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Officials Use Google Earth To Find Unlicensed Pools 650

Officials in Riverhead, New York are using Google Earth to root out the owners of unlicensed pools. So far they've found 250 illegal pools and collected $75,000 in fines and fees. Of course not everyone thinks that a city should be spending time looking at aerial pictures of backyards. from the article: "Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC, said Google Earth was promoted as an aid to curious travelers but has become a tool for cash-hungry local governments. 'The technology is going so far ahead of what people think is possible, and there is too little discussion about community norms,' she said."

Comment Re:It's not dead. (Score 2, Interesting) 127

I suspect in a lot of places where Snort is used, it's mostly just sitting there quietly generating thousands of mostly '(http_inspect) DOUBLE DECODING ATTACK' alerts and being completely ignored. It's easy enough to set it up, but out of the box it typically generates an awful lot of noise in the form of largely useless alerts, so it takes some configuring (and understanding of exactly what those alerts are) to get it to a point where it's really useful.

And yes, I reckon that the commercial aspect to Snort probably is a key factor in this argument. They push that quite heavily IMO with (e.g.) new rules only being available to subscribers and other users having to register and wait until they're 30 days old to download them.

I'm curious as to whether Suricata is any good, I might have to check it out. Also, meerkats.

Comment Re:More 3-D madness. (Score 1) 199

If you'd checked the link, you'd realise that as far as Zalman go, you're comparing a $3400 63" 3D Plasma TV with a < $500 21.5" LCD 3D monitor. They're not really directly comparable I'd say...

The main point I was making, though, is just that LCD displays which use circular polarization exist.

For larger 3D LCD displays using circular polarization, as another poster (jagsta) mentioned LG manufacture some. I'm not sure they're available to the home user yet (they're in pubs in the UK using Sky's 3D service), but the indications are the displays will be a bit cheaper than the active glasses equivalent, and more so when you account for the cost of additional pairs of glasses if you have family/friends.

Comment Re:More 3-D madness. (Score 1) 199

Zalman make 3D LCD displays that use circular polarization (using horizontal interlacing). You can use the same cheap light glasses that cinemas provide with them.

I have one myself - http://www.zalman.com/ENG/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=384 - and it works, but there are quite a few limitations. Obviously there's the consequences you'd expect from horizontal interlacing, less resolution to each eye. For PC gaming the Nvidia drivers are pretty good, but, they only work with the earlier Zalman monitor. Zalman didn't cough up the cash to Nvidia for them to continue support, so even though the Nvidia drivers are quite capable of supporting the newer Zalman monitors, they won't (although unofficially, it is possible to get them to work with a bit of hackery). Otherwise there are 3rd party drivers (http://www.iz3d.com/ for example) which have their own issues, e.g. variable quality and being detected by PunkBuster as a hack.

There's also quite extreme limitations on the vertical viewing angle for 3D, a 10-12 degree range. Move your head up or down out of that and the image splits.

As for the PS3, it won't detect this monitor as being 3D enabled at the moment. It relies entirely on automatic detection, there's apparently no way to manually configure it, so if it doesn't detect the display as 3D, that's it, no 3D for you. I'm not sure the PS3 even supports horizontally interlaced 3D output at the moment either.

I wouldn't really recommend it at the moment. It does work, the effect is great with the Nvidia drivers, and it is a bit cheaper than active shutter glasses solutions, but I expect (hope?) the technology to improve quite rapidly over the next year or so, so I'd hold off going down this route at the moment (if I didn't already have one).

Comment Re:Short answer (Score 1) 1115

It has to be no, given the way the question is phrased. I find it hard to even envisage a hypothetical scenario where the answer could be provably yes.

If a creative work financially fails, there's likely to be multiple factors that could be blamed. Quality, advertising, reviews, distribution, piracy...

How exactly could it be proven that piracy was a significant factor?
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

Comment Re:What a lot of work. (Score 1) 574

I was arguing against the notion that letting demand of entertainment determine pricing is some kind of cultural evil... it isn't.

Isn't it? As opposed to other approaches, it effectively and consistently excludes particular groups from particular events, biasing attendance towards other groups. It's hard to see how that could be a good thing, culturally...

Comment Re:What a lot of work. (Score 1) 574

Leaving aside points about merchandise sales, diversity of attendance, size of fan base, and the difference between specific and generic entertainment, look at it this way.

Say an artist wants to sell tickets to his gigs at a fixed price he considers fair, that the majority of his fans would be able to afford. Bear in mind this is about who actually attends the gig as much as it is anything else.

Why exactly should he not be allowed to do that? How is it fair, to the artist, to circumvent his intentions and require demand-set pricing (whether directly, or indirectly by allowing scalping)?

Comment Re:What a lot of work. (Score 1) 574

Well, I'm not real sure that someone who can afford to attend a concert for $100 a seat would be priced out by tickets that were $150 (or $20 and $30, you get the idea).

That basically boils down to, "if someone has $100, they must have $150". You can see the problem with that, right?

As for luck being more 'virtuous' than $50, it's not really about virtue, it depends what you're aiming for. If you want diversity in terms of attendance - and there are good reasons for that - then yes, luck is going to be a better system than 'most money wins'.

And in terms of cheaper tickets becoming available, I don't think that's really likely to be the case to any significant extent. If tickets sold out previously, they're unlikely to become cheaper, and if they weren't selling out previously it's often the case that they would have been available cheaply on the door or through promotions towards the date of the event anyway.

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"I'll rob that rich person and give it to some poor deserving slob. That will *prove* I'm Robin Hood." -- Daffy Duck, Looney Tunes, _Robin Hood Daffy_

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