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Graphics

Why Special Effects No Longer Impress 532

brumgrunt writes "When an advert for toilet roll now has a CG dog in it, have we come to the point where special effects have no lasting impact whatsoever? As Den of Geek argues, 'Where we once sat through Terminator 2 and gasped when Robert Patrick turned into a slippery blob of mercury, we now watch, say, Inception and simply acknowledge that, yes, the folding city looks quite realistic.'"
Censorship

WikiLeaks Starts Mass Mirroring Effort 586

A beautiful mind writes "WikiLeaks is asking for hosting space on Unix-based servers. The replication is implemented by a rsync+ssh based push that copies static files to a known path, authenticated via the private half of this public key. The complete website is a few GB in size, making it feasible to replicate on a large scale. The mirror list will be published when the number of independent mirrors reaches 50." Note: wikileaks.ch seems to be down for the moment, but eventually the above links may require that instead of 213.251.145.96. See also this WikiLeaks address finder. And for even more news, try this Twitter search.

Comment Not as bad as in the US (Score 5, Insightful) 225

Not seen this mentioned yet, but in the UK we have local loop unbundling, otherwise known as line sharing.

This means that any company is permitted to put their own equipment in the exchange and use the last mile as they choose. So in my house I have a choice between about 10-15 ISPs all of whom can have different policies.

I still think that net neutrality is a good thing, but if Google started to slow down, or the IPlayer then most people would simply switch to a new provider - in fact it would be likely that other ISPs would absolutely hammer them in marketing if they started to make other sites (like the iplayer) slower.

Comment Re:older developers... (Score 1) 742

Pretty sure the A500 shipped with BASIC.

Of course, I don't have it lying around here so I can't check too much...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaBASIC

Covers it. Of course, that stopped with the A500+, but by then you could get AMOS/Blitz fairly easily (or at least minimal versions of it, as they were included on magazine cover disks)

Australia

Nintendo Wins Lawsuit Over R4 Mod Chip Piracy 146

schliz writes "The Federal Court has ordered an Australian distributor to pay Nintendo over half a million dollars for selling the R4 mod chip, which allows users to circumvent technology protection measures in Nintendo's DS consoles. The distributor, RSJ IT Solutions, has been ordered to cease selling the chip through its gadgetgear.com.au site and any other sites it controls, as well as paying Nintendo $520,000 in damages."
Games

Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed 631

A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting: "If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."

Comment Re:It's already DRMd (Score 1, Informative) 169

I think it's bad public policy to have DRM affecting HD content, but this is more like DVD encryption than say, Blu-ray.

Ie, it has very little effect on technical people at all.

To be honest, I wonder what the point is - this isn't going to stop it being distributed over the Internet - the only reasonable argument is that it stops people from being unable to move HD signals from their generic boxes to other generic boxes - thus trying to up the sales of blu-ray.

I think this could be a long term boon to be honest - very few freeview boxes realistically allow you to pull content off them (at least with any ease) at the moment, and most people other than videophiles don't really care that much about HD content versus SD content.

Given that you can make SD copies of things on these boxes it might actually be a net gain.

Also if freesat is an example of it in use, then it shouldn't impact mythtv users at all.

Comment Re:It's already DRMd (Score 1) 169

Is there really DRM on Freesat?

It doesn't work. I have freesat, and I have raw h264 transport streams sitting on my disk.

That said, I run mythtv, which seems to support it well.

Force alarm then - nothing to see here.

Comment Re:Can we get rid of the US Congress so easily? (Score 1) 227

Tunbridge Wells Council collect rubbish every 2 weeks, and on the alternate week collect compostable waste and (paper) recycling.

Or at least, they did 3 years ago. I doubt it's changed

It is nowhere near as good as Sevenoaks council (where I live now), which collects rubbish every week, and has the brilliant recycling bags, which are everywhere now. They also have excellent recycling statistics.

Most of it comes from the fact that councils have to pay heavy fees to landfill rubbish, whereas they can make money (or at least lose less) on recycling. Thus they want to try and encourage people to recycle where possible. This ties into the fact that people have so little respect for local council elections that they elect people who really have no clue about democracy or using the media. The fact that they don't work on shaming people into recycling more, and applying pressure to local shops (perhaps on the threat of higher rates or otherwise) into providing better facilities (say a discount for using bags, or a charge) instead (which is very easy to explain to council tax payers), or even for the stronger suggestions actually put it to a public vote if they so choose, which wouldn't be too tricky.

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