ljaszcza - Slashdot User

Comment Re:3 strikes and he's out (Score 5, Insightful) 339

by ljaszcza on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @05:51PM (#41973993) Attached to: In Mississippi: 15-Year Jail Sentence For Selling Pirated Movies and Music

Actually, he should have gotten a job with one of the big banks. Goldman Sachs or such. Lighter sentence yet. Rob a liquor store, get 20 years. Rob 20,000 people of $200,000 in life savings, the feds don't have a case to pursue.

Comment Re:Perhaps (Score 2) 446

by ljaszcza on Thursday October 25, 2012 @12:11PM (#41766057) Attached to: 72% of Xbox 360 Gamers Approve of "More Military Drone Strikes"

Score of 5, insightful? Are you people sane? Does anyone read history? Drone strikes produce 80% civilian casulties as far as I can read on the subject. And that's a conservative estimate. And the comparison to Nazis? Read about the air raids on Germany and Japan by LeMay et al. They/we specifically targeted civilians in order to reduce production of war time supplies. We are killing civilians of other countries specifically and for a reason, and have done so for decades. Robert MacNamara himself said that if the Allies lost WWII, he would have been rightfully executed as a war criminal. My point is that the gamers seem to understand nothing. 72% of them agree that launching a hellfire at a guy emptying his truck at night is reasonable given a 80% chance that he is innocent of wrongdoing. People, look at your school or apartment or city block and consider killing 10 people to get two criminals. Is this acceptable for us? If not, then why Pakistan? I'm not aware of a state of war with them, did I miss something?

Comment NZ: Crime and Punishment (Score 3, Insightful) 235

by ljaszcza on Thursday September 27, 2012 @10:48AM (#41477683) Attached to: NZ Broke the Law Spying On Kim Dotcom, PM Apologizes

Well, The next time I break the law, I will issue a sincere apology. This apparently makes everything all right and obviates the need for punishment, prosecution, or any such things. Or, are politicians simply a different class of people with different rules and consequences than the rest of us? Orwell said: All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. Oh yeah.

Kongregate App Pulled From Android Market 139

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @04:28AM from the gone-in-a-flash dept.

itwbennett writes "Last week Google took a page from Apple's book and pulled the Arcade by Kongregate app from the Android Market for violating its terms of service. In particular, the part that forbids distributing 'any Product whose primary purpose is to facilitate the distribution of Products outside of the Market.' As Kongregate's Jim Greer explained to Joystiq, the app is essentially a custom web browser that loads in a Flash game from the mobile version of Kongregate. Plus, it will cache the game so you can play offline. And this may be the feature that got it yanked, speculates Ryan Kim at GigaOm."

Balancing Choice With Irreversible Consequences In Games 352

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday January 13, 2011 @07:23AM from the no-takebacks dept.

The Moving Pixels blog has an article about the delicate balance within video games between giving players meaningful choices and consequences that cannot necessarily be changed if the player doesn't like her choice afterward. Quoting: "One of my more visceral experiences in gaming came recently while playing Mass Effect 2, in which a series of events led me to believe that I'd just indirectly murdered most of my crew. When the cutscenes ended, I was rocking in my chair, eyes wide, heart pounding, and as control was given over to me once more, I did the only thing that I thought was reasonable to do: I reset the game. This, of course, only led to the revelation that the event was preordained and the inference that (by BioWare's logic) a high degree of magical charisma and blue-colored decision making meant that I could get everything back to normal. ... Charitably, I could say BioWare at least did a good job of conditioning my expectations in such a way that the game could garner this response, but the fact remains: when confronted with a consequence that I couldn't handle, my immediate player's response was to stop and get a do-over. Inevitability was only something that I could accept once it was directly shown to me."

China's Influence Widens Nobel Peace Prize Boycott 360

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @10:55PM from the friends-of-un-friends dept.

c0lo writes "Not only did China decline to attend the upcoming Nobel peace prize ceremony, but urged diplomats in Oslo to stay away from the event warning of 'consequences' if they go. Possibly as a result of this (or on their own decisions), 18 other countries turned down the invitation: Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco. Reuters seems to think the 'consequences' are of an economic nature, pointing out that half of the countries with economies that gained global influence during recent times are boycotting the ceremony (with Brazil and India still attending)."

