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TSA Worker Jailed In Body Scan Rage Incident 352

Posted by samzenpus from the checking-out-your-package dept.
A TSA worker in Miami was arrested for aggravated battery after he attacked a co-worker for making fun of the size of his genitals. Rolando Negrin walked through one of the new body scanners during a recent training session and a supervisor started making fun of his manhood. From the article: "According to the police report, Negrin confronted one of his co-workers in an employee parking lot, where he hit him with a police baton on the arm and back."
Biotech

FDA Approves Vaccine For Prostate Cancer 194

Posted by timothy from the where-you-can-stick-it dept.
reverseengineer writes "The US Food and Drug Administration has given its first first approval for a therapeutic cancer vaccine. In a clinical trial 'involving 512 men, those who got Provenge (sipuleucel-T) had a median survival of 25.8 months after treatment, while those who got a placebo lived a median of 21.7 months. After three years, 32 percent of those who got Provenge were alive, compared with 23 percent of those who got the placebo. ... "The big story here is that this is the first proof of principle and proof that immunotherapy works in general in cancer, which I think is a huge observation," said Dr. Philip Kantoff, chief of solid tumor oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the lead investigator in Dendreon's largest clinical trial for the drug. "I think this is a very big thing and will lead to a lot more enthusiasm for the approach."'"
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.
ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."
Businesses

Facebook Mafiosi Go To the Mattresses vs. Zynga 102

Posted by Soulskill from the concrete-galoshes dept.
sympleko writes "Zynga has the lion's share of traffic in Facebook applications, and Mafia Wars is one of their most popular social games. Collapsing under the weight of over 26 million users, Zynga has been scrambling to thwart hard-core gamers who reverse-engineer URLs or script the game to optimize their enjoyment. Many of the workarounds have annoyed users who were accustomed to various game features, and even worse, the hastily-deployed changes have resulted in many players losing access to the game, in-game prizes, or statistics. Fed up with a software company seemingly bent on discouraging people from enjoying their product, a number of tagged players have organized a boycott of all Zynga games. The first 24-hour boycott on Sunday 12/13 resulted in an 11% decline in Daily Active Users, and an emergency thread on Zynga's forums (from which most of the flames were deleted). The current boycott, extending Wednesday through Sunday is being supported by a 428K strong Facebook group. At issue is the social contract between software companies and their devoted user base, as well as the nefarious tactics Zynga has used to raise cash."
Image

Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki 249

Posted by samzenpus from the 9cm-edited dept.
sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"

Comment Re:On behalf of everyone else... (Score 1) 624

by YokoZar (#29081005) Attached to: Arizona Judge Tells Sheriff "Reveal Password Or Face Contempt"

[The system] also is a server and e-mail platform for several county agencies, including the Sheriff's and County Attorney's offices and the Superior Court.

Just as the Sheriff's Office is concerned about civilians' access to records, county management is concerned the Sheriff's Office now has access to information from other county agencies it is investigating, such as the Superior Court. State appellate courts have rebuffed Arpaio's attempts to obtain privileged court e-mails, which would be accessible through the system.

I'm wondering. What if there's incriminating evidence in those e-mail exchanges the Sheriff needs and wants to protect from tampering? It sounds a little like a Hollywood movie, but how do we know. Maybe he knew someone was going to remove that data and he needs it to expose corruption higher up.

I don't know anything about this Joe Arpaio, never heard of him, so it may be obvious this is not the case. But just exclaiming "Fuck you" didn't help me find out either.

The incriminating evidence the sheriff wants to secure is almost certainly against him.
GNU is Not Unix

Leaving the GPL Behind 543

Posted by kdawson from the one-license-to-rule-them-all dept.
olddotter points out a story up at Yahoo Tech on companies' decisions to distance themselves from the GPL. "Before deciding to pull away from GPL, Haynie says Appcelerator surveyed some two dozen software vendors working within the same general market space. To his surprise, Haynie saw that only one was using a GPL variant. 'Everybody else, hands down, was MIT, Apache, or New BSD,' he says. 'The proponents of GPL like to tell people that the world only needs one open source license, and I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position,' says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL."

Comment Re:Is the any allowance for Creative Commons music (Score 1) 57

What about artists who don't want to charge money for their work?

You have no choice. MSN charges to host the song, so they will want their money. Same for Harmonix. I suppose you can give your cut to charity.

Ok, so why can't I cut MSN and Harmonix out of the loop and download the song directly from the internet and then put it in using a CD?

Comment Re:Wine mouse bug kept unfixed (Score 5, Informative) 470

by YokoZar (#28080577) Attached to: Wine Project Frustration and Forking

Another long-standing issue is "Bug 6971: Mouse "escapes" window or is confined to an area in the full screen program", which affects A LOT of games out there. The developers in charge insists that it could only be fixed by making changes in the code all the way down to X.org layers and perhaps even in the kernel mouse handling. However, this is demonstrably false, because: A) there is no such issue in Wine's fork Cedega; and B) some "outside" developers pointed out that there is a way to deal with this problem without asking for personal favors from X.org and the Linux kernel, namely, to use the DGA subsystem to achieve the required mouse behavior. But that's not going to be accepted either, because someone somewhere decided that DGA was "deprecated" and never mind that the deprecation was ONLY concerning its graphic component. The bug was reported almost three years ago, and it's almost like it's kept "in" on purpose, so that Wine never works properly with many games, and so that users will always have a need for the proprietary Crossover Games product.

XInput 2 is coming to the next X Release, and the support for relative mouse movements means that this bug will be fixed "the right way" shortly thereafter. There are already Wine devs testing out the latest X alphas to make sure XInput2 does what we need.

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