets/desktop, or hover to glass all windows and show gadgets/desktop. Or press WInkey+D. Or Alt-Tab to the desktop. I understand what you're saying, and I certainly have no way of know what your usage habits are, but for me having that sidebar up all the time seems like a huge waste of space when they could just as easily be placed on the desktop.

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