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Music

Facebook Campaign Decides UK Christmas Music Charts 362

Posted by kdawson from the rage-against-the-commercialization dept.
uglyduckling writes "A grassroots Facebook campaign has pushed the 1990s Rage Against the Machine song 'Killing in the Name Of' to the top of the British music charts for Christmas. The campaign was planned to prevent the X-Factor winner from charting Christmas number one, as has been the case for the past four years. It was supposedly a kick against the commercialism of Christmas and commercial dominance in the music scene, although Rage and the X-Factor winner Joe McElderry were actually signed to the same label. Despite this minor detail, it's interesting to note that this is the first song to reach the number one spot through downloads alone in the UK, and is a testament to the organizational power of social networking sites like Facebook. The Facebook group also asked for donations to charity, and has raised £70,000 for the homeless charity Shelter."
The Military

$26 of Software Defeats American Military 534

Posted by CmdrTaco from the cheap-at-twice-the-price dept.
reporter writes "A computer program that can be easily purchased for $25.95 off the Internet can read and store the data transmitted on an unsecured channel by an unmanned drone. Drones are crucial to American military operations, for these aerial vehicles enable Washington to conduct war with a reduced number of soldiers. '... the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under US surveillance.'"
Idle

Hand Written Clock Screenshot-sm 86

Posted by samzenpus from the up-to-the-minute dept.
a3buster writes "This clock does not actually have a man inside, but a flatscreen that plays a 24-hour loop of this video by the artist watching his own clock somewhere and painstakingly erasing and re-writing each minute. This video was taken at Design Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach 2009."
Image

NASA Tests Flying Airbag Screenshot-sm 118

Posted by samzenpus from the drop-the-cloud-anchor dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA is looking to reduce the deadly impact of helicopter crashes on their pilots and passengers with what the agency calls a high-tech honeycomb airbag known as a deployable energy absorber. So in order to test out its technology NASA dropped a small helicopter from a height of 35 feet to see whether its deployable energy absorber, made up of an expandable honeycomb cushion, could handle the stress. The test crash hit the ground at about 54MPH at a 33 degree angle, what NASA called a relatively severe helicopter crash."
Portables

Dell Rugged Laptops Not Quite Tough Enough 225

Posted by timothy from the one-good-hit dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Trusted Reviews has put the new Dell XFR rugged laptop through the grinder and it hasn't fared as well as expected. Considering that these guys drove a car over a Panasonic Toughbook, they went pretty easy on the Dell, but it still couldn't take the punishment. It looks like Dell still has a way to go to steal the ball from Panasonic when it comes to all terrain computing."

Comment Re:No big deal (Score 1) 207

by feargal (#29742355) Attached to: Entire<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.SE TLD Drops Off the Internet

Sorry, that's incorrect, name-based virtual hosts pose no problem to this.

The webserver determines which virtual host is being requested by examining the Host: field in the http header. This happens well after the tcp session has been established, and that happens after the ip address has been determined.

When the browser looks for domain.example, it'll ask whatever resolver it uses to find an ip address to use. Once it has that ip address, it connects to it, and only then tells the webserver which host it wants. There is nothing to prevent the browser from using it's own cached version of the ip address and sucessfully making a connection.

Comment Re:Raymond E. Feist's Magician (Score 1) 1021

by feargal (#29654111) Attached to: What Belongs In a High School Sci-Fi/Fantasy Lit Class?

Our state exams at age 15 had an essay option for a book of your own choosing, and I did that with Magician, mostly because I'd already read it a half dozen times by then. The text is very accessible, and there's plenty of themes to work with. As noted, the language is relatively simplistic, so as a literary piece of work it's nothing special, but it deals with many common fantasy themes. The length is probably the main negative point. Also of interest, and possibly more appealing to both sexes would be his Daughter of the Empire series, which runs more or less concurrently with Magician, but is set on the world of the agressors in Magician.
Programming

