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Comment Grown in displays (Score 1) 90

by SuperSlug (#36424442) Attached to: Biological Lasers

Sounds like there may be a day when you will be able to get your cell phone display tattooed on your hand. Not clear
how they would incorporate the speaker, mic and camera... In addition, laser beam eyes would be cool at night.

Comment Re:So don't worry about it (Score 1) 173

by SuperSlug (#35654452) Attached to: Ridiculous Software Patents: a Developer's Nemesis

I tend to make the assumption that if it's about some silly law(-suit), patent or other silly legalese problem, then the poster resides in the US of A. else { Europe }. Occasionally I get a false positive, but then nothing of value was lost at that.

Hey don't forget about Canada we are not with the USofAs crazy patent system. Canada doesn't allow software patents either. I'm not sure why more American software companies haven't closed up shop in the US and moved to more friendly patent free climes...
Piracy

Call of Duty: Black Ops the Most Pirated Game of the Year 5

Posted by Soulskill from the five-button-discount dept.
Torrentfreak reports that after calculating download frequency for pirated copies of popular video games, Call of Duty: Black Ops has won the dubious honor of being the most pirated game of 2010. The PC version of the game was torrented roughly 4,270,000 times, and the Xbox 360 version was downloaded an additional 930,000 times. (The most pirated Wii game was Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Dante's Inferno somehow managed to accrue the most downloads of Xbox 360 games.) Fortunately for Activision, the game has still made over $1 billion in sales, and its 20,000,000+ players have racked up over 600,000,000 man-hours of play time since the game's launch in early November.

Comment Re:Nicely twisted summary (Score 1) 286

by SuperSlug (#34047652) Attached to: Microsoft Charging Royalties For Linux

Interesting, does anybody know of a map of the world that shows which countries actually allow software patents? It can't be that many.
I know that in Canada, Europe, China and New Zealand software is not patentable. I think besides the US, a few South American
countries and South Korea software patents are not allowed.
Bug

The Story of a Simple and Dangerous OS X Kernel Bug 230

Posted by timothy from the chink-in-the-armor dept.
RazvanM writes "At the beginning of this month the Mac OS X 10.5.8 closed a kernel vulnerability that lasted more than 4 years, covering all the 10.4 and (almost all) 10.5 Mac OS X releases. This article presents some twitter-size programs that trigger the bug. The mechanics are so simple that can be easily explained to anybody possessing some minimal knowledge about how operating systems works. Beside being a good educational example this is also a scary proof that very mature code can still be vulnerable in rather unsophisticated ways."
Medicine

Why Doctors Hate Science 1064

Posted by kdawson from the comparative-effectiveness-research dept.
theodp writes "A 2004 study found some 10 million women lacking a cervix were still getting Pap tests. Only problem is, a Pap test screens for cervical cancer — no cervix, no cancer. With this tale, Newsweek's Sharon Begley makes her case for comparative-effectiveness research (CER), which is receiving $1 billion under the stimulus bill for studies to determine which treatments, including drugs, are more medically sound and cost-effective than others for a given ailment. Physicians, Begley says, must stop treatments that are rooted more in local medical culture than in medical science, embrace practices that have been shown scientifically to be superior to others, and ignore critics who paint CER as government control of doctors' decision-making."
Science

Science's Alternative To an Intelligent Creator 683

Posted by kdawson from the theory-of-anything dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Discover magazine has an interesting article on the multiverse theory — a synthesis of string theory and the anthropic principle that explains why our universe seems perfectly tailored for life without invoking an intelligent creator. Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. While most of those universes are barren, some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life. The idea that the universe was made just for us — known as the anthropic principle — debuted in 1973 when Brandon Carter proposed that a purely random assortment of laws would have left the universe dead and dark, and that life limits the values that physical constants can have. The anthropic principle languished on the fringes of science for years, but in 2000, new theoretical work threatened to unravel string theory when researchers calculated that the basic equations of string theory have an astronomical number of different possible solutions, perhaps as many as 101,000, with each solution representing a unique way to describe the universe. The latest iteration of string theory provides a natural explanation for the anthropic principle. If there are vast numbers of other universes, all with different properties, at least one of them ought to have the right combination of conditions to bring forth stars, planets, and living things." So far xkcd is simulating just one single universe.
Microsoft

Microsoft, Blizzard Crack Down On Piracy, Cheating 150

Posted by Soulskill from the no-means-no dept.
Microsoft has confirmed that they've been wielding the banhammer lately over modifications to the Xbox 360 which allow players to run pirated games. Xbox Live's Major Nelson said the action would also void the warranty on the offending console, and that Microsoft will "continue to employ and bolster anti-piracy security measures to counter piracy in the gaming industry and improve security in the Xbox LIVE community." Meanwhile, Blizzard dealt with 350,000 of their own problem users on Battle.net, saying simply that they wouldn't tolerate cheating. This is likely one of many steps to clean up the system before it gets revamped for use with StarCraft II.

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