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Fans Come Together To Complete Star Wars Uncut 179

Posted by samzenpus from the in-a-backyard-far-far-away dept.
eldavojohn writes "Star Wars Uncut has taken a novel approach to remaking Star Wars IV: A New Hope. You merely sign up for a 15 second clip, film it and submit it. The trailer is now complete and I will suspect you might enjoy the high quality (and low quality) of some of the already accepted scenes. 251 scenes remain in need of claiming with 688 claimed and 291 finished. Do your part to remake one of the greatest movies by filming fifteen seconds of yourself and your friends!"
Security

EVE Bans Exploiters; Dropping 2% of Users Cuts Average CPU Usage 30% 261

Posted by Soulskill from the and-stay-out dept.
Earthquake Retrofit writes "Ars has a story about EVE Online banning thousands of accounts for real-world trading of in-game money for profit. From the article: 'Those who buy and sell ISK, the game's currency, are not only exploiting the game, but unbalancing play. That's why the company decided to go drastic: a program they called "Unholy Rage." For weeks they studied the behavior and effects these real-money traders had on the game, and then they struck. During scheduled maintenance, over 6,000 accounts were banned. [Einar Hreiðarsson, EVE's lead GM,] assures us that the methods were sound, and the bannings went off with surgical precision. ... While the number of accounts banned in the opening phase of the operation constituted around 2 percent of the total active registered accounts, the CPU per user usage was cut by a good 30 percent.' Looks like they got the right 6,000.' Further information and more graphs are available from the EVE dev blog."
The Internet

Phony Wikipedia Entry Used By Worldwide Press 391

Posted by samzenpus from the check-your-sources dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "A quote attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre was posted on wikipedia shortly after his death in March and later appeared in obituaries in mainstream media. 'One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear,' Jarre was quoted as saying. However, these words were not uttered by the Oscar-winning composer but written by Shane Fitzgerald, a final-year undergraduate student, who said he wanted to show how journalists use the internet as a primary source for their stories. Fitzgerald posted the quote on Wikipedia late at night after news of Jarre's death broke. 'I saw it on breaking news and thought if I was going to do something I should do it quickly. I knew journalists wouldn't be looking at it until the morning,' The quote had no referenced sources and was therefore taken down by moderators of Wikipedia within minutes. However, Fitzgerald put it back up a few more times until it was finally left up on the site for more than 24 hours. While he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone's death as a social experiment, he had carefully generated the quote so as not to distort or taint Jarre's life, he said. 'I didn't expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised.'"
Linux Business

He's a Mac, He's a PC, But We're Linux! 508

Posted by timothy from the those-other-people-are-blenders dept.
davidmwilliams writes "Earlier this year the Linux Foundation launched a competition for budding writers, film makers and just general Linux enthusiasts to make their own grassroots advertisement to compete with Apple's highly-successful 'I'm a Mac' series of adverts. The winner has now been announced."
Mars

Mars Winds Clean Spirit's Solar Panels Again 269

Posted by timothy from the like-mom-making-the-bed dept.
Titoxd writes "In a blast from the past, NASA reports that Spirit's solar panels have received a much-needed cleaning courtesy of the Red Planet. The report states, 'The cleaning boosts Spirit's daily energy supply by about 30 watt-hours, to about 240 watt-hours from 210 watt-hours. The rover uses about 180 watt-hours per day for basic survival and communications, so this increase roughly doubles the amount of discretionary power for activities such as driving and using instruments.'"
Cellphones

Local Police Want To Jam Wireless Signals 317

Posted by kdawson from the hope-you-like-jammin'-too dept.
The Washington Post is reporting on the growing pressure from state and local law enforcement agencies for permission to jam wireless signals the way the Secret Service and the FBI can. Officials especially want to be able to drop a no-call blanket over local prisons around the country from time to time. "...jamming remains strictly illegal for state and local agencies. Federal officials barely acknowledge that they use it inside the United States, and the few federal agencies that can jam signals usually must seek a legal waiver first. The quest to expand the technology has invigorated a debate about how widely jamming should be allowed and whether its value as a common crime-fighting strategy outweighs its downsides, including restricting the constant access to the airwaves that Americans have come to expect. ... Critics warn of another potential problem, 'friendly fire,' when one agency inadvertently jams another's access to the airwaves, posing a safety hazard in an emergency. [CTIA spokesman Joe] Farren said there are 'smarter, better and safer alternatives,' such as stopping inmates from getting smuggled cellphones in the first place or pinpointing signals from unauthorized callers."
Transportation

