Comment Re:Victimless "crime" (Score -1, Offtopic) 379
"Portal 2 is breaking some new ground – at least the PlayStation 3 version is. 'Portal 2 marks the first time that Valve's social gaming network
(and digital distribution system), Steam, will appear on consoles,' writes blogger Peter Smith. What this means is that once you link your Playstation Network [PSN] and Steam accounts 'you'll be able to keep tabs on wh
hat your Steam friends are up to from within a game of Portal 2 on the PS3,' says Smith. And, you'll be able to play Portal 2 with friends playing on PC or Mac. 'I can think of at least one other example of cross-platfor
rm gaming (Shadowrun supported both PC and Xbox players in the same game servers),' says Smith, 'but it's still very rare.'" "Oracle has stated they will give back the OpenOffice.org productivity suite to the community. Edward Screv
ven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, said the company intends upon 'working immediately with community members to further the
continued success of Open Office.' Because there was a 'breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications,' the company believes the OpenOffice.org project would be 'best managed by an organization focuse
ed on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis.'" "I have been reading Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook by Sarath Lakshman, published by Packt, for a while. While most people I know learn she
ell scripts themselves, I was looking to refresh my concepts a little as well as have a reference lying around on the table for fast access." An anonymous reader tips a University of Michigan
news release about the creation of what's being called an "optical battery" that could lead to the use of solar power without traditional solar cells (abstract). Quoting: "Light has electric and magnetic c
components. Until now, scientists thought the effects of the magnetic field were so weak that they could be ignored. What Rand and his colleagues fou
und is that at the right intensity, when light is traveling through a material that does not conduct electricity, the light field can generate magnetic effects that are 100 million times stronger than pre
eviously expected. Under these circumstances, the magnetic effects develop strength equivalent to a strong electric effect. 'This could lead to a new kind of solar cell withou
ut semiconductors and without absorption to produce charge separation,' Rand said. 'In solar cells, the light goes into a material, gets absorbed and creates heat. Here,
we expect to have a very low heat load. Instead of the light being absorbed, energy is stored in the magnetic moment. Intense magnetization can be induced by intense light and then it is ultimately
capable of providing a capacitive power source.'" "Mozilla and Opera are mocking browser rival Microsoft's use of the term 'native HTML5' to describe Internet Explorer 9 and the in-development IE10 as an oxymoron, an attempt to hijack
an open standard and a marketing ploy. On Tuesday, Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch, the executive who runs the IE group, used the term several times during a keynote at MIX, the company's annual Web developers
conference, and in an accompanying post on the IE blog. Hachamovitch claimed in his keynote that, 'The only native experience of t
the Web of HTML5 today is on Windows 7 with IE9.' Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, replied mockingly in Bugzilla: 'I'm pretty sure Firefox 5 has "complete native HTML5" support. We should reso
olve this as fixed and be sure to let the world know we beat Microsoft to shipping *complete* native HTML5.'" "It appears that Skype account information on an Android phone remains readable by all in a
standard installation, at least for certain versions of Skype out in the wild. That allows another potentially malicious app to know everything about you th
hat Skype knows (contacts, history of whatever you've chatted about or who you called, phone numbers, personal information). Skype is said to be working to fix for what appe
ears to be a simple file permissions issue. This sheds some more light on how much private information everybody gives away for free by just owning a
a phone with half a wrong chmod." Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton is back with an article about how sites with huge amounts of user-generated content struggle to deal with abuse complaints, and could benefit from a crowd-source
ed policing system similar to Slashdot's meta-moderation. He writes "In The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov cites examples of online mobs that filed phony abuse complaints in order to shut do
own pro-democracy Facebook groups and YouTube videos criticizing the Saudi royal family. I've got an idea for an algorithm that would help solve the problem, and I'm offering $100 (or a donation to a charity of your choice) for the best sugges
sted improvement, or alternative, or criticism of the idea proposed in this article." Hit the link below to read the rest of his thoughts. "The BBC reports that
