woohoodonuts - Slashdot User

Submission + - Keith Elwin wins pinball world championship (papa.org)

Submitted by woohoodonuts on Sunday August 15, 2010 @11:07PM

woohoodonuts writes: August 15, 2010. Keith Elwin won the world pinball championship in Pittsburgh, PA for the third consecutive year. The weekend-long event fielded 406 players from all over the world and distributed over $36,000 in prizes. The three games chosen in the final round were Stern Cheetah, Bally The Addams Family, and Bally Creature from the Black Lagoon. Keith scored over 500 million points on his final ball with $10,000 on the line to defeat fellow American, Andrei Massenkoff, by nearly 300 million points. Next year's event will be held August 11-14, 2011 in Pittsburgh, PA.

Comment Re:Nintendo's new motto: (Score 4, Interesting) 426

by woohoodonuts on Friday October 12, 2007 @01:30PM (#20956861) Attached to: Wii 'Popularity Bubble' to Burst?

Bored and worried about saving for Christmas, would be more correct. While I'm still excited about the wii, I'm also sitting around waiting for the new mario Galaxy game to be released. I finished beating Zelda, never was too fond of 1st person shooters (Metroid Prime) and so am left with a small gap until the holiday season allows my game spending budget to pick up another game or two. Since I only buy a few games a year, I don't take changes. When Brawl and Galaxy come out, I'll buy. Since Nintendo has cultivated a mostly Non-hardcore gamer market, the majority of their customers are only going to buy the AAA titles because that's what they hear about in the media. Most of those will be released in the coming months.

Submission + - Personal Phishing Responsibility? (kelvinism.com)

Submitted by

kelvinn

on Monday June 04, 2007 @03:22AM

kelvinn writes: "Like many of you, I'm in IT. Over the years I have seen every type of phishing attempt there is, yet I'm still grappling with my personal responsibility when I detect an attempt. Two days ago I received a phishing attempt from "Amazon", and reported it via Firefox's anti-phishing feature. Additionally, I went the extra step and sent an email to the compromised site's owner, the ISP of the compromised site, and the University where the phishing site actually resided. To my dismay, and surprise, the only action was by the Firefox Team. So I present this question to the Slashdot community: what do you do when you get phished?"

Submission + - Cell phone viruses: No longer the next big threat?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04, 2007 @03:15AM

An anonymous reader writes: The CEO of antivirus vendor F-Secure — a company who have long warned against the threat of cell phone viruses — seems to be backtracking on the company's stance in an interview with Silicon.com.
Back in 2005, the company said: "This is definitely not hype. We believe we are going to see a huge growth in threats targeting mobile devices."
Now, just this week the company's new CEO has stepped into the debate with this: "Independent of how we have communicated this in the past, we are making it very clear today that the threat level on mobile malware is not severe today. There are only 323 known malware on mobiles and over 300,000 on PCs. No hype. Period."
What a difference two years makes in the hype-fuelled world of the antivirus vendors.

Submission + - Emacs 22.1 released (gmane.org)

Submitted by

Michael Duggan

on Monday June 04, 2007 @03:14AM

Michael Duggan writes: "Two years since Emacs 21.4 was released, Emacs 22.1 has finally been released. Major changes include Mac OS X and Cygwin support, GTK support, more sane defaults for new users, and many, many new modes and packages."

Submission + - science: fuel technology

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward Rides Again

on Monday June 04, 2007 @03:07AM

Anonymous Coward Rides Again writes: "Someone please debunk this (from wykc tv news):

John Kanzius discovered that his radio frequency generator could release the oxygen and hydrogen from saltwater and create an incredibly intense flame. "Just like that. If that was in a car cylinder you could see the amount of fire that would be in the cylinder." The APV Company Laboratory in Akron has checked out John's amazing invention. They were amazed. "That could be a steam engine, a steam turbine. That could be a car engine if you wanted it to be." Imagine the possibilities. Saltwater as the ultimate clean fuel.

i googled this and didn't come up with too much; i hardly look to tv news stations for science... does the 2nd law of thermodynamics not apply because the energy released in salt water is so much greater than that being input by the radio waves and that being used to power the radio wave generator?"

Submission + - Google Maps Street View NOT invasion of privacy (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

airshowfan

on Monday June 04, 2007 @03:02AM

airshowfan writes: "Applicable laws say that Google Maps Street View is NOT a violation of privacy. The most relevant law here is probably the one used by Jennifer Aniston to sue a paparazzo! It says that an invasion of privacy only occurs when someone looks into your window while using "enhancing devices" (telephoto lenses, binoculars, etc) and sees/takes a picture that is more detailed than what a passerby could see from the street with the naked eye. So as long as Google's images are not as sharp as what you could see as you walk past, Google should be ok. This article explains these issues of how private your home really is, and goes into issues of surveillance and sousveillance, of how much privacy one can expect while in a public place, and of how the information age is all about organizing the crumbs of information you leave behind. It is no longer reasonable to expect that your information trail cannot be easily organized, interpreted, and broadcast to the world."

