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Comment Seems tied to user table (Score 2) 258

The errors match those gotten with a borked cookie. Also, not knowing there was an outage, I signed my account out, but it no longer recognizes my password nor sends the reset email(I know my p/w absolutely, was just testing the reset), effectively locking me out entirely.

I have a sinking "we've been hacked" feeling. Otherwise, I suppose I'll just have to be more productive today!

Comment Re:If you notice... (Score 2) 510

It would be useful if you educated yourself about the topic at hand before commenting on it(yes, I know, "You must be new here").

OnLive and Gaikai aren't multiplayer systems. Rather, you pay to play a game from a remote location, presumably on some powerful rack mounted hardware, which would stream the video to your client software. The keypresses from the client being equally streamed upwards to the servers.

Comment Re:same as Hadopi... (Score 1) 183

"So you believe "freedom of expression" isn't an absolute right? We're starting to chip away at the veneer."

Not sure that required much chipping. Seeing as I unabashedly said so in my own post: when I said "In regards to that separate argument, I do feel some limits on speech can be reasonably agreed"

So...kudos on failing to read my post. I'm sure you're very proud.

"Freedom of expression means they have a right to think that copyright law is wrong, that they have a right to go around saying that copyright law is wrong, but not to actually break copyright law."

Except they didn't. They provided a facilitator, no doubt. But never hosted any of the content. The law, as existed in Sweden during their trial, did not consider the act of simple facilitation illegal. So what they were doing was expression. Making a freedom of expression play here was entirely justified.

And I would certainly disagree with any law outlawing facilitation of a crime. By that token, VCRs and DVRs would have been outlawed long ago. If one were to extend that to other areas, one could claim kitchen knife makers are facilitating domestic/spousal murder and that fertilizer companies facilitate terrorism.

Comment Re:same as Hadopi... (Score 5, Insightful) 183

They are as nuanced as my statement would indicate. If the defamation is an untruth or a willful alteration of context meant(as in, literally "meant" as in the presence of mens rea) to cause literal, quantifiable harm to someone otherwise innocent of the accusation(s), I believe in the curbing of that instance of the defamer's freedom of expression in that case for the purpose of defending that person against that slander.

Again, this is my personal opinion on the matter.

Comment Re:same as Hadopi... (Score 3, Insightful) 183

Erm, you seem to mistaken. Not sure if just shilling or willfully ignorant, but "free speech" means "free to speak", therefore the freedom to say whatever you want, anywhere(sorry, should I have prefaced that with a snarky "Clue:?")

Whether you feel that brings about too many problems(shouting "Fire!" in a crowded room) and wish to regulate certain portions of it is a different argument. But "Free speech" is exactly that.

In regards to that separate argument, I do feel some limits on speech can be reasonably agreed upon if it is required to protect the safety of people should that speech serve no other purpose but to harm the innocent by a literal and quantifiable definition of harm(in other words, "harmful thoughts" or anything upsetting a status quo should not be sufficient grounds on which to curb the freedom of expression, nor should one's "sensitivity" to a topic, but the aforementioned yelling of "Fire!" to incite a harmful panic upon a crowded room would be as would knowingly be taunting a diagnosed case of depression into committing suicide).

What you appear to be proposing is that economic interests if a party wishing to perpetually control distribution of data should also trump it. That is certainly an argument to be made, but please do not attempt to mask it,

Comment Re:It was not just hardware (Score 1) 94

The Nintendo Virtual Boy failed due to being an undesirable product to most of the population(not me, I loved the thing....but I do think it was a bad idea and definitely way to pricey when it came out). It had nothing to do with safety concerns.

Having said that, there was a study way back which claimed stereoscopic displays would negatively impact the development of children less than 6 years old. There was also the concern of staring at a dark+red display too long since the display(unlike the Occulous) didn't really focus to infinity(though it did have some adjustable optics). So the VB had a health warning about letting six year old children play. It also paused automatically every 10 mins of play time to allow the player to lift their head and focus.

This didn't help sales. But it wasn't a health decision so much as a public paranoia issue that had just a minimal impact on what was otherwise an unfeasible product anyways.

