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Comment Booting from CD/USB (Score 1) 622

Actually, getting a relative newbie to get BIOS to boot from something other than a hard disk is way worse than learning a VM environment IMO. I'm all for the VM idea, whether VMware Player or VirtualBox. VirtualBox can import OVFs, too, so it's fairly easy to get just about anything that has been made as a virtual appliance to work.

Australia

In Australia, Censorship vs. DNS, and Porn As Network Driver 96

daria42 writes "Remember how Australia's planning to censor its Internet? Well, it looks as though the country's second-largest ISP, Optus, has made a stumble right out of the gate. Optus today confirmed you could circumvent its filtering technology simply by setting your PC to use a different DNS server than the default. Yup, it's really that easy. Oops." And why would anyone want to change their DNS settings? angry tapir writes "While the Australian Government has extolled the virtues of its currently under construction National Broadband Network (NBN) in delivering e-health and government agency services to every Australian, adult content will be the major driver of consumer adoption."

Comment San Jose State (Score 1) 432

I worked at SJSU up until 2008 and the policy was that access wasn't particularly restricted in any way but support for non Windows/MacOS was fairly limited.

Except in the College of Engineering--we tried our best to support basically anything the students would come up with, no matter how weird. Getting something bizarre working on our network was a point of pride :-). The school flirted with implementing Clean Access, but I don't know if that ever actually happened (and from the sound of it, the plan was that only Windoze users would have been affected).

DRM

Cable Channels Panic Over iPad Streaming App 346

jfruhlinger writes "Time Warner Cable this month released an iPad app that would allow its subscribers to stream (some of) the channels they already pay for to their iPad, so long as they're connected to home Internet service provided by Time Warner Cable. The app probably seems like a baby step to most Slashdotters, and was extremely popular among subscribers — but it's thrown the owners of those channels into a panic, and they're threatening lawsuits. Time Warner says the contracts they've signed with the channels allow broadcast to any device in the home — 'I don't know what a TV is anymore,' says one company exec — but the channel owners fear that this will disrupt current and future revenue streams and that they need to stop it now. 'If we allow this without litigation, everyone will do it tomorrow,' says an anonymous source. 'If we litigate, we have a chance to win.'"

Comment What Would Epic Fail Look Like? (Score 4, Funny) 534

Folks toss about the phrase "Epic Fail" far too loosely. Here's what a real Epic Fail looks like:

The DRM code has a bug that, when a certain condition happens (time passes, specially-formulated packet received, etc.), it overclocks the CPU to the point that it catches on fire. Within minutes of the event, most of the millions of PS3s in the wild have set peoples' homes ablaze.

As a result, thousands die and the insurance industry collapses. Anarchy reigns, so there's nobody to enforce copyright anymore and the original DRM is rendered irrelevant.

THAT is an epic fail.

Comment Endgame Cinema (Score 1) 418

The explanation is simple. The plucky young upstart warrior (and perhaps the rest of his party) just defeated the final boss using his strongest-ever attack. One involving, say, exploding materia*.

What everyone saw was just the endgame cutscene for that (at a safe distance, of course).

* Materia is a Final Fantasy VII term. Substitute your favorite mystical RPG energy thingy here if you like.

The Military

Laser Weapon Shoots Down Airplanes In Test 627

airshowfan writes "Boeing's directed-energy weapons (a.k.a. frickin' laser beams) have been getting some attention lately. The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) is a C-130 that famously burned a hole through a car's hood, and the YAL-1 AirBorne Laser is a 747 that shoots a laser from its nose that is powerful enough to bring down an ICBM. But even cooler is the Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments (MATRIX), a laser that is mounted on a truck (which probably costs less than a 747, but who knows) and that can shoot down small aircraft, as shown in the picture on this article. (The Laser Avenger supposedly also has this capability). We live in the future!"

Comment Re:Public Service Anouncement (Score 1) 709

...the fact that Catholics believe you can buy your way out of sin...

Whoa, there, Martin Luther. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I know the church is hardly perfect and that there have been plenty of problems both past and present, but I don't believe the buying of indulgences has been an actual issue within the last couple hundred years.

We Catholics owe a debt of gratitude to Martin Luther for pointing out (vociferously) many of our old problems, but...

I'm pretty sure the Spanish Inquisition is over, as well. Want to blame present-day Catholics for that, too?

...the head of the church is the pope - not Christ

Who says? Again, I'm hardly a perfect Catholic, but I'm pretty sure nobody ever said "ignore this Christ guy--the pope's where it's at" at any point. Believe it or not, we Catholics are Christians, despite what various (misinformed) non-Catholic Christians might believe. We just have a larger bureaucracy :-)

Does the Catholic Church have problems? You bet. Tons. Most of them related to being a huge, largely-decentralized *, and very forgiving ** organization. We do *not*, however, believe in the sale of indulgences or in the non-primacy of Christ. If you insist on attacking us, please do so with at least 20th century problems, not with 14th century ones.

* - Each individual diocese has a surprisingly large degree of autonomy from Rome. Hence the reason some dioceses dealt with the pedofile priest problem better than others.

** - Believe it or not, both the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition ended a long time ago. We tend to be a pretty forgiving lot nowadays.

Books

Professor Wins $240K In Fair Use Dispute 150

pickens writes "In a victory for Fair Use, Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project has announced that the estate of 20th century literary giant James Joyce, author of the landmark novel Ulysses, has agreed to pay $240,000 in attorneys' fees to Stanford University Consulting Professor Carol Shloss and her counsel in connection with Shloss's lawsuit to establish her right to use copyrighted material in her scholarship on the literary work of James Joyce. When Shloss used copyrighted materials in her biography of Joyce's daughter Lucia, titled Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, she had to excise a substantial amount of source material from the book in response to threats from the Joyce Estate. However following publication of the book, Shloss sued the Estate to establish her right to publish the excised material. The parties reached a settlement regarding the issue in 2007, permitting the publication of the copyrighted material in the US. Following the settlement, Shloss asked the Court to order the Estate to pay attorneys' fees of more than $400,000. She has now agreed to accept an immediate payment of $240,000 in return for the dismissal of the Estate's appeal. 'This case shows there are solutions to the problem Carol Shloss faced other than simple capitulation,' says Fair Use Project Executive Director Anthony Falzone, who led the litigation team."

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