kyriosdelis - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Replacing motor neurons ain't so easy... (Score 1) 147

by kyriosdelis on Wednesday February 25, 2009 @06:26PM (#26988589) Attached to: Functional Neurons Created From Adult Somatic Cells

Fear not, for nature has a way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axon_guidance
In a nutshell, specific protein concentrations in gradients all over the nervous system, help neurons extend their axons and find their specific targets.

Square Enix To Buy Eidos, Midway Files For Bankruptcy 88

Posted by Soulskill on Friday February 13, 2009 @03:32AM from the finish-them dept.

arcticstoat writes to tell us that Square Enix has been revealed as the potential buyer to Eidos, developer of the Tomb Raider franchise. Eidos had been shedding workers and studios in an attempt for financial stability. This comes alongside news that Midway Games is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to stave off creditors while they sort out what's left of their resources. World of Goo publisher Brighter Minds Media also filed for bankruptcy last month. Free Radical, a UK studio recently put in a similar position was snapped up by Crytek, and we discussed news of Sega's financial turmoil as well. It seems that claims from late last year suggesting the games industry may be "recession proof" are quickly being proven wrong, though Kotaku suggests that most of the blame falls on the developers.

Pirate Bay Operators Stand Trial On Monday 664

Posted by timothy on Friday February 13, 2009 @02:17AM from the stay-warm-date-a-swede dept.

Anonymous Pirate writes "Operators of The Pirate Bay stand trial on Monday in Stockholm. The four defendants from the popular file-sharing web site are charged with being accessories to breaking copyright law and may face fines or up to two years in prison if found guilty. The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. The Swedish public service television announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation."

Epilogue DLC Coming To Prince of Persia 36

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 30, 2009 @05:59AM from the still-not-dead dept.

IGN reports that Prince of Persia will be getting downloadable content on February 26th for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game. It will be an epilogue to the original game, and it will add about three hours of gameplay. "Expect everything to be at a higher pace and to keep you on the edge of your seat. Figuring out how to succeed passing this long acrobatic sequence mined with traps or how to defeat this boss before he regenerates his energy will definitely be more intense. What hardcore Prince of Persia gamers want is a challenge and some of them found the game too easy. We understand this. Seeing such feedback, our vision and intentions with the DLC coincided with their comments quite well. We wanted to build a challenge and experience even greater with all the tools at our disposal, and let me say that there are a lot: Elika's power, traps, combat system, etc."

Comment Lower forms of life? (Score 1) 344

by kyriosdelis on Saturday January 24, 2009 @08:00AM (#26587543) Attached to: Texas Board of Education Supports Evolution

What exactly makes an organism a higher form of life than another? We had this discussion just yesterday at the university...
There is no such thing as a "higher" or a "lower" organism. It all depends on the context of the discussion:
Humans for example, have the most complex nervous system than all other organism. This makes them the "highest" life form when discussing nervous systems. On the contrary, a species of archaea can for example live in underwater volcanic environments. This makes it a "higher" organism when discussing extreme environments.
And no, the size of the genome or the number of genes, are not a criterion for this either. The human genome has 3 billion base pairs, and there's a species of amoeba that has a genome of 100 billion bp.
And I don't want to hear any jokes about amoebas and overlords :p

Submission + - Is Last Man Sued by RIAA a College Student? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Tuesday January 20, 2009 @03:21PM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "It appears that one of the 'last people sued' by the RIAA, in the flurry of lawsuits commenced just prior to its announcement that its litigation campaign was folding up its tents, was a Pittsburgh area college student named Jerome Williams, against whom a complaint was filed on December 15th in Atlantic Recording v. Williams. While he was unlucky to get caught in the RIAA's propellor blades at the tail end of the campaign, he was, unlike most victims of the RIAA's 5 1/2-year onslaught, able to find spirited legal counsel who are hopping mad about the RIAA's lawsuits, saying that 'Just because the record industry plaintiffs are mammoth corporations with massive financial resources does not justify them shirking their burden of proof under the law, particularly when their claims can have such dire repercussions on often powerless individuals.' His lawyers have taken the fight to the RIAA, filing a motion to dismiss the complaint for legal insufficiency. I guess you know who I'm rooting for."

Submission + - SPAM: Pioneer ends Laserdisc production after 29 years

Submitted by

brumgrunt

on Tuesday January 20, 2009 @10:10AM

brumgrunt writes: "Pioneer has today confirmed that it is ending production of Laserdisc players, 29 years after the format first launched. Just 3000 more are to be made, and Den Of Geek has the story. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source

Report Claims 95% of Music Downloads Are Illegal 331

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 16, 2009 @07:57PM from the seems-low dept.

