http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/15/0220210

sooner or later everyone get's to make first post on slashdot! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=210774&cid=17168184

From i-wanted-a-piece-of-them-gaming-industry-for-a-long-time dapartment:
Years after little Cody Posey shot and killed three family members on the southern New Mexico ranch, several other family members filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Cody and the makers of a popular video game Grand Theft Auto -- a game, attorney Jack Thompson said, played a role in Cody killing his family members. The game's maker Sony, Take 2 Interactive Software, and Rock Star games are defendants in the suit. Monday Take 2 Interactive Software and Rock Star games said the suit had no merit and they would strongly defend their company.

The 'never-really-off' set-top box for your cable TV needs the juice to bring your favorite TV show at a whim of a moment. Reuters points out that it may cost you about $80 a year... Another reason to cut the cable?..

BoingBoing picked up a report that German police has raided and seized TOR server rooms. TOR is a service that allows one to anonymize his or her internet experience (web, chat, etc). BoingBoing writes: “We need support, lots of people are chanting the same stupid arguments against anonymization over and over again... "You dont need to be afraid if you have nothing to hide" ... "Only criminals have the need for anonymity." [] AskMefi has a great list of responses to that infernal "if you have nothing to hide..." question.

soultcer.net : "According to an owner of one of the servers, who talked to a public prosecutor, the public prosecutors office knew that the server owners had nothing to do with the child pornography case. Regardless they confiscated some hard disks so that the TOR servers were unusable. As reason they stated that they wanted to scan for traces (e.g. log files). Even though TOR does not keep any logs? I dont really believe them...
Why have the hard disks really been confiscated??"

citizen428.net: :Don’t get me wrong, child pornography is one of the worst crimes I can think of, and I wish the German authorities all the best in finding the people they are after. I do however feel that the route taken here wasn’t ideal, as it may well lead to a negative perception of Tor in the general public."

itnomad: "One operator whose server was seized as well wrote a letter to all the TOR-operators in Germany he was aware of, reaching me as well; he wrote that he is not aware of any charges pressed against him at the moment and that his provider, whose server-room was raided, was not avilable for a real comment on the weekend."

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194096&cid=15910653 http://www.hiphopmusic.com/best_of_youtube/2006/02/how_to_download_and_save_youtu.html[hiphopmusic.com] http://www.tian.cc/2005/11/how-to-save-flash-videos-from-youtube.html[www.tian.cc] These are two of the sites I turned to when I wanted to learn how to download YouTube videos. Basically, the premise is that you have to change the url to get it to download as a file and then convert it from an .FLV file into something else. Example: open "View Page Source" and do a text search for "player2.swf?video_id=" change this: player2.swf?video_id=b4Knsablahblahblah to this: http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=b4Knsabl ahblahblah [youtube.com] Then save the file and convert it to, say, AVI. I use CinemaForge for this. ---- To store YouTube videos on your own machine, get the VideoDownloader extension for Firefox: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Faddons.mozilla.org%2Ffirefox%2F2390%2F[mozilla.org]. Then go to the page for the YouTube (or Google Video or whatever) page of your choice, and click on their icon. A window pops up and you click on a button to download the actual .flv video. That's in Flash video format, which you'll probably want a player for: http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/article/flv-player-updated [martijndevisser.com]. Now you can run that (on a Windows machine at least) and play .flv videos from YouTube locally. Voila! --- In Addition to the other suggestions I offer youtube-dl chock full of "Cross Platform Command Line Goodness" http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/ [arrakis.es] You're Welcome It seems that this is presicely what is meant by how the internet is a World of Ends [worldofends.com]. As upload capability becomes more and more prevalent, it will become more representative of the global population. The question then becomes- Is this a good thing? Shallow content [shallowhalmovie.com], rumormonging [snopes.com], and misinformation [venganza.org] will lead to a populace that is more popular, but will it be more true?

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/03/019222

a well thought comment on government, bureaucracies, etc... http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=139841&op=Reply&threshold=3&commentsort=0&tid=172&mode=nested&pid=11715038

previously on /.

Agent Alice: How's the covert electronic suveillance of Slashnerd 172441 going Agent Bob?

Agent Bob: Mostly just harmless anti-government raving Agent Alice. Chances of this dork ever belonging to any sort of revolutionary or terrorist group are pretty fucking slim I'd say. He'd fucking bore them to tears and they'd take him out and execute him themselves. I mean Jesus Christ he even encrypts his goddamned grocery list. He encrypts his personal journal. Like he needs to. Anyone reading it would stop from sheer boredom after a couple of paragraphs. The only thing that keeps me from shoving my Glock in my mouth and blowing my brains out is the porn. He may be a boring dork but at least he has plenty of stolen pornsite passwords. I run his packets though a filter and it snags out the images and video/audio streams and dumps them to a folder for me to peruse. Saves me from having to go find the stuff on my own.

Agent Alice: Pretty clever there Agent Bob since you're getting paid to monitor the subject rather than surf for porn. I bet you even named the folder 'Evidence' or someting like that didn't you.

Agent Bob: Of course I did.

Agent Alice: *chuckles* Keep up the good wood... er I mean work Agent Bob.

in the same thread:

Of course the people dont want war. But after all, its the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and its always a simple matter to drag the people along whether its a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.

Thats easy.

All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

Herman Goering Nuremberg prison, 18 April 1946

Salon's.com election news column, War Room reports that early voters in New Mexico and Texas have already reported serious problems with electronic voting machines. Many computer scientists (aka Slashdot readers) have been very vocal about the potential pitfalls of electronic voting. A group of e-voting experts including Barbara Simons, perhaps the medium's biggest critic, has started a blog to interpret what potential problems might mean as the vote -- and mis-votes -- keep coming in. Are there any Slashdoters who may be interested in this virtual bug hunting/.interpretations?

http://betfest.com/ from discussion:
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=04/10/24/2146242

http://www.improving.org/paulp/
  http://www.hollywoodpoker.com/
prophetsplace.com
http://www.thepokerbookstore.com/page/page/858831. htm
wilwheaton.net
http://www.poker-babes.com/bio/paul-phillips/
  http://tiltboys.com/
http://www.philgordonpoker.com/index.html
www.rage.ws
thunderkeller.com

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=126948&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&tid=127&mode=nested&cid=10616659

I've seen the "brilliant" bit on slashdot but it's not an obligatory one yet... I wonder if it'll catch up...http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=126297&cid=10570282

Green Party Candidate David Cobb Answers Your Questions: http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/01/0535239&tid=219

The BBC reports that "Physicists have carried out successful teleportation with particles of light over a distance of 600m across the River Danube in Austria. Long distance teleportation is crucial if dreams of superfast quantum computing are to be realised." The original publication is in Nature and can be accessed here.

Cnet reports that Wall-Mart is starting to sell entry-level laptops for under $600 (no rebates or cupons nessesary). The machine comes loaded with a 14.1-inch display, an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ processor, 128MB of RAM, a 40GB hard drive, a DVD-drive, Wi-Fi 802.11b and Microsoft's Windows XP Home Edition operating system, and a one-year warranty.