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Comment Re:Verizon has best coverage... but it's verizon. (Score 2, Informative) 395

<quote>Outside of cities though, AT&amp;T has pretty good coverage. Verizon is going to get you the best cell service, but like you said, its Verizon. T-Mobile would be the company that I would reccomend, but sadly their coverage isn't too great.</quote>

I used to have Verizon, and in rural areas / areas far away from cities, I would usually have some coverage. I'm on AT&T now, and the coverage is nonexistent in many places.

Coverage in the location where you live and where you spend time will matter more, though, and both companies have coverage maps that I have found to be fairly accurate.

Comment Re:And who's going to buy the pansy version? (Score 1) 219

The anonymous coward wasn't the only one offended.

Both heterosexism (the implied "fag-football") and notions of masculinity that associate masculinity with GTA (calling non-GTA style games "pansy" games) are bad things. They hurt people.

Even if what you're saying is accurate, and OP was only framing the issue in terms of 13 year olds, are you actually saying that is a good thing? 13 year olds are sexist and heterosexist and we should cultivate that rather than work against it? That's the entire point of the study: the games don't have to cultivate negative values to be fun.

I do agree that the study could do with a lot more rigor and a bigger sample size, but that doesn't mean that it has a bad mission.
The Internet

Internet Not Really Dangerous For Kids After All 445

Thomas M Hughes writes "We're all familiar with the claim that it's horribly dangerous to allow our children on to the Internet. It's long been believed that the moment a child logs on to the Internet, he will experience a flood of inappropriate sexual advances. Turns out this isn't an accurate representation of reality at all. A high-profile task force representing 49 state attorneys general was organized to find a solution to the problem of online sexual solicitation. But instead the panel has issued a report (due to be released tomorrow) claiming that 'Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.' The report concluded that 'the problem of child-on-child bullying, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.' Turns out the danger to our children was all just media hype and parental anxiety." Those who have aggressively pushed the issue of the dangerous Internet, such as Connecticut's attorney general Richard Blumenthal, are less than happy with the report.

NVIDIA GTX 295 Brings the Pain and Performance 238

Vigile writes "Dual-GPU graphics cards are all the rage and it was a pair of RV770 cores that AMD had to use in order to best the likes of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280. This time NVIDIA has the goal of taking back the performance crown and the GeForce GTX 295 essentially takes two of the GT200 GPUs used on the GTX 280, shrinks them from 65nm to 55nm, and puts them on a single card. The results are pretty impressive and the GTX 295 dominates in the benchmarks with a price tag of $499."

Comment Re:Interesting Idea, but? (Score 2, Insightful) 132

The idea isn't that people will search for a long string of adjectives. More likely, it would work like Pandora where you identify a game you like and they show you games that have similar elements. Or you could take a survey of many games and it will find the common themes, or maybe you could just take a survey of the themes. I wouldn't think of "post-apocalyptic fun fantasy" on my own, but I might mark it up on a survey.

Comment Not So Radical? (Score 1) 193

From the article:
"The Government's approach will be informed by the filtering technologies adopted in countries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Canada where ISP filtering, predominantly of child pornography, has been successfully introduced without affecting internet performance to a noticeable level."

I wasn't aware that those countries had filters. Their internet isn't so horrible, is it?

Where I stand is that I am not ideologically opposed to censorship so much as I think that you have to be very careful about it. If the IP blacklist was subject to public scrutiny and input, and if there were still some way to access the information if you really needed to (ie, people doing research on the kiddie porn industry), and there were strict limits to the expanses of the blacklist, and it didn't slow down internet speed, then it would probably be an OK plan.

Their plan probably won't fulfill at least some of those conditions, but I still think that it might be most productive to reach for a reasonable compromise.
Censorship

Clarifying the Next Step in Australia's Net-Censorship Scheme 193

teh moges writes "I recently received a response from the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, regarding issues I had with the ISP filtering proposed for Australia. My comment can be summed up by 'Any efficient filter won't be effective and any effective filter won't be efficient.' His response clarifies the issue of using the blacklist for censorship." Read on for the gist of Conroy's mistakes-were-made response, which seems to sidestep teh moges' critique, but offers Australian Internet users some idea of what they're in for.

Comment Battery Usage? (Score 5, Interesting) 200

I would be interested to see the energy difference between a laptop with a fan versus water cooling. I know that the specs haven't been released yet, but it seems like pumping water around would eat up the battery.
I have a HP laptop which runs fairly hot, but that's still better, as far as I'm concerned, than carrying around a heavy pump that uses up the battery.

Of course, if they manage to make it more compact and energy efficient than fans, all the power to them. I would still worry about it leaking and destroying my laptop, though.

Since Apple is trying for a patent for all types of mobile devices on this, it would be particularly interesting to see a water cooled iPhone...
Portables

Apple Hints At Future Liquid-Cooled Laptops 200

Lumenary7204 writes "According to the Register, Apple recently received US Patent Application No. 20080291629 for a 'liquid-cooled portable computer.' The filing describes a system where a 'pump ... coupled to the heat pipe is configured to circulate the liquid coolant through the heat pipe.' All claims of obviousness aside (after all, PC enthusiasts have been using liquid and phase-change cooling for years), the existence of the patent application seems to indicate that laptop manufacturers are in agreement with physicists and engineers who say we are running up against the practical limits of air-cooling such compact pieces of equipment."

Comment Don't we have enough? (Score 1) 391

You say that the best songs (or articles) will still succeed even in the current unfair system, and that the issue is just the middle.
On the internet, there is a saturation of opinion articles. If there are enough of the best out there, why do we, as consumers of information, need a sorting algorithm to promote the middle?
I completely agree that, from the standpoint of a writer or a more democratic marketplace of ideas, it would be better to have some sort of better moderation system than the current one.

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