Un pobre guey writes "The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) press release claims that 95% of music file downloads in 2008, an estimated 40 billion files, were illegal. Oddly enough, digital music sales are up: 'The digital music business internationally saw a sixth year of expansion in 2008, growing by an estimated 25 per cent to US$3.7 billion in trade value. Digital platforms now account for around 20 per cent of recorded music sales, up from 15 per cent in 2007. Recorded music is at the forefront of the online and mobile revolution, generating more revenue in percentage terms through digital platforms than the newspaper (4%), magazine (1%) and film industries (4%) combined... Despite these developments, the music sector is still overshadowed by the huge amount of unlicensed music distributed online. Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates over 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.'"

Comment Re:Same Here. (Score 1) 289

by kyriosdelis on Monday January 05, 2009 @11:45PM (#26339041) Attached to: Tooth Regeneration Coming Soon

I think the alcohol kills the bacteria.

Ahhh... Beer: The cause of, and solution to all of life's problems.

The Fight Over NASA's Future 288

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @10:15AM from the still-no-power-at-my-house dept.

swestcott writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about the transition to the Obama administration and NASA's transition to the new Orion."

Top Tech Breakthroughs of 2008 116

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday December 26, 2008 @09:54AM from the r&d-still-hard-at-work dept.

As we approach the end of the year it's time once again for the never-ending stream of retrospectives and year-in-review discussions. Wired has their version of the best technology breakthroughs of 2008. From phones to shrinking laptops to flexible displays, there is no shortage of interesting advancements when looking back at this year. What other groundbreaking advancements were made this year, and what do we have to look forward to for 2009?

The Return of (Old) PC Graphic Adventures 93

Posted by Soulskill on Monday December 22, 2008 @02:09AM from the back-to-the-past-ure dept.

KingofGnG writes "Though they belong to a genre already considered defunct and inadequate for the mainstream video game market, adventure games have a glorious past, a past that deserves to be remembered, and, of course, replayed. At the center of a good part of this effort of collective memory, there is ScummVM, the virtual machine which acts like an interface between the feelings and the puzzles from the good old times and the modern operating systems. As already highlighted before, the ScummVM target has grown immensely over time, going from the simple support of the 'classic' adventure games par excellence published by Lucasfilm/Lucasarts, to a range that includes virtually any single puzzle-solving game developed from the beginning of time up to the advent of the (Windows) NT platform. The last video game engine added to ScummVM within the past few days is Groovie, created by the software house Trilobyte for its first title released in 1993, The 7th Guest ."

The Wackiest Technology Tales of 2008 97

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 14, 2008 @11:11PM from the hindsight-is-much-better-than-20/20 dept.

coondoggie writes "Despite the daily drumbeat of new and improved hardware or software, the tech industry isn't all bits and bytes. Some interesting things happen along the way too. Like floating data centers, space geekonauts, shape shifting robots and weird bedfellows (like Microsoft and Jerry Seinfeld). What we include here is an example of what we thought were the best, slightly off-center stories of 2008."

Ultra-Sensitive Camera To Measure Exoplanet Sizes 62

Posted by timothy on Saturday December 13, 2008 @03:30PM from the ignoring-global-poverty dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "US astronomers and engineers have built a new camera to precisely measure the size of planets moving around distant stars. This camera has been dubbed OPTIC — short for 'Orthogonal Parallel Transfer Imaging Camera.' According to the research team, it is 'so sensitive that it could detect the passage of a moth in front of a lit window from a distance of 1,000 miles.' I'm not sure if this analogy is right, but the team said it was able to precisely define the size of a planet called WASP-10b which is orbiting around the star WASP-10, about 300 light-years from Earth."

Oldest-Known Human Brain Discovered 74

Posted by timothy on Friday December 12, 2008 @10:57AM from the does-not-belong-to-hans-delbrueck dept.

Smivs writes "The BBC report that archaeologists have found what could be Britain's oldest surviving human brain. The team, excavating a York University site, discovered a skull containing a yellow substance which scans showed to be shrunken, but brain-shaped. Brains consist of fatty tissue which microbes in the soil would absorb, so neurologists believe the find could be some kind of fossilised brain. More tests will now be done to establish what it is actually made of. The skull was discovered during an exploratory dig at Heslington Eastin, an area of extensive prehistoric farming landscape of fields, trackways and buildings dating back to at least 300 BC."

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