First Hot-Ice Computer Created 120

Posted by timothy from the can-we-run-a-vm-on-it? dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Sodium acetate is the stuff inside chemical handwarmers that emits heat when it crystalizes after you press that little metal widget. That's why it is known as hot ice. Now a computer scientist in the UK has created a computer made entirely out of hot ice. The device processes information by exploiting the movement and interaction of wavefronts of crystallisation as they move through the material. The data input is in the form of metal wires that trigger crystal nucleation. The output works by reading off the direction of the moving wavefronts and the edges of the resulting crystals. The researcher has created AND and OR gates and solved a few problems such as finding the shortest path through mazes. There are even a few videos of the computer in action. The resulting computer is far from perfect, however. The data readout sometimes gives no solution and at other times gives circular results, the hot ice equivalent of a BSOD."
Bug

Apple Faces Inquiries In the EU On iPhone Accidents 174

Posted by kdawson from the or-are-you-just-glad-to-see-me dept.
o'reor writes "As more cases of iPhone screen explosions emerge in the news on this side of the pond, Apple is now facing official inquiries and lawsuits in France. This situation has forced Apple finally to break silence and acknowledge the incidents: 'We are aware of these reports and we are waiting to receive the iPhones from the customers. Until we have the full details, we don't have anything further to add.' Following those reports, the European Commission had already decided last week to step in, while Apple tried to dismiss the problem as 'isolated incidents.' Meanwhile, iPhone explosion-related sites are now popping up on the Internet, releasing games such as iPop to chill out and relax on the subject, but also giving users advice on preventing iPhone accidents, or detecting imminent explosions."
Medicine

Bioreactors Engineer Tissue To Mend Heart Damage 46

Posted by samzenpus from the make-yourself-better dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Heart attacks usually cause irreversible damage to heart muscle and, because cells lost from the heart do not grow back naturally, leave the organ in a weakened and vulnerable state that may cause another serious condition — called heart failure — if the victim survives. Now a team of scientists led by Tal Dvir from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva has developed a tissue-engineering technique, using the body as a 'bioreactor,' to create a 'patch' made from heart muscle that can be used to fix scarring left over from a heart attack. First, a biodegradable 'scaffold' is seeded with immature cells taken from the hearts of newborn rats. For 48 hours, the scaffold is exposed to a cocktail of growth-promoting chemicals in the laboratory and is then transplanted into a rat's abdomen where it develops a network of blood vessels and muscle fibers. After seven days the patch is removed and grafted onto the animal's heart. A month later the patch has completely integrated itself into the heart, synchronizing its 'beat' with that of the surrounding tissue. 'Using the body as a bioreactor to engineer cardiac tissue with stable and functional blood vessel networks represents a significant improvement in cardiac patch performance over ex vivo (outside the body) methods currently used for patch production,' write the authors. The technique is also being developed for livers and bladders."
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Achron — an RTS With Time Travel 141

Posted by Soulskill from the flux-capacitor-not-required dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As much as I'm looking forward to StarCraft 2, there's a new RTS gaming tech that has me even more enthused. The Escapist Magazine has posted interviews and footage of the upcoming 'meta-time strategy game' Achron, which was announced at GDC earlier this year. It's a multiplayer RTS where you can send things through time. The official site has some gameplay footage as well, and it looks like their tech is useful outside of gaming."
The Internet

Wikipedia To Require Editing Approval 453

Posted by kdawson from the knock-knock-who's-there-anonymous dept.
The NY Times reports on an epochal move by Wikipedia — within weeks, the formerly freewheeling encyclopedia will begin requiring editor approval for all edits to articles about living people. "The new feature, called 'flagged revisions,' will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia's servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version. ... The new editing procedures... have been applied to the entire German-language version of Wikipedia during the last year... Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia's contributors into two classes — experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else — altering Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries."

Comment Re:At the Risk of Sounding Like an Apologist (Score 1) 832

by feargal (#29144539) Attached to: Poor Design Choices In the Star Wars Universe

The storm trooper uniforms are stupid, kind of remind me of French Legionnaire uniforms that always made me laugh when I saw someone dressed like that in the desert. The red flags on your shoulders make you stick out like a sore thumb regardless of where you are.

You have, of course, realised that that uniform is for ceremonial purposes, and not the battledress used in actual combat situations?

Here's an example of the not in dress uniform:

http://www.legion-2reg.com/modules_media/photo/2_5_02052009_232705.jpg

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