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Earth

Submission + - LatLng Is The New Address 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With the location land rush in full swing, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld declares it's time for an open database of places and calls on the Big Dogs of location — Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, SimpleGeo, Loopt, Citysearch, etc. — to make it so. An open database that maps latitude and longitude coordinates to businesses, points of interest, and even people's homes should just be part of the basic fabric of the mobile Web. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley was enthusiastic about the idea, says Schonfeld, while Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was a little bit more lukewarm and cautious. Time for Larry and Sergey to invite the Families to a sit-down at 37.423021,-122.083739?
Sci-Fi

Maybe the Aliens Are Addicted To Computer Games 496

Posted by Soulskill from the gotta-do-one-more-daily dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Geoffrey Miller has an interesting hypothesis in Seed Magazine that explains Fermi's Paradox — why 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing: no radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind. All the aliens are busy playing computer games. The aliens 'forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism,' writes Miller. He says the fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself, and that although evolution favors brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. 'The result is that we don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography,' writes Miller. 'Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot.' Miller adds that most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children, until they eventually die out." Who here doesn't think a TNG-style Holodeck would lead to the downfall of our civilization?
Government

Feds Question Big Media's Piracy Claims 261

Posted by kdawson from the show-me-the-losses dept.
WrongSizeGlass writes "CNET is reporting that the GAO's study of big media's piracy claims has raised some questions. (Here are the study's summary, highlights [PDF], and full report [PDF].) 'After spending a year studying how piracy and illegal counterfeiting affects the United States, the Government Accountability Office says it still doesn't know for sure.... The GAO said that most of the published information, anecdotal evidence, and records show that piracy is a drag on the US economy, tax revenue, and in some cases potentially threatens national security and public health. But the problem is, according to the GAO, the data used to quantify piracy isn't reliable.'"
Operating Systems

Researcher Releases Hardened OS "Qubes"; Xen Hits 4.0 129

Posted by timothy from the past-the-rotating-knives-yes dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher known for her work on virtualization security and low-level rootkits, has released a new open-source operating system meant to provide isolation of the OS's components for better security. The OS, called Qubes, is based on Xen, X and Linux, and is in a basic, alpha stage right now. Qubes relies on virtualization to separate applications running on the OS and also places many of the system-level components in sandboxes to prevent them from affecting each other. 'Qubes lets the user define many security domains implemented as lightweight virtual machines (VMs), or 'AppVMs.' E.g. users can have 'personal,' 'work,' 'shopping,' 'bank,' and 'random' AppVMs and can use the applications from within those VMs just like if they were executing on the local machine, but at the same time they are well isolated from each other. Qubes supports secure copy-and-paste and file sharing between the AppVMs, of course.'" Xen's also just reached 4.0; some details below.
Star Wars Prequels

Star Wars To Air As Animated Sitcom 268

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-could-make-this-stuff-up dept.
The Bastard writes "As if the Star Wars Holiday Special and Jar-Jar weren't insulting enough to fans, George Lucas has decided to turn the franchise into an animated sitcom. I have a bad feeling about this." The article says that Seth Green is involved, which either sets off your late April Fool's Day alarm, immeasurable dread, or excitement.
GUI

Making Closed Software Act Like It's Open 157

Posted by kdawson from the latter-day-screen-scrape dept.
The Installer writes "Researchers from the University of Washington have managed to add customization and accessibility options to proprietary software without ever touching the source code. Rather than alter program code, Prefab looks for the pixels associated with the blocks of code used to paint applications to a screen, grabs hold of them, and alters them according to whatever enhancements the user has chosen to apply. Any user input is then fed back to the original software, still running behind the enhanced interface."
Medicine

Science Attempts To Explain Heaven 692

Posted by kdawson from the what-gene-codes-for-the-harps dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek about the thesis that heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event, but rather something that happens in your brain as you die. The thesis is based, in part, on a growing body of research around near-death experience. According to a 2000 article by Bruce Greyson in The Lancet, between 9 and 18 percent of people who have been demonstrably near death report having had an NDE. Surveys of NDE accounts show great similarities in the details, describing: a tunnel, a light, a gate or a door, a sense of being out of the body, meeting people they know or have heard about, finding themselves in the presence of God, and then returning, changed. Scientists have theorized that NDEs occur as a kind of physiological self-defense mechanism when, in order to guard against damage during trauma, the brain releases protective chemicals that also happen to trigger intense hallucinations. This theory has gained traction after scientists realized that virtually all the features of an NDE can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a short-acting, hallucinogenic, dissociative anesthetic. 'I came out into a golden Light. I rose into the Light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the Light, which I believed to be God,' wrote one user of his experience under ketamine. 'Dante said it better,' writes Miller, 'but the vision is astonishingly the same.'"
Wikipedia

Print-On-Demand Publisher VDM Infects Amazon 190

Posted by kdawson from the scam-on-demand dept.
erich666 writes "In recent months a flood of so-called books have been appearing in Amazon's catalog. VDM Publishing's imprints Alphascript and Betascript Publishing have listed over 57,000 titles, adding at least 10,000 in the previous month alone. These books are simply collections of linked Wikipedia articles put into paperback form, at a cost of 40 cents a page or more. These books seem to be computer-generated, which explains the peculiar titles noted such as 'Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit.' Such titles do have the marketing effect of turning up in many different searches. There is debate on Wikipedia about whether their 'VDM Publishing' page should contain the words 'fraud' or 'scam.' VDM Publishing's practice of reselling Wikipedia articles appears to be legal, but is ethically questionable. Amazon customers have begun to post 1-star reviews and complain. Amazon's response to date has been, 'As a retailer, our goal is to provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover, and buy any item they might be seeking.' The words 'and pay us' were left out. Amazon carries, as a Googled guess, 2 million different book titles, so VDM Publishing is currently 1/35th of their catalog, and rapidly growing."
Space

