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Comment Re:Bluray is a mistake (Score 1) 95

by bit01 (#35474390) Attached to: Dutch Court Lifts PlayStation 3 Seizure Order

Sorry, but that's not quite good enough a distinction.

It is actually. Your kids would not have an unbelievable feigned ignorance over a period of years, or even days, over basic facts. e.g. pretending that the economic network effect does not exist or that both closed and open source have both good and bad developers, even when those simple facts have been stated in obvious fashion. Your kids may be biased but they are not willfully ignorant.

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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.

Submission + - Electricity rationing in Tokyo (yomiuri.co.jp) 1

Submitted by siddesu
siddesu writes: The TV in Tokyo is just announcing a schedule for electricity blackouts to last from tomorrow until the end of April.

Practically all suburbs of Tokyo will be affected by the blackouts. The 23 districts of central Tokyo seem to be exempt for the moment, but if supply is not sufficient, blackouts are possible.

Electricity will be interrupted for about 3 hours a day in each area.

Comment Re:Bluray is a mistake (Score 1) 95

by bit01 (#35470286) Attached to: Dutch Court Lifts PlayStation 3 Seizure Order

So how exactly does your theory distinguish between "shills" and people who hold less hostile views of Microsoft of their own volition?

Normal people don't give two shits about any particular company. Shills on the other hand are so bigoted it's funny and are almost completely incapable of coping with alternative points of view. In particular they have a perpetual and unbelievable feigned ignorance of anything that doesn't happen to agree with their propaganda.

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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.

Crime

Submission + - Prosecutors to Use Secret Code in NSA Leak Trial

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Baltimore Sun reports that that the US government wants to invoke a little-used rule that allows prosecutors to use code words in the courtroom — making portions of a public trial private in the trial of Thomas Drake, an employee at the National Security Agency accused of sharing classified documents with journalist Siobhan Gorman that revealed that NSA's Trailblazer Program was was a boondoggle of sorts — and that the agency had removed several of the privacy safeguards that were put in place to protect domestic conversations and e-mails from being stored and monitored. The "silent witness rule," is meant to minimize the disclosure of classified information by allowing only those directly involved in a case — the judge, jury, witnesses, lawyers and defendants — to see the evidence. Any public discussion of the secret details must be done in code. "They literally have a key, a glossary, that the jury would have that the public would not," says Abbe D. Lowell, a Washington, DC defense attorney who gave an example of what the code would sound like: "When [the defendant] and I were talking about Country A, we discussed the fact that there was a possibility that Leader 1 might not appreciate the United States' sanction on Topic C." That's impossible for a jury to follow, and it will cripple a defendant's rights to really cross-examine and confront the evidence against him says Lowell. Drake's defense attorneys say Drake is more whistleblower than traitor. "The documents at issue in this case concern NSA's waste, fraud, and abuse," says Maryland federal public defender James Wyda, who represents Drake. "Most importantly, Mr. Drake's activities relating to these documents were intended to reveal the waste, fraud, and abuse that cost the taxpayers money, weakened our civil liberties, and hindered our nation's ability to identify potential threats against our security.""

Submission + - Six Atari 2600 "vaporware" games from 1983 found! (digitpress.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Six previously unreleased Atari VCS/2600 games that were developed by Jerry Lawson’s company, Video Soft, are at last being released! The games were mentioned in press releases from the early 1980s and were long thought to have been just one of the many vaporware titles that never materialized. Not only do they exist in prototype form, but all were far enough along in development to be playable, with half of them considered to be complete!

Thanks to Jerry Lawson and the efforts of a few, dedicated Atari fans, the prototypes were archived, new artwork was created, and cartridges were produced. Each includes both a box and manual, and production is limited to 100 numbered copies of each title. Only 100 of each will ever be produced. This is the single-largest cache of unreleased Atari VCS/2600 prototypes to ever be released at one time!"
Google

Submission + - Tech Expertise Not Important in Google Managers 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "For much of its 13-year history, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone but if employees become stuck, they should ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place. Now the NY Times reports that statisticians at Google looking for characteristics that define good managers have gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports and found that technical expertise ranks dead last among Google’s eight most important characteristics of good managers (reg. may be required). What Google employees value most are even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers. “In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Googlespeak for human resources. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”"
Technology

Submission + - Spanish government to subsidize IPv6 (elpais.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Spanish government will initiate a plan to incorporate IPv6 starting in april, initially the Ministry of Industry with other ministries to follow. The biggest part of the plan is a program of subsidies for small and medium sized enterprises that will cover projects involving, among others, pilot testing, network reconfiguration, purchase of software and equipment replacement. The plan will revise registration procedures for the .es TLD to include IPv6 addressing.
Medicine

