VikingOfNorth - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Reading too much into the cover of The Economis (Score 1) 999

by VikingOfNorth on Tuesday August 14, 2012 @06:54PM (#40990915) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Place To Relocate?

Do you like to have to bribe your way around the local bureaucracy?
Do you like to live within a mile of crushing poverty?
Do you like to endure social, natural, and economic crises?

If you answered yes to all of these, then yes an emerging market is for you (i.e. Brazil, China, India, etc). If you answered no to any of them, stay in a Western country.

A nice, cozy, Western country like the United States?

If you want to avoid all these, you pretty much don't have other choice than one of those OMIGOD SOCIALIST! wellfare states, and even then these are not guaranteed. Nitpicking aside, all these three problems seem to be a part of everyday life in the US, just in a (slightly) different scale.

Comment Re:It sucks to be a Windows OEM right now (Score 1) 192

by VikingOfNorth on Sunday August 12, 2012 @07:59AM (#40963451) Attached to: Microsoft Working On "Surface 2" Tablet

Still, selling Windows licenses to OEMs continues to be Microsoft's meat and potatoes. So if everything goes catastrophically wrong, they lose their OEM customers AND they'll never break through to the tablet market... right?

Just some optimistic thinking, but from my (naive) point of view, Microsoft is making plenty of phenomenally bad business decisions in a row.

Submission + - Breakthrough in drawing complex Venn diagrams (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP on Sunday August 12, 2012 @07:43AM

00_NOP writes: Venn diagrams are all the rage in this election year, but drawing comprehensible diagrams for anything more than 3 sets has proved to be very difficult. Until the breakthough just announced by Khalegh Mamakani and Frank Ruskey of the University of Victoria in Canada, nobody had managed to draw a simple (no more than two lines crossing), symmetric Venn diagram for more than 7 sets (only primes will work). Now they have pushed that on to 11. And it's pretty too.

Submission + - Apple offered expensive licensing option to Samsung in 2010 (edibleapple.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11, 2012 @12:41PM

An anonymous reader writes: The treasure trove of documents from the ongoing Apple-Samsung dispute continue to flow on. The latest startling revelation touches on Apple and Samsung’s licensing discussions pre-litigation.

In October 2010, 6 months before Apple said “enough is enough” and initiated its lawsuit against Samsung, Apple offered Samsung a licensing deal for its patented technologies. As part of its offer, Apple said it was willing to offer Samsung a royalty rate of $30 per Android smartphone and $40 per Android tablet. Apple also indicated that it would wipe 20% off of its royalty asking price if Samsung was willing to cross license its own patents with Apple.

As part of its presentation, Apple explained: "Samsung chose to embrace and imitate Apple’s iPhone archetype. Apple would have preferred that Samsung request a license to do this in advance. Because Samsung is a strategic supplier to Apple, we are prepared to offer a royalty-bearing license for this category of device."

Submission + - Humble Bundle: Linux Users Pay Most For Music Too (humblebundle.com) 2

Submitted by dylan_- on Thursday August 09, 2012 @04:00PM

dylan_- writes: It's well known that in the various game Humble Bundles — pay whatever you want for a variety of games — Linux users have consistently been the ones who voluntarily pay the most. Some have attributed this to the lack of games on Linux but the latest Bundle is for music rather than games and the trend continues. Linux users paying an average of $11.95, Mac $9.92 and Windows $7.50. Perhaps the old complaint of it being more expensive to hire Linux sys-admins is correct, meaning they tend to earn more and leaving Linux users with more disposable income?

Submission + - Realtime Gets $100 Million To Build "Whole New Era Of The Internet" (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by CaryGarcia on Thursday August 09, 2012 @01:15PM

CaryGarcia writes: Realtime, a technology developed by a company which has been around since the Internet’s earliest days with the practically un-Googleable name “Internet Business Technologies,” has just received a massive $100 million investment to help fund its lofty plan to build the real-time web. The company offers a developer framework that now powers 2,000 real-time client applications, but, until now, it has only been available outside the U.S.

Submission + - US Freezes Nuclear Power Plant Permits Because of Waste Issues (cnn.com)

Submitted by KindMind on Thursday August 09, 2012 @11:16AM

KindMind writes: All permits for new plants and license extensions for existing plants are being frozen. From the article:

"The U.S. government said it will stop issuing permits for new nuclear power plants and license extensions for existing facilities until it resolves issues around storing radioactive waste. The government's main watchdog, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, believes that current storage plans are safe and achievable. But a federal court said that the NRC didn't detail what the environmental consequences would be if the agency is wrong."

The NRC says that "We are now considering all available options for resolving the waste issue, But, in recognition of our duties under the law, we will not issue [reactor] licenses until the court's remand is appropriately addressed."

Affected are 14 reactors awaiting license renewals, and an additional 16 reactors awaiting permits for new construction.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Rugged e-book reader?