Flying Car Ready To Take Off 315

Posted by timothy from the fill-up-on-windshield-fluid-please dept.
ChazeFroy writes "The first flying automobile, equally at home in the sky or on the road, is scheduled to take to the air next month. If it survives its first test flight, the Terrafugia Transition, which can transform itself from a two-seater road car to a plane in 15 seconds, is expected to land in showrooms in about 18 months' time. Terrafugia claims it will be able to fly up to 500 miles on a single tank of unleaded petrol at a cruising speed of 115mph. Even at $200,000 per automobile, they have already received 40 orders."
Earth

A Sixth Region In the Magnetosphere 69

Posted by timothy from the difracting-imposed-distinctions dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "As you probably know, Earth's magnetosphere, 'the invisible bubble of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surrounds and protects the planet from the periodically lethal radiation of the solar wind,' was discovered in 1958. Until now, it was believed to comprise five regions, including the ionosphere or the Van Allen radiation belts. Now, a US research team has discovered a sixth region, called the warm plasma cloak."
Math

The End of Individual Genius? 364

Posted by Soulskill from the at-least-until-zefram-cochrane dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A recent study suggests the downfall of individual researchers, who are being rapidly replaced by enormous research groups. Quoting: '... in recent decades — especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 — the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding. And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.'"

Comment Re:perspective (Score 1) 684

by Bevilr (#25862021) Attached to: How to Deal With an Aging Brain?
I actually have the same problem - I simply can't remember lyrics. Oddly enough however I'm actually quite good at memorizing lines for plays and things of that nature. Although I know you meant it partly as a rhetorical question, I find that if you memorize meaning and not how it "sounds," it's a lot easier to remember. I know some people who can memorize songs after listening to them just once, and they memorize completely by sound, they can sing it back to me, but they don't actually know what any of it is, and if they misheard a lyric don't correct it in their recitation, even if the mistaken lyric now makes no sense what so ever.

Comment Re:Quantity Vs Quality (Score 2, Interesting) 160

by Bevilr (#25814621) Attached to: The Importance of Procedural Content Generation In Games
Also I think the procedural content in Farcry 2 managed to avoid being hideous, but as just mentioned, you could tell what was, and what wasn't. The sky did turn out nice though.

I played Oblivion extensively, and while it was very pretty when you got the huge 4GB texture packs - what was pretty was the landscape, the massive vistas, mountains and valleys. In Oblivion the farther you could see the prettier it was. Almost every random spot in the woods looked exactly like every other random spot in the woods, the only exception being the swampy area in the south, which all looked exactly the same once you got in it.

The Introversion City game is the first piece of procedurally generated content that I've seen that looks amazing. It looks like a legitimate city is being planned out before you. the final result is just like a real city's layout, both planned out, and chaotic. The cities in the tech videos reminded me of Paris.
Image

Dead Parrot Sketch Is 1,600 Years Old Screenshot-sm 276

Posted by samzenpus from the he-prefers-kipping-on-his-back dept.
laejoh writes "Monty Python's 'Dead Parrot sketch' — which featured John Cleese — is some 1,600 years old. A classic scholar has proved the point, by unearthing a Greek version of the world-famous piece. A comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius told the original version, only rather than a parrot they used a slave. It concerns a man who complains to his friend that he was sold a slave who dies in his service. His companion replies: 'When he was with me, he never did any such thing!' The joke was discovered in a collection of 265 jokes called Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which dates from the fourth century AD. Hierocles had gone to meet his maker, and Philagrius had certainly ceased to be, long before John Cleese and Michael Palin reinvented the yarn in 1969."

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