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The Military

High-Tech Blimps Earning Their Wings 200

Posted by samzenpus from the truly-goodyear dept.
coondoggie writes "The US Army this week showed off its latest high-tech blimp laden with powerful radar systems capable of detecting incoming threats 340 miles away. The helium-filled blimps, or aerostats, are designed to hover over war zones or high-security areas and be on guard for incoming missiles or other threats. The Army wants them to reduce some of the need for manned and unmanned reconnaissance flights. The aerostat demonstrated this week is known as the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Sensor System (JLENS), which is designed to fly up to an altitude of 10,000 feet. According to GlobalSecurity.org., the $1.4 billion JLENS is a large, unpowered elevated sensor moored to the ground by a long cable. From its position above the battlefield, the elevated sensors will allow incoming cruise missiles to be detected, tracked, and engaged by surface-based air defense systems even before the targets can be seen by the systems."
Medicine

Obesity May Accelerate Brain Aging 289

Posted by timothy from the to-be-aware-of dept.
natehoy writes "According to the US News and World Report, a recent study has shown a link between obesity and the loss of neurological tissue. The brains of elderly patients who were obese had on average 8% less tissue than their trimmer counterparts. Overweight patients had brains lighter by about 4%. This could have implications for the onset of dementia illnesses such as Alzheimer's. Just one more risk factor to add to the growing body (no pun intended) of reasons to try and stay trim."

Comment Re:"Scientific Consensus Over Climate Change" ? (Score 1) 1100

by CheshireCatCO (#29203307) Attached to: Global Warming To Be Put On Trial?

Sure, but you need not be conclusive to publish.

And in this case, we need not be conclusive to act. We've got a problem that won't wait around, we can't afford to wait for 3-sigma evidence. Even deferring the decision is, itself, a decision that we're making all the time. So really, all we can do is go with the best data available and do what we can.

Comment Re:"Scientific Consensus Over Climate Change" ? (Score 1) 1100

by mrtommyb (#29202015) Attached to: Global Warming To Be Put On Trial?
If you read a little further into the report they state that global warming is due to human activities at a 90% confidence level. Now, in the real world this seem definative but as a scientist this is certainly not conclusive. This is less than a 2 sigma detection, if I want to publish anything I need at least 99.7% confidence (3 sigma) that my result is correct.
Windows

China Jails Four For Microsoft XP Piracy 164

Posted by CmdrTaco from the imagine-what-they-do-if-you-make-a-silly-face dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "Chinese court has jailed four people for spreading their bootleg 'Tomato Garden' version of Microsoft's Windows XP program, in what the Xinhua news agency called the nation's biggest software piracy case. One of the four men Hong Lei, the creator of the downloadable 'Tomato Garden Windows XP' software, was jailed for three and a half years by a court in Suzhou in eastern China, Xinhua."
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."
Image

NASA Wants To Fund Space Taxis Screenshot-sm 136

Posted by samzenpus from the would-you-like-a-trip-to-the-stars dept.
NASA plans on using $50 million in stimulus funds to seed development of a commercial passenger transportation service to space. Potential space taxi inventors have 45 days to submit their proposals. The proposals will be competitively evaluated and the winners will be announced by the end of September. It is unclear what other Commodore 64 games NASA plans on making a reality, but I hope Arkanoid makes the short list.
Medicine

Medical Papers By Ghostwriters Pushed Hormone Therapy 289

Posted by timothy from the just-keep-a-positive-attitude dept.
krou writes "The New York Times reports on newly released court documents that show how pharmaceutical company Wyeth paid a medical communications firm to use ghost writers in drafting and publishing 26 papers between 1998 and 2005 backing the usage of hormone replacement therapy in women. The articles appeared in 18 journals, such as The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International Journal of Cardiology. The papers 'emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia,' and the apparent 'medical consensus benefited Wyeth ... as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001.' The apparent consensus crumbled after a federal study in 2002 'found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke.'"
Announcements

Submission + - Smart rooks - Aesop's fables based on facts? (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
Sven
Sven writes: "'One of Aesop's fables may have been based on fact, scientists report. In the tale, written more than 2,000 years ago, a crow uses stones to raise the water level in a pitcher so it can reach the liquid to quench its thirst. Now a study published in Current Biology reveals that rooks, a relative of crows, do just the same when presented with a similar situation. The team says the study shows rooks are innovative tool-users, even though they do not use tools in the wild. Another paper, published in the journal Plos One, shows that New Caledonian crows — which like rooks, are a member of the corvid group, along with ravens, jackdaws, magpies and jays — can use three tools in succession to reach a treat. ' For further information please visit the official BBC release: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8181233.stm?ls"
Movies

Submission + - Finnish man prosecuted for discussing CSS (out-law.com)

Submitted by Repossessed
Repossessed writes: From Out-Law.com

A Finnish man has asked the European Court of Human Rights to defend his right to discuss encryption systems used by the entertainment industry. He says that Finland's implementation of the EU's Copyright Directive restricts his right to free speech.

The original court dismissed the case, since European law requires the DRM to be effective, but a Finnish high court reversed the ruling. An application to appeal before Finland's supreme court was also denied.
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Phil Schiller Responds To iPhone App Rejection (daringfireball.net)

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: Phil Schiller has responded to the controversy over Apple's rejection of the iPhone dictionary app, Ninjawords. It turns out Apple simply told them to resubmit the app after parental controls were implemented in iPhone OS 3.0, because the app "provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable." To get to market sooner, Ninjawords decided to filter its own dictionary before parental controls were implemented--Apple didn't request any censorship.
Microsoft

Microsoft's Code Contribution Due To GPL Violation 508

Posted by samzenpus from the say-it-aint-so dept.
ozmanjusri writes "While Microsoft presented its recent embrace of the GPL as 'a break from the ordinary,' and the press spoke of them as going to great lengths to engage the open source community,' as is often the case with Microsoft, it turns out they had an ulterior motive. According to Stephen Hemminger, an engineer with Vyatta, Microsoft's Hyper-V used open-source components in a network driver and the company released the code to avoid legal action over a GPL violation. Microsoft's decision to embrace the GPL was welcomed by many in the open source community, but their failure to honestly explain the reason behind the release will have squandered this opportunity to build trust, something which is sadly lacking in most people's dealings with Microsoft."
Books

Submission + - U of MI and Amazon to Offer 400,000 OOP Books (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Four hundred thousand rare, out of print books may soon be available for purchase ranging anywhere from $10 to $45 a piece. The article lists a rare Florence Nightengale book on Nursing which normally sells for thousands due to its rarity. The university's librarian, Mr. Courant said, 'The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitised. We are very excited to be offering this service as a new way to increase access to the rich collections of the university library.' U of MI has been a library that Google is scanning rare books at and was the aim of heavy criticism (Some of the Google scanned books are to be sold on Amazon). How the authors guild and publishers react to Amazon's Surge offering softcover reprints of out of print books remains to be seen.

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