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Privacy

Submission + - Creepy Stalking App Explained by Author (thinq.co.uk) 1

An anonymous reader writes: Creepy, a package described as a 'geolocation information aggregator,' is turning heads in privacy circles, but should people be worried? Yiannis Kakavas explains why he developed his scary stalking application.

Creepy is a software package for Linux or Windows — with a Mac OS X port in the works — that aims to gather public information on a targeted individual via social networking services in order to pinpoint their location. It's remarkably efficient at its job, even in its current early form, and certainly lives up to its name when you see it in use for the first time.

Transportation

Submission + - Tesla Sues BBC's Top Gear For Libel (allcarselectric.com) 3

thecarchik writes: About two years ago BBC's Top Gear aired a test drive of the then relatively new Tesla Roadster. In the particular episode, Tesla Roadsters are depicted as suffering several critical “breakdowns” during track driving. Host Jeremy Clarkson concludes the episode by saying that in the real world the Roadster "doesn’t seem to work"

Tesla claims that the breakdowns were staged, making most of Top Gear'(TM)s remarks about the Roadster untrue. Tesla also states that it can prove Top Gear’s tests were falsified due to the recordings of its cars’ onboard data-loggers.

What's Tesla asking for in the lawsuit? Tesla simply wants Top Gear to stop rebroadcasting the particular episode and to correct the record.

Space

Submission + - Why Russian Space Images Look Different From NASA? (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Russians have published two amazing photos of Earth using their new Elektro-L satellite, in 30,000km high orbit around the equator. The quality is stunning, and they look quite different from NASA's Earth images. But why are they different? And are they better than NASA's?

Comment Re:Warning! Prospective alert. (Score 1) 537

In Chernobyl 28 workers died of acute radiation poisoning within weeks. Within the first few years another 15 first responders died of direct effect cancers, thyroid cancer etc. 100,000 people were within the radiation zone and the rates of cancer among the population are 1% above normal. Of the 4000 people who died of cancer from the elevated radiation level population we can only attribute 30 of those deaths to the increased radiation level based on general population cancer rates.

So It was not a disaster in slow motion. The majority of the deaths from Chernobyl happened within the first week. Deaths in the first week in Japan, 0.

Comment Re:Pry my curly brackets from my cold dead hands (Score 1) 444

Blocks: I don't care how you denote them but DENOTE them. Seems that language developers these days are trying to reinvent fortran. Not exactly the model of fast error free programming.

For scanning speed I would prefer a single character bracket, quote, parenthesis whatever vs multi character tags. But as long as there is some opening and closing for which I can receive syntax errors rather than silent bugs I am happy.

Comment Re:Blizzard s*cks! (Score 1) 83

You are not an RTS fan. You are a linux guy. Can you be both? I don't think you can, not in today's game market. Perhaps you were an rts fan years ago and still have nostalgia for the genre, but you have chosen to remove yourself from the evolution of the genre and the pc game playing playerbase in general.
You can look down on us from your high, and game free ideological throne. But the pragmatic, actual game fans, have long since switched back to windows. Or at least dual boot. Or a hackintosh if you are willing to wait for your games and still want to make an OS statement.

The Almighty Buck

EA Says Game Development Budgets Have Peaked 157

Gamasutra reports on comments from Electronic Arts VP David Demartini indicating that the company thinks AAA game development budgets are not going to continue their skyward trend. "If [a developer] happens to make a lot of money based on that budget, great for them. If they come up short and have to cover some of it — y'know, they'll be smarter the next time they do it. That's kind of the approach that we take to it." Certainly this has something to do with a few major economic flops in the games industry lately, such as the cancellation of This Is Vegas after an estimated $50 million had been dumped into the project. Another example is the anemic response to APB, an MMO with a budget rumored to be as high as $100 million. Poor sales and reviews caused developer Realtime Worlds to enter insolvency and lay off a large portion of the development team.
Data Storage

