Comment Re:Why activation for Blu-rays/DVD's? (Score 2) 312
It's probably a licensing thing. Sony doesn't want to pay the per-player fee on every device they sell, just every device that is activated.
Comment Re:FOXNews has a problem not all of libertarianism (Score 1) 1352
Well, at the time Obama was born, a child born of a single citizen parent was not automatically a citizen. The parent needed to meet several requirements for time of residency, and Obama's mother did not (indeed, could not, since she was too young to have been a resident for long enough).
Now, since he was born in Hawaii, this is moot. But it does legally matter that he was born in Hawaii, and not elsewhere.
Lies, Damned Lies and Cat Statistics 175
spopepro writes "While un-captioned cats might be of limited interest to the /. community, I found this column on how a fabricated statistic takes on a life of its own interesting. Starting with the Humane Society of the United States' (HSUS) claim that the unsterilized offspring of a cat will '...result in 420,000 cats in 5 years,' the author looks at other erroneous numbers, where they came from and why they won't go away."
Rupert Murdoch Claims To Own the 'Sky' In 'Skype' 186
Crudely_Indecent writes "Not content to own just news stories, Rupert Murdoch is now going after individual words! His BSkyB is fighting a legal battle with Skype, claiming that it owns the 'Sky' in 'Skype.' From the article: 'A spokesman for Sky confirmed that the company has been involved in a "five-year dispute with Skype" over trademark applications filed by the telecomms company. These are, the spokesman added: "including, but not limited to, television-related goods and services."'"
Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time 362
sfraggle writes "Kotaku has an interesting review of Doom (the original!) by Stephen Totilo, a gamer and FPS player who, until a few days ago, had gone through the game's 17-year history without playing it. He describes some of his first impressions, the surprises that he encountered, and how the game compares to modern FPSes. Quoting: 'Virtual shotgun armed, I was finally going to play Doom for real. A second later, I understood the allure the video game weapon has had. In Doom the shotgun feels mighty, at least partially I believe because they make first-timers like me wait for it. The creators make us sweat until we have it in hand. But once we have the shotgun, its big shots and its slow, fetishized reload are the floored-accelerator-pedal stuff of macho fantasy. The shotgun is, in all senses, instant puberty, which is to say, delicately, that to obtain it is to have the assumed added potency that a boy believes a man possesses vis a vis a world on which he'd like to have some impact. The shotgun is the punch in the face the once-scrawny boy on the beach gives the bully when he returns a muscled linebacker.'"
Submission + - Study Released: How Students Use Wikipedia (uic.edu) 1
crazybilly writes: First Monday recently released a study about how college students actually use Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, they found, "Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility." The study offers some initial data to help settle the often heated controversy over Wikipedia's usefulness as a research tool and how it affects students research.
