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Comment Re:Lets see (Score 2, Insightful) 736

by Whatshisface (#30593544) Attached to: Why Do So Many Terrorists Have Engineering Degrees
Bingo! This is the part that most people don't get. Its amazing how many terrorists are not fundamentalist Muslims, but simply young kids from Muslim countries who are pissed off at the treatment their people get from the Americans and Israelis. And every time a drone indiscriminately kills 30 civilians in a failed attempt to kill one Al-Qaeda member, they gain a few more recruits.

Comment Re:Charities? (Score 5, Insightful) 464

by Whatshisface (#30498426) Attached to: Charities Upset Over Chase Facebook Contest
But coming back to the original point, is that a charity? Just from reading the summary, it seems like all the groups that were removed were activist groups endorsing a specific change in laws. Its one thing to ask Chase to endorse the charity of your choice, its another to ask them to make a political donation to support your pet cause.

Comment Re:If women are so smart . . . (Score 2, Informative) 928

by Whatshisface (#30350134) Attached to: How Men and Women Badly Estimate Their Own Intelligence
There's never been a woman who actually won the nomination for either the Democratic or Republican parties. Obviously the closest that anyone came was Hillary Clinton in 2008, who would have been President now (IMO) if Obama had not come out of nowhere. But I would think given how close she came, and that Sarah Palin is still a major draw (whatever her qualifications may be), it will not be too long before a woman becomes a major party nominee, or actually wins the election.

Comment Re:Unfriending due to Farmville (Score 5, Informative) 251

by Whatshisface (#30344378) Attached to: <em>Farmville</em>, Social Gaming, and Addiction

Due to Farmvilles massive spamming, and my inability to make it stop telling me when my sisters/friends/coworkers have found a new cow, I've actually resorted to unfriending people who are farmville addicts. My "newsfeed" went from updates on my friends lives to 3/4 farmville useless announcements, making it effectively useless. I was tempted to install the app to see if I could filter them somehow, but ultimately said forget it.

It's fine if people want to play games, but frankly, the rest of the world doesn't care or need to know that you planted seeds. If I installed a facebook app that broadcasted every time I got a green drop in WoW I'm sure my friends wouldn't be too happy.

Add to this the Mafia wars spam, and these stupid little apps have made a mess out of what was once a useful tool for me to keep on top of my friends day to day and related silliness.

It takes one click to block an unwanted application like Farmville from posting to your News Feed. There's a "Hide" option on any News Feed story which will block all posts from that application. Very useful.

Comment Re:Blurring only targets makes them easy to pick o (Score 1) 597

by Whatshisface (#27076773) Attached to: Calif. Politican Thinks Blurred Online Maps Would Deter Terrorists

This bill would prohibit an operator, as defined, of a commercial Internet Web site or online service that makes a virtual globe browser available to members of the public from providing aerial or satellite photographs or imagery of places in this state that have been identified on the Internet Web site by the operator as a school, place of worship, or government or medical building or facility unless those photographs or images have been blurred.

So it only has to be blurred if the representation is a GLOBE ? In other words, Google maps is not subject to this, only Google Earth. Yeah, those terrorists are really screwed now.
Image

The Walking House 304

Posted by samzenpus from the baba-yaga-eat-your-heart-out dept.
What is 10' tall, has six hydraulic legs, and is powered by the wind and solar panels? The prototype pod house built by art collective N55 in Copenhagen, Denmark. With the help of MIT, N55 built the pod over a two-year period at a cost of £30,000. Designers say it provides a solution to the problem of rising water levels as the house can simply walk away from floods. One of the designers says, "This house is not just for travellers but also for anyone interested in a more general way of nomadic living." It won't be long now until the Japanese make Howl's Moving Castle.
The Almighty Buck

Bandwidth Use In MMOs 188

Posted by Soulskill 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."

Comment Re:It's not that simple (Score 1) 696

by Whatshisface (#25352577) Attached to: National Debt Clock Overflowed, Extended By a Digit

Basically think: you want new shoes. So I send you my permit to raise your own pig, slaughter it yourself, tan its skin, and make your own gloves. Only now you have to pay me for the gloves. I'll even pay you back a few cents for the leather, 'cause that's raw materials and dirt cheap, and charge you lots for the gloves.

Wow, that is a messed up system. I want new shoes, I have to pay you, do the work myself, and at the end of it all I get is GLOVES? Bastards !
Media

MediaDefender's Parent Company Joins P2P Market 40

Posted by Soulskill from the playing-both-sides dept.
An anonymous reader writes with news that ArtistDirect, the company who acquired MediaDefender, has launched another company called PiCast for the purpose of P2P video distribution. The reader says: "This is a strange twist for a company which last year set up a video-sharing site called Miivi in an attempt to entrap users uploading copyrighted content, and was caught launching a DoS attack against Revision3, which we discussed earlier this year."

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