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Censorship

The U.N.'s Push for Power Over the Internet 326

Posted by samzenpus from the world-wide-web dept.
Omnifarious writes "China (along with other member nations) is trying to push a proposal through a little known UN agency called the International Telecommunications Union (aka ITU). This proposal contains a wide variety of problematic provisions that represent a huge power grab on the part of the UN, and a severe threat to a continued global and open Internet. From the article: 'Several proposals would give the U.N. power to regulate online content for the first time, under the guise of protecting against computer malware or spam. Russia and some Arab countries want to be able to inspect private communications such as email. Russia and Iran propose new rules to measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic, as with international phone calls. That would result in new fees to local governments and less access to traffic from U.S. "originating" companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple. A similar idea has the support of European telecommunications companies, even though the Internet's global packet switching makes national tolls an anachronistic idea.'"
Space

Submission + - Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise in 20 Years (universetoday.com) 3

Submitted by
Nancy_A
Nancy_A writes: "An engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail – building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the starship Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years. “We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let’s do it,” writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE Dan."

Comment Re:Hearkens back to when kids were prepared (Score 1) 606

by erockett (#36208520) Attached to: Professor Questions Sink-Or-Swim Intro To CS Courses

I observed this in my design major as well – students who read online about their topic and spent a lot of extra time learning the material not only came in better prepared to absorb the material but also came out ahead at the end. The classes certainly improved everybody, but it became clear that independent learning was at least as helpful as the class instruction. One girl I knew came in expecting to be hand-taught everything she needed to know, with no prior experience, and she was consistently one of the worst students in our year –despite dedication to all her classwork. She was clearly aware of what happened and was trying, but didn't get enough guidance from the teachers. I know I struggled with incorrect expectations some as well, though at least I came in with some prior knowledge.
GUI

When PC Ports of Console Games Go Wrong 398

Posted by Soulskill from the in-other-words-always dept.
A post up at Gamasutra complains about the lack of effort put into the PC ports of some console games. The author picks on the unimpressively-reviewed Ninja Blade in particular: "Just as a quick guide to what we're dealing with here: when you create a new save file at the start of Ninja Blade on the PC, it warns you not to 'turn off your console.' Yes, Ninja Blade is one of those conversions: not so much converted as made to perfunctorily run on a different machine. In-game, you're asked to press A, B, X and Y in various sequences as part of Ninja Blade's extraordinary abundance of quick-time events. Whether you have an Xbox 360 pad plugged in or not, the game captions these button icons with text describing the PC equivalent controls. Only it doesn't always do that. Sometimes, you're left staring at a giant, pulsating, green letter A, and no idea what to do with it." What awful ports have you had the misfortune to experience?
Nintendo

Nintendo Announces DSi XL 179

Posted by timothy from the time-for-some-side-talkin' dept.
lbalbalba writes "This morning, Nintendo announced the third upgrade to the DS family, the DSi LL (or DSi XL). It will be released in Japan on November 21, one year after the DSi debuted, for ¥20,000 (approx. $220). The LL's main improvement is the size of its screens, which have been increased from 3.25" to 4.2" with a moderate increase to the size of the chassis. The device also includes a much bigger stylus, which looks to be the size of a ballpoint pen, and battery life has reportedly been increased to five hours at maximum screen brightness."
The Almighty Buck

2D Boy Posts "Pay-What-You-Want" Final Wrap-up 12

Posted by Soulskill from the digital-tip-jars dept.
sleeponthemic writes "Developer 2D Boy has posted the final results of their 'pay-what-you-want' experiment, selling their World of Goo game for an unrestricted price. After coming to the attention of Slashdot, a further ~26,000 sales were recorded, bringing the total to 83,147. Note that publicizing crucial mid-sale statistics — such as the revelation that ~17,000 people chose to 'donate' $0.01 — seems to have affected the average donation, which increased from $2.03 to above $3 by the end of the week." They also show some interesting charts which break down the average donation by operating system, saying "We were expecting the average price paid to be highest for Linux users and lowest for Windows users, but the gap was larger than we thought it would be."
Games

Love Moves To Alpha Testing 4

Posted by Soulskill from the no-word-on-hate dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Love, the home-made MMO game by Eskil Steenberg, has hit alpha. Check out the News page for details on the testing. A Linux version of the game is a possibility; Steenberg said, 'The numbers right now look good (around 1600 players), but I don't trust that that many will return next month, so I would still say the viability of the project is in limbo. In order to do ports to OSX and Linux I will need at least 2000 returning players.' Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently got a look at an early version of the game."
Linux

Linux Games For Non-Gamers? 460

Posted by timothy from the many-addictive-options-but-any-great-ones? dept.
Nethead writes "Due to some down-time, I'm looking for some Linux games to pass the time. I've been playing BattleMaster, a PHP web game but it's only two turns a day, and I'd like something a bit faster. I've not really played PC games since the Doom era so I'm really out of touch here. I don't have a real gamer box, just a simple video card. What do Slashdotters think I should try? A simple FPS or some type of networked game would do. What's out there for Linux?"
Debian

Debian Elevates KFreeBSD Port to First-Class Status 376

Posted by timothy from the you-want-options-here-are-options dept.
Reader tail.man points out this press release from Debian which says that the port of the Debian system to the FreeBSD kernel will be given equal footing alongside Debian's several other release ports, starting with the release of Squeeze. Excerpting from this release: "The kFreeBSD architectures for the AMD64/Intel EM64T and i386 processor architectures are now release architectures. Severe bugs on these architectures will be considered release critical the same way as bugs on other architectures like armel or i386 are. If a particular package does not build or work properly on such an architecture this problem is considered release-critical. Debian's main motivation for the inclusion of the FreeBSD kernel into the official release process is the opportunity to offer to its users a broader choice of kernels and also include a kernel that provides features such as jails, the OpenBSD Packet Filter and support for NDIS drivers in the mainline kernel with full support."
Printer

Choosing a Personal Printer For the Long Haul 557

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-thought-they-were-disposable-now dept.
The Optimizer writes "After 16 years of service, my laser printer, a NEC Silentwriter 95, is finally wearing its internals out, and I need to find a replacement. It's printed over 30,000 pages and survived a half-dozen long-distance moves without giving me any trouble. I believe it's done so well for two reasons. First, it's sturdily built and hails from an era when every fraction of a penny didn't have to be cost-cut out of manufacturing. The other reason was its software. Since it supported postscript Level II, it wasn't bound to a specific operating system or hardware platform, so long as a basic postscript level 2 driver was available. A new color laser printer with postscript 3 seems like a logical replacement, and numerous inexpensive printers are available. I'd rather get a smaller, personal-size printer than a heavy workgroup printer. Most of all, I would like it to still be usable and running well with Windows 9, OS X 11, and whatever else we will be using in 2020. Can anyone recommend a brand or series of printers that is built to last and isn't going to be completely dependent on OS specific proprietary drivers?"

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