alextheseal - Slashdot User

Comment We are adults (Score 1) 513

by alextheseal on Friday December 13, 2013 @01:06PM (#45681501) Attached to: Senators Propose Bill Prohibiting Phone Calls On Planes

For fucks sake, if it's not a safety issue that we don't need laws about it. We are adults and contend with this in tons of other planes in our lives and can self regulate in a airplane. There is nothing magical about being in an airplane that makes us better or worse then off an airplane.

Comment Re:Not sure what their priorities are. (Score 1) 369

by alextheseal on Thursday March 17, 2011 @06:31PM (#35523508) Attached to: Further Updates On Post-Tsumami Japan

Drop the hose from the helicopter. Weight the end with a ton of iron ahead of time.

Comment Why cool with a bucket instead of a firehose (Score 1) 369

by alextheseal on Thursday March 17, 2011 @05:24PM (#35522658) Attached to: Further Updates On Post-Tsumami Japan

Why are we hoisting in a bucket at a time by helicopter when we could use the same flight to lift in an drop a weighted firehose which would provide a stream of water? Would require less exposure to radiation by the flight crews. Also drop one on each of the reactors now while you still have access, don't wait till they blow.

Rupert Murdoch Publishes North Korean Flash Games 186

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday September 08, 2010 @06:33AM from the wonder-if-they're-paywalled dept.

eldavojohn writes "You might recall back in June when it was noted that North Korea was developing and exporting flash games. Now, the isolated nation state is apparently home to some game developers that are being published by a subsidiary of News Corp. (The games include Big Lebowski Bowling and Men In Black). Nosotek Joint Venture Company is treading on thin ice in the eyes of a few academics and specialists that claim the Fox News owner is 'working against US policy.' Concerns grow over the potential influx of cash, creating better programmers that are then leveraged into cyberwarfare capabilities. Nosotek said that 'training them to do games can't bring any harm.' The company asserts its innocence, though details on how much of the games were developed in North Korea are sparse. While one of the poorest nations in the world could clearly use the money, it remains to be seen if hardliner opponents like the United States will treat Nosotek (and parent company News Corp.) as if they're fostering the development of computer programmers inside the DPRK. The United Nations only stipulates that cash exchanged with companies in the DPRK cannot go to companies and businesses associated with military weaponry or the arms trade. Would you feel differently about Big Lebowski Bowling if you knew it was created in North Korea?"

Comment The end of India mobile developers (Score 0, Flamebait) 176

by alextheseal on Saturday August 28, 2010 @12:06AM (#33400762) Attached to: BlackBerry Battle In India Going Down To the Wire

Here's a perspective that perhaps India is not considering. My company employs a fair number of mobile developers and QA staff in India. They work on BlackBerry mobile devices as well as others. If BlackBerry's are shutdown in India guess how long we will wait until we pull all that work back to the US and drop all our India employees. Hint: It starts with a D and ends in "ays".

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."

Game Distribution Platforms Becoming Annoyingly Common 349

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 26, 2010 @07:48AM from the looking-at-you-games-for-windows-live dept.

The Escapist's Shamus Young recently posted an article complaining about the proliferation of distribution platforms and social networks for video games. None of the companies who make these are "quite sure how games will be sold and played ten years from now," he writes, "but they all know they want to be the ones running the community or selling the titles." Young continues, "Remember how these systems usually work: The program sets itself up to run when Windows starts, and it must be running if you want to play the game. If you follow this scheme to its logical conclusion, you'll see that the system tray of every gaming PC would eventually end up clogged with loaders, patchers, helpers, and monitors. Every publisher would have a program for serving up content, connecting players, managing digital licenses, performing patches, and (most importantly) selling stuff. Some people don't mind having 'just one more' program running in the background. But what happens when you have programs from Valve, Stardock, Activision, 2k Games, Take-Two, Codemasters, Microsoft, Eidos, and Ubisoft? Sure, you could disable them. But then when you fire the thing up to play a game, it will want to spend fifteen minutes patching itself and the game before it will let you in. And imagine how fun it would be juggling accounts for all of them."

