Comment Re:Remember the Corgi model? (Score 1) 102
I had one of those, it was really cool, even as a kid you could see it was designed better than most other toys. Thanks for the back story.
Comment Re:WTF??? (Score 2) 1060
Since he said he has a 5GB file of secret banking industry documents to be released at a later date.
Bethesda Criticized Over Buggy Releases 397
SSDNINJA writes "This editorial discusses the habit of Bethesda Softworks to release broken and buggy games with plans to just fix the problems later. Following a trend of similar issues coming up in their games, the author begs gamers to stop supporting buggy games and to spread the idea that games should be finished and quality controlled before release – not weeks after."
Comment Re:A bit big for their britches? (Score 1) 640
I'm not sure about Gnome, but KDE already works on non-X11 platforms (e.g. KDE 4.4 is available for Mac), and there's already an ongoing port of Qt to Wayland, so it shouldn't require a big effort from the KDE developers to support this move.
Comment Re:How Do Europeans Do It? (Score 1) 450
Well, in the case of Germany, first you allow a fascist party to rule for a few years, and then allow a communist puppet state to rule part of the country for 40 odd years after that. With that experience its very easy to convince people that personal privacy is an important issue.
If anything, these new laws are aimed directly at the later group. Just having been a member of the Stasi (east German secret police) was not a crime after reunification, and many of them later became private "security consultants". There's been a few high profile cases of them using their old techniques to help companies track employees.
Nuclear Energy Now More Expensive Than Solar 635
js_sebastian writes "According to an article on the New York Times, a historical cross-over has occurred because of the declining costs of solar vs. the increasing costs of nuclear energy: solar, hardly the cheapest of renewable technologies, is now cheaper than nuclear, at around 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Furthermore, the NY Times reports that financial markets will not finance the construction of nuclear power plants unless the risk of default (which is historically as high as 50 percent for the nuclear industry) is externalized to someone else through federal loan guarantees or ratepayer funding. The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive, and the push from the US government to subsidize it seems to be forcing the wrong choice on the market."
Comment As Zaphod would have said (Score 1) 144
Oh. Belgium!
Comment Cool, but still some artifacts. (Score 1) 205
Well, the image is really cool, I'll give it that.
The "Quotes" from TFS are all from the author of TFA. If you want to see what the real description of the work, best look here http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/terapixel/default.aspx
There's still some artifacts left though, have a look near (seriously overexposed) Sirius for a ghost of the telescope pupil (the thing that looks like an alien solar sail) (Constellations -> Canis Major)
What US Health Care Needs 584
Medical doctor and writer Atul Gawande gave the commencement address recently at Stanford's School of Medicine. In it he lays out very precisely and in a nonpartisan way what is wrong with the institution of medical care in the US — why it is both so expensive and so ineffective at delivering quality care uniformly across the board. "Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has... enumerated and identified... more than 13,600 diagnoses — 13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we've discovered beneficial remedies... But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we're struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver. ... And then there is the frightening federal debt we will face. By 2025, we will owe more money than our economy produces. One side says war spending is the problem, the other says it's the economic bailout plan. But take both away and you've made almost no difference. Our deficit problem — far and away — is the soaring and seemingly unstoppable cost of health care. ... Like politics, all medicine is local. Medicine requires the successful function of systems — of people and of technologies. Among our most profound difficulties is making them work together. If I want to give my patients the best care possible, not only must I do a good job, but a whole collection of diverse components must somehow mesh effectively. ... This will take science. It will take art. It will take innovation. It will take ambition. And it will take humility. But the fantastic thing is: This is what you get to do."
Comment Re:It's like dejavu all over again! (Score 1) 114
Congratulations, you've missed the point entirely. This letter was (in part) in response to Google's botched launch of Buzz which is exactly "some unknown social network". The privacy commissioners wanted to know exactly how a company with as much talent as Google could launch a product with such glaring privacy concerns and wait for public outcry before fixing them. It would appear that Google have completely failed to answer that question.
Comment Neither Google nor Windows. (Score 1) 236
To me there's 2 fairly clear things to be said about HP's buy:
They don't like Windows Mobile 7, they already use Windows Mobile in their devices, but they must have decided 7 was uncompetitive and too closed down by Microsoft.
They don't like Google, they like selling big expensive enterprise servers, so selling a device which emphasizes connecting the the gCloud was kind of out of the question.
Of course HP has a long heritage of mobile design via other buyouts, the original iPaq from Compaq came out of a research project from DEC. It'll be interesting to see how their heritage melds with that of their one time main competitor in mobile devices.
Comment Re:Reminds me of Legacy of Kain (Score 1) 303
Yes, Lagacy of Kain's shifts between the real and 'spectral' worlds does seem to be pretty much identical, although the developers never gave it such a high concept PR treatment.
PS3 Hacked? 296
Several readers have sent word that George Hotz (a.k.a. geohot), the hacker best known for unlocking Apple's iPhone, says he has now hacked the PlayStation 3. From his blog post:
"I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip. 3 years, 2 months, 11 days...that's a pretty secure system. ... As far as the exploit goes, I'm not revealing it yet. The theory isn't really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can't post dumps. I'm hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone's KBAG."
Comment Re:Worrying precedent (Score 4, Insightful) 216
This case is (fortunately) nothing like the examples you give.
This was about a question in Parliament. i.e. Statements publicly made, by public representatives in a place where freedom of speech is protected to the highest extent in the UK. The statements were available to anyone who looked at the records.
The idiot lawyers then tried to prevent a newspaper from reprinting those statements, bringing into doubt the entire system of freedom of speech and press in the UK. (note to non-UK readers, there is no UK constitution to protect free speech).
The bloggers (and more importantly, pretty much every other part of the UK media) were entirely right to repeatedly report on the gross misuse of UK libel law.
Comment Movie failure. (Score 5, Insightful) 261
Sony can only blame itself for the failure of UMD movies. When the PSP first came out I was looking forward to having portable movies, but they cost significantly more than DVD's even though they were lower quality and could only be viewed on one device (the PSP 1000 had no video out), it was no wonder they didn't sell.
