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Comment Re:A little extreme there, don't you think? (Score 1) 872

by stars_are_number_1 (#25958179) Attached to: Bittorrent To Cause Internet Meltdown
I understand your frustration and agree with you. However, have you ever had a commercial electric account? My experience with commercial electric has been that if you use the electricity in a certain manner...say, turning on three air conditioners at once, you will be pushed into a higher rate bracket because you are deemed a heavy demand on the system. I wonder if a system like this would work for ISPs and consumers alike?

Feed Engadget: Faking one's death still not enough to escape Verizon contract (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Cellphones

It's no secret that some wily individuals will look high and low for loopholes to escape a wireless contract, but staging your own death in order to bypass a $175 early termination fee is admittedly extreme. Nevertheless, a frustrated and determined Verizon customer decided to do just that after the carrier refused to let him out of his contract. Insistent that a host of dropped calls and "string of defective cellphones" were reason enough to ditch The Network, he went so far as to "fashion a fake death certificate" and convinced a friend to fax it in. Unfortunately, Verizon caught on to the scheme and yet again refused to let Mr. Taylor out, so as you can probably guess, the perturbed ex-customer begrudgingly coughed up the dough, trashed his phone, and hoped that he "sent a definite message about how much people hate being strapped to a cellphone that doesn't work."

[Via Pocket-Lint]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Movies

Submission + - Netflix Gets Hacked (tvsquad.com)

Submitted by
Dragontologist
Dragontologist writes: "In an interestingly round-about way, a few hackers have posted publicly about how to get around the $17/month fee for Netflix streaming video. It's not particularly easy, you only get 17 hours of video a month, and you can't copy it onto your iPod (not without another hack, anyway), but it's free (assuming you don't mind the whole illegal thing). All I want to know is, who would think to exploit Windows Media Player?"
Google

Submission + - Eight Parties Join Suit Against YouTube/Google (nzherald.co.nz)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Things have worsened in the copyright suit against Google for its YouTube service. eight more parties have joined among them the National Music Publishers' Association, which is the largest US music publishing trade association, the Rugby Football League, the Finnish Football League Association and author Daniel Quinn. Back in May, Google commented on this suit by saying "These suits simply misunderstand the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which balances the rights of copyright holders against the need to protect internet communications and content.""
Biotech

Submission + - Barry Bonds' HR Record Tainted by Elbow 'Armor'? (editorandpublisher.com)

Submitted by
solitas
solitas writes: "An interesting article for the mechanical engineers and baseball fans on /. about the guard Bonds wears on his right elbow, and the possible physical and mechanical advantages it gives his swing.

Beyond his alleged steroid use, Barry Bonds is guilty of the use of something that confers extraordinarily unfair mechanical advantage: the "armor" that he wears on his right elbow. Amid the press frenzy over Bonds' unnatural bulk, the true role of the object on his right arm has simply gone unnoticed."
Networking

Submission + - Internet Pioneer Unveils Flow Router (theglobeandmail.com)

Submitted by No_Weak_Heart
No_Weak_Heart writes: From this article in the Globe and Mail: "Lawrence Roberts, once part of a group that developed the world's first major computer packet network in the 1960s, started up Anagran Inc. in 2004 with the aim of developing a router that can better handle Internet traffic. The FR-1000 Flow Router, Anagran's first product, uses what the company calls behavioural traffic control, instead of existing methods of delivering data "packets" across networks, to ensure online video and voice services are delivered without interruptions."
Handhelds

Submission + - iPhone unlocked for use on European carriers

Submitted by thefickler
thefickler writes: Thanks to a Macedonian hacker and the iPhone hacking team at Hackint0sh, the Apple iPhone is now usable across the pond. All you need to unlock the iPhone for use with a European carrier is a SIM reader/writer, V1Comp SIM card, and a blank SilverCard smart card.
Space

Submission + - Die-hard Pluto Fans Have New Cause Fro Despair (astronomyreport.com)

Submitted by HaHaHa7129
HaHaHa7129 writes: AstronomyReport.com tells us that new data shows that the dwarf planet Eris is 27 percent more massive than Pluto, thereby strengthening the decree last year that there are eight planets in the solar system and a growing list of dwarf planets. The new results, obtained with Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Observatory data, indicate that the density of the material making up Eris is about two grams per cubic centimeter. This means that Eris very likely is made up of ice and rock, and thus is very similar in composition to Pluto. Past results from the Hubble Space Telescope had already allowed planetary scientists to determine that its diameter is 2,400 kilometers, also larger than Pluto's.
Music

Submission + - Record Industry Woes Aggravated by Years of Bad PR

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Richard Menta makes a strong case on MP3 Newswire that bad public relations stirred by the open conflict between the record industry and the consumer is a heavy contributor to the crumbling fortunes of the major labels. In his analysis he contrasts how the NFL and Major League baseball tread gingerly with the Michael Vick and steroids scandals respectively to avoid further raising the ire of sports fans, while the major labels and the RIAA openly antagonize music fans who dare embrace new technologies they don't have full control of. From the article" Today the major record labels don't have a positive brand image and the very public actions they have taken to control the rise of digital media and the Internet over the last several years is at the very heart of their fall from grace. To some the big labels are an anachronism. To others they are anti-consumer. The erosion of their image is dramatic..." Menta then lays out 17 public events that have chipped away at the image of the recording industry including those that show them as bullies (RIAA sues little girls), as incompetent (RIAA sues the dead), as oppressors of the artist (Courtney Love, Janis Ian, and Grey Tuesday), as greedy (that's what Steve Jobs called them), and as practitioners of unauthorized access (Sony rootkit scandal). Consumer perception can be a bitch and the end result here is that many consumers probably don't feel as good about buying a CD anymore.
Supercomputing

Submission + - NASA to build largest Supercomputer ever (linuxworld.com.au) 1

Submitted by Onlyodin
Onlyodin writes: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has given the green light to a project that will build the largest ever supercomputer based on Silicon Graphics' (SGI) 512-processor Altix computers.

Called Project Columbia and costing around $160-million, the 10,240-processor system will be used by researchers at the Advanced Supercomputing Facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

What makes Project Columbia unique is the size of the multiprocessor Linux systems, or nodes, that it clusters together. It is common for supercomputers to be built of thousands of two-processor nodes, but the Ames system uses SGI's NUMAlink switching technology and ProPack Linux operating system enhancements to connect 512-processor nodes, each of which will have more than 1,000G bytes of memory.

Full Story at Linuxworld

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