iamwhoiamtoday - Slashdot User

Comment Parenting skills? (Score 3, Insightful) 184

by iamwhoiamtoday on Wednesday October 13, 2010 @12:28PM (#33883730) Attached to: Apple Awarded Anti-Sexting Patent

News flash, dearest parents. Controlling everything that your child does is not good parenting. Yes, the kids will mess up every now and then. So do we all. If you impose a lot of rules, monitor every little thing that your child does, then all they will do is find a way around whatever blocks / rules you have in place. They have a LOT of energy, and endless free time.

tl:dr - Being a good parent does not mean monitoring every little action.

Student Arrested For Classroom Texting 1246

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @05:52PM from the the-strong-arm-of-the-education-system dept.

A 14-year-old Wisconsin girl was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after she refused to stop texting during a high school math class. The girl denied having a phone when confronted by a school safety officer, but a female cop found it after frisking her. The Samsung Cricket was recovered "from the buttocks area" of the teenager, according to the police report. The girl was banned from school property for a week, and is scheduled for an April 20 court appearance for a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge. I applaud the adults involved for their discretion and temperance in this heinous case of texting without permission.

Comment This brings up something interesting. (Score 1, Redundant) 61

by iamwhoiamtoday on Friday February 13, 2009 @05:57PM (#26849991) Attached to: Dutch City Fears Loss of Pornography Archive

Pornography has been around for ages, and I mean: since man figured out how to draw stuff. [citation needed]

Where are the records? I, for one, would think that older porn should be preserved. What about the porn flicks from the 50s? what about the really old playboy magazines? There really should be a "world wide foundation for the preservation of Pornography" Some would argue that it's "History" or "Art."

Dutch City Fears Loss of Pornography Archive 61

Posted by samzenpus on Friday February 13, 2009 @05:03PM from the oh-the-humnaity dept.

The Dutch city of Leeuwarden has lost the municipal pornography archive and officials fear it may be gone forever. A spokesman for the city said the collection may have been taken home "accidentally" by an employee or visitor. "We're hoping that someone will say 'Hey, I have that in my attic' and bring it back," he said Thursday. "No questions asked." Leeuwarden shouldn't be too upset. I've found it a good practice to get rid of your porn archive and rebuild every 6 months or so.

Comment Re:World domination 201 (Score 1) 898

by iamwhoiamtoday on Sunday December 28, 2008 @06:56PM (#26252737) Attached to: First Look At Windows 7 Beta 1

But it had WAY more program-compatibility issues then VISTA did. I was using XP64 for about a year before Vista came out, and I must say, I have had WAY less problems with Vista 64-bit then with XP64.

EA Is Now Officially On Steam, Spore Loses SecuROM 354

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 19, 2008 @10:13PM from the baby-steps dept.

Trevor DeRiza writes "Today, Valve and EA revealed that this week's earlier rumors were true: Spore (and other EA games) are coming to Steam. As of today, Spore, Spore Creepy & Cute Parts Pack, Warhammer Online, Mass Effect, Need for Speed: Undercover, and FIFA Manager 2009 are all available for download on Steam. In the coming weeks, EA will add Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, and Red Alert 3. On the official Steam forums, when asked whether or not Spore would contain the dreaded SecuROM DRM that contributed to it being the most pirated game of 2008, a moderator replied, 'It does not have third party DRM.' EA has also finally launched a 'de-authorization tool' to free up limited installation slots." Several readers have written to point out other news about Steam today: they've begun selling games priced in local currency for European customers. The only problem? Their conversion rate seems to be $1 per €1, somewhat less favorable than the current exchange rate, which is roughly $1.40 per €1.

Valve's Gabe Newell On DRM 241

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:41AM from the he's-pretty-steamed dept.

Ars Technica is running a story about recent comments by Valve's Gabe Newell in which he bluntly stated, "As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb. The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe I'll be able to play my game and maybe I won't)." Ars then points out a response by Microsoft's Games for Windows Community Manager Ryan Miller suggesting Rockstar Games' recent decision not to have install limits for the PC version of GTA IV made the use of SecuROM acceptable. GameSetWatch has a related piece discussing the difficulty in measuring piracy and enforcing infringement laws.

