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The Almighty Buck

Micro-Transactions Coming To Team Fortress 2 Via Steam Wallet 161

whoop writes "Valve has announced that Team Fortress 2 will be getting a new Mann Co. Store to buy trinkets with real money through a service called Steam Wallet. TF2 is the first game to use this new Steam Wallet, but the money can be spent on anything in Steam, including full games. This would open them up to featuring gift cards, micro-transaction games, and more." PC Gamer has an interview with Valve's Robin Walker about why they're doing this. Walker says everything they're selling will still be obtainable by playing the game, other than a few cosmetic items.
Image

Researchers Discover Irresistible Dance Moves 215

sciencehabit writes "To find out if certain dance moves are more attractive to women than others, researchers recruited a bunch of college guys and used motion-capture to create avatars of them dancing. When women watched the avatars (2 videos included in story), the men they found most attractive were those who kept their heads and torsos moving without flailing their arms and legs. The researchers say dancing is thus an honest signal to women of the man's strength and health, just as it is in crabs and hummingbirds, who also move in special ways to attract mates."

Comment Re:Former USAF Intel Analyst here (Score 3, Interesting) 776

The ACLU is asking about is the process by which the US government decides that someone is a valid target. I think that pretty much everyone agrees that if someone is an enemy combatant (i.e. carrying weapons or attacking friendly forces) they are fair game. The question becomes what happens when the target is a) not in an area of active operations b)not engaged in armed conflict and c)a US citizen.

Lets take a hypothetical case of a US citizen operating in Yemen who the US government believes to be funding AQ. Is it legal for the president to order the US military to kill this person? It would pretty clearly be illegal to summarily execute them if they were operating out of New Jersey, but frankly is Yemen any different?

Comment Re:Other Amendments (Score 1) 490

People look down on the south because it was their own damn fault. The big difference between the revolutionary war and the civil war was the fact the could vote. In the revolutionary war the colonies(USA) had absolutely zero representation in parliament. At the start of the civil war the south had 66 representatives in congress (~28%) and 22 out the 66 senators.

Also, be aware that the reasons for succession outlined by South Carolina had nothing to do with tariffs or taxes. The stated reasons were:

a) some northern states were refusing to follow the fugitive slave act.

b) the federal government was poking it's nose into the slavery question, and the south didn't think it belonged there.

c) The president elect was anti-slavery.

In short, the south backed an economic strategy which limited it's political clout and when whining about it stopped working they started a war.

Comment Re:Good and bad. (Score 3, Informative) 207

Hey, don't be so pessimistic. According to the bureau of Labor statistics there were 759,200 lawyers practicing in the US in 2008. Let's call it 800,000 for nice number. Then lets assume it takes 100 ft of chain per lawyer. Chain costs about $5.87 per foot from mcmaster carr, but lets call it $6.00 per foot including hardware. So $600 per lawyer gives us $480,000,000 in costs, assuming volunteer labor. The US is currently spending about 65 billion per year on the war in Afganistan, or about 170 million per day. So if the US moves the pull out date up by 3 days we save enough money to chain all of the lawyers to the bottom of the sea floor. NB: I may be significantly underestimating the costs, but even if I'm of by an order of magnitude, that's still less than a month of war-fighting.
Earth

Officials Sue Couple Who Removed Their Lawn 819

Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that Orange County officials are locked in a legal battle with a couple accused of violating city ordinances for replacing the grass on their lawn with wood chips and drought-tolerant plants, reducing their water usage from 299,221 gallons in 2007 to 58,348 gallons in 2009. The dispute began two years ago, when Quan and Angelina Ha tore out the grass in their front yard. In drought-plagued Southern California, the couple said, the lush grass had been soaking up tens of thousands of gallons of water — and hundreds of dollars — each year. 'We've got a newborn, so we want to start worrying about her future,' said Quan Ha, an information technology manager for Kelley Blue Book. But city officials told the Has they were violating several city laws that require that 40% of residential yards to be landscaped predominantly with live plants. Last summer, the couple tried to appease the city by building a fence around the yard and planting drought-tolerant greenery — lavender, rosemary, horsetail, and pittosporum, among others. But according to the city, their landscaping still did not comply with city standards. At the end of January, the Has received a letter saying they had been charged with a misdemeanor violation and must appear in court. The couple could face a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for their grass-free, eco-friendly landscaping scheme. 'It's just funny that we pay our taxes to the city and the city is now prosecuting us with our own money,' says Quan Ha."
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
PC Games (Games)

EA Shutting Down Video Game Servers Prematurely 341

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?"
Image

PhD Candidate Talks About the Physics of Space Battles 361

darthvader100 writes "Gizmodo has run an article with some predictions on what future space battles will be like. The author brings up several theories on propulsion (and orbits), weapons (explosives, kinetic and laser), and design. Sounds like the ideal shape for spaceships will be spherical, like the one in the Hitchhiker's Guide movie."

Submission + - Russia confirms failed missile launch (barentsobserver.com)

Ch_Omega writes: According to this article over at BarentsObserver, the giant spiral seen on the sky over Norway wednesday morning local time, has been confirmed to be be the result of a failed Russian missile launch. Russia now confirms that "...the missile was launched from submerged position in the White Sea by the nuclear submarine "Dmitri Donskoy". Studies of the telemetric data from the launch show that the two first stages of the missile functioned as they should, and that a technical malfunctioning occured during the third stage.."

There is also and article on this over at The Daily Mail.

Earth

Submission + - SysAdmin: Climategate an Inside Job (climateaudit.org)

brian0918 writes: "Since this story broke, almost everyone in the media has claimed that the Climategate emails were hacked by Russians, maybe even ex-KGB types, maybe even working with oil companies in the United States. Now, a sysadmin has examined the structure and provenance of the files and concludes that "the only reasonable explanation for the archive being in this state is that the FOI Officer at the University was practising due diligence. The UEA was collecting data that couldn't be sheltered and they created FOIA2009.zip. It is most likely that the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it.""

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