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Comment Re:Someone's math is wrong (Score 5, Insightful) 487

by Samedi1971 (#35979010) Attached to: Department of Justice: FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

Tho I agree, playing devil's advocate I'd have to point out they are trying to remove the market for the kiddie porn. Remove the market and the producers will dramatically drop off. Only a minor percentage are paying for it, but there are also a lot more that are funding the producers/distributors indirectly with banner impressions and clicks, and with zip files of KP with botnet/spyware sprinkled in.

Why not? It's been working so well to shut down the drug trade.

Comment Re:Why not leave it at the ISS? (Score 1) 205

by Samedi1971 (#35436258) Attached to: A Bittersweet Finale For Discovery Space Shuttle

The Mir didn't make a very good re-entry vehicle.

Arguably better than SkyLab?

I'd argue that. Skylab parts were successfully retrieved for posterity. As far as I know nobody has recovered any Mir parts from the bottom of the Pacific. So in terms of bringing random bits of scrap back from orbit, good ol' american "let it fall and hope it doesn't hit anything expensive" beat russian planning and execution.
Software

Preserving Virtual Worlds 122

Posted by Soulskill from the how-will-they-play-starcon-2-in-2150 dept.
The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so: "Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."
Censorship

Thailand Cracks Down On Twitter, Facebook, Etc. 130

Posted by timothy from the and-everybody-loves-the-king dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The ongoing poitical turmoil in Thailand has inspired the country's Ministry of Information, Computers, and Telecommunications to issue a stern warning that all users of the Internet in Thailand must 'use the internet in the right way or with appropriate purpose and avoid disseminating information that could create misunderstanding or instigate violent actions among the public', that 'all popular websites and social networks such as facebook, twitter, hi5 and my space [sic] will be under thorough watch,' and that 'Violators will be prosecuted by law with no compromise.' Thailand has draconian anti-lèse majesté laws which are routinely abused in order to settle political scores and silence dissent, and recently implemented a so-called 'Computer Crimes Act' which appears to be almost solely focused on thoughtcrimes and censorship, rather than dealing with, you know, actual crime. Several Web forums have recently been shut down, their operators charged because they failed to delete 'harmful posts' quickly enough to suit the Thai authorities."
PC Games (Games)

An Early Look At Civilization V 286

Posted by Soulskill from the new-and-shiny dept.
c0mpliant writes "IGN and Gamespot have each released a preview of the recently announced and eagerly awaited Civilization V. Apart from the obvious new hexagon shape of tiles and improved graphics, the articles go on to outline some of the major changes in the game, such as updated AI, new 'flavors' to world leaders, and a potentially game-changing, one-unit-per-tile system. No more will the stack of doom come to your city's doorsteps. Some features which will not be returning are religion and espionage. The removal of these two have sparked a frenzy of discussion on fan-related forums."
Games

8-Year Fan-Made Game Project Shut Down By Activision 265

Posted by Soulskill from the of-doors-and-ways-out dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Activision, after acquiring Vivendi, became the new copyright holder of the classic King's Quest series of adventure game. They have now issued a cease and desist order to a team which has worked for eight years on a fan-made project initially dubbed a sequel to the last official installment, King's Quest 8. This stands against the fact that Vivendi granted a non-commercial license to the team, subject to Vivendi's approval of the game after submission. After the acquisition, key team members had indicated on the game's forums (now stripped of their original content by order of Activision) that Activision had given the indication that it intended to keep its current fan-game licenses, but was not interested in issuing new ones."

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