Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Ars: Final Hobbit Movie is 'Soulless End' to 'Flawed' Trilogy (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The final chapter to Peter Jackson's series of films based on The Hobbit debuted last week, and the reviews haven't been kind. Ars Technica just posted theirs, and it highlights all the problems with Battle of the Five Armies, a two hour and twenty-four minute film based on only 72 pages of the book. Quoting: "The battles in Battle of the Five Armies are deadly boring, bereft of suspense, excessively padded, and predictable to the point of being contemptuous of the audience. Suspense is attempted mostly by a series of last-minute saves and switches. ... There are other problems. Everyone in this movie takes themselves way too seriously, which makes them even harder to sympathize with. Peter Jackson leans way too hard on voice modulation to make characters seem menacing or powerful. The movie's tone is still way out of step with the book's tone. ... There's one big thing that doomed these movies from the outset—the fiscally smart but artistically bankrupt decision to make a single, shortish children's novel into three feature-length prequel films." Other review titles: "Peter Jackson Must Be Stopped," "The Phantom Menace of Middle Earth," and "Lots of fighting, not much hobbit."

Submission + - Thunderbolt rootkit vector

Submitted by Holi
Holi writes: Attackers can infect MacBook computers with highly persistent boot rootkits by connecting malicious devices to them over the Thunderbolt interface.

The attack, dubbed Thunderstrike, installs malicious code in a MacBook’s boot ROM (read-only memory), which is stored in a chip on the motherboard. It was devised by a security researcher named Trammell Hudson based on a two-year old vulnerability and will be demonstrated next week at the 31st Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg.

More at PCWorld

Submission + - Paquete Semanal (Weekly Packet) (theguardian.com)

Submitted by FarnsworthG
FarnsworthG writes: Every morning, Teresita Rodriguez ferries external hard drives back and forth across Havana, using her feet to carry out the role that cables and wi-fi perform in other countries with less-restricted access to the world wide web.
Her job is both high-tech and extraordinarily simple. At one end, she sits and waits for a couple hours in the front room of the home of an information peddler, while he copies the latest terabyte-sized package of global films, TV dramas, comedies, magazines, applications and anti-virus software to her hard drive via a USB cable. She then takes those digital files to the home of her employer so he can download it and sell it on to his customers, many of whom will in turn charge their friends and neighbours for a copy.

Submission + - Three-hundred-million-year-old fossil fish still has traces of eye tissue (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Researchers have unearthed a fossil fish so well preserved, it still has traces of eye tissues. What’s more, these fossil tissues reveal that the 300-million-year-old fish called Acanthodes bridgei, like its living relatives, possessed two types of photoreceptors called rods and cones—cells that make vision possible. This is the first time that mineralized rods and cones have been found conserved in a vertebrate fossil. The discovery of cones, which help the eye see colors, is suggestive of the presence of color vision in fish for at least 300 million years.

Submission + - US will no longer prosecute medical marijuana users in legal states (latimes.com) 1

Submitted by melchoir55
melchoir55 writes: The LA times is reporting that Congress has ended the federal government's prohibition on medical marijuana, in states where that behavior is legal. Though the Obama administration already asserted it would not prosecute such offenses, there was the possibility that the next administration would have a different opinion. This position is now codified in law.

Submission + - Where does the Solar System come from? 1

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: There's a cosmic story behind all the physical phenomena we observe, and an origin story to where every physical thing comes from. In episode 2 of a new series, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel takes us behind the scenes of where our Solar System comes from. Five minutes that's definitely worth watching.

Submission + - Ericsson: 90% Of World's Population To Own A Smartphone By 2020 (gizmorati.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ericsson Mobility Report, the detailed update on mobile trends leveraging big data from live networks worldwide has recently released its latest edition. Mobile research prospects for future indicate that 90 percent of World’s population will have a mobile phone by 2020.

Submission + - A Mysterious Twitter Account Is Leaking Morocco's Secrets

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: For the past three months, an anonymous Twitter account has been leaking classified Moroccan diplomatic documents, much to the dismay of the African country's government.

“Le Makhzen,” or @chris_coleman24, is referred to routinely in regional press as "Morocco’s Snowden," in reference to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, and is commonly compared to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. The account began disseminating classified documents and correspondence from the government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and General Directorate for Studies and Documents early in October this year. Some of the "leaks," however, reportedly include fabricated misinformation.

Submission + - Brain shield brings neural network to the Arduino (indiegogo.com)

Submitted by Paul Bristow
Paul Bristow writes: The Arduino has done a fantastic job in making things react, move and blink. Now http://neuromorthings.com/ are making the Arduino think as well. They're running an Indiegogo campaign to produce the Braincard, a neural network shield for Arduino that incorporates a CM1K 1024-node neural network chip. One variant includes a camera so that the Arduino will be able to do real-time image recognition. Oh, and they built in a stacking mechanism to you can expand to 9000+ neurons.

You could use it to teach a robot to read, or count the number of beers in a room, or get a drone to chase frisbees, or make a beer fridge that only opens for you and your buddies. The technology has been around for a while, but the scientists have only just realised that the maker movement could do some really cool things with this. The same board works with Raspberry Pi and PMOD sensors too.

Any ideas what you would make?

Slashdot Top Deals

HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!

Close