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Comment Re:Fair use when it suits them (Score 1) 222

At the time, however, the equipment that allowed you to create and/or view the motion pictures was covered by Edison's patents, and so it gave him significant leverage in imposing morality codes on what people produced using that equipment. Read up on Edison sometime - he was a complete asshole not satisfied with making shitloads of money when he could also gain total control over whatever he touched.

If you feel Edison is too old, you may just read up on Steve Jobs.

Comment Re:Double blind should not be hard (Score 1) 298

Actually, people do there all the time. There are lots of tables and graphs of sun's noise temperature, tellin the engineers how much noise you should expect coming from the sun in every frequency, season, place on Earth (or outside it - really, sattelites often get this noise), azimuth, zenith, or whatever.

The fine print: nobody wants an antenna to to look straight to the Sun. The noise from it becomes a real problem, specially in higher frequencies.

E.g, satellite TV, at least here in Brazil, stops working for a up to an hour a day for some weeks because of it. This happens twice a year, and its cause is the Sun getting behind the satellite (or the other way round, as Copernico told us).

Comment Re:yeah I know how you feel (Score 1) 1184

Not a valid comparison.
You can write whatever book you want and try to sell it through any publisher. There are hundreds of them, surely you can find one that fits your work style. Damn, if you believe your book will sell a lot despite of the opinion of every publisher, you can even pay for print (it's actually cheap) and try to sell yourself! This is not a novelty, or even a rare thing.

However, if you develop for iOS, it takes less than a Steve Jobs' bad day and you will never be able to sell your software. There is no option, no alternative publishers, not even a self-publishing option. No, Cydia is not in scope here, it's hackery and demands users to violate the ToS.

Comment Consolidate (Score 1) 763

Why do you have 3 keys for one home? Isn't it possible to keep the other keys in a relatively safe place inside your girlfriend's home and pick them up as needed?

If you really need immediate access to all these doors, why don't you change the locks so they all have the same key? Even better, you could even extent this to your home, and have a one key to rule them all.

Also try to reduce the number of keys. For example, try using combination locks. It is easy to do the shift in the case of padlocks, and also cheap, depending on your security needs.

Finally, I bet you do not use the car, the bike and the motorcicle at the same time. Take care of keeping you bike locked even at home (so you won't forget the keys), and this is only one key more to your keyring.

In the ideal situation, this would mean: 1 key for your home and your girlfriend's, 1 key for the current vehicle, and some codes to remember. Even if you can't reach the ideal case, the situation sounds much more manageable now.
Games

Best Way To Sell a Game Concept? 250

dunng808 writes "If a couple of young, game-crazy guys wanted to get started designing a game with the intention of selling the concept, how should they proceed? In the music industry they would make a demo MP3. In the film industry they would write a script (and I would recommend lyx with the hollywood document class). Should they develop some sample game play with a well-known engine? Is the one in Blender good enough? This somewhat dated list suggests it is. Or should they focus on textual descriptions and static scenes made with Blender and the GIMP? Is there even a market, let alone a convention, for selling game concepts?"
The Gimp

Submission + - GIMP Resynth vs Photoshop content aware (ultradownloads.com.br)

" rel="nofollow">aylons writes: "Just after Adobe releasing their videos showing off the content-aware feature of Photoshop CS5, the GIMP community answered (in /. comments also) showing the resynthesizer plugin, which is available for some time and can do a similar job. However, are they really comparable? This article (in portuguese, google translation here, but really, the images are pretty much self-explaining) compare then side by side removing the same objects from different kinds of images. Results do vary, but the most interesting part may be seeing the different results and trying to understand the logic of each algorithm."
News

Mayan Plumbing Found In Ancient City 220

DarkKnightRadick writes "An archaeologist and a hydrologist have published evidence that the ancient Mayans had pressurized plumbing as early as sometime between the year 100 (when the city of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, was first founded) and 800 (when it was abandoned). While the Egyptians had plumbing way earlier (around 2500 BC), this is the first instance of plumbing in the New World prior to European exploration and conquest."

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