Comment Re:Thrown Out (Score 1) 422
More thinking, less typing. You are right, my bad.
Comment Re:Thrown Out (Score 1) 422
What an original argument style, fabricate your opponents case then refute it.
Valve Trademarks 'DOTA' 141
An anonymous reader tips news that Valve Software has filed a trademark claim for the term "DOTA," fueling speculation that the company will soon reveal a new Defense of the Ancients game. Voice actor John St. John recently said he was recording for such a game in a post to Twitter. The tweet was subsequently deleted. Last year Valve hired 'Icefrog,' lead developer for the original DotA mod.
Comment Re:Thrown Out (Score 1) 422
As said above this is done in many other cases, why should copyright infringement be any different? Oh right, you dont agree with the copyright laws.
props on the car analogy
Comment Re:This sounds more like a job for a computer? (Score 1) 148
FTA:
NERA recommended making information available so that the masses can match the numbers reported to the SEC, the numbers reported to clients, and the numbers disclosed by custodians, or financial institutions that hold the securities for investment advisors.
The goal is to check if all the numbers are consistent, if properly formatted this is easy for a computer. The problem is that the data isnt nicely formatted, so netflix = fail. Mandating a format is the way to go.
Comment Re:So who will be the next China? (Score 2, Funny) 242
Every few years pick a country and bomb it, 20 years later they will start to recover. Remember this is for our children.
Comment Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score 1) 267
When someone disagrees with you there are too choices:
- Be skeptical and research.
- Ignore them and mark them a Troll.
Glad to see slashdot has a healthy portion of the latter.
Comment Re:Pointless stats (Score 1) 795
Not necessarily easy. With no quams about ethics, $20 game = hours of work for most people.
Comment Re:How is this different? (Score 1) 120
There's a finite amount of room at Verizon's data centers, so I imagine they'll be able to charge plenty of money for this, and that smaller providers will be locked out (or will have to pay fractionally, e.g., through an already-colocated service like Akamai). Verizon gets a new profit center and Verizon users pay for it invisibly through advertising and the cost of any services that Google eventually offers for pay. Which is the truly worrisome aspect of net non-neutrality.
This argument is essentially
We should be equal, but you have something shiny. Destroy it, destroy it now!
Comment Re:I agree but it's unlikely to happen (Score 1) 185
it appears from experience that they rarely do this voluntarily.
From watching the news, I would never have thought crime was decreasing. People are generally good, let that be the assumption till proven otherwise.
Comment Re:money talks, freedom walks (Score 1) 185
sign a 'smiling deal' with our arch enemies
Someone should really get the word out, there is ~10 billion dollars of trade. I'll update wikipedia then we can get this war started.
I have lost all respect for RIM
Rockefeller advanced medicine, RIM built perimeter. A little perspective please, the world has enough drama.
ReCAPTCHA.net Now Vulnerable to Algorithmic Attack 251
n3ond4x writes "reCAPTCHA.net algorithms have been developed to solve the current CAPTCHA at an efficacy of 30%. The algorithms were disclosed at DEFCON 18 over the weekend and have since been made available online. Also available is a video demonstration of random reCAPTCHA.net CAPTCHAs being subjected to the algorithms." There's probably an excellent Firefox plugin to render this page's color scheme more bearable. Note: the PowerPoint presentation linked opens fine in OpenOffice, and the video speaks for itself.
Comment Re:Of course they can (Score 1) 560
A truth can misrepresent the truth. My favorite example, since voters reacted to the lie, is George Bush's "No new taxes", which he then claimed was kept as he only extended an existing tax. Even if you determined how to classify truths, the analysis is still fatally flawed. Not all promises are equal, not all people value promises the same.
Blaming Obama for lying is like blaming Obama for being a good negotiator. The fact that he has managed to not lie on 90% of his campaign promises is not just remarkable, it's incredible. In fact, it is so good that Republicans have voted against bills they sponsored to try to decrease his approval rating. They then use that "evidence" as a weakness of the Presidency, knowing full well that the public doesn't associate the passage of laws with Congress, they "feel" the President does it all.
A key part of this argument is that voters dont understand and therefore to help them we must lie to them. This line of thinking leads to many layers of assumptions and inferences. Social sciences have little certainty as such logical rube goldberg machines rarely have their intended consequences. KISS.
Sun Founders' Push For Open Source Education 169
theodp writes "Unfortunately for textbook publishers, Scott McNealy has some extra time on his hands since Oracle acquired Sun and put him out of a job. The Sun co-founder has turned his attention to the problem of math textbooks, the price of which keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. 'Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,' McNealy quips. 'We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks' in the US, he adds. 'It seems to me we could put that all online for free.' McNealy's Curriki is an online hub for free textbooks and other course material. Others hoping to bring elements of the Open Source model to the school textbook world include Vinod Khosla (who co-founded Sun with McNealy), whose wife Neeru heads up the CK-12 Foundation, which has already developed nine of the core textbooks for high school."
