Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:This is dumb (Score 1) 292

by JJP (#36248800) Attached to: Twitter Prepared To Name Users

But Twitter most definitely does have business interests in England and Wales!! They have a business-model in which they make money of their subscribers and they have subscribers from England and Wales using their services.
PC Games (Games)

How PC Game Modders Are Evolving 98

Posted by Soulskill from the longer-beaks-for-breaking-shells dept.
Lanxon writes "Wired has a lengthy investigation into the state of PC game mods, and the amateurs keeping the scene exciting in the wake of draconian DRM placed on many PC titles by major studios. It highlights a number of creative modders, such as Scott Reismanis, founder and editor of Mod DB, and his community-driven alternative to Valve's Steam — Desura — which is 'a distribution system, and, like Steam, will sell games and champion indie titles. But the way it handles mods makes it even more exciting.'"
Crime

Justice Not As Blind As Previously Thought 256

Posted by samzenpus from the too-pretty-for-jail dept.
NotSoHeavyD3 writes "I doubt this is much of a surprise but apparently Cornell University did a study that seems to show you're more likely to get convicted if you're ugly. From the article: 'According to a Cornell University study, unattractive defendants are 22 percent more likely to be convicted than good-looking ones. And the unattractive also get slapped with harsher sentences — an average of 22 months longer in prison.'"
Security

Blizzard Authenticators May Become Mandatory 248

Posted by Soulskill from the gotta-take-off-your-shoes-too dept.
An anonymous reader writes "WoW.com is reporting that a trusted source has informed them that Blizzard is giving serious consideration to making authenticators mandatory on all World of Warcraft accounts. The authenticators function the same as ones provided by most banks — in order to log in, you must generate a number on the external device. Blizzard already provides a free iPhone app that functions as an authenticator. The source stated, 'it is a virtually forgone conclusion that it will happen.' This comes after large spates of compromised accounts left Bizzard game masters severely backlogged by restoration requests."
PC Games (Games)

EA Shutting Down Video Game Servers Prematurely 341

Posted by Soulskill from the sixty-dollar-yearly-fee dept.
Spacezilla writes "EA is dropping the bomb on a number of their video game servers, shutting down the online fun for many of their Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 games. Not only is the inclusion of PS3 and Xbox 360 titles odd, the date the games were released is even more surprising. Yes, Madden 07 and 08 are included in the shutdown... but Madden 09 on all consoles as well?"
Television

How an Online-Only TV Series Stays Successful 163

Posted by timothy from the roll-enough-dies dept.
ChronoDragon writes "The Wall Street Journal points out that it is possible to make a successful web series without the backing of a studio. With the release of a music video, Do you Wanna Date My Avatar, and the start of Season of 3, the web series The Guild is ready for even more success. The Guild, created by Felicia Day (Doctor Horrible), is a low-budget comedy series about a group of MMORPG gamers and their interactions both online and off. While there are a lot of references that will be instantly recognized by gamers, the show is still very accessible to non-gamers."

Comment Re:They force you to lease software (Score 1) 1016

by JJP (#28949899) Attached to: California Student Arrested For Console Hacking

But it's not. Even making a business of modding consoles so that people can import games or use homebrew, I think, would be tolerated.
But advertising that you make a business of modding consoles to play pirated games, I understand that won't be tolerated.

As far as I understand the DMCA it is not. Converting a console is considered circumventing a protection system and is as such illegal. That's one reason why the DMCA is such a crap piece of law.
Google

Submission + - Google helps catch 'muggers' (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
Bifurcati
Bifurcati writes: "Two Dutch men have been arrested after a boy they allegedly mugged spotted them in Google StreetView. The 14-year-old boy was pulled off his bicycle in the town of Groningen in September and robbed of his mobile phone and about 250 dollars. He found the pictures in StreetView apparently by chance and while his attackers' faces were blurred (as per Google's rules) Google gave investigators the original unobscured pictures. The bad guys were also apparently twins...or there's some clever real life photoshopping going on!"
Games

Submission + - Valve is actually releasing a Linux supported game (phoronix.com)

