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To further strengthen their brand recognition, I've heard that the duopoly is going to merge and rename themselves. The incumbent POTS service will be known as Pravda and the cable people will be Tass. No others will be allowed to enter the market because these two will have all the truth and news you need.

Really. How is it that companies cooperating is advertised as competition?

How about the billions in chasing phantom terrorists, waging two wars, creating the DHS, funding a massive wiretapping dragnet, new TSA security crackdowns, general security crackdowns, and plenty of pricey court cases arguing against the 4th Amendment.

Your pathetic attempt at distraction ignores the devastating cost of our overreaction.

Jeez, this is the most asinine thread I've ever read. We start with some tasteless jokes about dying animals and end up with the argument that it's all no big deal because a little coastal flooding now and then is good. Let's not deal with the hard stuff, like the extinction of thousands of species, the loss of cropland, the reversal of the carbon cycle, increase in catastrophic weather, and the faint (but real) possibility that the whole thing will cycle out of control and render the planet uninhabitable. No, that would require giving up some smugness. And we at Slashdot value our smugness!

Exactly! And no industry is quite so guilty as games and entertainments I think. They are actively destroying the lifeblood on which they thrive. Take an industry that absolutely depends on pushing the boundaries and cultivating the brightest and most talented. Tie up the practicioners in chilling NDAs and wicked intellectual property landgrabs. Get them to sign non-compete agreements to turn their careers into cul-de-sacs. Make sure they isolate themselves in a monoculture. Ensure you're using arcane, expensive proprietry tools that students and educators don't have access to. Make sure the people who've paid for access to the inner circle are too selfish or fearful to engage outside. Work against standards that would create portable skillsets. Abuse the patent system to breed anti-commerce knowledge monopolies. Reduce the image of the industry to something you "break into". Spit on the ideals of a professional meritocracy by putting work out to unpaid spec, so those with the self respect to value their work get passed over. Replace fundamental principles like mathematics and physics with toy push button instant mash potatoes TV dinner plugins. Not invented here syndrome. Paranoid, insular, self-defeating.

And then turn around and say "We've got a skills shortage".

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/19/1719206
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7460870.stm

No shit? Perhaps if you were't so full of yourselves and treated your employees with respect they might stay.

Humans are curious by nature.

If you forbid someone something and grant them acces to it 9 out of 10 people *will* take a look. Combine that with the powertrip most people get when put in a control position it get's to good to bet let alone.

For those reasons alone I never trust any sysadmin anywhere, period.

At work or anywhere else I simply asume some admin will read my email on a bored day and I simply asume he will browse through my files the other day.

HEY, this is America! Our 2.4 children ARE too large to fit in your undersized small penis Japanese sedans. /sarcasm

Isn't it weird? Conservatives don't have a problem with the government invading their personal lives, but they DO have a problem with the government invading the corporations' lives.

What a classic set of liberal distortions!

Conservatives, for the most part, do not want the government to enter our lives. However, we value the following rights as tantamount to freedom: a) free speech, b) freedom of commerce, c) the right to hold property and d) the right to get income from the investment of that property. That is why, as a rule, you will see conservatives balk at any sort of proposed rule about what kind of car, house, medicine, or anything else that a person might own or buy.

Conversely, the liberal would legislate the federal right to ALL property, and impose regulations on ANYTHING. Liberals always complain about "conservative fascism", but, then, their solutions always involve creating ever more regulation (and thus, devaluing property). Liberals might make you free in the Khmer Rouge sense of the word, but, ultimately, they make you poor.

In the free market state you Americans idolize, corporations and citizens should have the same treatment under the eye of the law. No more, no less.

Actually, we view corporations as distinctly less than the rights of citizens. However, corporations, via our shares, are our property, and therefor, we resist what the government would do with it. But, make no bones about it, in the eyes of a conservative, owning a stake in Exxon Mobil, or even the entire company, is no different than the legality of owning a pencil. It is my company, my pencil, and I can do with it what I will.

When I was in school, we were taught about Francis Cabot Lowell, who heroically copied machine plans in England to use in the US for textile mills.

England was so worried that their monopoly on their mill technology would be taken that they would search ships, cargo and passenger for hidden plans.

Fortunately for the US, Lowell memorized the plans and was able to build his own plants in the New World. His business was the beginning of the industrialization of the New World. Without which, the United States would have continued to be merely agrarian in nature. Does anyone know if they still teach this lesson in gradeschools, or was it killed when they started teaching kids to respect copyrights more?

Read the bloody summary even!

So if the summary is to be believed, you're increasing output nearly threefold, and reducing cost of manufacture. The cost-per-watt ratio moves the right way on both sides.

spoco2 writes "The id Software site has announced that work has begun on the next sequel to their most famous game, Doom. Will they be able to resurrect the series after what many considered to be a serious misstep with Doom 3? Oh... and they're hiring for the team, so maybe you can steer them in the right direction?"

hackingbear writes "Unsatisfied by the reliance on American GPS navigation systems and not feeling much security joining the European Galileo system, China will expand its 4-satellite Beidou navigation system to a full-fledged, competitive, and encrypted system by 2010."

TangAddict writes "Dr. Alan Weston, who previously invented bungee jumping, led a team of scientists at NASA Ames Research Center to build a $4 million spacecraft in less than two years. The Modular Common Spacecraft Bus is designed to accept payloads of up to 50kg. and can be used for a variety of missions including a rendezvous with asteroids, orbiting Earth or Mars, and landing on the moon. When NASA officials saw the first flight test, they offered Weston and his team $80 million to use their design for the LADEE mission, which will gather dust and atmosphere samples from the moon in 2011."

TaeKwonDood writes "Is it reptile, bird or mammal? Some of each. Does it have venom, lay eggs and lactate? Yes. Upon discovery in 1798, fellow scientists thought it was for an episode of 'Thou hast been Punk'd,' but this Australia native, on home on land and in water, is real and, finally, it gets its own decoded genome. It's no surprise the DNA is as messed up as the critter itself."

eldavojohn writes "Although we don't know what they were after due to the settlement, a gag order was just released that kept Internet Archive member Brewster Kahle quiet. The FBI had issued a national security letter to them under the Patriot Act. Kahle fought it. Hard. The EFF came to the aid of his lawyers and what resulted was one of the only three times an NSL has been challenged: all three have been rescinded. The FBI agreed to open some of the court files now for it to be public. The ACLU added, 'That makes you wonder about the the hundreds of thousands of NSLs that haven't been challenged.'"

Tridus writes "The PC version of Mass Effect is going to require Internet access to play (despite being a single-player game), as its DRM system requires that it phone home every 10 days. Sadly, Spore will use the same system. This will do nothing to stop piracy of course, but it will do a heck of a good job of stopping EA's new arch-enemy: people playing their single player games offline." Is this better or worse than requiring a CD in the drive to play? Update: 05/07 17:17 GMT by T : According to a message from Technical Producer Derek French (may require a scroll-down) on the Bioware forums, there is indeed an internet connection required, but only for activation, not for all future play. Update: 05/08 04:10 GMT by T : Mea culpa. As reader David Houk points out, the 10-day window is in fact correct as initially described, so don't count on playing this on any machine without at least some Internet connectivity.