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Submission + - Satellite Reign on Kickstarter, Spiritual Successor to Original Syndicate Games 24

Submitted by static0verdrive
static0verdrive writes: Satellite Reign, a game in development by 5 Lives Studios, is intended to be the "spiritual successor" and third installment (not counting EA's recent first-person disappointment) to Syndicate / Syndicate Wars from the late Bullfrog Studios. 5 Lives includes staff who worked on the original games. The kickstarter fundraising campaign, now in it's final 24 hours, highlights a few very interesting stretch goals as well. Satellite Reign will incorporate the same real-time strategy and dystopian setting that made the Syndicate series so popular. Gamer fans of any kind of cyberpunk, from Syndicate to the works of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson should check this project out!

Submission + - Google Engineer Wins NSA Award, Then Says NSA Should Be "Abolished" (tikkun.org)

Submitted by MetalliQaZ
MetalliQaZ writes: Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA’s first annual “Science of Security (SoS) Competition.” The competition, which aims to honor the best “scientific papers about national security” as a way to strengthen NSA collaboration with researchers in academia, honored Bonneau for his paper on the nature of passwords. And how did Bonneau respond to being honored by the NSA? By expressing, in an honest and bittersweet blog post, his revulsion at what the NSA has become: "Simply put, I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form."

Submission + - English High Court bans scientific paper (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The High Court — England's highest civil court — has temporarily banned the publication of a scientific paper that would reveal the details of a zero day vulnerability in vehicle immobilisers and, crucially, give details of how to crack the system. Motor manufacturers argued that revealing the details of the crack would allow criminals to steal cars. Could this presage the courts getting involved in what gets posted on your local Bugzilla? It certainly means that software giants who dislike security researchers publishing the full facts on vulnerabilities might want to consider a full legal route.

Submission + - Software-defined data centers might cost companies more than they save (datamation.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: As more and more companies move to virtualized, or software-defined, data centers, cost savings might not be one of the benefits. Sure, utilization rates might go up as resources are pooled, but if the end result is that IT resources become easier for end users to access and provision, they might end up using more resources, not less.

That's the view of Peder Ulander of Citrix, who cites the Jevons Paradox, a 150-year-old economic theory that arose from an observation about the relationship between coal efficiency and consumption. Making a resource easier to use leads to greater consumption, not less, says Ulander. As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used.

The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck. It won't mean cost savings, but it could mean higher revenues.

Comment Re:What about Apple? (Score 1) 92

by static0verdrive (#44317285) Attached to: Patent Trolls Getting the Attention of the Feds
Is that worse than buying competition to create a monopoly the way corporations like Microsoft do? IMO Patents aren't as much the issue so much as the laws surrounding corporations and their free run on power. Power derived from money. A good example is how they can do illegal/dangerous/harmful things if they want because often a fine is less than the profit they'll make. Shouldn't they be put out of business and their cash given back to the public or shareholders rather than scolded mildly so they can repeat the offense?
Android

New Android Eyewear Wants To Compete With Google Glass 55

Posted by timothy from the everyone-will-have-one dept.
DeviceGuru writes with this excerpt from LinuxGizmos: "GlassUp, an Italian startup, has started taking pre-orders on Indiegogo for an Android eyewear display system billed as a simpler, lower-cost alternative to Google Glass. The GlassUp device is a receive-only Bluetooth accessory to a nearby mobile device, providing a monochrome, 320 x 240-pixel augmented reality display of incoming messages and notifications. GlassUp was unveiled at CeBit in March, and is now up for crowdfunding on Indiegogo, where pre-sales opened today ranging from $199 to $399, depending on whether it's a pre-release, pre-production, or full-production version. This is less than a quarter the price of the $1,500 Google Glass Developer Edition. Already almost two years in development, GlassUp is expected to ship to presales customers in Feb. 2014, around the same time Google Glass is expected to ship in commercial production form." And for Google Glass itself, there's at least one project to bring Google's own hardware an alternative operating system.

Comment Re:Doing what is right... (Score 1) 955

by static0verdrive (#43962269) Attached to: USA Calling For the Extradition of Snowden
I guess it depends on if you think anything anti-government counts as treason. Some think the government is somewhat anti-freedom, which is another form of treason? In this case, I wonder about the secrecy of the documents he released myself. Just saying a document is "top secret" doesn't make it top secret, I'm sorry. It has to contain info that would endanger lives or the good of the country. You can't have douchebags marking every document "top secret" just to prevent it from being shared because they know it will incriminate them. Did these documents contain the info gathered or just let us know that info was being gathered?

Comment Re:But why was he shooting? (Score 2) 773

Not to mention giving attention to the act and criminals, thereby potentially motivating other evil attention-seekers to perform similar acts. The media needs to report it once, maybe the odd update when it matters, and Never, Ever, name those responsible. (Saying whether they were caught is OK, but why make them famous/infamous and go down in history?)

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