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Censorship

The New York Bill that Would Ban Anonymous Online Speech->

Submitted by Kargan
Kargan writes "Watching faceless online passerby troll bloggers or mock fellow scribblers can be a drag, but what if legislators’ answer to online ne’er-do-wells was to ban anonymous comments from websites entirely? That’s what the state of New York is planning to do in identical bills — S.6779 and A.8688 – proposed by the New York State Assembly that would “amend the civil rights law” in order to “[protect] a person’s right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting.”

The bill would require a web administrator to “upon request remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate.” By “web site,” the bill means just what it seems to: Any New York-based website, including “social networks, blogs forums, message boards or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.”

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/05/24/the-new-york-bill-that-would-ban-anonymous-online-speech/#ixzz1vol0fxcz"
Link to Original Source

Comment: How old is old? (Score 2) 309

by Kargan (#39974257) Attached to: What do you usually do with old hardware?

I will absolutely sell my most recent graphics cards, they're still worth some dough and it really helps to offset the cost of upgrading all the time. I call it "trading up", and usually I can get away with buying a $200 video card and make $100 back from the old card. (Simple math: new cards only cost me $100 that way!)

But I just gave away my old K6/2 400 Windows 98-era retro-gaming box. It's so old that I couldn't even donate it anywhere, and one of my co-workers wanted one just like it. No more Mechwarrior 2 or Rogue Spear for me.

NZ Politicians accused of hiding Kimdotcom's donations->

Submitted by
vik
vik writes "Kimdotcom well remembers splitting an NZ$50,000 payment into two to help MP John Banks hide the money under the limit for anonymous donations. John Banks claims amnesia, and this is not the first bout of donation-induced memory loss he has suffered from. If convicted, he will lose his seat in NZ's Parliament. But NZ has recently been very flexible in changing its laws to suit big business, so the outcome is far from certain."
Link to Original Source
Games

Max Payne 3 is a 35GB install on PC

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "If you’re a fan of the Max Payne games, and intend playing it on PC, be glad that hard drive prices are returning back to normal following the flooding last year. The reason being, Rockstar Games seems to be going for a world record in storage requirements for Max Payne 3.

The system specifications for the third game in the series have been released, and the hard drive requirements certainly stand out. The minimum space required on your disk? 35GB.

What implications does that have? Game will ship on at least 4 DVDs, the digital download version will take forever to complete, and I'm concerned about level load times if this much data is needed for the game..."
Games

Gaming Clichés That Absolutely Need To Die->

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes "The PC and console game industry is in desperate need of an overhaul. With skyrocketing costs to develop games, consumers aren't going to accept $80-$100 game titles, especially not with mobile game prices in the 99 cent — $4.99 range. Not to mention, how games are designed these days needs some serious rethinking. This list of some of the industry's most annoying gaming clichés, from scripted sequences to impossibly incompetent NPCs, and how they might be solved, speaks to a few of the major ailments in modern gameplay with character and plot techniques that are older than dirt."
Link to Original Source

"Board of Imagination" is a motorized skateboard controlled only by your mind->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "We were impressed by Chaotic Moon Labs' Board of Awesomeness, a motorized skateboard that used your hand as a virtual gas pedal, when we took it for a spin at CES. Now the company is back with a follow-up called the Board of Imagination — that's controlled by the power of thought. The rider wears a wireless Emotiv EPOC headset, which picks up signals from their brain."
Link to Original Source
Image

Airline to Offer In-Flight Adult Movies 200 Screenshot-sm

Posted by samzenpus
from the one-man-mile-high-club dept.
Soon the loud passenger who's had too much to drink on your red-eye flight will be the least of your travel worries. Ryanair Airlines chief Michael O'Leary plans to launch an app that will allow passengers to watch porn on their tablets and smartphones during flight. Mr O'Leary told the Sun: "I'm not talking about having it on screens on the back of seats for everyone to see. It would be on handheld devices. Hotels around the world have it, so why wouldn't we?" Best of all, the app could also be used to gamble or play games in case you got bored during the speaking parts of your in-flight adult movie.

Comment: Re:He's mentioned everything except (Score 1) 112

by Kargan (#36968838) Attached to: Living In an Unsecured World

I don't disagree with what you are saying at all, but I am curious:

Who is going to do the educating, exactly, and how? It's not like you can force people to learn things they don't want to learn. You don't need a license to use a computer or the Internet.

Make no mistake, there are actively, willfully ignorant users all over the place. They know what they need to do to learn more - use the computer more. But they don't want to, because using the system is not an enjoyable, rewarding experience. It's more like they approach it with a sense of dread -- "I could click or do something wrong and just ruin the damn thing!" Consider also that even the cheapest pc still costs a few hundred dollars, which is a lot of money for some folks.

They'd rather just have someone that already knows how to use a computer fix their issue for them, thereby separating the world into the haves and have nots (or in this case, know and know nots) that we have today.

Bitcoin

Those 500K Bitcoins That Caused a 'Flash Crash' We->

Submitted by Kargan
Kargan writes "It looks like the hacker who breached Mt. Gox made off with about $34,000 worth of Bitcoin and then artificially crashed the market by dropping a sell order for 500,000 BTC, according to the post-mortem about the hack published by Mt. Gox. But while the hacker did withdraw 2,000 in actual BTC, which Mt. Gox is replacing at their own expense, the enormous sell order was vapor:

        We would like to note that the Bitcoins sold were not taken from other users’ accounts—they were simply numbers with no wallet backing. For a brief period, the number of Bitcoins in the Mt. Gox exchange vastly outnumbered the Bitcoins in our wallet. Normally, this should be impossible.

The sales could not have been completed because there were no actual Bitcoins to transfer. The hacker had simply assigned himself a huge number of BTC, which was enough to place orders on Mt. Gox and confuse the market."
Link to Original Source

Comment: The new account setup continues to suck (Score 3, Insightful) 154

by Kargan (#36616012) Attached to: Mozilla Releases Thunderbird 5

It won't let you create an account (even for testing purposes) using servers and settings that it can't "probe".

Working at a tech support firm as I do, the new account wizard that was implemented with TB3 is an absolute nightmare for users. I like TB better than MS mail clients in general, but they make us and our users' lives far more difficult than need be.

Do away with the "autoconfiguration" crap and just let people specify what they want, or at least make it optional to have TB "autodetect" everything, for cripes' sake. What's wrong with letting the end-user configure an account using any settings they want?

In like a dimwit, out like a light. -- Pogo