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The Definitive Evisceration of The Phantom Menace *NSFW* 629

Posted by samzenpus from the meesa-completely-agree dept.
cowmix writes "When TPM came out ten years ago, its utter crappiness shocked me to the core and wounded a entire generation of geeks. My inner child had been abused and betrayed. I moped around, talking to no one, for almost two weeks. I couldn't bring myself to see #2 or #3, whatever they were called. Now, a decade later, comes Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review, the ultimate, seven-part, seventy minute analysis of this mother of all train wrecks. Not only does it nail how the film blows, but tells us why. Time, apparently, does not heal all wounds." Or, if you prefer all 7 parts embedded in one page, you can check out slashfilm's aggregation.
Math

Insurgent Attacks Follow Mathematical Pattern 181

Posted by Soulskill from the news-from-terminus dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Nature reports that data collected on the timing of attacks and number of casualties from more than 54,000 events across nine insurgent wars, including those fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2008 and in Sierra Leone between 1994 and 2003, suggest that insurgencies have a common underlying pattern that may allow the timing of attacks and the number of casualties to be predicted. By plotting the distribution of the frequency and size of events, the team found that insurgent wars follow an approximate power law, in which the frequency of attacks decreases with increasing attack size to the power of 2.5. This means that for any insurgent war, an attack with 10 casualties is 316 times more likely to occur than one with 100 casualties (316 is 10 to the power of 2.5). 'We found that the way in which humans do insurgent wars — that is, the number of casualties and the timing of events — is universal,' says team leader Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami in Florida. 'This changes the way we think insurgency works.' To explain what was driving this common pattern, the researchers created a mathematical model which assumes that insurgent groups form and fragment when they sense danger, and strike in well-timed bursts to maximize their media exposure. Johnson is now working to predict how the insurgency in Afghanistan might respond to the influx of foreign troops recently announced by US President Barack Obama. 'We do observe a complicated pattern that has to do with the way humans do violence in some collective way,' adds Johnson."

Comment Re:Government setting up TOR nodes? (Score 1) 174

by Ironlenny (#28525099) Attached to: The Technology Keeping Information Flowing in Iran
Yes, theoretically Iran could setup enough relays to figure out who is using tor and where they are going, but in practice it is prohibitively expensive. Since the information is routed at random, and there is nothing in the encryped packet to give it's origen, Iran would need to control a large portion of the tor network inorder to have a reasonable chance of tracing the traffic.

The trouble is, as more relays are added that are outside of Iran's network, the number of possible routs information can take increases exponentially, the end result being a huge increase in the amount of resources Iran must devote to tracing packets with just a few outside nodes.
The Internet

In-Game Web Browser Round-Up 193

Posted by timothy from the not-complete-until-it-includes-one dept.
theodp writes "CNET takes a look at Web browsers you can run inside of the latest video games, offering mini-reviews of PlayXpert, Steam, Rogue, and Xfire. Why run these instead of your standard browser? Well, these browsers run lean and mean, play nice with full-screen apps, provide hot keys that can make them appear or disappear in an instant, and offer transparency so you can continue to play a game in full screen while chatting, reading e-mail or looking up cheat codes. So how much longer before we see a variation of this on our real-world car windshields?"

Comment Re:Original Sources (Score 1) 758

by Ironlenny (#26730189) Attached to: MS Confirms Six Different Versions of Windows 7

Yeah, as a Linux user, it's nice not to have things so complicated. I only have to choose between Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, and-

Windows 7 is one operating system with potentially six different versions. You have listed 11 different Operating Systems.

That's like one man complaining about Ford having five versions of the Tauris, and another man complaining about having to many car companies to choose from.
Cellphones

Local Police Want To Jam Wireless Signals 317

Posted by kdawson from the hope-you-like-jammin'-too dept.
The Washington Post is reporting on the growing pressure from state and local law enforcement agencies for permission to jam wireless signals the way the Secret Service and the FBI can. Officials especially want to be able to drop a no-call blanket over local prisons around the country from time to time. "...jamming remains strictly illegal for state and local agencies. Federal officials barely acknowledge that they use it inside the United States, and the few federal agencies that can jam signals usually must seek a legal waiver first. The quest to expand the technology has invigorated a debate about how widely jamming should be allowed and whether its value as a common crime-fighting strategy outweighs its downsides, including restricting the constant access to the airwaves that Americans have come to expect. ... Critics warn of another potential problem, 'friendly fire,' when one agency inadvertently jams another's access to the airwaves, posing a safety hazard in an emergency. [CTIA spokesman Joe] Farren said there are 'smarter, better and safer alternatives,' such as stopping inmates from getting smuggled cellphones in the first place or pinpointing signals from unauthorized callers."

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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