Exotic "Electroweak" Star Predicted 68

Posted by kdawson from the reunited-at-last dept.
astroengine writes "A new type (or phase) of star has been characterized by Case Western Reserve University scientists in a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters. The 'electroweak' star is a stellar corpse too massive to be a quark star, yet too light to collapse into a black hole. It crushes and burns the quarks inside, generating an outward radiation pressure that acts against gravity. Interestingly, the interior is predicted to be a 'Big Bang factory,' forcing the electromagnetic and weak forces to collapse as one (hence 'electroweak') — a condition that hasn't been seen elsewhere in our universe since moments after the Big Bang." The article notes that the first calculations on electroweak stars pegged them as an intermediate stage on the way to a black-hole collapse, lasting at most a second. The new calculations suggest that electroweak stars could persist for millions of years.
Biotech

Magnetism Can Sway Man's Moral Compass 586

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-can-hot-chicks dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Discovery News reports that scientists have identified a region of the brain which appears to control morality and discovered that a powerful magnetic field can scramble the moral center of the brain, impairing volunteers' notion of right and wrong. 'You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior,' says Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. 'To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing.' Young and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to locate an area of the brain just above and behind the right ear known as the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ), which other studies had previously related to moral judgments. Volunteers were exposed to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for 25 minutes before reading stories involving morally questionable characters, and being asked to judge their actions. The researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm — not whether they were morally wrong in themselves. The scientists didn't permanently remove the subjects' moral sensibilities and on the scientists' seven point scale, the difference was about one point, averaging out to about a 15 percent change, 'but it's still striking to see such a change in such high level behavior as moral decision-making.' Young points out that the study was correlation; their work only links the RTJP, morality, and magnetic fields, but doesn't definitively prove that one causes another."
Games

Decrying the Excessive Emulation of Reality In Games 187

Posted by Soulskill from the plumbers-with-shrooms dept.
An editorial at GameSetWatch makes the case that game developers' relentless drive to make games more real has led to missed opportunities for creating unique fictional universes that are perhaps more interesting than our own. Quoting: "Remember when the norm for a video game was a blue hedgehog that ran fast and collected rings and emeralds? Or a plumber that took mushrooms to become large, and grabbed a flower to throw fireballs? In reality they do none of those things, but in the name of a game, they make sense, inspire wonder, and create a new universe. ... We’ve seen time and time again that the closer you try to emulate reality, the more the 'game' aspects begin to stick out. Invisible walls in Final Fantasy, or grenades spawning at your feet when you go the wrong way in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are examples of kicking the player out of that illusion of reality, and letting them know that yes, this is a game, and yes, the rules are designed to keep you in the space of this world, not the real world. In reality, as a soldier I could disobey my orders and go exploring around the other side. I could be cowardly and turn back to base. Games shouldn’t have to plan for every eventuality, of course, but it’s not so hard to create universes that are compelling but where the unusual, or even simple backtracking, is not so unfeasible."

Comment Re:Sorry kids (Score 1) 739

by guitarMan666 (#31666206) Attached to: "Install Other OS" Feature Removed From the PS3
At the risk of sounding ignorant, how does the ability to install an OS on the hard drive allow you to cheat in a PS3 game? How can that even remotely be a possibility?! I'm not asking for a how-to here just a vague idea to make me believe it's even possible. It smells like a load of crap to me, but might be a defensible reason if it can be backed up with some evidence. So far Sony has taken away both of the reasons for me to want a PS3: first the backward compatibility, now the OS installation. So looks like it'll be me and my PS2 for a while to come.
Open Source

Open Source, Open Standards Under Attack In Europe 164

Posted by Soulskill from the you-can-take-our-source-but-you'll-never-take-our-freedom dept.
Glyn Moody writes "A battle for the soul of European IT is taking place behind closed doors in Brussels. At stake is the key Digital Agenda for Europe, due to be unveiled in a month's time. David Hammerstein, ex-Member of European Parliament for the Greens, tweeted last week: 'SOS to everyone as sources confirm that Kroes is about to eliminate "open standards" policy from EU digital agenda; Kroes has been under intense lobbying pressure from Microsoft to get rid of interoperability and open source goals of EU.' This is confirmed by the French magazine PC Inpact (Google translation), which also managed to obtain a copy of the draft Digital Agenda (DOC). It's currently supportive of both open source and open standards — but for how much longer?"
Programming

Best Way To Land Entry-Level Job? 441

Posted by timothy from the pick-a-field-with-no-advancement dept.
chemicaldave writes "I'm graduating this May and have been seeking a programming position for months. It seems that the biggest hurdle to landing an interview is getting past the doorman that is HR. After reading this entry from Coding Horror describing the lack of programming candidates who can actually program, I can't help but scratch my head. I can program! (See how I put that link in?) If I can't land an interview, then even a short online evaluation of my coding skills would suffice. I just want a chance to prove myself. Alas, sending resumes to companies has rarely led to anything but an auto-confirmation email of my submission. I understand that sending resumes online is not the best method to landing an interview, but I come from a small rural school so job fairs rarely offer anything more than IT support positions let alone a programming position. It seems to me that developers are always looking for talented young programmers. We're out here looking for you too. Am I missing something?"

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