Submitted by

Augury

on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @07:34AM

Augury writes: "I'm about to undertake a lengthy trip involving travel through dusty, damp and drop-inducing environments. When it comes to packing for such a trip, reading is a fundamental need, to help while away the inevitable hours spent in transit lounges, at bus stops and on beaches. The weight and bulk of the dead tree approach makes it impractical, so an e-book reader seems ideal — does anyone have any experience with ruggedising an e-book reader for such conditions?"

Submission + - WikiLeaks Under DDoS Again (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by

twoheadedboy

on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @07:30AM

twoheadedboy writes: "After being hit by a "72-hour" DDoS in May, WikiLeaks is claiming to be under attack yet again. All its sites appear to be down and fingers have already been pointed at government entities. WikiLeaks, posting on Twitter, said it had its suspicions of why it was being targeted. It was either because of its ongoing releases related to Stratfor and Syria, or because of an upcoming release, Julian Assange's organisation speculated. The fact that everyone is currently engrossed in the Olympics may have given attackers good reason to target the websites right now, WikiLeaks said."

Submission + - Facebook facial recognition under scrutiny in Norway (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Qedward on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @05:53AM

Qedward writes: Certainly not the first country to raise concerns, but Facebook's facial recognition feature will now be investigated by the Norwegian Data Protection Agency.

Last year, Facebook added the ability to use facial recognition technology to help to tag images as a default feature to users worldwide. Ove Skåra, communications manager at the Norwegian Data Protection Agency or Datatilsynet said: "Facial recognition, is a technology that it is important to have critical view of, and see how it is actually used."

Outside of Europe, US Senator Al Franken, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's privacy subcommittee, called on Facebook to turn off the feature by default in July.

But Facebook doesn't think that is a very good idea. Facebook is an opt-in experience, and people choose to be on Facebook because they want to share with each other, according to Rob Sherman, manager of privacy and public policy....

Submission + - Cable Cut Takes Out Wikipedia (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by

twoheadedboy

on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @06:58AM

twoheadedboy writes: "Wikipedia went down for over an hour yesterday, thanks to some cut cables between its two data centres. The site uses its Ashburn, Virginia data centre for most traffic, but relies on another in Tampa, Florida for certain backend services such as databases. Despite having two fibre cables running between the two facilities, a cut cable led to a complete blackout of the online encyclopaedia. Wikimedia itself is baffled by the situation and has asked its network provider what is going on and why resiliency measures failed."

Submission + - Dark Reign 2 goes open source (google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @06:25AM

An anonymous reader writes: One of Activision's last RTS games, Dark Reign 2, has gone open source under the LGPL.
Although the release by a former Pandemic Studios employee was some time ago, it had happened relatively silently.
With the source code now available, it is hoped that online play that isn't dependent on WON servers will be implemented and possibly ports to other platforms.

Submission + - Megaupload Boss Kim Dotcom Says New Zealand Police Beat Him (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @06:10AM

wiredmikey writes: Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom on Tuesday accused New Zealand police of kicking and punching him when they raided his Auckland mansion earlier this year to arrest him for alleged copyright piracy. Dotcom told the Auckland High Court he tried to surrender peacefully to police during the raid in January, when about 70 armed police cooperating with a major US online piracy probe raided the mansion.

"Then they were all over me, I had a punch to the face, I had boots kicking me down to the floor," he told the court, adding that one officer stood on his hand and another kneed him in the ribs. "I was screaming and I was in pain," he said.

Megaupload and related file-sharing sites were closed after the raid in January, part of an investigation US prosecutors have described as the world's largest copyright action.

Submission + - Three years in jail for receiving an image of fisting? 1

Submitted by

wwwrench

on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @05:34AM

wwwrench writes: "In the UK, it may be illegal to receive an emailed image of legal and consensual sex. The Crown Prosecutation Service is currently trying a man for receiving an image of two people fisting. Under the U.K.'s 2008 obsenity law it is illegal to view a pornographic image of extreme sex, even if the image depicts a legal act. Questions have been raised about the motives for the case, as the defendent is openly gay, and used to prosecute corrupt police officers. Although the case has been virtually ignored by the media, this is also the first trail in the U.K. where one of the lawyers has been allowed to tweet during the trial (under the hashtag #porntrial).""

Submission + - 4D is so yesterday, what about 5D and up? (ef.gy)

Submitted by

jyujin

on Monday August 06, 2012 @06:34AM

jyujin writes: "Ever notice in certain university maths lectures that certain things just ought to be great do visualise, but nobody ever bothered to do it? One of those was higher dimensional geometry. For some reason there's a lot of talk about n-cubes and the like, but you'll be lucky to find Youtube videos about it. So here's a nice little programme for you to get dirty with on your Mac that let's you view a lot of the common primitives in higher dimensional geometry and just play with them. Sure helped me get the gist of 4D rotations and beyond."

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