Qil'elPhil - Slashdot User

Comment Re:A better idea (Score 1) 383

by Qil'elPhil on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @06:56AM (#27743513) Attached to: Twitter Considered Harmful To Swine-Flu Panic

Nonsense, check out the google map. The flu hasn't made it to Madagascar and I doubt it will due to the lack of airports in the country.

Right. But then what of people coming by train ? huh ?

Why is there no "+-0 I hope it's a joke" moderation?

The Best Games of 2020 136

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @07:02AM from the congrats-duke-nukem-forever dept.

Gamasutra held a contest this year to describe what hit video games in the year 2020 would be like. Over 150 detailed entries were sent in, and they've posted the top 20. One persistent theme is the ever-present connectedness to the outside world, both in reality-based games and with multiplayer modes that are part of typical daily interactions. Quoting: "It's just an average day at your job. Noon swings around and it's time to amble out of the cubicle farm and venture outside into the city to find some lunch. You put on your slick steel framed Hunters Glasses, place your Hunters earpiece, and with black and white Hunters Gloves on, step out of the building and onto the street. After a block suddenly your dark tinted shades switch to a red tint. A silky female voice echoes in your ear, 'Players within range. Good Hunting.' The glasses are acting as a WiFi enabled computer screen. You swivel your head to scope the scene and find someone standing out within the red crowd as a white outline. The man with the white outline is scouting the area as well, trying to find who else is in the game right now. You get within range, pack a virtual snow ball with your gloves, approach slowly, wind up and throw with all your might the virtual snow ball at the man with the white outline. 'Player Eliminated,' says the female voice, 'Uploading Statistics.'"

Nobel Prize Winning Physicist As Energy Secretary 498

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 11, 2008 @07:57AM from the the-man-for-the-job dept.

bledri writes "Officials close to the Obama transition team say that Physics Nobel Laureate Steven Chu is the likely candidate for Energy Secretary. Some are worried that Chu is not politically savvy enough, but I'm hopeful that a scientist will base policy on evidence. Discuss among yourselves."

Researchers Calculate Capacity of a Steganographic Channel 114

Posted by timothy on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @11:32AM from the intentionally-not-left-blank dept.

KentuckyFC writes "Steganography is the art of hiding a message in such a way that only the sender and receiver realize it is there. (By contrast, cryptography disguises the content of a message but makes no attempt to hide it.) The central problem for steganographers is how much data can be hidden without being detected. But the complexity of this problem has meant it has been largely ignored. Now two computer scientists (one working for Google) have made a major theoretical breakthrough by tackling the problem in the same way that the electrical engineer Claude Shannon calculated the capacity of an ordinary communications channel in the 1940s. In Shannon's theory, a transmission is considered successful if the decoder properly determines which message the encoder has sent. In the stego-channel, a transmission is successful if the decoder properly determines the sent message without anybody else detecting its presence (abstract). Studying a stego-channel in this way leads to some counter-intuitive results: for example, in certain circumstances, doubling the number of algorithms looking for hidden data can increase the capacity of the steganographic channel"

Japanese Begin Working On Space Elevator 696

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday September 22, 2008 @09:57AM from the you-can't-get-there-from-here dept.

thebryce writes "From cyborg housemaids and waterpowered cars to dog translators and rocket boots, Japanese boffins have racked up plenty of near-misses in the quest to turn science fiction into reality. Now the finest scientific minds of Japan are devoting themselves to cracking the greatest sci-fi vision of all: the space elevator. Man has so far conquered space by painfully and inefficiently blasting himself out of the atmosphere but the 21st century should bring a more leisurely ride to the final frontier. Japan is increasingly confident that its sprawling academic and industrial base can solve those issues, and has even put the astonishingly low price tag of a trillion yen (£5 billion) on building the elevator. Japan is renowned as a global leader in the precision engineering and high-quality material production without which the idea could never be possible."

Nanotubes "As Deadly as Asbestos" 180

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday May 21, 2008 @09:35AM from the hack-cough-weeze dept.

Stony Stevenson writes "Certain carbon nanotubes may be as hazardous to humans as asbestos. A paper to be published in Nature Nanotechnology suggests that inhaling certain types of nanotubes can lead to the formation of mesothelioma, a type of lung cancer commonly caused by exposure to asbestos. "This is a wakeup call for nanotechnology in general and carbon nanotubes in particular," said Andrew Maynard, co-author of the report and chief science adviser to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies." I'm really hoping that those medical face masks get popular again. That's a look that should really be cyclic, like bell-bottoms and thongs. Update: 05/21 19:18 GMT by T : See also this page at the Nanotechnology Project, which features a link to video commentary from Andrew Maynard, the researcher mentioned in the above-linked article.

Comment Re:What am I not seeing? (Score 1) 57

by Qil'elPhil on Wednesday October 03, 2007 @10:11AM (#20836663) Attached to: Jericho Won't Be Edited For Germany

This has nothing to do with living in a free world. It's just that we germans are (unterstandably) a little bit touchy about certain symbols of our past.

Which means that there are a small number of symbols that you are not allowed to display without the occasion being in a critical or scientific way but in a setting that might be used to glorify the symbols and the system they stood for. Among these are the swastika, the SS-Runes and the old german war-flag.

Americans have these kinds of forbidden symbols too. They are taboo and displaying them will result in social and/or penal sanctions. I am thinking of the N*-word to describe people of color, a burning American flag, the confederate flag and others. Using these Symbols in the wrong context will get you in any number of troubles in America, free speech or not.

When it comes to violence in games there are another number of rules which I find quite strict sometimes, but must admit that the idea behind them is rather sound.

- You may not make graphic depictions of violence against humans (hence the 'red blood thing') available to minors unter the age of 18. If they are too graphic, you may not even advertise them in a way that may make minors aware of the game and their content.

I know it won't work like this with kid's being kid's and nosey and all, but you can't fault us for trying to minimise their exposure to violence before they are old enough to be be deemed able to handle this kind of exposure.

While there are some restrictions on displaying images of sexual content to children, they are by far not as prudish or paranoid as some of the rules and decisions I've heard from the Land of the Free lately.

just my 2 Pfennige

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