The study about affecting the very young have since been refuted, however, Nintendo still allows parents who fear it to lock out the 3D effect on the 3DS via parental locks. I have no idea if 3D TVs these days extend the same courtesy.

Comment Re:About time! (Score 1) 159

While software isn't quite as bad, I do know that physical goods can be doubled in price in Canada when the company in question is in the US, even when the company in question manufactures and/or ships from Canada.

This tactic is used to "subsidize" the price for Americans by making every other country pick up the slack. I quote "subsidize" since, in the end, it just means "We can maintain our very high profits while still pricing the competition out of existence within our very large domestic market."

Comment Re:Toshiba to Customers: Drop dead. (Score 4, Informative) 268

1- It is not clueless to say they have to defend their patent or lose it. That's how it works. You lose patent and trademark protection if you don't try to defend any infringement you know about.
Try again. Trademark works that way since trademark is basically perpetual. Patent protection doesn't work that way, though it should, since it'd take care of a lot of submarine patents and patent trolls who wait until a product is big to sue. So yeah, still clueless.

2- This isn't about patent, it is about copyright. They are different.
On this we agree. But again, at the same time, copyright still doesn't get affected by attempts of enforcement. Only trademark does.

3- You can hate the current copyright laws, but that doesn't mean someone who acknowledges them is clueless.
The irony in that statement is hilarious given the above.

4- Don't buy products from manufacturers who play this game. Do your research before purchasing.
Noble gesture. Not sure it'll make even a dent in their bottom line, but noble nonetheless and something I try to do myself.

Comment This is pretty cool (Score 1) 1

Minus the sort of over-embelishment which I would otherwise have dismissed as slashvertisement, and the somewhat over the top movie trailer they used, the underlying object, being a seemingly easy to assemble off the shelf volumetric display, is pretty darn cool.

While none of the technique is oevrly new, having it nicely put together using kit that is well within the means of many is not. Opening it up makes it better.

Good on them :) May try to build one myself :D

Space

Submission + - New Proof That the Moon Was Created in a Massive Collision 2

derekmead writes: New proof that the giant impact hypothesis is correct: A paper published today in Nature shares findings of a chemical analysis of Moon rocks that shows fractional differences between the makeup of the Earth and Moon that most likely were caused by the collision between Earth and a Mars-sized planet around 4.5 billion years ago.

Although the two are quite similar, it’s been previously shown that Moon rocks lack volatile elements, which suggests they may have evaporated during the incredibly intense heat and pressure created during an impact event. But if the hypothesis that light elements actually evaporated from Moon rocks during their formation is correct, you’d expect to find evidence of elements being layered by mass — heavier elements would condense first, and so on.

That process is known as isotopic fractionation — a concept central to carbon dating — and the Washington University team's results suggest they found exactly that. They compared the blend of zinc isotopes in Moon rocks and Earth samples, and found that the Moon rocks held slightly higher proportions of heavier zinc isotopes. If the Moon was indeed once part of Earth — which has been shown by extensive modeling — the difference in the balance of zinc profiles would most likely be explained by lighter zinc isotopes evaporating away following a collision.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What happens if you Open Source, and in doing so violate a Patent? 1

An anonymous reader writes: We have developed a fairly useful Video Processing algorithm that we are thinking of open sourcing in 2013. There is one snag however: There are hundreds of imaging and image/video processing Patents that have been granted over the years, and some (small) part of our algorithm may violate one or more of these patents accidentally. Checking our work against the mountain of imaging patents out there is unfeasible. It would take a team of 5 months to do that. It doesn't help that many of these patents use obscure mathematical notations and formulae that make it difficult to decipher quickly precisely what the patent holder has patented. Now suppose that we open source our algorithm, and it turns out that it violates one or more patents. Could we get sued for damages because we open sourced it, and hundreds or thousands of people are now using it for free? It could take the patent holder months or years to identify that their patent is being violated, by which time our algorithm may have thousands of users. To sum it up: If you open source something that — accidentally — violates somebodys patent somewhere, what happens to you? Do you get sued for damages or forced to pay a high license fee? Do you have to shut the Open Source project down and take all files offline? Has anyone been in such a situation before? Are there any legal mechanisms or protections that shield you in a case like this? Thanks for any advice!

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