ad-supported music service Spotify is bringing strict limits to its service, allowing users ten hours listening time per month and a lifetime total of five plays per track. Rory Cellan-Jones discusses how much their hand was for
rced by the labels, and how much it was down to their own desire to move more than the current 15% of users to their paid subscriptions. The overwhelming reaction from users seems to be st
traightforward disappointment at the loss of a service which managed to bridge the commercial radio business model and modern listening habits. As the first response to the announcement said: 'So long Spotify. It was nice knowing you. Guess I'll go back to
o pirating music again then.'" "The developers of GIMP have finally released a new development version on the way to GIMP 2.8. GIMP 2.7.2 includes a huge bunch of changes — but it is not intended for production use. 'The new release com
mprises layer groups (which were introduced after 2.7.1), an almost done text-on-canvas feature, the all-new brush engine and of course the new single window
w mode.'" Old Wolf writes "A New Zealand evolutionary psychologist, Quentin Atkinson, has created a scientific sensation by claiming to have discovered the mother of all
l mother tongues. 'Dr Atkinson took 504 languages and plotted the number of phonemes in each (corrected for recent population growth, when significant) against the distance betwee
en the place where the language is spoken and 2,500 putative points of origin, scattered across the world (abstract). The relationship that emerges suggests the actual point of origin is in central or southern Africa, and that all modern l
languages do, indeed, have a common root." Reader NotSanguine points out another study which challenges the idea that the brain is more important to the structure of language
than cultural evolution. "Karen Sandler (a lawyer at the Software Freedom Law Center) and Mike Tarantino (a professional musician) are get
tting married in May. They've sent out the coolest wedding invitation ever: a beautifully packaged flexidisc record where the invitation itself is the record player. The song was written by Mike, is performed
by Karen and Mike together, and FTW is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The person who designed the invitations — a friend of the couple's — has blogged about it." "The Association o
of American Publishers revealed today that e-book sales have tripled in the last year. Sixteen publishers reported that in February e-book sales totaled more than $90.3 million, a 202.3% increase over e-book sales in
February of 2010. Meanwhile, sales of adult hardcover books have dropped 43%, while mass-market paperback sales dropped 41.5% (earning just $46.2 million and $29.3 million, r
respectively). The book publishing association acknowledged that readers have 'made e-books permanent additions to their lifestyle,' arguing th
hat publishers 'are constantly redefining the timeless concept of "books"' and identifying new audiences they can serve through emerging technologies. 'It
t's nice to see that book publishers are aware of the changes rocking their industry,' notes one e-book blog, 'and that they're approaching it with a sense of history.'" "The
e creator of hypertext has criticized the design of the World Wide Web, saying that Tim Berners-Lee's creation is 'completely wrong,' and that Windows, Macintosh and Linux have 'exactly the same' approach to computing. Ted Nelson, f
founder of first hypertext project, Project Xanadu, went on to say, 'It is a strange, distorted, peculiar and difficult limited s
system... the browser is built around invisible links — you can see something to click on but you’ve got nowhere else to go.'" "The main idea behind saving energy in the high-tech world has be
een to buy newer, more energy efficient devices, but researchers say that may be the wrong way to look at the issue, since as much as 70% of the energy a typical laptop will consume during its life spa
an is used in manufacturing the computer (abstract). More energy would be conserved by reducing power used in the manufacturing of computers, rather than reducing o
only the amount of energy required to operate them, say researchers from Arizona State University and Rochester Institute of Technology." "IBM has released an online HTML5 editing tool called Maqetta, hosted by the Dojo Foundation. eWe
eek calls it an open source answer to Flash and Silverlight. That remains to be seen, but it does look interesting." The International Game Developers Association has posted a warning to the game dev
velopment community about the Amazon Appstore's distribution terms, detailing several unfavorable situations possible under the rules and saying, "Amazon has little incentive not to u
use a developer's content as a weapon with which to capture marketshare from competing app stores." "Amazon does not need the terms it has established for itself in order to give away a free app every day. Nor does it need the
