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Actually you don't own your property in the truest sense of the word (yes technically I acknowledge that you own and possibly have possession of it). Ultimately the government owns your land. Just stop paying the land or property taxes and this point will be made abundantly clear. Now if a copyright holder had to pay a yearly fee based on the value (either intrinsic, or perhaps market or realized, something along those lines) of the work in question to keep the copyright I'd be a lot more supportive of copyright laws.

You can create much smaller lines than the wavelength of your light. You use tricks for that, but that's how it is done at Samsung, IBM, Intel, etc. for ages.

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier today Sony launched firmware V2.40 for the PS3 which is mandatory for online play. To my horror after installing the update my console wouldn't boot, and this appears to be a not uncommon problem affecting all ages and models of PS3s. Although there is rampant fanboy denial over at the official Playstation forums, the Kotaku article details the issue and has a suggested solution if you don't mind yanking your PS3's hard drive."

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.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Xian-Jin Li claims to have proven the Riemann hypothesis in this preprint on the arXiv." We've mentioned recent advances in the search for a proof but if true, I'm told this is important stuff. Me, I use math to write dirty words on my calculator.

It seems to me that the only people making things large and unwieldy are large closed source software companies (like MS, but others exist), that believe they have to be the be-all-and-end-all, the "one software company to bind them all", that they end up creating giant monstrosities like Vista. Open source, or at least, the Linux way, is to keep things simple. Do one thing and do it well. Don't try to be everything to everyone. Realize that it's OK if somebody wants to use some other competing software product. Just because our computers are fast, and they do lots of stuff, it doesn't mean that we have to make it complicated.

David W. White writes "Wired mag's Danger Room carried an article today that highlighted how desperate the US Military's DARPA has become in its attempts to bring in additional brain power. The tactics include filmed testimonials, folders and even playing cards all screaming join DARPA! Where are all the Einsteins who want to be on the cutting edge for the Government?"

It's apple people. What ELSE could it be but mass hysteria? ;)

Yeah, but when we Apple fans do mass hysteria, it's in a hip, cool, stylish kinda way.

After Intel's prominent work in ray tracing in the both the desktop and mobile spaces, many gamers might be thinking that the move to ray tracing engines is inevitable. NVIDIA's Chief Scientist, Dr. David Kirk, seems to think otherwise as revealed in an interview on the topic of rasterization and ray tracing. Kirk counters many of Intel's claims of ray tracing's superiority such as the inherent benefit to polygon complexity while pointing out areas where ray tracing engines would falter like basic antialiasing. The interview rounds out discussion on mixing the two rendering technologies and whether NVIDIA hardware can efficiently handle ray tracing calculations as well.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=530

whitehartstag writes "Microsoft late Monday said Vista SP1 won't be available until mid-March because developers are fixing a flaw to do with device drivers that lose functionality when the service pack is installed. The announcement kinda muffles the celebration of earlier that day when Microsoft said it had wrapped up work on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/020408-windows-server.html and said both the server and client software will be generally available within the next month. The device driver issue was uncovered by beta testers who found that after installing the service pack certain drivers lost functionality and the corresponding devices would not operate."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/020408-microsoft-vista-sp1-driver.html

cnettel writes "It's that special time of the month when every MS sysadmin gets a warm fuzzy feeling. It's Patch Tuesday! But, who cares about a remote execute vulnerability in the TCP/IP stack of Windows (XP and up, the critical one is in the IGMP support), when there is an update that improves disk performance in Vista? Now, let's see if the remaining copy time can get from infinity to something low, like negative..."

According to open standards advocate Russell Ossendryver, Microsoft will be deprecating certain functionality in its Microsoft Office Open XML specification. Ossendryver says the move is an attempt to quiet critics of the specification in the run up to the crucial February vote as to whether Microsoft OOXML will be included as a second standard for e-documents, along with the existing ODF ISO standard. ECMA, the Microsoft-led industry standards group formally offering OOXML to ISO, confirms in a 21 December 2007 announcement that issues related to the "leap year bug", VML, compatibility settings such as "AutoSpaceLikeWord95" and others will be "extracted from the main specification and relocated to an independent annex in DIS 29500 for deprecated functionality." Ossendryver is not convinced that deprecation will work, calling the deprecation proposal a 'smoke screen' and a 'bomb disguised as a standard' because 'every application will need to support the deprecated features in order to read files with the deprecated features.' Ossendryver also points out that legacy formatted Microsoft Office documents will still remain non-standard under the new proposal for deprecation.
http://fanaticattack.com/2007/the-deprecated-smoke-screen-of-ms-office-open-xml-ooxml.html

European astronomers have for the first time ever been able to detect and monitor the visible light that is scattered in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, HD 189733b, which is also known as a 'hot Jupiter,' and orbits a star slightly cooler and less massive than the Sun located about 60 light-years from Earth. According to this ETH Zurich news release, 'Polarization technique focuses limelight,' the researchers used 'techniques similar to how Polaroid sunglasses filter away reflected sunlight to reduce glare. They also directly traced the orbit of the planet, a feat of visualization not possible using indirect methods.' The team thinks that their findings are opening new opportunities for exploring physical conditions on exoplanets. But read more for additional references and a great picture of this exoplanet.

Panasonic plans to unveil the thinnest Blu-ray Disc drive at the upcoming CES show. The drive is 9.5mm high, which allows it to fit into standard laptop form factors instead of requiring manufacturers to redesign systems to fit high-def DVD players as they've been doing. "Panasonic has already begun offering samples of the drives to laptop makers with the hope that the companies will build it into new PCs."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=storage&articleId=9054278&taxonomyId=19&intsrc=kc_top

reporter writes "In an opinion piece, the "Wall Street Journal" (WSJ) forcefully urges Washington to replace all the F-15 jet fighters with F-22 Raptors. The WSJ offers several reasons. First, the F-15 is simply too old: one F-15 literally disintegrated in the air due to the excessive age of its air frame. Second, the F-15 is inferior to other frontline fighters: a Eurofighter decisively defeated 2 F-15s in a mock dogfight in 2005. Third, both Beijing and Moscow are aggressively modernizing their military forces, and the F-22 is the only fighter that can deal with these hostile threats. The F-35 is not acceptable because it woefully underperforms the F-22."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110011043