Submission + - Is Daylight Saving Time Bad for You?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Time Magazine reports that according to experts on circadian rhythms, the hour shift in sleep schedule from Daylight Savings Time can have serious effects on some people's health, particularly in people with certain pre-existing health problems with one study finding that men were more likely to commit suicide during the first few weeks of Daylight Saving Time (DST) than at any other time during the year and another study showing that the number of serious heart attacks jumps 6% to 10% on the first three workdays after DST begins. Dr. Xiaoyong Yang, an assistant professor of comparative medicine and cellular and molecular physiology at Yale University, theorizes that shifts in biologic rhythms could trigger harmful inflammatory or metabolic changes at the cellular level, which these individuals may be more susceptible to. "Most people don't have much of a problem — they can adjust their body clock quickly. Eventually, after a couple of days, they already can adapt to the new schedule," says Yang. "But for some groups of people — people who have depression or a heart problem — there's some research that suggests that [they] have a higher risk of suicide and heart attack.""
Iphone

Submission + - Pricing mobile apps: Why EA is losing money (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "A blog belonging to a two-man Swiss company follows up on Slashdot's post "Crime Writer Makes a Killing With 99 Cent E-Books" and explains how publishing companies are getting it wrong with the pricing of e-products.

"Let'(TM)s take Dead Space by Electronic Arts as an example. It's an exceptional game, we love it. After launch it climbed up the top-grossing list, reaching the second place by the end of January 2011, right after Angry Birds, despite a 6.99$ on its price tag. One month later, Angry Birds is still on top, but where is Dead Space? It even disappeared from the top-10! Where did it land? Beyond place 50. So, what does Angry Birds have that Dead Space has not? This is the question that should keep Electronic Arts' management awake at night.""
Idle

Submission + - A Game Played in the URL Bar (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Kilrah_il
Kilrah_il writes: Whether you think it is useful or useless, you can't ignored the sheer cool geekiness of a game played entirely in the URL bar. "... this self-described "ridiculous" project was developed over the course of one evening."
Apple

Submission + - iPad 2 teardown shows tablet's guts (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Apple's iPad 2 tablet, which became available Friday, boasts a big battery, tiny speakers, an ample 512MB of RAM and a glass front that's tricky for tinkerers to take off. That's the upshot from an initial teardown of the new Apple tablet by iFixit, which specializes in Apple product repair. IFixit warns that those who dare to peer into the insides of the iPad 2 on their own risk cracking the glass front panel, which is thinner than that from the original iPad (0.62 mm vs. 0.85 mm) and glued on rather than attached via tabs. A heat gun was needed by iFixit to disassemble the device.
Japan

Submission + - The Current Status of Japan's Reactors (tepco.co.jp)

Submitted by Xenographic
Xenographic writes: There's so much panic over Japan's nuclear power plant malfunctions that a lot of misinformation has started showing up in the media from people who don't know anything about BWR safety systems or even what a Sievert is. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has been issuing detailed reports concerning the status of each of the reactors and the operations they're performing on each. Fukushima Daiichi has all six units shut down and everyone within 10km has been asked to evacuate. That's the same plant where the explosion took place, which experts believe to have been caused by built-up hydrogen. Also, before the explosion near unit 1, one worker, who was working on that same unit was accidentally exposed to 106.3mSv of radiation and hospitalized. Fukushima Daini currently has all four units shut down and everyone within 3km of it has been evacuated, while those within 10km are on standby. Kashiwazaki Kariwa is still up, with four of its seven units active and the other three undergoing regular inspections. Several other non-nuclear plants and power substations have been shut down as well. This leaves about 600k people in the area without power.

Comment Re:Let the inventor pay (Score 1) 176

by bit01 (#35374950) Attached to: Microsoft, Google Sue Troll Who Sued 397 Companies

The alternative is that you come up with something, a rich guy sees or hears what it is, the rich guy screws you over because he doesn't need the loan to patent the thing.

As opposed to the current systen where the rich guy has a thicket of patents ready to block you from doing anything useful. Patents are a weapon that anybody can use, rich guys have more of them, and patents don't change the balance of power at all, just escalate the damage.

The superficial thinking of patent proponents is just incredible. Not to mention the endless spamming of naive view points to drown out much more sophisticated alternative points of view. The PP post has been spammed on slashdot for years. Tto this day patent proponents still pretend the sophisticated view points that many slashdotters have from years of discussing this topic don't exist.

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Has the Least Patentable Unit reached zero yet?

Comment Re:I sort of understand... (Score 1) 317

by bit01 (#35345458) Attached to: Sony's War On Makers, Hackers, and Innovators

Just because theft leads you to enjoy a product later on doesn't mean your still not stealing.

Fanatics like you who can't cope with even the simplest discussion about what ownership is and is not, and thus what theft is and is not, are either barefaced liars or delusional. Which are you?

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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.

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