WD, Intel, Corsair, Kingston, Plextor SSDs Collide 56

J. Dzhugashvili writes "New SSDs just keep coming out from all corners of the market, and keeping track of all of them isn't the easiest job in the world. Good thing SSD roundups pop up every once in a while. This time, Western Digital's recently launched SiliconEdge Blue solid-state drive has been compared against new entrants from Corsair, Kingston, and Plextor. The newcomers faced off against not just each other, but also Intel's famous X25-M G2, WD's new VelociRaptor VR200M mechanical hard drive, and a plain-old WD Caviar Black 2TB thrown in for good measure. Who came out on top? Priced at about the same level, the WD and Plextor drives each seem to have deal-breaking performance weaknesses. The Kingston drive is more affordable than the rest, but it yielded poor IOMeter results. In the end, the winner appeared to be Corsair's Nova V128, which had similar all-around performance as Intel's 160GB X25-M G2 but with a slightly lower capacity and a more attractive price." Thanks to that summary, you might not need to wade through all 10 of the pages into which the linked article's been split.

Comment Re:People are always in denial (Score 1) 678

Your analogy is backwards.

The slot machine that the publishers keep pumping money into is the PC game industry. Developers want to release PC games, but doing so is just not profitable and piracy takes sales away from the SKUs that are actually profitable (consoles). If DRM fails they will just stop making PC versions.

This is a last ditch effort to save pc gaming. But pc gamers keep piling on the hate, trying to make this fail.

I think you are just waving farewell to pc gaming. Good going.

Comment Re:So..?? (Score 1) 285

Ahh i see we have a liberatarian here. When the revolution comes we are going to remove the FDA. Instead we will make idiots like you line up to test all the canned food for botulism and meat for salmonella. You see this way we kill two birds with one stone.

Seriously though? how the hell do you think this would work? Regular people are not equipped to do testing of all their food. There are contaminents that are tasteless and don't kill for months or years. (iron, mercury etc.)
And the concept of an anarcho-capitalist honor system is complete fantasy. In real life companies have only to change their names and move on. These rules are there for a reason.

Games

Ocarina of Time — Best Game Ever? 615

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the best game yet made, according to a list compiled by readers and writers of the lauded British gaming magazine Edge. Their list of the hundred best games ever is top-heavy with Nintendo titles, a full five out of the top ten being released to a Nintendo platform. Obviously, this sort of thing can get contentious, and CNet's Crave blog spoke up quickly with a contrary opinion. "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is truly a masterpiece that should be thought of as one of the greatest games ever created. But to call it the greatest game of all time is a serious misstatement. Unlike Super Mario Bros., Ocarina of Time was released in an era where video games were booming and sales were on the rise. Simply put, everyone was playing video games, and the game was the best of its time. But no other game in history--Ocarina of Time included--was able to save an entire industry from almost guaranteed destruction the way Super Mario Bros. did, and it is for this reason that we should all give ol' Mario and Luigi credit where it's due." Let's hear it, then. What game deserves to top a list of the 100 best games ever made?
Displays

Man Sues Gateway Because He Can't Read EULA 666

Scoopy writes "California resident Dennis Sheehan took Gateway to small claims court after he reportedly received a defective computer and little technical support from the PC manufacturer. Gateway responded with their own lawyer and a 2-inch thick stack of legal docs, and claimed that Sheehan violated the EULA, which requires that users give up their right to sue and settle these cases in private arbitration. Sheehan responded that he never read the EULA, which pops up when the user first starts the computer, because the graphics were scrambled — precisely the problem he had complained to tech support in the first place. A judge sided with Sheehan on May 24 and the case will proceed to small claims court. A lawyer is quoted as saying that Sheehan, a high school dropout who is arguing his own case, is in for a world of hurt: 'This poor guy now faces daunting reality of having to litigate this on appeal against Gateway...By winning, he's lost.'"

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