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Medicine

Sarcasm Useful For Detecting Dementia 389

Posted by CmdrTaco from the yeah-that'll-work dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but Australian scientists are using it to diagnose dementia, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of New South Wales, found that patients under the age of 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common form of dementia, cannot detect when someone is being sarcastic."
Cellphones

(Useful) Stupid BlackBerry Tricks? 238

Posted by kdawson from the maze-of-twisty-stupid-tricks dept.
Wolfger writes "Continuing the recent (useful) stupid theme: I've recently become a BlackBerry user, and I'm in love with the obvious(?) tricks, such as installing MidpSSH to access my home box remotely. But I'd like to know what more experienced Crackberry addicts can share."
The Military

40 Years Ago, the US Lost a Nuclear Bomb 470

Posted by kdawson from the chrome-dome-down dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "A BBC investigation has found that in 1968 the US abandoned a nuclear weapon beneath the ice in northern Greenland after a nuclear-armed B52 crashed on the ice a few miles from Thule Air Base. The Stratofortress disintegrated on impact with the sea ice and parts of it began to melt through to the fjord below. The high explosives surrounding the four nuclear weapons on board detonated without setting off the nuclear devices, which had not been armed by the crew. The Pentagon maintained that all four weapons had been 'destroyed' and while technically true, investigators piecing together fragments from the crash could only account for three of the weapons. Investigators found that 'something melted through ice such as burning primary or secondary.' A subsequent search by a US submarine was beset by technical problems and, as winter encroached and the ice began to freeze over, the search was abandoned. 'There was disappointment in what you might call a failure to return all of the components,' said a former nuclear weapons designer at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory. 'It would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn't find them.'"
The Internet

China Defines Internet Addiction 201

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the one-more-addiction-to-the-list dept.
narramissic writes "Three years after the first clinic dedicated to Internet addiction opened in Beijing, Chinese doctors have now officially defined it as an ailment. Those afflicted with this ailment spend six or more hours a day online and exhibit at least one of the following symptoms: difficulty sleeping or concentrating, yearning to be online, irritation, and mental or physical distress. Do you meet the criteria? You're in good company: About 10 percent of China's 253 million Internet users exhibit some form of addiction to the medium, and 70 percent of those people are young men, an official Xinhua News Agency report said."
PC Games (Games)

99.8% of Gamers Don't Care About DRM, Says EA 554

Posted by CmdrTaco from the they-also-don't-understand-it dept.
arcticstoat writes "If you thought that EA might have been humbled by the massive Internet backlash against its use of SecuROM in its recent games, then you'd be wrong. Speaking at the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media and Money Conference, EA's CEO John Riccitiello claimed that the whole issue had been blown out of all proportion. 'We implemented a form of DRM and it's something that 99.8 per cent of users wouldn't notice,' claimed Riccitiello, 'but for the other 0.2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it.'"

Comment Re:Before everyone posts the 'so obvious' facts... (Score 1) 733

by kriss (#24704663) Attached to: Firefox SSL-Certificate Debate Rages On

Call me an elitist, but I don't care much about the hundreds of millions of consumer grade appliances sitting on a home user network somewhere. If you use them for something important and they can't even swallow a decent SSL cert for the web frontend - well sorry, but you bought the wrong device. It's definitely not worth diluting PKI over that. I'll be the first one to agree that PKI is not perfect, but it'll be closer to worthless every time JoeUser learns just to click warnings away.

The FF3 warnings are a good thing.
Security

Submission + - Free certificates lacking in trust

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CAcert, the free/open Certificate Authority covered a few months back, might not be such a tempting alternative after all given some shoddy coding standards. What makes this a bit more interesting is that Mandriva, CentOS, Debian, Knoppix, Gentoo and OpenBSD(!) distribute the root certificate for this CA by default.
Privacy

Submission + - 80 Gbps Deep Packet Inspection Hardware announced (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Bittorrent take note: Procera Networks will announce today a new standard in deep packet inspection (DPI) gear: an 80Gbps monster called the PacketLogic PL10000 that is targeted at tier-1 network operators. At up to $800,000 a unit, these aren't cheap, but when you want to throttle, inspect, and shape traffic in real-time on a major network, this is now the fastest thing on the market (and by a large margin). The PL10000 can handle up to 5 million subscribers and can track 48 million real-time data flows. The PL10000 can do this at 80Gbps with 96 percent accuracy. Looks like more money being wasted by ISPs that could have been used for boosting the network.
Microsoft

Submission + - Its official! Denmark votes NO to OOXML (groklaw.net)

Submitted by SplatMan_DK
SplatMan_DK writes: According to an official press release (Danish only) from Dansk Standard, it is now official: Denmark will vote NO (with comments) to approving Microsoft Open Office XML (OOXML) as an ISO standard at this time. Here is a translation from Groklaw:

Dansk Standard (the Danish Standard's institute) has on behalf of Denmark voted "No with Comments" to the proposed standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500 OOXML. This means, that DS will cooperate with the standards committee to approve Office Open XML as a ISO/IEC standard, if certain problems is addressed.
User Journal

Journal SPAM: Will Bush Cancel The 2008 Election? 10

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius
Published on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

Will Bush Cancel The 2008 Election?

by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis

It is time to think about the unthinkable.

The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election.
Robotics

Submission + - First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Robots have been roaming Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time — the first time in any warzone — the 'bots are carrying guns. The SWORDS robots, armed with M249 machine guns, "haven't fired their weapons yet," an Army official says. "But that'll be happening soon." The machines have actually been ready to a while, but safety concerns kept 'em off the battlefield. Now, the robots have kill switches, so "now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy," according to the Army. I feel safer already.
Security

Submission + - Russian Subs Seek Glory at North Pole (forbes.com)

Submitted by PatPending
PatPending writes: MOSCOW — Two small manned Russian submarines completed a voyage of 2 1/2 miles to the Arctic shelf below the North Pole Thursday, planting a titanium capsule on the Arctic Ocean floor to symbolically claim what could be vast energy reserves beneath the seabed. The dive was part serious scientific expedition and part political theater. But it could mark the start of a fierce legal scramble for control of the sea bed among nations that border the Arctic, including Russia, the U.S., Canada, Norway and Denmark, through its territory Greenland.
Editorial

Submission + - But Mom! The other 61-year-olds get an allowance! (reuters.com)

Submitted by
deweycheetham
deweycheetham writes: "ROME (Reuters) — A Sicilian mother took away her 61-year-old son's house keys, cut off his allowance and hauled him to the police station because he stayed out late. http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idU SL0288587220070802 The article goes on to say "Most Italian men still live at home late into their 30s, enjoying their "mamma's" cooking, washing and ironing.". Well Pack my bags, I am moving to Italy."

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