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Comment Re:Street Legality: Nope! (Score 1) 87

It's a damn shame that to make this thing street legal, you actually have to crash a bunch of them.

And building like 10 of them, is going to be a real issue.

Actually, you'd have to do more than that in order to make it street legal. It has no mirrors and no signal lights, for starters.

You wouldn't want it the way it was originally designed anyway, other than as something to look at. I've seen the original prop, and the inside was pretty barren. Other than the basic controls, a seat, and a seatbelt, the entire inside is pretty much just sheet aluminum. The guy I saw backing it off a trailer (with lots of help btw, as with no back window and no mirrors, he couldn't see WTF he was doing) was sweating his balls off in there, even with the top down, as it was the middle of summer, and there was no insulation between him and the heat of the engine, nor any air conditioning.

A prop-accurate Tumbler would pretty much only be good for a prop or a conversation piece.

Comment Re:What about servers? (Score 1) 451

I don't see much use of Java on the desktop these days (aside from a few specific applications)

Ok, but those applications are relatively significant...

Eclipse. (Open|Libre)Office. Lotus Notes and just about any other desktop application made by IBM in the last eight to ten years. Many others.

The apps I listed are very important for a lot of businesses. A lot of critical applications only exist on the Mac because of Java.

I don't think Java on the Mac is going away entirely. If there were no JVM at all on the Mac, it would pretty much kill the platform in the business segment of the market. I think it's more the case that Apple has looked at things like OpenJDK and decided that it's not worth the resources to maintain their own JVM in a near vacuum. I imagine that it's intended for the slack to be picked up from some other direction, we just haven't heard the plan yet.

Comment Re:What they need to do (Score 1) 87

I think you should mention I pay $35 per month or year.

Sorry, I thought the following made it clear:

It is not very hard to rack up $35 in long distance charges in a year otherwise.

But yes, to be clear, it's $35 per year.

Comment Re:What they need to do (Score 1) 87

Is that a one time fee or an annual fee?

One time fee, as far as I recall. It's just basically so that they can confirm that you are the actual owner of that phone number. They send a message to your phone (hence why the Skype Credits are required), then you message back to confirm that you got the message. Otherwise nefarious types could use the service to masquerade as though they were calling from your number.

Comment What they need to do (Score 3, Informative) 87

The service is great. I pay $35 for unlimited calling across Canada and the US. It's a no brainer for me. Working from home? No problem, I make all the conference calls I want without tying up the home phone. Need to phone mom long distance? No problem. Working from my girlfriend's place where there's no landline? No problem.

There is the occasional issue. Sometimes (rarely), calls drop. Sometimes (very rarely) there is a number somewhere in the US I can't call. Honestly the biggest problem I have is that my number comes up weird on call display, so there's times when people I'm phoning don't answer because they think I'm some telemarketer, but really that's just my own fault for not shelling out $14 for some Skype credits so they can send an SMS message to my cell phone to confirm that they can use my cell number for call display.

Really their problem is they need to advertise better. When I tell people what I pay for my service, they immediately say "Holy crap that's cheap!" Most people just don't know it's out there, or if they do, they think it's only for Skype-to-Skype calling, and don't know you can call regular phones with it.

It would be nice if they had Skype-In support here (Canada), but really for what I'm paying, I can hardly complain. I easily am recouping in long distance savings what I'm paying out. It is not very hard to rack up $35 in long distance charges in a year otherwise.

Comment Re:Snarkified (Score 1) 198

The noise over Miracles wasn't about internet trolls getting uppity just for fun (though it is fun). These guys didn't say, "hey these things are amazing" when they called them miracles. They suggested that these various natural things were no less than god's direct intervention in the physical world and implied that they couldn't be satisfactorily explained by science. Then they said they don't want to hear from any scientists about any of these subjects because, "[those] motherfuckers lyin'". Yeah, scientists of the world are part of a giant conspiracy to lie about where rainbows come from... fuckwits.

Anyone that has listened to ICP for any reasonable length of time knows that their songs are meant to be tongue in cheek, and this one is no different.

If you take all their songs as literally as the critics are taking this one, then you'd actually believe they've murdered half the planet for little reason other than their own amusement, because that's primarily what their songs are about. I will go out on a limb and say that if all their songs were true, they'd be on Death Row by now.