Comment Smoking gun (Score 1) 156

by alextheseal on Tuesday January 26, 2010 @01:48AM (#30900722) Attached to: Chinese Human Rights Orgs Hit By DDoS

As another person pointed out, if the DDOS is coming from China, but the sites are firewalled by the China government then the conclusion is only the China government could be doing it since end users are blocked. I think the term is hoisted on their own petard.

Disney Releases 3D Texture Mapper Source Code 83

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 20, 2010 @03:52PM from the nice-of-them dept.

dsavi writes "Ptex, Walt Disney Animation Studio's cutting-edge 3D texture mapping library which was first used on nearly every surface in the 2008 animated feature Bolt, was released under the BSD license on Friday. Quoting the announcement on monophyl.com: 'We expect to follow Ptex with other open source projects that we hope the community will find beneficial. We will soon be launching a new Walt Disney Animation Studios Technology page under disneyanimation.com. It will include links to our open source projects as will as a library of recent publications.' This looks good for open source 3D graphics."

Tower Switch-Off Embarrasses Electrosensitives 292

Posted by samzenpus on Friday January 15, 2010 @03:03PM from the radiation-placebo dept.

Sockatume writes "Residents in Craigavon, South Africa complained of '[h]eadaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns' after an iBurst communications tower was put up in a local park. Symptoms subsided when the residents left the area, often to stay with family and thus evade their suffering. At a public meeting with the afflicted locals, the tower's owners pledged to switch off the mast immediately to assess whether it was responsible for their ailments. One problem: the mast had already been switched off for six weeks. Lawyers representing the locals say their case against iBurst will continue on other grounds."

Moscow Police Watch Pre-Recorded Scenes On Surveillance Cams 114

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 13, 2010 @01:46PM from the I-always-feel-like-nobody-is-watching-me dept.

An anonymous reader writes "During several months of 2009, Moscow police looked at fake pictures displayed on their monitors instead of what was supposed to be video from the city surveillance cams. The subcontractor providing the cams was paid on the basis of 'the number of working cams,' so he delivered pre-cooked pictures stored on his servers. The camera company CEO has been arrested."

How To Judge Legal Risk When Making a Game Clone? 270

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 12, 2010 @05:07AM from the ask-a-lawye-oh-wait dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I'm an indie game developer making a clone of a rather obscure old game. Gameplay in my clone is very similar to the old game, and my clone even has a very similar name because I want to attract fans of the original. The original game has no trademark or software patent associated with it, and my clone isn't infringing on the original's copyright in any way (all the programming and artwork is original), but nevertheless I'm still worried about the possibility of running afoul of a look and feel lawsuit or something similar. How do I make sure I'm legally in the clear without hiring an expensive lawyer that my indie developer budget can't afford?"

NASA To Cryogenically Freeze Satellite Mirrors 47

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 08, 2010 @10:12PM from the ain't-it-cool dept.

coondoggie writes "NASA said it will soon move some of the larger (46 lb) mirror segments of its future James Webb Space Telescope into a cryogenic test facility that will freeze the mirrors to -414 degrees Fahrenheit (~25 K). Specifically, NASA will freeze six of the 18 Webb telescope mirror segments at the X-ray and Cryogenic Facility, or XRCF, at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in a test to ensure the critical mirrors can withstand the extreme space environments. All 18 segments will eventually be tested at the site. The test chamber takes approximately five days to cool a mirror segment to cryogenic temperatures."

Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? 221

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 04, 2010 @03:11PM from the pricepoint-better-be-right dept.

Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."

NASA Tests Flying Airbag 118

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @03:10PM from the drop-the-cloud-anchor dept.

coondoggie writes "NASA is looking to reduce the deadly impact of helicopter crashes on their pilots and passengers with what the agency calls a high-tech honeycomb airbag known as a deployable energy absorber. So in order to test out its technology NASA dropped a small helicopter from a height of 35 feet to see whether its deployable energy absorber, made up of an expandable honeycomb cushion, could handle the stress. The test crash hit the ground at about 54MPH at a 33 degree angle, what NASA called a relatively severe helicopter crash."

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