Slashdot

CWmike writes "More than one in every three new PCs is downgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP, either at the factory or by the buyer, said performance and metrics researcher Devil Mountain Software, which operates a community-based testing network. 'The 35% is only an estimate, but it shows a trend within our own user base,' Craig Barth, the company's CTO, said. 'People are taking advantage of Vista's downgrade rights.' Last year, Devil Mountain benchmarked Vista and XP performance using other performance-testing tools and concluded that XP was much faster. Barth said things haven't changed since then. 'Everything I've seen clearly shows me that Vista is an OS that should never have left the barn.'"

A commonplace of cosmologists who argue the anthropic principle is the assumption that if any or a few of the constants of nature took on an even slightly different value, life could not have evolved — perhaps even stars and galaxies would not form. Science News reports on a new calculation showing that, to the contrary, star formation could happen in up to one-quarter of universes with different values of three important constants. "In fact, all universes can support the existence of stars, provided that the definition of star is interpreted broadly," said the researcher, Fred Adams. "...calculations suggest that, contrary to some previous claims, stars are not only common in our cosmos but are also ablaze in myriad other universes, where the laws of physics may be drastically different... Had Adams found that the range of parameters that allowed for stars was very small, that would have suggested that the laws of physics in our universe have been 'fine-tuned' to allow for star formation... Instead, Adams' study shows that our universe doesn't seem particularly special in that regard."

Bob Hearn writes "I was in attendance at the US Go Congress match yesterday where history was made: the go program MoGo, running on an 800-core supercomputer, beat 8-dan professional go player Myungwan Kim in a 9-stone handicap game. Most in the audience were shocked at the computer's performance; it was naturally assumed that the computer would be slaughtered, as usual. Go is often seen as the last bastion of human superiority over computers in the domain of board games. But if Moore's law continues to hold up, today's result suggests that the days of human superiority may be numbered." Read below for more details in Bob's account of the match.

An anonymous reader writes "Stephen Spoonamore, founder of IT security firm Cybrinth and former advisor to John McCain, claims he has new evidence of election tampering by Diebold in the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial and senate races. A whistleblower gave Spoonamore a patch that was applied to Diebold machines in person by the Diebold CEO. Spoonamore confirmed that the patch did not correct the clock problem it supposedly addressed, but contained two parallel programs. Without access to the hardware, he could not learn more. He reported his findings to the Justice Department, which has not acted."

DieNadel writes to share that naturally occurring proteins called "zinc fingers" are being used in a new approach to AIDS treatment. Using modified T-Cells with the zinc fingers, researchers at the Pennsylvania School of Medicine have shown a reduction in viral load in mice. "'By inducing mutations in the CCR5 gene using zinc finger proteins, we've reduced the expression of CCR5 surface proteins on T cells, which is necessary for the AIDS virus to enter these immune system cells,' explains first author Elena Perez, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Penn. 'This approach stops the AIDS virus from entering the T cells because it now has an introduced error into the CCR5 gene.'"

Ian Lamont writes "Anti-spam service Knujon has released reports highlighting how certain registrars in the US and abroad have consistently failed to live up to certain WHOIS-related obligations under ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) — specifically, the requirement that people or company registering domains provide valid contact information. Now the firm is requesting that ICANN shut down the worst alleged offender, Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software. According to Knujon, none of the WHOIS records in a sample of 11,000 alleged spam sites registered through Xinnet and reported by Knujon to ICANN's Whois Data Problem Report System were corrected in a six-month period ending in May 2008 — and the Chinese registrar continues to register about 100 spam sites per day. In many cases, says the Knujon document (PDF), Xinnet does not have 'any Whois record data for review while the sites are still active' and the spam sites further promote 'seal abuse' by posting bogus BBB, Verisign, and other trusted industry seals. ICANN says it is investigating. ICANN has just posted a draft revised RAA that is open for public comment until August 4. However, the wording of Section 3.7.8, governing registrars' obligations to check and correct domain owners' contact information, hasn't changed."

