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Comment Re:or its a fine line between gritty and miserable (Score 1) 602

by wlad (#34050750) Attached to: BSG Prequel Series Caprica Canceled
Not only 14 year old goths, as it seems, 'emo' appeals to a much wider public than 'tech'. So for commercial reasons they usually try to downsize the sci-fi element and amplify the drama. Which is why you won't see a happy sci-fi series any time. It would mainly appeal to nerds like us who are excited about science, physics, technology of the future and what is possible with it :)
Space

Submission + - NASA to Search Documents for '65 UFO Incident (physorg.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "NASA has agreed to probe its documents for information regarding an object that streaked across the sky and crashed near Kecksburg, Pa., 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. This comes following a NYC journalist's (Kean) four year old lawsuit to open relevant documents up to the public. From the article, 'The agency has turned over several stacks of documents which Kean says are not responsive to the request, an argument that U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan agreed with. In March, Sullivan rejected NASA's request to throw the case out of court, resulting in negotiations that led to the agency promising last week that it will conduct a more comprehensive search.' The witness accounts fall right into the classic government/military cover up style descriptions."
Communications

Submission + - RIAA Launches Attack on Usenet (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "The major record labels have launched a copyright infringement lawsuit against Usenet.com. The complaint filed in the federal District Court in New York accuses Usenet.com of providing access to millions of copyright infringing files and slams it for touting its service as a "haven for those seeking pirated content" Usenet.com has been putting up a fight against the RIAA, refusing to block access to alleged 'copyright infringing groups' Game On"
Patents

Submission + - LOTR Actor Slays Amazon 1-Click Patent

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "A reexam initiated by Lord of the Rings motion capture performer Peter Calveley's do-it-yourself legal effort has prompted the USPTO to reject 21 of the 26 Amazon 1-Click Patent claims. A USPTO Examiner found a 1995 Newsweek article on Digicash submitted by Calveley sufficient to quash a number of the claims, while many others were rejected in light of an e-shopping patent flagged by Calveley. Interestingly, additional claims were rejected by the Examiner in light of a TV remote control patent that was deemed to be unsuitable 1-Click prior art (for not being specific to the Web) in a contest run by the Tim O'Reilly and Jeff Bezos-bankrolled BountyQuest (Amazon last year testified to Congress that the contest failed to find prior art for Bezos' patent). Unfortunately, the action is non-final, so Amazon's high-priced law firm will get another chance to crush Calveley's PayPal-financed effort."
Graphics

Submission + - GIMPShop Review: GIMP Made Friendly (osweekly.com)

Submitted by
LNXPHreak
LNXPHreak writes: "OSWeekly.com has reviewed GIMPShop, an add-on to GIMP, the ever popular Photoshop replacement for Linux. The review concludes, "What's really cool is that the author of this GIMP variation also seems to have removed usability errors from the Adobe way of doing things as well. Same features as before, yet with an improved naming scheme, I can honestly say that this would have a much better chance of turning a Photoshop user than GIMP ever had. To reiterate as clearly as possible, the 'fixes' seen with GIMPShop are cosmetic and relate to the application's layout, not GIMP's fantastic feature set."
Space

Submission + - "All Quiet Alert" issued for the sun

Submitted by
radioweather
radioweather writes: "The phrase sounds like an oxymoron, and maybe it is, but the sun is extremely quiet right now, so much in fact that the Solar Influences Data Center in Belgium has issued an unusual "All quiet alert" on October 5th.

Since then, the sunspot number has remained at zero. Because solar cycle 24 has not yet started. There are signs that the sun's activity is slowing. The solar wind has been decreasing in speed, and this is yet another indicator of a slowing in the suns magnetic dynamo. There is talk of an extended solar minimum occurring.

There are a number of theories and a couple of dozen predictions about the intensity solar cycle 24 which has yet to start. One paper by Penn & Livingstonin 2006 concludes: "If [trends] continue to decrease at the current rate then the number of sunspots in the next solar cycle (cycle 24) would be reduced by roughly half, and there would be very few sunspots visible on the disk during cycle 25."

We'll know more in about six months what the sun decides to do for cycle 24."
Security

Submission + - The Vulnerable State of Security With Web Apps (osweekly.com)

Submitted by anand
anand writes: OSWeekly.com's Matt Hartley tackles security in his latest column for Web apps. He writes: "With most users busy trying to secure their individual machines from execution of malicious code, it feels like most of the public have forgotten about the threat of sloppy Web applications. These days, we have become entirely too complacent with the websites we visit that run all of our applications through our Web browsers. It's just too easy to overlook the threat of buffer overflow attacks, cross site scripts being run and in some cases, URL hijacking, be it a human error and not really an exploit.
Microsoft

Submission + - Out of memory in Vista while... copying files? (zdnet.com)

Submitted by ta bu shi da yu
ta bu shi da yu writes: It appears that, incredibly, Vista often runs out of memory while copying files. ZDNet is reporting that not only does it run out of memory after copying 16,400+ files, but "often there is little indication that file copy operations haven't completed correctly". After several billion dollars spent developing Vista, surely Microsoft could get their OS to copy files properly?
Security

Submission + - Storm Worm Botnet Partitions for Sale (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Bowling for cents
Bowling for cents writes: There is evidence that the massive Storm Worm botnet is being broken up into smaller networks, a surefire sign that the CPU power is up for sale to spammers and denial-of-service attackers. The latest variants of Storm are now using a 40-byte key to encrypt their Overnet/eDonkey peer-to-peer traffic, meaning that each node will only be able to communicate with nodes that use the same key. This effectively allows the Storm author to segment the Storm botnet into smaller networks. This could be a precursor to selling Storm to other spammers, as an end-to-end spam botnet system, complete with fast-flux DNS and hosting capabilities.
Enlightenment

Submission + - Is a perfect object possible?

Submitted by rhade
rhade writes: I know this isnt along the conditions of 'stuph that matters' i'm just curious what the community thinks. A cube is described as a 6 sided 3 dimensional objects where all sides are the same(length) now this works well in paper, but could an object actually be created? You could make one with a degree of accuracy, metres to the closest centimetre, centimetre to the closes millimiter, and so on. This would follow on all the way down to the atomic scale, could you make a cube that is x atoms by x atoms by x atoms? But even then as they move around the shape would not be static. Your thoughts?

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