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Comment Re:What about the economics? (Score 2, Insightful) 244

by MeisterVT (#29668397) Attached to: How Video Games Reflect Ideology
Causing games to be more social also helps sell DLC. If your bud buys those extra maps or levels, now you are more compelled to do the same, otherwise there is no more co-op for you. It is all about being able to sell more. While religion, politics, or anything else may be tackled in games, it is not to force a point, it is to create a world/scenario that can be relevant to the player. Why? So they play it more, recommend it to friends and buy the requisite expansions. Again, all about the money.
Robotics

Robot Soldiers Are Already Being Deployed 258

Posted by timothy from the from-my-cold-dead-solenoids dept.
destinyland writes "As a Rutgers philosopher discusses robot war scenarios, one science magazine counts the ways robots are already being used in warfare, including YouTube videos of six military robots in action. There are up to 12,000 'robotic units' on the ground in Iraq, some dismantling landmines and roadside bombs, but 'a new generation of bots are designed to be fighting machines.' One bot can operate an M-16 rifle, a machine gun, and a rocket launcher — and 250 people have already been killed by unmanned drones in Pakistan. He also tells the story of a berserk robot explosives gun that killed nine people in South Africa due to a 'software glitch.'"
The Courts

Court Orders Breathalyzer Code Opened, Reveals Mess 707

Posted by timothy from the take-a-sober-look-at-this dept.
Death Metal writes with an excerpt from the website of defense attorney Evan Levow: "After two years of attempting to get the computer based source code for the Alcotest 7110 MKIII-C, defense counsel in State v. Chun were successful in obtaining the code, and had it analyzed by Base One Technologies, Inc. By making itself a party to the litigation after the oral arguments in April, Draeger subjected itself to the Supreme Court's directive that Draeger ultimately provide the source code to the defendants' software analysis house, Base One. ... Draeger reviewed the code, as well, through its software house, SysTest Labs, which agreed with Base One, that the patchwork code that makes up the 7110 is not written well, nor is it written to any defined coding standard. SysTest said, 'The Alcotest NJ3.11 source code appears to have evolved over numerous transitions and versioning, which is responsible for cyclomatic complexity.'" Bruce Schneier comments on the same report and neatly summarizes the take-away lesson: "'You can't look at our code because we don't want you to' simply isn't good enough."
Graphics

AMD Breaks 1GHz GPU Barrier With Radeon HD 4890 144

Posted by timothy from the sheer-necessity dept.
MojoKid writes "AMD announced today that they can lay claim to the world's first 1GHz graphics processor with their ATI Radeon HD 4890 GPU. There's been no formal announcement made about what partners will be selling the 1GHz variant, but AMD does note that Asus, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, Gigabyte, HIS, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE, XFX and others are all aligning to release higher performance cards." The new card, says AMD, delivers 1.6 TeraFLOPs of compute power.
Data Storage

How Does Flash Media Fail? 357

Posted by kdawson from the in-the-pan dept.
bhodge writes "Aside from the obvious 'it stops working' answer, how does flash media — such as USB, SD, and CF — fail? Unlike with traditional hard drive, where anyone who's worked with computers for a while knows what a drive failure looks like, I don't know anyone who has experienced such a failure with flash. I've haven't been able to find more than scant evidence of what such failures look like at the OS level. The one account I have found detailed using a small USB drive for /var/log storage; it failed very quickly, and then utterly (0 byte unformatted device), after five years of service in the role. This runs contrary to other anecdotal claims that you should still be able to read the media after you can no longer write to it. So my question is: what have you seen of the nature of flash media failure, if anything?"

Comment Re:april fools? (Score 2, Interesting) 273

by MeisterVT (#27517097) Attached to: Conficker Downloads Payload

In this case everyone was growing to expect just that, and would therefore be taking it seriously. Or at least people that could do something about it would. Now, since nothing much has happened people are lulled into a false sense of security and become lax or start considering the threat that something big was happening on 4/1 the real joke.

Now that the hype has supsided, what better time to strike? I think that dovetails nicely with GreggBZ's earlier post about the holiday weekend (for some of us).
Worms

Conficker Downloads Payload 273

Posted by CmdrTaco from the still-the-best-name-ever dept.
nk497 writes "Conficker seems to finally be doing something, a week after hype around the worm peaked on April Fool's Day. It has now downloaded components from the Waledac botnet, which could contain rootkit capabilities. Trend Micro security expert Rik Ferguson said: 'These components have so far been missing, but could this finally be the "other boot dropping" that we have all been been waiting for?' Ferguson also suggested that people behind Conficker could be the very same who are running Waledac and created the Storm botnet. 'It tallies with some of the assumptions people have made about Conficker — that the first variant was actively trying to avoid the Ukraine because Waledac was Eastern European,' Ferguson added."

Comment yeah, resource pipelines... yeah (Score 1) 1297

by MeisterVT (#27516611) Attached to: South Park Creators Given Signed Photo of Saddam Hussein

Correction: We ostensibly invaded Iraq to ... set up a supply line for it's resources..

Whew, thanks for clearing that up for me. I guess it's a really good thing we got all those resources flowing or else oil/gas prices may have spiked, er, spiked higher, or something like that. I guess they just haven't managed to bury that super-secret Iraq-to-DC oil pipeline yet.
Security

US Electricity Grid Reportedly Penetrated By Spies 328

Posted by kdawson from the im-in-ur-wirez-eatin-ur-lectrons dept.
phantomfive worries about a report in the Wall Street Journal ("Makes me want to move to the country and dig a well") that in recent years a number of cyber attacks against US infrastructure have been launched over the Internet: "Cyberspies have penetrated the US electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials. The spies came from China, Russia, and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the US electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war."
Idle

Submission + - Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
the_therapist
the_therapist writes: "A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast and discovered that chimpanzees enter into "deals" whereby they exchange meat for sex.

Among the findings are that "male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts". They also found this to be "a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are"."
Privacy

EU Data-Retention Laws Stricter Than Many People Realized 263

Posted by timothy from the you-mean-like-a-12-month-year? dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a snippet from the Telegraph: "A European Union directive, which Britain was instrumental in devising, comes into force which will require all internet service providers to retain information on email traffic, visits to web sites and telephone calls made over the internet, for 12 months."

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