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Comment Re:It's inevitable (Score 1) 990

Machines don't get sick, they don't take holidays, and they don't complain. Most important to business is the fact that they're cheaper.

Machines don't get sick? Tell that to the infrastructure in Iran taken down by stuxnet, or to the thousands of cars with critical system failures due to normal wear-and-tear (blown head gaskets, leaky hoses, etc). The danger of automation is that machines can make large, expensive mistakes very quickly, so you risk getting eaten alive by both maintenance costs and "oops" factors.

The Internet

US Intelligence Mining Your Social Network Data 240

bs0d3 writes "U.S. Intelligence has hired social scientists to mine the vast resources of the Internet — Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones. They intend to use this info to track sociological laws of human behavior — enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability. Privacy advocates are deeply skeptical of the project, saying it reminds them of Total Information Awareness, a 9/11 Pentagon program that proposed hunting for potential attackers by identifying patterns in vast collections of public and private data: telephone calling records, e-mail, travel data, visa and passport information, and credit card transactions. In a recent budget proposal, the defense agency argues that its analysis can expose terrorist cells and other groups by tracking their meetings, rehearsals and sharing of material and money transfers."

Comment Online Pass is the biggest scam of current gen (Score 1) 271

Online Pass/Sony Pass is nothing more than a money grab.

EA and Sony want you to believe that a used copy of the game incurs them additional costs in addition to whatever costs were generated by the first buyer. Is this true?

Suppose N is the set of copies of any given game that have been sold to customers. When a copy is traded in to GameStop, the cardinality of N drops by 1 by definition. When that used copy is sold again, the cardinality of N increases by 1, again by definition. A game cannot be classified as "used" if it has not previously been in N. Therefore, a used sale does not change the cardinality of N, and so the costs incurred by EA or Sony do not change. It costs them the same to support |N| copies of the game, regardless of who owns those copies.

Supporting Online Pass or Sony Pass is supporting nothing more than corporate greed.

Star Wars Prequels

Ask Slashdot: What To Do In SW:TOR For Just 3 Days? 211

rodrigoandrade writes "I've been invited to participate in the beta testing program for SW:TOR. However, EA's giving out 3-day passes to most testers. A few people are receiving passes for longer periods. Mine will be from Friday 5am through Monday 12am (CST) (i.e. Sunday evening). Since it's a frakking 10GB download (almost 2GB for video alone) I'll use for only 3 days, I'd like to make the most out of it. If you're an experienced beta tester, please post some tips travel-guide style on what I should do, quests I should take, places to visit, etc. TYIA. May the Force be with you!"
Networking

Ask Slashdot: Network Backup Solution Out of the Box? 251

First time accepted submitter file terminator writes "I want to buy a network drive for home usage, and am looking for something that would allow for secure and encrypted remote backups over the Internet to a second network drive, preferably advanced enough that all drive content does not have to be transmitted every time. The solution may come as a pair of network drives, and two-way synching would actually be a plus. The drives would be behind respective NATs and setup must allow connecting to any target port. The solution should be readily available (no obscure/local brands/solutions) and not unreasonably expensive. Does anyone have any recommendations for a full out of the box solution?"

Comment Good riddance, I say. (Score 2) 314

Starz content on Netflix Streaming has always been horrible quality. Fire up Tangled, skip to the scene where the dam breaks, and listen in horror to the audio compression artifacts. I've got pretty low standards of quality, and even I'm embarrassed for Starz.

Facebook

Spam King Wallace Indicted For Facebook Spam 93

itwbennett writes "Notorious spam king Sanford Wallace is facing federal fraud charges for allegedly breaking into the Facebook accounts of 500,000 victims in 2008 and 2009 and using the stolen credentials to post 27 million spam messages. The charges are outlined in an indictment, filed July 6 but made public Thursday after Wallace turned himself in to federal authorities. If convicted, Wallace could get more than 16 years in prison."

Comment Re:I work for a phone company... (Score 1) 207

Netflix contracts with companies such as Akamai, called content delivery networks. These companies pay ISPs to co-locate their servers so that each ISP gets its own local cache of the content served by their clients. And yes, this means that the Netflix content you watch, which counts towards your monthly cap, is being served *locally*.

Customers pay ISPs to access their network. The CDN pays the ISP for the bandwidth they use to transfer their data to their servers, and the CDNs are paid by the content providers, who are, in turn, also paid by customers.

Every step of the delivery between Netflix and the customers is completely paid for, yet ISPs want to whine and cry about how Netflix is harming their network. More like anti-competitive posturing, since the ISPs doing the biggest whining happen to be owned by big media corporations.

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