Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Evolution.. (Score 1) 588

by rozz (#35643714) Attached to: 12-Year-Old Rewrites Einstein's Theory of Relativity

I've been saying it for years. Autism isn't a disease, it's the next step in human evolution.

amen to that! people just like to classify as sick whatever they do not like or understand.
and also, I always thought that the big bang in the 3rd biggest scam in the history of the mankind ... with no1&2 being money and religion
good luck and all the best to lil jack

Comment Re:Well, we've finished with the hard part (Score 1) 363

by rozz (#34428804) Attached to: Sahara Solar To Power Half the World By 2050
quite effective your comparison, unfortunately it is totally flawed.
First, selling black market energy is quite a bit harder than selling black market diamonds.
As for the oil comparison, energy is a market-ready product, oil is not; it is usually transported to a western refinery which produces the final product and therefore the origin country ends up with a very low fraction of the benefits generated from the whole oil-processing chain.

Comment Re:Spain, Really? (Score 1) 103

by rozz (#32589570) Attached to: 178 Arrested In US/EU Credit Card Cloning Ops

TFA is to PC to say it outright, but putting Romania at the head or the list says it is a Gypsy operation. These are multi-generational career criminal families. And the Spanish police seem unable to do anything about it. There was a good documentary on the BBC:

How Gypsy gangs use child thieves

really? bet you never had contact with a gypsy your whole life.

I am a big fan of BBC documentaries almost all are very well done. The problem with those is that not any dummy can understand. Sometimes I cannot believe what some ppl get from such documentaries. And although I have not seen this one, sounds like it was your case too.

Gypsies are "low-tech" crime experts .. small time thieves, children/women exploitation, etc. The vast majority are illiterate and the bosses make no exception. And probably an even bigger problem is that you cannot count on them. Not even for using a counterfeit card to get the money out of the ATM .. even if they manage to do it, they will run away with the money or try to keep most for themselves.

This operation is way too high-tech for a gypsy clan .. at least for now. And judging by their appetite for education that is not going to change anytime soon.

Comment since you asked... (Score 1) 261

by rozz (#31348870) Attached to: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Music

If this goes on, will the major labels and studios actually need musicians and actors?

yes .. both dead and alive ones ... and some 3D rendered ones too .. the more the merrier

In the future, it could be harder to make money playing guitar with all of the competition from dead or retired artists

so? if you can't play the guitar better than a dead guy, why should you make any money?
plus, a decent guitar player should always be able to make some bikinis "dissapear" .. that not enough as a reward?

and if guitars and guitar players dissapear forever so what?
Image

Seinfeld's Good Samaritan Law Now Reality? Screenshot-sm 735

Posted by samzenpus from the not-that-there-is-anything-wrong-with-that dept.
e3m4n writes "The fictitious 'good samaritan' law from the final episode of Seinfeld (the one that landed them in jail for a year) appears to be headed toward reality for California residents after the house passed this bill. There are some differences, such as direct action is not required, but the concept of guilt by association for not doing the right thing is still on the face of the bill."
PlayStation (Games)

PS3 Hacked? 296

Posted by Soulskill from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.
Several readers have sent word that George Hotz (a.k.a. geohot), the hacker best known for unlocking Apple's iPhone, says he has now hacked the PlayStation 3. From his blog post: "I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip. 3 years, 2 months, 11 days...that's a pretty secure system. ... As far as the exploit goes, I'm not revealing it yet. The theory isn't really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can't post dumps. I'm hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone's KBAG."
Education

Researchers Make a Case For Learning Through Video Game Creation 68

Posted by Soulskill from the now-third-graders-get-to-experience-crunch-time dept.
ub3r n3u7r4l1st sends along this snippet from Science Daily: "Computer games have a broad appeal that transcends gender, culture, age and socio-economic status. Now, computer scientists in the US think that creating computer games, rather than just playing them, could boost students' critical and creative thinking skills as well as broaden their participation in computing. ... 'Worldwide, there is increasing recognition of a digital divide, a troubling gap between groups that use information and communication technologies widely and those that do not,' the team explains. 'The digital divide refers not only to unequal access to computing resources between groups of people but also to inequalities in their ability to use information technology fully.' There are many causes and proposed solutions to bridging this divide, but applying them at the educational and computer literacy level in an entertaining and productive way might be one of the more successful. The team adds that teaching people how to use off-the-shelf tools to quickly build a computer game might allow anyone to learn new thinking and computing skills."
Microsoft

Visual Studio 2010 Forces Tab Indenting 390

Posted by kdawson from the one-man's-readable dept.
An anonymous reader writes "For years, Microsoft has allowed Visual Studio users to define arbitrary tab widths, often to the dismay of those viewing the resultant code in other editors. With VS 2010, it appears that they have taken the next step of forcing tab width to be the same as the indent size in code. Two-space tabs anyone?"
Networking

Game Developers Note Net Neutrality Concerns To FCC 74

Posted by Soulskill from the game-developers-are-people-too dept.
eldavojohn writes "A list of notes from game developers (PDF) was sent in a letter to the FCC which represented a net neutrality discussion between the developers and FCC representatives. Game Politics sums it up nicely, but the surprise is that developers are concerned with latency, not bandwidth, unlike the members of many other net neutrality discussions. One concern is that each and every game developer will need to negotiate with each and every ISP to ensure their traffic achieves acceptable levels of latency for users. 'Mr. Dyl of Turbine stated that ISPs sometimes block traffic from online gaming providers, for reasons that are not clear, but they do not necessarily continue those blocks if they are contacted. He recalled Turbine having to call ISPs that had detected the high UDP traffic from Turbine, and had apparently decided to block the traffic and wait to see who complained.' It seems a lot of the net neutrality discussions have only worried about one part of the problem — Netflix, YouTube and P2P — while an equally important source of concern went unnoticed: latency in online games."
Privacy

Social Security Administration Launches E-Health Info Exchange 114

Posted by Soulskill from the not-the-kind-of-security-this-needs dept.
Lucas123 writes "In what could be the start of a national health information exchange system, the Social Security Administration became the first federal agency to go live with a public-private electronic health records information exchange that will cut wait time for 2.6 million Americans who apply for benefits each year by weeks or months. The electronic exchange runs on a database operated by a non-profit organization in Virginia and open-source software deployed at the Social Security Administration. 'The goal of the NHIN effort is to enable secure access to health care data and real-time information sharing among physicians, patients, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and federal agencies ... regardless of location or the applications that are being used.'"
Software

Richard Stallman Warns About Non-Free Web Apps 747

Posted by Soulskill from the beware-hidden-dollarsign dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Richard Stallman has published an article which warns about the 'Javascript trap' posed by non-free AJAX-based applications. The article calls for a mechanism which would enable browsers to identify freely-licensed Javascript applications and run modified version thereof. 'It is possible to release a Javascript program as free software,' Stallman writes. 'But even if the program's source is available, there is no easy way to run your modified version instead of the original ... The effect is comparable to tivoization, although not quite so hard to overcome.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.

Close