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Media

Submission + - new tool for **AA to wage war on the populous

Submitted by torxim
torxim writes: a new content piece of content recognition software has been developed that takes movie clips and identifies if it is material under copyright or not. I just wonder what database the software compares against, and if they will have licenses to all of that material as well.
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Regrowing lost body parts coming in the future

Submitted by
[TheBORG]
[TheBORG] writes: "There are two stories on Yahoo! News about regrowing lost body parts. One is about regrowing lost fingers & limbs and the other one is about regrowing teeth. The story about regrowing lost fingers and limbs talks about the experimental use of powdered pig bladder to regrow fingers and eventually lost limbs for soldiers and others in need from information that Pentagon-funded scientists hopefully learn from studying the salamander. The story about regrowing teeth talks about how Japanese scientists used primitive cells (not quite as early as stem cells) and injected them into a framework of collagen (the material that holds the body together). Once grown to a certain point, scientists implanted the growths into mice where the teeth developed normally."
Programming

Submission + - Did D-Wave really demonstrate a quantum computer?

Submitted by Qubert
Qubert writes: Was D-Wave's quantum computer demo last week the real thing? Ars Technica takes a look inside the cold, black box and concludes that whatever was in there, it probably wasn't a 'pure' quantum computer: 'Jumping off the fence, we will say that we think D-Wave demonstrated a real device; however, we think their device is going to set off a debate in the physics community over where the boundary between classical and quantum computation is. At present, quantum computers are "globally phase coherent," which means that every qubit's state is entangled (and therefore correlated) with every other qubit... The D-wave system, however, is certainly not globally phase coherent, which raises the question of whether it is a quantum computer.'
Censorship

Submission + - Journalist arrested for taking photo of CT Governo

Submitted by reub2000
reub2000 writes: Journalist Ken Krayeske was arrested for taking a photograph of Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell during a parade. Krayeske a pacifist, was on a list of "potential troublemakers" and his photo had been sent to cops on the parade route.
Television

Submission + - Robert Adler, co-inventor of TV remote, dead at 93

Submitted by
yroJJory
yroJJory writes: "Hit the mute button for a moment of silence: The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, has died. Adler, who won an Emmy Award along with fellow engineer Eugene Polley for the device that made the couch potato possible, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at 93, Zenith Electronics Corp. said Friday.

In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.

In a May 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Adler recalled being among two dozen engineers at Zenith given the mission to find a new way for television viewers to change channels without getting out of their chairs or tripping over a cable.

Adler also was considered a pioneer in SAW technology, or surface acoustic waves, in color television sets and touch screens. The technology has also been used in cellular telephones.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published his most recent patent application, for advances in touch screen technology, on Feb. 1."
Microsoft

Submission + - Has Microsoft Patented A Successor To Clippy?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IWeek blogger Alex Wolfe theorizes that Microsoft might be searching for a successor to 'Clippy, the iconic paperclip which was featured in Office from 1997 until the folks at Redmond got tired of the ridicule and retired it in 2004. The most promising candidate may be an eye with a rotating iris. What's equally notable is that Microsoft seems to be taking a page from its attempt to trademark the English word "Windows," and has patented the icon for a camcorder. Do you think this is the typical patent work of a big company, or has Microsoft got something up its sleeve here?
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - The Science of Godzilla

Submitted by GuyMannDude
GuyMannDude writes: Darren Naish at scienceblogs.com has written an overview of kaiju-biology, the study of giant Japanese monsters. The article focuses on Godzilla, both the original Japanese and the Hollywood version, and examines both his skeletal structure and his unique internal organs. Interested readers should also check out the analyses done by Michael Dexter, Connie Goodnow, and Mark Meloon.
The Internet

Submission + - Porn as a digital archive model

Submitted by EZCheese
EZCheese writes: Once again, porn leads the way into the next digital frontier. And where is it leading us this time? According to this researcher from the Long Now Foundation, toward a better archive of digital art: "'I guarantee that a wealth of pornography from the late 20th century will survive in digital distributed form (because) it's a social model that's working extremely well,' said Kurt Bollacker, digital research manager at the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit fostering several digital-works preservation projects...He held up the adult industry — always the digital pioneer — as one example of a self-selected community on the Web that swaps images and videos so regularly and widely that that activity will ultimately help preserve an archive over years." Also citing MAME and other digital preservation efforts, he advises "Anyone interested in preserving digital art should evaluate ongoing distributed data efforts." Perhaps there are hidden lessons in all that bittorrenting of the Paris Hilton tapes...
Announcements

Submission + - World Energy Shortage is Over..ZPE is here!

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to website: http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file =article&sid=2206 the Chinese have a prototype electricity generator called the Wang Shum Ho Electricity Generator. Evidently a proof of concept device was demonstrated to Chinese officials on 15 Jan 2007. Lawrence Tseung, a colleague of the inventor states plans to build four 5kW units. One to be in Beijing, another in Hong Kong, the third one will be set up in the United Nations in New York, and the fourth one will be a roving demonstrator unit. All will be made available to universities for academic validation. Then 200 more will be produced. One each of these will go to every member country of the United Nations as a gift from China. Mass production is to begin in 2008. Nr Tseung has written that these devices take advantage of electromagnetic wave energy that ssurrounds us all the time. Some call this Zero Point Energy. He states that the world energy crisis is now over.
Biotech

Submission + - Brain Damage Cures Smoking Addiction

Submitted by gurps_npc
gurps_npc writes: A New York Time Story (free today, may require sign in tomorrow) discusses a recent discovery that strokes to a certain part of the brain instantly end addiction to cigarettes.

While they pretend that no one would want to intentionally damage that part of the brain, I disagree. Lots of people want to stop smoking so bad they would accept minor brain damage to do it. (From "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", best quote: "Technically, this procedure IS brain damage.")

The scientists found that damaging that particular area does not affect eating. The study was small (they had to find people that used to smoke that had a stroke, not give smokers a stroke), and did not examine other addictions.

Today, people that are so obese they have health problems engage in dangerous surgery to help reduce their weight, from liposuction to stomache stapling. It would not surprise me if in 10 or 20 years smokers had a nuerosurgeon burn out this part of their brain.
Data Storage

Submission + - Digital archivists take lessons from porn

Submitted by
yppiz
yppiz writes: "The Long Now Foundation had a seminar in Berkeley last week where digital archivists talked about the problem of maintaining and recovering digital art works. This is already affecting museums, as the first wave of video artists often used custom hardware that's now hard to find and repair.

One of the problems, however, is much simpler — preserving copies of the work so it's not lost. And in this domain, archivists are taking a cue from models that work well for porn — specifically the fact that the user community is motivated to keep multiple copies around the world, and uses peer-to-peer technology to keep the bits in transit, rather than worrying about maintaining a single (and expensive) well-guarded archive.

ZD Net has more of the story, and there's another article on xbiz.com."

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