Comment Re:no ufos (Score 1) 418
No, a UFO is just an Unidentified flying object. If it's a "flying saucer" or known to be some space object, then it's an identified flying object :-).
Comment Re:Good to see game developers put their foot down (Score 1) 277
Yes, because after all, a single video game being judged by a board of people as being above their criteria for classification; that board presumably appointed by a sovereign government, elected by the majority of the people of Australia with full suffrage is a lot like that, isn't it?
If in 20 years times the history book shows this as the event that sparks the Australian Revolutionary War of disgruntled gamers against the federal government, I will be rather surprised, and even more spectacularly disappointed by human nature.
If people don't like policies, write to your representative, or run for election. Advocating armed action against policies as a first resort is rather bizarre (politest phrase I can currently find). Perhaps decades of living in Northern Ireland where people have been keen on using guns to make their diplomatic points has jaded me, maybe is it a jolly good idea after all with no drawbacks. Carry on. Start firing.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the Boston Tea Party didn't even start off that way, did it?
If in 20 years times the history book shows this as the event that sparks the Australian Revolutionary War of disgruntled gamers against the federal government, I will be rather surprised, and even more spectacularly disappointed by human nature.
If people don't like policies, write to your representative, or run for election. Advocating armed action against policies as a first resort is rather bizarre (politest phrase I can currently find). Perhaps decades of living in Northern Ireland where people have been keen on using guns to make their diplomatic points has jaded me, maybe is it a jolly good idea after all with no drawbacks. Carry on. Start firing.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the Boston Tea Party didn't even start off that way, did it?
Comment Re:Good to see game developers put their foot down (Score 1) 277
Uh, armed rebellion... is this a computer game we are talking about?
You need a trip to the total perspective vortex.
Great White Sharks Visiting San Francisco 105
Ponca City, We love you writes "Juliet Eilperin writes in the Washington Post that while for years, humans have thought of great white sharks as wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore, it turns out we were wrong. Scientists lured 179 great white sharks to their boat with a carpet decoy designed to look like a seal, and used a lance to attach satellite tags with the aid of 2.3-inch titanium darts to track the sharks and discovered that Pacific white sharks spend months near the northern and central California coast between August and February, foraging among elephant seals, sea lions, and other prey. The sharks were spotted as far inland as the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, east of the Golden Gate Bridge. 'It shows you how wild it is off our West Coast of North America. This is Yellowstone,' says Stanford University marine sciences professor Barbara A. Block. The fact that 'a major concentration' of great whites can ignore humans 'shows us the sharks are really minding their own business. The number of interactions with people is very small, considering,' says Salvador J. Jorgensen."
Why the Sony PSP Had To "Go" 261
We recently discussed the release of the PSP Go, which drew criticism for many design choices that were of dubious value to consumers. Now, Phaethon360 sends in a story about why Sony felt the need to improve upon the old PSP. "As a format, the UMD was holding the entire platform back. Few people (if anyone) bought into the UMD movie hype Sony attempted to thrust back in 2005. Very soon after that, people realized they could rip their DVDs to a memory stick with the same quality. It's ironic how, as the price of Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo dropped and size increased, PSP UMD sales decreased along with it. It doesn't take too many Howard Stringers to figure out what the problem was." Indeed, Sony was complaining of rampant PSP piracy for quite some time. They cited "legal and technical issues" for not supporting the transfer of UMD games onto the PSP Go; undoubtedly they couldn't find a way to keep pirated games from being copied.
Comment Re:just Turing? (Score 1) 653
Quite so. I'm a UK citizen and have signed the petition, but let's stop the nation bashing, most countries older than a few hundred years have lots to be embarrassed about, and for that matter, the USA, which is only a few hundred years old has accumulated its fair share of things to be ashamed of too, like every other country.
Comment Re:Android G1 also heats when using GPS (Score 5, Informative) 364
When I truck a lot of traffic over 3G to the G1 I also seem to have some overheating problems, albeit not as severe as those being discussed above. Notably trying to watch TV in beebplayer seems to cause overheating which may or may not be why the video often halts for me in that application. That might tally with those proclaiming general traffic as being a problem too.
PS. No idea why you've been modded off topic, since a comparison of similar issues with other phones seems highly relevant to me. Had I mod points I'd have corrected that.
Interview With an Adware Author 453
rye writes in to recommend a Sherri Davidoff interview with Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, who talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) "So we've progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that's encrypted — really more just obfuscated — to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. ... There was one further step that we were going to take but didn't end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers. It turns out that in Windows, you can get access to the interrupt handler pretty easily. ... It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network."
White Christmas In Antarctica 84
The idea of a white Christmas may seem magical for many of us, but Science Daily asks you to "spare a thought for a team of scientists forgoing the festive season to take part in a novel campaign being carried out in one of the most inhospitable regions on Earth to support ESA's CryoSat mission." Plenty of people cooped up in the upside-down parts seem to find good ways to amuse themselves; I am especially fond of this introduction to Condition One weather, and Cops McMurdo. If anyone is reading this down there, I hope you're having a nice holiday.
Bay Area To Install Electric Vehicle Grid 388
Mike writes "Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States. The Bay Area will be partnering with Better Place to create an essential electric vehicle infrastructure, marking a huge step towards the acceptance of electric vehicles as a viable alternative to those that run on fossil fuels." Inhabitat.com has some conceptual illustrations and a map showing EV infrastructure, such as battery exchange stations, stretching from Sacramento to San Diego — though this is far more extensive than the Bay Area program actually announced, which alone is estimated to cost $1 billion.
Comment Re:Amazing! They've invented... (Score 1) 438
Surely it was
4. Profit!
5. Profit!
6. Profit!
1. Profit!
2. Profit!
3. Profit!
4. Profit!
5. Profit!
6. Profit!
1. Profit!
2. Profit!
3. Profit!
Floating Cities On Venus 501
Geoffrey.landis writes "Some of you may have heard me talk about colonizing Venus. Well, for those who haven't, Universe Today is running story about floating cities on Venus. It's a reasonable alternative for space colonies — after all, the atmosphere of Venus (at about 50 km) is the most Earth-like environment in the solar system (other than Earth, of course). '50 km above the surface, Venus has air pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0C-50C range, a quite comfortable environment for humans. Humans wouldn't require pressurized suits when outside, but it wouldn't quite be a shirtsleeves environment. We'd need air to breathe and protection from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.'"
UPS Using Software To Eliminate Left Turns 511
cybermage writes "The NY Times has a story about UPS using software to dramatically reduce the number of left turns their drivers take. With a fleet of vehicles their size, the time and money saved by pre-planning routes that try to eliminate left turns means big savings." Some CS major probably figured this out instead of traveling salesman.
Google Summer of Code Extends to Highschoolers 79
phobonetik writes "Building on three successful years of engaging University students with over one hundred open source projects, the Google Summer of Code program is being complemented with the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, launched today.
Running initially as a pilot involving 10 open source projects, the contest is open to any student enrolled in highschool education. Students choose from a list of several hundred predetermined tasks that improve the open source project, and get paid small sums for their successful completion. At the end of the contest (4th Feb 2008), each of the ten open source projects nominate their best contributor, who wins a grand prize." I wish there would have been something like this when I was in high school... I wonder how great my BBS door games would have been if there was a chance of getting cash and trips.
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