Ponca City, We Love You sends news of a study by Colorado State University psychologist William Szlemko that recorded whether people had added seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos, or plastic dashboard toys to their cars. Szlemko found a link between road rage and the number of personalized items on or in people's vehicles. "The number of territory markers predicted road rage better than vehicle value, condition, or any of the things that we normally associate with aggressive driving,' says Szlemko. What's more, only the number of bumper stickers, and not their content, predicted road rage... Szlemko suggests that this territoriality may encourage road rage because drivers are simultaneously in a private space (their car) and a public one (the road). 'We think they are forgetting that the public road is not theirs, and are exhibiting territorial behavior that normally would only be acceptable in personal space,' the researcher says.

Btarlinian writes "GLAST (the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope) was launched Wednesday at 1605 GMT. GLAST was built in a rather interesting manner, in that much of the work was funded by the Department of Energy. In fact, the main instrument on GLAST, the Large Area Telescope was assembled at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. It can detect gamma rays at energies between 20 MeV and 300 GeV. Researchers will use GLAST to study some of the most massive and energetic objects known to science."

An editor for the Telegraph, Roger Highfield, recently volunteered to allow a UK researcher to shut off the speech center of his brain with a high-powered magnetic pulse. Regular speech is controlled by a section of the brain called Broca's area. Once the precise location is determined in the subject, a magnetic pulse can temporarily disrupt speech without impairing other cognitive functions. The link contains a video in which you can watch Highfield stutter and twitch while attempting to recite a nursery rhyme. A later test shows that he's able to sing the rhyme without difficulty, since singing is controlled in a different part of the brain (as you may remember from Scott Adams' speech disorder). Researchers believe that the ability to stimulate or quell activity in specific areas of the brain may help in treating conditions like epilepsy and migraine headaches.

Dr. Eggman writes "Oscar Pistorius, a 21-year-old South African double-amputee sprinter, has won his appeal filed with the Court of Arbitration for Sport. This overturns a ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations, and allows Mr. Pistorius the chance to compete against other able-bodied athletes for a chance at a place on the South African team for the Beijing Olympics. He currently holds the 400-meter Paralympic world sprinting record, but must improve on his time by 1.01 seconds to meet the Olympic qualification standard. However, even if Pistorius fails to get the qualifying time, South African selectors could add Oscar to the Olympic 1,600-meter relay squad."

opencity writes "The Register reports that the (perhaps inevitable) robot rebellion has been avoided ... for now. 'Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.' Gizmodo also has a good photo."

seattle-pk writes "Males are apparently clueless when it comes to interpreting sexual intent from females, according to a recent study (PDF) from Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Men were found commonly to perceive more sexual intent in women's behavior than women were intending to convey. (A campus survey showed that 68% of college females had an experience where a male mistook signs of friendliness for affection.) However, the study also shows that men were quite likely to misperceive sexual interest as friendliness. 'Rather than seeing the world through sex-colored glasses, men seemed just to have blurry vision of sorts, overall,' according to the article. If you're a male who ever mistook the meaning of a barista's smile, looks like you're not alone."

holy_calamity writes "Researchers at RPI are testing the effects of putting blue LEDs inside cars to keep drivers alert. People driving through the night are much more likely to cause accidents because our circadian rhythms just want to sleep — blue light at around 450nm wavelength can fool them into thinking it's morning and keep them awake."

Stony Stevenson writes "A day after it was released for public download, Windows Vista SP1 is drawing barbs from some computer users who say the software wrecked their systems. 'I downloaded it via Windows Update, and got a bluescreen on the third part of the update,' wrote 'Iggy33' in a comment posted Wednesday on Microsoft's Vista team blog. Iggy33 was just one of dozens of posters complaining about Vista Service Pack 1's effect on their PCs. Other troubles reported by Vista SP1 users ranged from a simple inability to download the software from Microsoft's Windows Update site to sudden spikes in memory usage. To top it all off, the service pack will not install on computers that use peripheral device drivers that Microsoft has deemed incompatible."

arogier writes "After numerous delays and an actual release reversal, the official release date for Vista service pack one has been set for Tuesday, March 18th on Windows Update and Microsoft Downloads. It will be released as an automatic update on April 18th. 'It's unclear so far how a February snafu will affect SP1's roll-out. Last month, after Microsoft pushed a pair of prerequisite patches to users, some reported that their machines refused to finish installing one of the fixes, then went into an endless series of reboots. Several days later, Microsoft pulled the update from automatic delivery, said it was working on a solution and promised it would "make the update available again shortly after we address the issue."' It would be a good time for those planning to adopt early to perform requisite backups and locate their restore media."