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Comment Re:Hmmm, don't really like the guys tone (Score 0) 473

I agree. There's nothing cool about swastikas. However, that's not really the issue here.

The problem is that Microsoft approved a game for release that allows people to use the swastika as a logo. If they find that so objectionable that it's an automatic Xbox Live ban for the player, then the simple fact of the matter is that they should have rejected the release until the logo was removed from the game. The requirements on a game's release are incredibly strict, and Microsoft has an entire team of people looking for issues like this in game. If they missed it, it's Microsoft's problem, not whichever gamer decides to use it as a logo.

Submission + - Privilege of Higher Education

realsilly writes: "The discussion of cheating took place this week with this article http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/11/18/152256/200-Students-Admit-Cheating-After-Professors-Online-Rant about cheating students at UCF. I found that there were over 600+ posts about cheating. They included the range of feedback from the posters, from "the professor is an idiot", to "Cheating is wrong and hurts those who don't cheat", to "everybody does it" and "Fortune 100 companies hire cheaters". I'm rather curious as to why Cheating is acceptable. Are people that afraid to actually work / study for a class? Are professors so disenchanted that they just go through the motions to teach? Why is there not a greater penalty for cheating?

I've always understood that to be educated up to the 12th grade was mandatory for all states, no matter how that education is applied, Public School, Private school, or Home school. But I've always understood higher education to be a privilege. Not a right, but a privilege. That being the case, I would think that the educational system would look at cheating more closely, and remove cheaters from the education system and allow those students who really want to learn to have the opportunity to learn.

If the only reason you're in college is to score that 6-figure job and you don't know the material about your job because you managed to get your degree by cheating your way through college, then you're a fraud to the core. I certainly don't want to work for some business major who cheated his/her way through school and then tries to become my manager. But as many of you have noted, Cheating has gone on for ages, maybe that's the situation we're already facing in this country, and may help explain why this country is such a wreck.

As an educational system, I'd much rather take students that weren't top performers in high school, who want to get a higher education and improve themselves than cheaters who just beat the system."
Science

Submission + - Life found in deepest layer of Earth's crust (newscientist.com)

michaelmarshall writes: For the first time life has been found in the gabbroic layer of the crust. The new biosphere is all bacteria, as you might expect, but they are different to the bacteria in the layers above: they mostly feed on hydrocarbons that are produced by abiotic reactions deep in the crust. It could mean that similar microbes are living even deeper, perhaps even in the mantle.
Crime

Submission + - Scalpers bought tix with CAPTCHA-busting botnet (networkworld.com)

alphadogg writes: Three California men have pleaded guilty charges they built a network of CAPTCHA-solving computers that flooded online ticket vendors and snatched up the very best seats for Bruce Springsteen concerts, Broadway productions and even TV tapings of Dancing with the Stars.

The men ran a company called Wiseguy Tickets, and for years they had an inside track on some of the best seats in the house at many events. They scored about 1.5 million tickets after hiring Bulgarian programmers to build "a nationwide network of computers that impersonated individual visitors" on websites such as Ticketmaster, MLB.com and LiveNation, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said Thursday in a press release. The network would "flood vendors computers at the exact moment that event tickets went on sale," the DoJ said.

They had to create shell corporations, register hundreds of fake Internet domains (one was stupidcellphone.com) and sign up for thousands of bogus e-mail addresses to make the scam work. Wiseguy Tickets then resold the tickets to brokers, at a profit.

"These defendants made money by combining age-old fraud with new-age computer hacking," the DoJ said in its press release.

Submission + - 2,000 fetuses found at Thai Buddhist temple (gbooza.com)

Petertijuana writes: Thai police investigating a strong smell emanating from a Buddhist temple have found more than 2,000 fetuses hidden in the complex's morgue that appear to have come from illegal abortion clinics.
During an initial investigation at the temple in Bangkok on Tuesday, police discovered piles of plastic bags containing more than 300 fetuses. Police Lt. Col. Kanathud Musiganont said workers pulled more bodies from the temple's morgue Friday. More than 2,000 have been unearthed from vaults where bodies are traditionally interred pending cremation, which under some circumstances can take place years after death.
Abortion is illegal in Thailand except under three conditions — if a woman is raped, if the pregnancy affects her health or if the fetus is abnormal.

Comment Revolution (Score 5, Interesting) 303

The Wii's motion controls were evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Nintendo obviously believed the motion controls were revolutionary - the Wii codename was revolution. Look inside the battery compartment of the Wiimote and you'll still see the code RVL-003.

In any case, it did revolutionise gaming input in a tangible way and brought a whole new demographic into gaming as a result.

Hardware

Submission + - PCIe 3.0 standard goes live (thinq.co.uk)

Stoobalou writes: The PCI Special Interest group, the body responsible for managing the PCI family of industry standards, has announced the release of the PCI Express 3.0 standard — and it promises to make future hardware fly.

The PCIe 3.0 standard increases the bandwidth available on each PCI Express lane compared to the current PCIe 2.0 standard to an impressive eight gigatransfers per second from five gigatransfers per second.

That equates to around 1GB/s of bandwidth per lane or 16GB/s for a PCIe-x16 slot, as typically used for high-performance graphics cards. In theory, a bidirectional connection will allow for aggregate bandwidth of up to 32GB/s — a seriously impressive figure.

Nintendo

Wii 2 Unlikely For 2011, Maybe In 2012 303

An anonymous reader writes "As discussed on Slashdot earlier this year, the lack of a next-generation Wii may be hurting Nintendo. That doesn't seem to concern the company's US chief, Reggie Fils-Aime, who said this week that a Wii 2 might not appear until 2012. He wants to sell a few million more consoles before a successor is launched. So, no Wii 2 for 2010 or 2011 — meanwhile, the PS3 and Xbox consoles get motion control support and other content enhancements. What does that mean for the success of Nintendo's gaming console business? Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?"
Piracy

Submission + - Anti-piracy lawyers "knew letters hit innocents" (pcpro.co.uk) 1

nk497 writes: A UK legal watchdog has claimed lawyers who sent out letters demanding settlement payments from alleged file-sharers knew they would end up hitting innocent people. The Solicitors Regulators Authority said the two Davenport Lyons lawyers "knew that in conducting generic campaigns against those identified as IP holders whose IP numeric had been used for downloading or uploading of material that they might in such generic campaigns be targeting people innocent of any copyright breach." The SRA also said the two lawyers lost their independence because they convinced right holders to allow them to act on their behalf by waiving hourly fees and instead taking a cut of the settlements. The pair earned £150,000 of the £370,000 collected from alleged file-sharers. Because they were looking to recoup their own costs, the lawyers ignored clients' concerns about the negative publicity the letter campaign could — and eventually did — cause, the SRA claimed.
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook Prevents Women From Logging On (eweekeurope.co.uk)

jhernik writes: Thousands of women found themselves locked out of their Facebook accounts 16 November due to a bug in the social network.

According to Facebook spokesperson Simon Axten, the problem was created by a bug in a system designed to find and root out fake accounts. Though the issue was fixed within hours, the site is still working to restore some of the affected accounts, Axten told eWEEK.

According to Axten, the site is still assessing the impact of the bug and could not provide details about exactly how many accounts were affected, though he believes it to be “only a very small percentage.”

Comment Not news (Score 1) 1

This isn't even vaguely news. Canada's had that zip code for years, much like UK has the post code SAN TA1.

The real question is what the hell they do with all the letters he gets anyway (and how they can justify charging a postage fee if they just chuck them in the bin).

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