Miracles just tries to send a message that there are wonders all around us that we all take for granted. It does it in a tongue in cheek way. It wouldn't be an ICP song if it didn't. Get over it.

Seriously, next you people are going to tell me that Weird Al really bashed in the head of "good old Mister Fender", because he sang about it. Get real.

Comment drugs? (Score 1, Redundant) 169

The designers also hope that one day the underwear can release drugs to relieve pain and treat wounds.

Or how about Viagra when they sense foreplay? That would make a hojillion dollars. Add in a mild heater to combat shrinkage on those cold nights, and you have yourself a winner.

Comment Re:Here's the problem. (Score 2, Informative) 302

The problem is not targeted ads. I don't mind having targeted ads at all. What I do mind is that stuff that I wanted to keep private being suddenly open to Everyone and to my friends and networks. Yes.. it's naked greed indeed. I disabled my account earlier today and don't see myself going back. Too much of a time sink anyway.

Agreed. The targeted ads themselves don't give the advertiser any of your data.

I actually ran an ad on Facebook for a couple of months to advertise the Fan Page for a charity that I volunteer for (shameless plug... it's the National Wild Turkey Federation). All the ad targeting does is select parameters to match when deciding whether to show your ad to people. You can select things like gender, age, location, interests, etc. It tells you roughly how many people will match your criteria. As an advertiser, this is REALLY useful. I was able to target my ad and say "I only want to show this thing to people over 18 within 50 miles of my city that are interested in X, Y, and Z". That is the kind of direct targetability that everyone in the advertising industry wants. If someone doesn't match your criteria, they just plain won't be shown your ad, and you won't have to pay.

It does NOT give you a list of their names and/or profiles, or anything else of their information. You get a number that says your criteria matches X number of profiles. That is it. And it does this without those profiles needing the information your criteria tries to match being public. I really fail to see how it's any invasion of privacy in and of itself.

I'm not claiming that Facebook doesn't have some shitty privacy policies of late, but as the parent states, the targeted ads are not the problem here.

Comment Re:What do you mean by now? (Score 1) 359

What I mean is this attitude with schools has been around for a long time. We had the vice principal sneaking around while classes were in session because he wanted to personally do locker checks and that was 20 years ago. He definitely didn't consider your locker personal space.

There is a lot of established case law that says that school lockers are the property of the school and hence not considered private. Heck in my school, it was mandatory to provide the office with the combination to the lock you had on your locker. We certainly had no expectations of privacy. It was fairly routine for anyone at the school that got themselves on the wrong side of the law to find out that the police had come to the school and asked the principal to open up their locker for them, which the principal would readily do.

IMHO, if you're stupid enough to store contraband at school, you deserve to get caught.

Science

Antarctic's First Plane, Found In Ice 110

Arvisp writes "In 1912 Australian explorer Douglas Mawson planned to fly over the southern pole. His lost plane has now been found. The plane – the first off the Vickers production line in Britain – was built in 1911, only eight years after the Wright brothers executed the first powered flight. For the past three years, a team of Australian explorers has been engaged in a fruitless search for the aircraft, last seen in 1975. Then on Friday, a carpenter with the team, Mark Farrell, struck gold: wandering along the icy shore near the team's camp, he noticed large fragments of metal sitting among the rocks, just a few inches beneath the water."
Games

Whatever Happened To Second Life? 209

Barence writes "It's desolate, dirty, and sex is outcast to a separate island. In this article, PC Pro's Barry Collins returns to Second Life to find out what went wrong, and why it's raking in more cash than ever before. It's a follow-up to a feature written three years ago, in which Collins spent a week living inside Second Life to see what the huge fuss at the time was all about. The difference three years can make is eye-opening."
Games

EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) 308

captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."
Censorship

AU Senator Calls Scientology a "Criminal Organization" 511

An anonymous reader passes along news that an Australian senator, Nick Xenophon, has denounced the Church of Scientology as "a criminal organization" from the floor of Parliament. "Senator Xenophon used a speech in Parliament last night to raise allegations of widespread criminal conduct within the church, saying he had received letters from former followers detailing claims of abuse, false imprisonment, and forced abortion. He says he has passed on the letters to the police and is calling for a Senate inquiry into the religion and its tax-exempt status." It wasn't that long ago that the CoS was calling for Net censorship in Australia; a month later the organization was convicted of fraud in France.

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