Gm4n - Slashdot User

Comment Does anyone RTFA these days? (Score 1) 838

by Gm4n on Tuesday July 15, 2008 @12:59AM (#24191971) Attached to: Blizzard Wins Major Lawsuit Against Bot Developers

There's been a bit of a misinterpretation here. Loading your game into RAM is legal. Violating the EULA is illegal. The EULA for World of Warcraft says that you may not copy the game into RAM (run it) while glider is running. So, if you run Warcraft first, then Glider, it's perfectly legal.

However, glider must invoke Warcraft, so it knows which data is stored in which memory locations. So glider needs to re-code to attach to a running WoW, instead of doing the executing itself.

Submission + - Convincing users of email address privacy (dailycashier.com)

Submitted by

Gm4n

on Sunday September 30, 2007 @06:05PM

Gm4n writes: "Recently, a friend of mine had the [possibly bad] idea of creating a lottery website that gives away the prior day's ad revenue to one visitor. It was finished a few hours ago, but there's still a big problem... how do you convince a user that you are not, in fact, going to spam them or sell their email address? With all the shady sites on the internet these days, the end-user is skeptical of any website that asks for an email address. Is it best to have a paragraph or two saying you won't do anything bad, or a popup written in legalese?"

Submission + - Pirates vs Ninjas: The Great Debate (wellingtongrey.net)

Submitted by Zero on Saturday August 11, 2007 @02:32PM

Zero writes: Wellington Grey of the Miscellanea webcomic has created a presentation to answer of the the pivotal questions of our age: who would win in a fight, a ninja or a pirate? Grey looks at the weapons, fighting characteristics, environmental concerns, relationship to the flying spaghetti monster and challenges faced by each group. Also included is a slide of particular interest to slashdotters on pirates, ninjas and the RIAA.

Submission + - SCO Fiasco Over for Linux, Starting For Solaris? (desktoplinux.com) 1

Submitted by

kripkenstein

on Saturday August 11, 2007 @03:46AM

kripkenstein writes: "We have just heard that the SCO fiasco is finally going to end for Linux. But Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at DesktopLinux.com points out that the favorable result for Linux may cause unpleasant consequences for rival open-source operating system OpenSolaris:

At one time, Sun was an SCO supporter. [...] Sun's Jonathan Schwartz — then Sun VP of software and today Sun's president and CEO — said in 2003 that Sun had bought "rights equivalent to ownership" to Unix.

SCO agreed. In 2005, SCO CEO Darl McBride said that SCO had no problem with Sun open-sourcing Unix code in what would become OpenSolaris. "We have seen what Sun plans to do with OpenSolaris and we have no problem with it," McBride said. "What they're doing protects our Unix intellectual property rights."

Sun now has a little problem, which might become a giant one: SCO never had any Unix IP to sell. Therefore, it seems likely that Solaris and OpenSolaris contains Novell's Unix IP.
It should be noted that we have no idea if Sun doesn't already have an appropriate license from Novell (if they even need one at all). But, if not, we may see some messy business between Sun and Novell, and correspondingly OpenSolaris and Linux."

Submission + - Your rights offline...

Submitted by on Saturday August 11, 2007 @03:11AM

An anonymous reader writes: are continually being eroded, as we all know.

I just found out another way they were eroded about 3 years ago.

Businesses can now send a lot of personal information via Standard Mail, instead of First Class. This saves them money, lets the Postal Inspectors and presumably the FBI see whatever they've written to you, and lets the Post Office dispose of undeliverable material by the simple expedient of tossing it in the bin.

Submission + - A light based device for NP-complete problems

Submitted by

Nicusor

on Saturday August 11, 2007 @02:40AM

Nicusor writes: "A theoretical device that could solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, but using an exponential amount of energy has been presented at Unconventional Computing conference in York, 2006. From the abstract of the paper: In this paper we suggest the use of light for performing useful computations. Namely, we propose a special device which uses light rays for solving the Hamiltonian path problem on a directed graph. The device has a graph-like representation and the light is traversing it following the routes given by the connections between nodes. In each node the rays are uniquely marked so that they can be easily identified. At the destination node we will search only for particular rays that have passed only once through each node. We show that the proposed device can solve small and medium instances of the problem in reasonable time. http://www.cs.ubbcluj.ro/~moltean/uc_oltean.pdf http://www.cs.ubbcluj.ro/~moltean/lightcomputer.pp s http://www.springerlink.com/content/j6uh6k0177419l 74/?p=f28cb0f4e98740b0a132a8ce7771cc6f&pi=5"

Submission + - Zend and IBM building a better LAMP stack

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10, 2007 @06:48PM

An anonymous reader writes: This is IBM and Zend building a better LAMP stack; the one in which "M" is replaced by "D" as in DB2. The interesting part is that DB2 can be on a Linux machine or on some honking big mainframe. That's pretty cool. Now the question is will this ability to scale from small to, pretty big (AS/400), to huge (mainframe) make PHP programmers consider DB2 as their database of choice. Or, maybe the question should be "will availability of DB2 support make enterprise programmers consider PHP?". Question, questions, what do you think?

Submission + - Perfect 10 Sues Microsoft as Copyright Infringer

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Friday August 10, 2007 @06:31PM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Adult photography publisher Perfect 10 has sued Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming that MSN's Search engine displays thumbnails of pirated versions of the company's copyrighted pictures in search results, and that those results include links to the full-size pirated versions. It would appear that the outcome of this case will be controlled by the decision in Perfect 10 v. Amazon and Google (pdf), where claims of this nature — relating to the Google search engine — were dealt with in detail."

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