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The Best Burglar Alarm In History 137

Sportsqs writes "When Nikola Tesla got creative with transformers and driver circuits at the turn of the 20th century he probably had no idea that others would have so much fun with his concepts over a hundred years later. One such guy is an Australian named Peter who runs a website called TeslaDownUnder, which showcases all his wacky Tesla ways, or rather electrickery, as Peter calls it." Very cool stuff, I wish I would have had something like this to protect my comic books from my little brother when I was a kid.
Games

Survival-Horror Genre Going Extinct? 166

Destructoid is running an opinion piece looking at the state of the survival-horror genre in games, suggesting that the way it has developed over the past several years has been detrimental to its own future. "During the nineties, horror games were all the rage, with Resident Evil and Silent Hill using the negative aspects of other games to an advantage. While fixed camera angles, dodgy controls and clunky combat were seen as problematic in most games, the traditional survival horror took them as a positive boon. A seemingly less demanding public ate up these games with a big spoon, overlooking glaring faults in favor of videogames that could be genuinely terrifying." The Guardian's Games Blog has posted a response downplaying the decline of the genre, looking forward to Ubisoft's upcoming I Am Alive and wondering if independent game developers will pick up where major publishers have left off.

Comment mhddfs (Score 1) 487

if you want a simple, software-based quasi-raid and you're running *nix, try mhddfs - the only drawback is that it doesn't support splitting large files across multiple volumes (so it may not work for video production, depending on whether you've got a couple huge files or a bunch of smaller ones)
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Looses EU Antitrust Case

elyk writes: Microsoft finds itself once again on the losing end of an antitrust lawsuit — this time in the European Union as this court system continues to establish its authority. This decision upholds earlier rulings regarding bundling and interoperability, as well as a whopping 497 million euro ($613 million) fine. From the article:
"The European Union's Court of First Instance handed Microsoft a major defeat on Monday, slapping down the software maker's appeal in three significant areas of the historic antitrust case brought by the European Commission.In the closely watched case, which has dragged on since March 2004, the Luxembourg-based court upheld the Commission's findings that Microsoft abused its dominant position in the market."
Mozilla

Submission + - Getting embedded media from web was never so easy

ranga_the_don writes: "Ever wondered how to get that cool video from YouTube or some other streaming site and play it on your computer offline? It's easy now if you are using Firefox! A cool new Firefox extension called UnPlug does it for you

UnPlug scans web pages and tells you where media players are getting their data from, and displays it as a simple hyperlink: in most cases, you can then follow the simple download link to save the media file.
"

Feed Apple Still Can't Buy Beatles' Love (wired.com)

The long and winding road to DRM-free downloads from a major record label led this week to the door of The Beatles' label, EMI. To the disappointment of many, the deal between Apple and EMI won't include the long-awaited release of the Fab Four's catalog on the iTunes Music Store.


Feed EMI's Last-Ditch Effort: DRM-Free Music (wired.com)

In its deal with iTunes, EMI is planting a flag in the online music marketplace as the first major label to drop the DRM software restricting music copying. The company is gambling that music lovers won’t mind paying a little more - - $1.29 versus .99 - - for hassle-free, higher quality music files.


Quickies

Submission + - Labelled food can lead to 10 years longer life?

MitsuMirage writes: The Society of Chemical Industry is reporting on new research that shows isotopically labelled foods can lead to longer life spans.

From the abstract:

A method is proposed that has the potential to lessen detrimental damages caused by reactive oxygen species (ROS) to proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and other components in living cells. Typically, ROS oxidize substrates by a mechanism involving hydrogen abstraction in a rate-limiting step. The sites within these (bio)molecules susceptible to oxidation by ROS can thus be "protected " using heavier isotopes such as (2)H (D, deuterium) and (13)C (carbon-13). Ingestion of isotopically reinforced building blocks such as amino acids, lipids and components of nucleic acids and their subsequent incorporation into macromolecules would make these more stable to ROS courtesy of an isotope effect. The implications may include enhanced longevity and increased resistance to cancer and age-related diseases.

The researcher, Dr. Shchepinov, started a company, Retrotope, Inc., to commercialize the idea although isotopically labelled foods are still prohibitively expensive.

Feed Abusing DMCA Notices To Take Down Content You Don't Like (techdirt.com)

Last year, we wrote about how people were figuring out that they could abuse the DMCA to take down just about any content they don't like -- and apparently the practice is becoming more widespread. Boing Boing notes that Uri Geller has been using the DMCA to take down videos that debunk his "psychic abilities" while Robert Cringely claims that someone (he's not sure who, but it's clearly not the actual copyright holder) has issued a takedown notice of a video of Steve Jobs from Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds documentary. In both cases, it was not the actual copyright holder issuing the takedown notice -- which is illegal. But since the DMCA requires sites to take down content first and ask questions later, the content is quickly removed. This, of course, is not the intended purpose of the DMCA, but since it's apparently so effective, expect to see it happen a lot more frequently.

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