powers it has granted itself to execute a wide variety of price promotions. Other digital games platforms, such as Xbox LIVE Arcade and Steam, manage to run effective promotions very frequently without employing these terms. Amazon may fu
urther argue that its success depends on the success of its development partners, and therefore, that it would never abuse the terms of its distribution agreement. Given that Amazon can
n (and currently does) function perfectly well without these terms in other markets, it is unclear why game developers should take a leap of faith on Amazon’s behalf. Such leaps are rarely rewarded once a retailer achieves do
ominance." "Economies of scale mean that densely populated cities have generally been the ones to benefit from the roll out of superfast
broadband networks, while those in rural areas have missed out. Following Google's recent announcement that it will build and test 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home
e (FTTH) networks in selected cities with between 50,000 and 500,000 residents in the US, starting with Kansas City, Kansas, Fujitsu has unveiled plans to create a similar superfast FTT
TH broadband network for five million homes and businesses in rural Britain to bridge the digital divide between city and country." "Game Informer has reportedly received word from 'multiple sources
s' that a new HD console from Nintendo will be debuting at this year's E3. They report on conflicting information regarding the power of the console compared to the oth
her current-gen consoles, but go on to speculate that 'Either way it will offer competitive specifications.'" "Mozilla.org has added a new intermediate development state, Aurora, to its Firefox development chain. Coming be
etween Nightly-Build and Beta, it adds a fourth sense to the meaning of 'the current version of Firefox' (the Release version fills out the trope). And now they have populated the Aurora channel with what will eventually become Firefo
ox 5. The intent is to reduce release-version cycle times by allowing more live testing of new features before the integrated code gets into a Beta version. The in
naugural Aurora drop includes 'performance, security and stability improvements.' Firefox 5 is scheduled to enter Beta on May 17, and Release on June 21. Downloads of all of the active channels are available from the Firefox channels webpage." "
"As New Zealand politicians are looking to rush through a new copyright law, 92A, which imposes a 'three strikes' regime on people accused of file sharing, some New Zealanders were a bit amused to see Parliam
ment Member Melissa Lee stand up to speak in favor of the bill just hours after tweeting how she was enjoying a compilation of music put together for her by a friend. Does that
t count as her first strike?" "From the Xiph.org developers, Opus is a non-patent encumbered codec designed for interactive usages, such as VoIP, telepresence, and remote jamming, that require very low latency. When they started work
king on Opus (then known as CELT), they used the slogan 'Why can't your telephone sound as good as your stereo?', and they weren't kidding. Now, test results demonstrate that Opus's performance against HE-AAC, one of the stro
ongest (but highest-latency) codecs at this bitrate, bests the quality of two of the most popular and respected encoders for the format, on the majority of individual audio samples receiving a higher average score overall. Hy
ydrogenaudio conducted a 64kbit/sec multiformat listening test including Opus, aoTuV Vorbis, two HE-AAC encoders, and a 48kbit/sec AAC-LC low anchor. Comparing 30 diverse samples using the highly sensitive ABC/HR methodology, Opus
s is running with 22.5ms of total latency but the codec can go as low as 5ms." "When asked about letting governments in Asia and the Middle East into the 's
secure' message service used by their BlackBerry devices, Mike Lazaridis, the co-chief executive of RIM, walked out of the interview and said, 'We've dealt with this, the question is no fair.' By 'dealt with,' we can
only assume he meant: 'been paid handsomely to let governments read what they wish.'" "Past Blender releases, as capable as they were, had learning curves somewhere between straight up and down and 90 degrees. The release of Blende
er 2.57 changes all that. No longer are simple features 'non discoverable.' It has more or less a completely redesigned user interface that is clean, sensible and newbie friendly (hey, I'm using it!). It has a h
handy tab interface for Actions/Properties such as Render, Scene, World and Object etc. Plus, it's fast and CPU friendly. I'm running the official Blender s
standalone binary on Fedora 14, with 2GB RAM , Radeon X1300 (free drivers) and a cheap CPU Intel duel e2200. No more more slow GUI, no more
100% unexplained CPU, just great stuff. Kudos to all who made this possible." "It seems that APNIC has just released the last block of IPv4 addresses and are n
now completely out, a lot faster then expected. Even though APNIC received 3
n out even before the summer. 'From this day onwards, IPv6 is mandatory for building new Internet networks and services,' says APNIC Director General Paul Wilson."