USAF Unveils Supercomputer Made of 1,760 PS3s 163

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 03, 2010 @05:35PM from the going-for-the-gusto dept.

digitaldc writes with this excerpt from Gamasutra: "The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has connected 1,760 PlayStation 3 systems together to create what the organization is calling the fastest interactive computer in the entire Defense Department. The Condor Cluster, as the group of systems is known, also includes 168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (500 TFLOPS), according to AFRL Director of High Power Computing Mark Barnell."

Morphing Metals 121

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday September 16, 2010 @05:38AM from the forge-ahead dept.

aarondubrow writes "Imagine a metal that 'remembers' its original, cold-forged shape, and can return to that shape when exposed to heat or a magnetic pulse. Like magic out of a Harry Potter novel, such a metal could contract on command, or swing back and forth like a pendulum. Believe it or not, such metals already exist. First discovered in 1931, they belong to a class of materials called 'shape memory alloys (SMA),' whose unique atomic make-up allows them to return to their initial form, or alternate between forms through a phase change."

The White House Listed On Real Estate Website 123

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 14, 2010 @10:54AM from the been-for-sale-for-years dept.

Forget visiting the White House, if you have $10 million you can own it. At least that is the price for the president's home on the real estate website Redfin. From the article: "Obviously this is an error. It looks like Redfin software pulled an example listing from the website Owners.com by mistake. That example listing was the White House. We have e-mailed Redfin for comment." I know it's historic but it still looks a bit on the high side according to the comparables in the area.

Political Affiliation Can Be Differentiated By Appearance 262

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 27, 2010 @02:06PM from the if-it-looks-like-a-liberal-and-quacks-like-a-liberal dept.

quaith writes "It's not the way they dress, but the appearance of their face. A study published in PLoS One by Nicholas O. Rule and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University used closely cropped greyscale photos of people's faces, standardized for size. Undergrads were asked to categorize each person as either a Democrat or Republican. In the first study, students were able to differentiate Republican from Democrat senate candidates. In the second, students were able to differentiate the political affiliation of other college students. Accuracy in both studies was about 60% — not perfect, but way better than chance."

PS3 Hacked? 296

Posted by Soulskill on Monday January 25, 2010 @07:35AM from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.

Several readers have sent word that George Hotz (a.k.a. geohot), the hacker best known for unlocking Apple's iPhone, says he has now hacked the PlayStation 3. From his blog post: "I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip. 3 years, 2 months, 11 days...that's a pretty secure system. ... As far as the exploit goes, I'm not revealing it yet. The theory isn't really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can't post dumps. I'm hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone's KBAG."

Living In Tokyo's Capsule Hotels 269

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @05:34PM from the living-in-the-hive dept.

afabbro writes "Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 once offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home. Now with Japan enduring its worst recession since World War II, it is becoming an affordable option for people with nowhere else to go. The Hotel 510’s capsules are only 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide. Guests must keep possessions, like shirts and shaving cream, in lockers outside of the capsules. Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas says, 'It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep. You get used to it.'”

An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @03:06PM from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.

Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."

Doom-Like Video Surveillance For Ports In Development 56

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday December 17, 2009 @06:48AM from the hurt-me-plenty dept.

oranghutan writes "A research and development group down under is working to develop an advanced video surveillance system for ports around the world that uses video superimposed onto a 3D map. With 16-megapixel high-definition cameras on a distributed (cabled) network and a proprietary system written in a variety of languages (C++, Python, SQL, etc.), the group from NICTA is aiming to allow security teams at the Port of Brisbane — which is 110km long — to monitor shipping movements, cargo and people. By scrolling along a 3D map, the security teams can click on a location and then get a real-time video feed superimposed onto the map. Authorities from around the world with the right permissions can then access the same system. The main difference from regular surveillance systems is the ability to switch views without having to know camera numbers/locations and the one screen view."

Comment Re:As soon as you mentioned "Group Health"... (Score 1) 430

by ljaszcza on Saturday October 17, 2009 @07:51PM (#29780885) Attached to: On the Efficacy of Flu Vaccine

Group health is a business. I would guess that if their analysts show that spending $X on vaccines leads to savings of $Y when people are not admitted to the hospital or visit the ER with influenza and $Y>$X then they are likely to pay for the vaccine. If $X>$Y than it is not worth it to them. I can't see any businessman/underwriter doing anything different.

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