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Comment Causation /= Correlation (Score 1) 415

by Raccroc (#55383767) Attached to: Smartphones Are Killing Americans, But Nobody's Counting

You really shouldn't take anything that uses total numbers in the way this article does to seriously. If you really want to get to the meat of the matter, the correct way to view the data is "per 100,000" and/or "per x million traveled miles". Makes it much easier to control for other factors (e.g. urban vs rural, harsh anti-texting law areas vs. unrestricted, high fatality areas vs low, high DWI area vs low, etc.). Same is true with most of MADs DWI figures, gun control, pot based DUI, etc. Totals are not only misleading, but often inflammatory (37k sound like a big number...but what is it really in the context of 300 million people driving trillions of miles a year?).

Comment Just use TM (Score 1) 373

by Raccroc (#35712010) Attached to: Google Fights Back Against Android Fragmentation

Going about it the wrong way...what they should be doing is taking a page out of the Red Hat playbook and just protect the Google TM within Android. Then they could just set forth specific rules which must be strictly followed in order to say this is an Android device and to use any of Google's TM within.

For example:
    Create a directory structure for 3rd party (non-ASOP) drivers, libs, and config scripts which must be used and prevent manufacturers/providers from altering or removing other files/folders.
    Force manufacturers/providers to allow users to use default Android applications in place of 3rd party apps through some standard means.
    Weigh in with yes/no on things like encrypted boot loaders, rooting, preventing side loading of apps, etc.
    [Add whatever rules which are causing fragmentation problems or allowing such monstrosities as Viewsonic's Tap'nTap here!]

What this should do, is allow manufacturers/providers who do not care about being labled as Android to do as they please (the B&N NOOK, for example, may not care at all if they get to put a little robot sticker on the box or not since it is such a specific device). Manufacturers/Providers who DO care, would be forced to follow the rules if they want to take advantage of Google's advertising, marketing, and reputation.

As a side benefit of going this route, they could also do things like strike back at MS forcing Bing on everyone within WM7 by specifically banning it from Android(TM).
PlayStation (Games)

Epilogue DLC Coming To Prince of Persia 36

Posted by Soulskill from the still-not-dead dept.
IGN reports that Prince of Persia will be getting downloadable content on February 26th for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game. It will be an epilogue to the original game, and it will add about three hours of gameplay. "Expect everything to be at a higher pace and to keep you on the edge of your seat. Figuring out how to succeed passing this long acrobatic sequence mined with traps or how to defeat this boss before he regenerates his energy will definitely be more intense. What hardcore Prince of Persia gamers want is a challenge and some of them found the game too easy. We understand this. Seeing such feedback, our vision and intentions with the DLC coincided with their comments quite well. We wanted to build a challenge and experience even greater with all the tools at our disposal, and let me say that there are a lot: Elika's power, traps, combat system, etc."
The Almighty Buck

EMA Suggests Point-Of-Sale Game Activation To Fight Piracy 244

Posted by Soulskill from the new-ways-to-break-things dept.
Gamasutra reports on a set of standards (PDF) published by the Entertainment Merchants Association to promote the use of technology that would "disable" games and DVDs until they are activated when purchased. "The effort is codenamed 'Project Lazarus,' and the EMA says it's assembled a consortium of retailers, home video companies and video game publishers to see how easily such 'benefit denial technology' could be implemented, and to evaluate possible cost-benefit analyses. The initiative is similar to security tags used in clothing retail that spill ink on garments if they're forcibly removed, thereby destroying the item. In such a situation, shoplifting is discouraged by implementing a solution that only the retailer can remove at the point of sale."
AMD

AMD A Ripe Target For Buyout? 108

Posted by Zonk from the change-of-pace dept.
SpiceMonkey writes "AMD stock was up 6.74% on Monday on rumors that AMD is a prime buyout target. After their purchase of ATI, they've been pressed to maintain their aggressive policy of chip production increases. As a result, the AMD message board on Yahoo! is full of speculation on who has their eyes on the company. Many folks there think that IBM is the right buyer for the company. There's no firm word that AMD is even being considered for purchase, but it's certainly and interesting prospect."
Communications

T-Mobile Bans Others' Apps On Their Phones 349

Posted by kdawson from the get-less dept.
cshamis writes "T-Mobile has recently changed their policies and now tell their customers with appropriate data plans and with Java-Micro-App-capable T-Mobile phones: no third-party network applications. You can, of course, still use their incredibly clunky and crippled built-in WAP browsers, but GoogleMaps and OperaMini are left high and dry. Would anyone care to speculate if this move is likely to retain or repel customers?"
The Internet

Journal Journal: Coming coming Internet revolution in science

Journal by vacognition
The Internet may soon change how the cognitive and social sciences are conducted, much in the way the open source movement has changed software, wikipedia has changed information gathering, etc. In the traditional lab-based model, scientists pay a small number of people to be subjects, subjecting them to a lot of testing. (By "a lot", I mean typically 1 hour, but it can last much longer.) The experiments are very carefully controlled in the lab. Now, as bandwidth has increased dramatically, it i
Windows

Journal Journal: QWERTY and unicode characters

Journal by jlguenego

I am French, and using a QWERTY keyboard. How to write characters like é, à, etc. and how to write specific unicode characters ?

I am not the only one to have this problems. All European people using a US keyboard have the same.
So I decided to solve it and I designed a keyboard with the following properties:

Pthreads vs Win32 threads 385

Posted by Hemos from the different-situations,-different-needs dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It's interesting when different people have different opinions. While I was searching for something on Intel's website, I came across an article on why Windows threads are better than Posix threads. Curiously, I also came across this article on why Posix Pthreads are better that Win32 threads. The thing is, both of these articles are written by the same author!

So who is right (metaphorically speaking?), or what has changed since the first article was written?"
Music

Submission + - EMI: ditching DRM to cost you

Submitted by 33rpm
33rpm writes: EMI has told online music stores that selling its catalog without DRM is going to cost them a lot of money. 'EMI is the only major record label to seriously consider abandoning the disaster that is DRM, but earlier reports that focused on the company's reformist attitude apparently missed the mark: EMI is willing to lose the DRM, but they demand a considerable advance payment to make it happen. EMI has backed out of talks for now because no one will pay what they're asking.'
The Almighty Buck

An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little 58

Posted by Hemos from the from-the-smallest-mustard-seeds dept.
The Firehose brought us a link from the NYTimes about Quigo. As the Times feed says: "Yahoo and Google are facing a challenge from a tiny adversary named Quigo Technologies over contextual text ads online." And while obviously not in the same financial league, it is good to see more competition in this space.
Security

Campaign Sites Full of Vulnerabilities 36

Posted by Hemos from the not-surprising dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Bloggers have been buzzing about the new wave of "Web 2.0" campaign sites, but it seems that a lot of presidential candidates haven't bothered to protect themselves from cross-site scripting attacks. A blogger has found a collection of XSS vulnerabilities including the websites of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, John Cox, Newt Gingrich, Tom Tancredo, the Democratic National Committee, and even a surprise from Whitehouse.gov. Some of the holes are low-risk, but others would allow a user's accounts on the affected website to be compromised. A victim would simply have to click on a maliciously crafted link that appears to lead to the candidate's site."

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