Submission + - Second Life sued in France for porn, gambling

Submitted by Submarine on Monday June 04, 2007 @02:14AM

Submarine writes: A (very) conservative French family union, Familles de France is sueing Second Life for making available to minors many things that should not be, including pornography, advertisements for tobacco and alcohol, and online gambling. The details of the lawsuit were not given in their communiqué ; it is conjectured that, if unsuccessful against Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, they will seek injunctions against French ISPs, asking for blocks on the Second Life service. Familles de France was one of the groups pushing for the ill-written anti-happy slapping parliamentary amendment, and also for the "deontology commission" for Internet services ; it is also known for protesting against measures such as making it easier for minors to get contraceptive pills. Predictibly, the Odebi League is protesting.

Submission + - Untapped Niche Markets (qelix.com)

Submitted by Zeluse on Monday June 04, 2007 @12:13AM

Zeluse writes: ....services like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, etc. have cornered their niche markets and have rapidly moved from being "startups" to "market leaders", with the power of new 'social' phenomenon.

As Web 2.0 matures further, markets will begin to organize themselves and the leaders will become more obvious. There are, however, pockets of innovation going on beyond the developed markets, as I've stumbled across a few untapped, and essentially unexplored niche markets.

http://qelix.com/blog/index.php/2007/06/04/untappe d-niche-markets/

Space Elevator Company LiftPort In Trouble 257

Posted by kdawson on Sunday June 03, 2007 @12:53PM from the going-dwn dept.

TropicalCoder writes "The LiftPort Group, founded four years ago with the lofty dream of building a stairway to heaven, has seemingly reached the end the line. The dream was to develop a ribbon of carbon nanotubes 100,000 km long, anchored to the Earth's surface and with a counterweight in space, providing a permanent bridge to orbit. Elevator cars would be robotic 'lifters' which would climb the ribbon to deliver cargo and eventually people to orbit or beyond. Now LiftPort has all but run out of funds, and the State of Washington's Securities Division has entered a Statement of Charges (PDF) against LiftPort Inc. dba LiftPort Group and founder Michael Laine."

Economic Analysis of Toilet Seat Position 473

Posted by kdawson on Sunday June 03, 2007 @08:16AM from the why-is-this-so-hard? dept.

Ant writes "The Science Creative Quarterly has published an economic analysis of The Social Norm of Leaving the Toilet Down, employing game theory. This analysis is more thorough than preceding ones cited (from 2002 and 2005), as it factors in the cost of yelling. Both men and women can take some comfort in the conclusion though neither may in the end be satisfied.

TiVo Says It Could Suffer Under GPLv3 710

Posted by kdawson on Sunday June 03, 2007 @02:52AM from the no-prevention-of-hacking dept.

Preedit writes to tell us that those busy folks over at InformationWeek have been scrutinizing yet more SEC filings, and Novell and Microsoft aren't the only ones concerned about certain provisions in the final draft of GPLv3. TiVo worries too. The problem is that TiVo boxes are Linux-based. They're also designed to shut down if the software is hacked by users trying to circumvent DRM features. But GPLv3 would prohibit TiVo's no-tamper setup. "If the currently proposed version of GPLv3 is widely adopted, we may be unable to incorporate future enhancements to the GNU/Linux operating system into our software, which could adversely affect our business," TiVo warns in a regulatory filing cited by InformationWeek."

'Kryptonite' Discovered in Serbian Mine 272

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday April 24, 2007 @08:46AM from the okay-now-nobody-find-the-red-kryptonite-and-we're-fine dept.

Rubinstien writes "A mineralogist at London's Natural History Museum was contracted to help identify an unknown mineral found in a Serbian mine. While he initially thought the miners had discovered a unique compound, after its crystal structure was analyzed and identified the researcher was shocked to find the material already referenced in literature. Fictional literature. Dr. Chris Stanley, from the BBC article: 'Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral's chemical formula — sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide — and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luthor from a museum in the film Superman Returns ... I'm afraid it's not green and it doesn't glow either — although it will react to ultraviolet light by fluorescing a pinkish-orange.'"

Submission + - The Slashdot effect simulator

Submitted by

Emmanuel Cecchet

on Tuesday April 24, 2007 @08:25AM

Emmanuel Cecchet writes: "Research groups at EPFL in Switzerland are building a Slashdot effect simulator. It reproduces the impact of a Slashdot post on a web site by generating a real distributed load using machines distributed over the planet. This can also replay existing Apache access.log files and extrapolate the workload to evaluate the scalability of web sites.
What about using Slashdot as the next metric for availability: 'How many Slashdots can your web site sustain?'"

Submission + - Green Tea good for you due to Quantum Tunneling

Submitted by Frumious Wombat on Tuesday April 24, 2007 @07:35AM

Frumious Wombat writes: Green tea is supposed to be good for you, but the antioxidants are available in such low quantities why has been a mystery. Now a team of researchers at Autonomous University of Barcelona have used high-level computational studies to demonstrate the antioxidants make complexes which enhance quantum-mechanical tunneling, thereby speeding the reaction enough to compete with damaging peroxide-radical reactions.

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