US Army To Push X-Files Tech Development 139

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 05, 2008 @08:20PM from the the-truth-is-out-there dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The US Army is ramping up the development of technology right out of the X-Files; 'making science fiction into reality' as Dr. John Parmentola — Director of their Research and Laboratory Management — puts it. The list of things currently in the works is amazing: regenerating body parts on 'nano-scaffolding,' telepathy through electronic impulses in the scalp, and self-aware virtual photorealistic soldiers that can be deployed in the battlefield through 'quantum ghost imaging.' To test these they want to use them into a massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft or Eve online."

Bandwidth Use In MMOs 188

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday October 23, 2008 @12:59AM from the more-always-more dept.

Massively is running a story about bandwidth costs for MMOs and other virtual worlds. It's based on a post at the BBC on the same subject which references a traffic analysis (PDF) done for World of Warcraft. Quoting: "If you're an average user on capped access, the odds are you have roughly 20Gbytes per month to allocate among all of your Internet usage (it varies depending on just where you are). For you, sucking back (for example) a 2GB World of Warcraft patch isn't something you can just do. It's something you have to plan for — and quite often you have to plan for in the following month. Even a 500MB download has to be handled with caution. MMOGs as a rule don't use a whole lot of bandwidth in actual operation. However, the quantity definitely rises in busy areas with lots of players, where there are large numbers of mobs, or on raids, and takes quite a much larger jump if you're using voice as well."

The Development of Braid 27

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday September 13, 2008 @02:35PM from the weaving-strands dept.

Gamasutra sat down with Jonathan Blow, creator of the successful independent game Braid. He talks about going through the three-year-plus development cycle as a one-man team, and how his concept of the game changed as he worked on it. He also discusses what he feels is the difference between "natural rewards" and "artificial rewards." "... for the most part, when you're playing Tetris, you're enjoying it because you enjoy fitting the blocks together. Whereas when you play World of Warcraft — and what I'm about to say is a generalization, since different players enjoy different things, obviously — a lot of the appeal of playing World of Warcraft is not in the core gameplay mechanic, because it's boring, a lot of the time. ... I think what keeps them in there is, at first, the level ding, because it's very addictive to get that. 'Okay, I've got more gold. Whatever.' And eventually, they've made this huge time investment and they've got a character there and they know what that level ding feels like and the next one is pretty far off, but they can get there! And it's not any better, because this is like number 67. It's got to be better than 66!"

Journal SPAM: The Smartest Browser and OS? 10

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday May 25, 2008 @09:29PM

IQ League maintain a "60 Second IQ Test" online. Interestingly, the correlate the results of this test with a number of statistics available from their weblogs. Along with the geographical distinctions - like city and country - the referrer and OS/Browser user-agent strings are also mined, to determine the Smartest Browser and OS. The dirt? The very smartest is

How Japan's Biggest BBS Keeps Things Simple 265

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 21, 2008 @03:51PM from the by-ignoring-them-mostly dept.

zedsville points out an article at Wired proving that plenty of people (at least in Japan) are willing to brave BBS environments without all the fancy layers to screen out spam or online provocateurs: "It's a profile of Hiroyuki Nishimura, the man behind the Japanese site 2channel. Nishimura set up the simplistic BBS in 1999, when he was an exchange student in the USA. The site has no registration or web handles or moderating, no mechanisms to filter out flames and trollish behavior, and no mechanisms to help users find the most insightful comments and topics. But this ugly, lo-res site gets about 500 million pageviews a month. Nishimura doesn't police the contents of posts to his bulletin board, which has resulted in numerous libel claims. 'I used to show up in court,' he says. 'Then one day I overslept, and nothing happened. So I stopped going.' Nishimura has lost about 50 lawsuits and owes millions of dollars in penalties, which he has no intention of paying. 'If the verdict mandates deleting things, I'll do it,' he says. 'I just haven't complied with demands to pay money. Would a cell phone carrier feel responsible when somebody receives a threatening phone call?'"

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