Submitted by
ndogg
ndogg writes: "There was some speculation last year about Valve possibly releasing Linux ports of Steam when some Linux libraries were found with Left 4 Dead. Some speculated that it had nothing to do with any client libraries at all, but instead perhaps with their servers. Now there's even more reason to believe that Steam is being ported to Linux since Valve is releasing a game called Dyson with Linux listed as among the requirements."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Amazon.com holding non-Prime orders hostage. (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It seems Amazon.com hasn't been moving enough membership subscriptions for it's new Amazon Prime service which offers unlimited free two day shipping, one day shipping upgrades for $3.99, and a host of other supposed benefits. Users of Amazon who haven't subscribed to prime have begun noticing a delay in their shipments. One such user contacted Amazon.com only to find they were purposefully delaying shipping as part of a ploy and sales pitch to push subscriptions. FTA: "Evidently in the Amazon terms of service they have the right to hold your items for later shipping, and the 3-5 days is just the time it takes from leaving the warehouse. We'd never had this kind of delay before so we were a bit surprised, was there a problem? No. Amazon is just trying to get folks to sign up for Amazon Prime (which we were offered an upgrade to, one month free trial). In fact if we upgraded today our book would ship immediately." Seems that not only ISPs are thinking of trying to throttle service unless you pay more.
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago

Submitted by evw
evw writes: The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required, or google the url and click from Google) that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago. He is on track to return to work at the end of June. William Hawkins, a doctor specializing in pancreatic and gastrointestinal surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., said that the type of slow-growing pancreatic tumor Mr. Jobs had will commonly metastasize in another organ during a patient's lifetime, and that the organ is usually the liver. Having the procedure done in Tennessee makes sense because its list of patients waiting for transplants is shorter than in many other states. There are no residency requirements for transplants. Also in the Mercury News.
Displays

Submission + - LG To Offer Monitors with Built-In Virtualization (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Later this month, LG Electronics plans to start selling flat screen monitors that can function as virtual computers. LG's new SmartVine N-series LCD monitors will utilize embedded virtualization technology from U.S.-based NComputing. This technology is based on the idea that today's computers are so powerful that many applications use only a small fraction of the computer's capacity. NComputing's virtualization enables many users to tap the unused capacity and share the computer as if each had their own machine. Because LG Electronics is embedding NComputing virtualization circuitry inside the new SmartVine N-series monitors, users simply connect their keyboards and mice directly to the monitor, which then connects to the host PC via a cable. A PCI Card Kit must also be installed in the host PC."
Microsoft

Submission + - The Truth Behind the Death of Linux on the Netbook (groklaw.net)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Groklaw brings us news of Microsoft holding the smoking gun in regards to the death of Linux on netbooks. You see, the question of Linux on netbooks in Taiwan was put forth to the Taiwan Trade Authority director who replied, 'In our association we operate as a consortium, like the open source consortium. They want to promote open source and Linux. But if you begin from the PC you are afraid of Microsoft. They try to go to the smart phone or PDA to start again.' It's simple, fear will keep them in line. PJ points out 'So next time you hear Microsoft bragging that people *prefer* their software to Linux on netbooks, you'll know better. If they really believed that, they'd let the market speak, on a level playing field. If I say my horse is faster than yours, and you says yours is faster, and we let our horses race around the track, that establishes the point. But if you shoot my horse, that leaves questions in the air. Is your horse *really* faster? If so, why shoot my horse?'"
Education

Submission + - Women Engineers and Workplace Sexism

Submitted by yali
yali writes: Women in traditionally male-dominated fields like math and engineering face the extra burden that their performance, beyond reflecting on them individually, might be taken as broader confirmation of stereotypes if they perform poorly. A newly published series of experiments tested the effects of such stereotype threat among engineering students. Standardized observations showed that male engineering students who had previously expressed subtle sexist attitudes on a pretest were more likely, when talking with a female engineering student about work issues, to adopt a domineering posture and to display signs of sexual interest (such as noticeably looking at the woman's body). In the next 2 experiments, female engineering students were randomly assigned in one experiment to interact with males who had endorsed different levels of subtle sexism, and in a second experiment with an actor who randomly either displayed or did not display the domineering/sexual nonverbal behaviors. Women performed worse on an engineering test after interacting with the randomly-assigned sexist males (or males simulating sexists' nonverbal behavior). In another experiment, women's poorer performance was shown to be limited to stereotype-related tests, not a broad cognitive deficit. In a final experiment, interacting with a domineering/sexually interested male caused women to have temporarily elevated concern about negative stereotypes, which they subsequent attempted to suppress (thought suppression being a well-known resource hog). The results indicate that even subtle sexism can be toxic in workplace environments where women are traditionally targets of discrimination.

Slashdot Top Deals

And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

Close