A 60-year-old British woman is suffering from a neurological defect that is sure to put her in the next version of "The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." She is unable to recognize any voice she hears — any voice, that is, but Sean Connery's. Unless she sees the face of the person speaking, she has no idea who is talking to her, even her daughter and co-worker's voices are unrecognizable. Dr. Brad Duchaine at University College London, thinks she might have the first documented case of vocal prosopagnosia, a condition which makes it extremely difficult for people to recognize faces. "His accent is distinctive," Duchaine explained. "And she is a British woman in her sixties ... let's say it's probable he got her attention."

JTRipper writes "Monty Python seems to have done the right thing. Instead of issuing take down notices of their videos on YouTube, they are doing it better themselves with their own YouTube channel. They are putting all their clips (including snips from their movies) up in a decent resolution, with the only caveat being a link to buying the movies and TV episodes from Amazon."

An anonymous reader writes "The hedge fund investor who prided himself on achieving 1000% returns, Andrew Lahde, wrote a goodbye letter to mark his departure from the financial world. In it, he suggests people think about building a new government model, and his suggestion is to have someone like George Soros fund a new government that brings together the best and brightest minds in a manner where they're not tempted by bribery. In doing so, he refers to how Linux grows and competes with Microsoft. An open source government. How would such a system work, and could it succeed? How long before it became corrupt? Would it need a benevolent dictator (Linus vs. Soros)?"

AusGamers spoke with Blizzard's Jay Wilson recently about Diablo 3's multiplayer experience. Among other things, Wilson said the developers were making an effort to encourage cooperative gameplay. For example, each player within a particular game will see different loot drops from monsters, which prevents competition over who can click an item the fastest, and encourages trading. He also mentions that a team is already working on methods to prevent cheating, and he discusses why Blizzard games tend to be announced so long before they're completed. "One of the reasons why we actually prefer a really long window before we release a game is because we want a lot of feedback; we want to hear what people like and don't like about it; we want to give them several opportunities to play it before release."

KingofGnG writes "The new Diablo III screenshots highlight the strong chromatic variations existing between the dungeons and the various stages ... It appears obvious, however, that all those details enriching the scenes, the crumbling parapets of the paths within the dungeons, the plants and the ragged drapes lightened by candles, would lose the best part of their raison d'etre if put in monochrome palettes inclined to black."

Downtown isn't so bad a long as you have a fast car and some covering fire.

Jackson writes "Security researchers from ETH Zurich, Google, and IBM Internet Security Systems have shown that more than 600 million Internet users don't use the latest version of their browser. The researchers' paper, shows that as of June 2008, only 59.1 percent of Internet users worldwide use the latest major version of their preferred web browser. Suggestions have also been made to inform users that their browser is out of date."

azuredrake writes "Facebook, the largest social networking site in the US, has sued German social networking site studiVZ on the grounds that studiVZ has copied the look and feel of Facebook in order to piggyback off their success. According to the article, 'The German company sued by Facebook for running a "knockoff" of the social networking Web site said on Sunday it asked a German court to declare that Facebook's claims are without merit.' However, a simple glance at the two sites' homepages seems to tell a different story — studiVZ copies many things from Facebook, from their button layout down to the font they're using."

phantomflanflinger writes "The Cern Laboratory, home of the Large Hadron Collider, is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe. According to news.bbc.co.uk, the Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) — colder than deep space. The LHC aims to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang and continue the search for the Higgs boson."