SomePgmr - Slashdot User

Submission + - Bitcoin: Making Online Gambling Legal in the U.S.? (businessweek.com) 1

Submitted by

SomePgmr

on Wednesday January 09, 2013 @07:30PM

SomePgmr writes: "Michael Hajduk had sunk one year and about $20,000 into developing his online poker site, Infiniti Poker, when the U.S. online gambling market imploded. On April 15, 2011, a day now known in the industry as Black Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice shut down the three biggest poker sites accessible to players in the U.S., indicting 11 people on charges of bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling.

Hajduk, though, was barely fazed. Calgary-based Infiniti Poker, like several other new online gambling sites, plans to accept Bitcoin when it launches later this month. The online currency may allow American gamblers to avoid running afoul of complex U.S. laws that prevent businesses from knowingly accepting money transfers for Internet gambling purposes. “Because we’re using Bitcoin, we’re not using U.S. banks—it’s all peer-to-peer,” Hajduk says. “I don’t believe we’ll be doing anything wrong.”"

Submission + - Why WikiLeaks Is Worth Defending, Despite All Its Flaws (gigaom.com)

Submitted by

SomePgmr

on Friday August 24, 2012 @03:49PM

SomePgmr writes: "By now, anyone with even a passing interest in the WikiLeaks phenomenon is familiar with most of the elements of its fall from grace: the rift between founder Julian Assange and early supporters over his autocratic and/or erratic behavior, the Swedish rape allegations that led to his seeking sanctuary in Ecuador, a recent childish hoax the organization perpetrated, and so on. Critics paint a picture of an organization that exists only in name, with a leadership vacuum and an increasingly fractured group of adherents. Despite its many flaws, however, there is still something worthwhile in what WikiLeaks has done, and theoretically continues to do. The bottom line is that we need something like a âoestateless news organization,â and so far it is the best candidate we have."

Submission + - Snow Crash Movie to be Written and Directed by Joe Cornish (geek.com)

Submitted by

SomePgmr

on Friday June 15, 2012 @01:23PM

SomePgmr writes: "Fans of the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash have reason to rejoice today, as itâ(TM)s been announced that the film adaptation of Neal Stephensonâ(TM)s classic has been revived once again, this time with an exciting writer and director at the helm in the form of Joe Cornish.

Cornish is known for his recent sci-fi alien invasion flick Attack the Block, which was filmed and released in the UK by the same studio that put out Shaun of the Dead. Cornishâ(TM)s first film came to the US in a limited release in 2011 and did well enough that Paramount took notice and pursued Cornish for the Snow Crash project."

Submission + - Pre To Postmortem: The Inside Story of the Death of Palm and webOS (theverge.com)

Submitted by

SomePgmr

on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @02:12PM

SomePgmr writes: "Thirty-one. That's the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract. Understanding exactly how Palm could drive itself into irrelevance in such a short period of time will forever be a subject of Valley lore."

Submission + - America's Secret Space Plane To Land After A Year in Orbit (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by

SomePgmr

on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @12:05AM

SomePgmr writes: "The U.S Air Force's highly secret unmanned space plane will land in June — ending a year-long mission in orbit. The experimental Boeing X37-B has been circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour and was due to land in California in December. It is now expected to land in mid to late June. And still, no one knows what the space drone has been doing up there all this time."

Submission + - NASA Gets Two Military Spy Telescopes for Astronomy (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by

SomePgmr

on Monday June 04, 2012 @01:22PM

SomePgmr writes: "The U.S. government’s secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes as big as, and even more powerful than, the Hubble Space Telescope. Designed for surveillance, the telescopes from the National Reconnaissance Office were no longer needed for spy missions and can now be used to study the heavens."

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