n.wegner - Slashdot User

+ - Definitive answer to Fermi's Paradox

Submitted by

fiveniner

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @11:51PM

fiveniner writes "I have written my definitive answer to Fermi's paradox, which I think is pretty more accurate and fun than the one shown one month ago in slashdot (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/ 19/1515205) I really belive no one can argument on it. Here it goes: (link to my post: http://logforbuggymind.blogspot.com/2007/02/my-own -response-to-fermis-paradox.html ) So today I came with my own response to Fermi's paradox: As the technology and science knowledge of extraterrestrial civilizations advance, they feel eager to conquer the rest of the universe, but at some point in that way to the universe, they advance in science enough to know how does their brain work, and they realize that being eager to conquer the world is an impulse originated by their desire of power, which ultimately only gives pleasure because some neurotransmitters activate when "power" is achieved. So before they can even go and conquer the universe, they discover a drug which gives that same pleasure, but without conquering the universe, just eating a pill, so then they eat the pill, and dont want to conquer anything, because they are happy, and after that, they discover that disappearing is not such a bad option, so they decide to just disappear, so that's why there's no evidence of extraterrestrial life, it's better to have drugs and disappear. That's the ULTIMATE ANSWER to Life, the Universe and Everything thanks and best regards... (I love karma) elias"

+ - Linux Video Decoder

Submitted by rthornto on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @11:50PM

rthornto writes "We need a PCI card that can decode the advanced video codecs in hardware, so I created a pledge here: http://www.pledgebank.com/1080p-linux, please pledge, this is for Linux or Windows. The pledge is as follows:

"I will pay $200USD for a PCI 1080p MPEG2/H.264/VC-1 decoder card with Windows/Linux drivers and HDCP support, it also needs to output video across the PCI bus but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."

The idea is to send this to the manufacturers to spur some interest, or maybe we could have one produced from a reference design."

+ - Dow Jones Plunge Fueled by Overwhelmed Computers

Submitted by

cloudscout

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @11:47PM

cloudscout writes "The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped over 400 points today. While there were various valid financial reasons for such a decline, some of the blame is being placed on computer systems that couldn't keep up with the abnormally high volume at the New York Stock Exchange and the resulting tremor as they switched over to a backup system. In other words, Dow Jones got Slashdotted."

+ - Legal Battle For AACS Begins

Submitted by henrypijames on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @11:14PM

henrypijames writes "As widely expected, the MPAA has learned nothing from the debacle of its failed prosecution against DVD Jon (of DeCSS) and is now releasing its army of lawyers to fight against the circumvention of AACS (the successor of CSS): Upon the reception of a DMCA takedown notice, SourceForge has immediately terminated its hosting of BackupHDDVD (a tool to backup HD DVD movies, as its suggestes). The project leader is seeking advice on how to proceed."

+ - Canadian Gov't Votes Down Anti-Terrorism Measures

Submitted by jon_anderson_ca on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @11:13PM

jon_anderson_ca writes "The CBC reports:

Opposition parties banded together Tuesday to defeat a controversial Conservative proposal to extend two anti-terrorism measures contained in the Criminal Code.
It should be noted that neither of these measures, put in place in December 2001, were ever used."

+ - Music execs: Apple and DRM are the problem

Submitted by EMB Numbers on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @10:00PM

EMB Numbers writes "C-Net says last year saw a 131 percent jump in digital sales, but overall the industry still saw about a 4 percent decline in revenue. http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-6162729.html?part= rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news At the opening of the conference, some of the panel members lashed out at Jobs. Members said Jobs' call three weeks ago for DRM-free music was "insincere" and a "red herring." Apple has maintained a stranglehold on the digital music industry by locking up iTunes music with DRM......and "it's causing everybody else who is participating in the marketplace — the other service providers, the labels, the users — a lot of pain. If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them.""

+ - Xbox360 Hypervisor Vulnerability - Homebrew on 360

Submitted by RedLine on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @09:10PM

RedLine writes "A new post on the BugTraq list released details on a critical vulnerability in Microsoft's Xbox360 that allows privilege escalation into hypervisor mode. Together with a method to inject data into non-privileged memory areas, this vulnerability allows an attacker with physical access to an Xbox 360 to run arbitrary code such as alternative operating systems with full privileges and full hardware access. The post is a follow-up on the anonymous presentation held on December 30th at the 23C3 Hacker Congress that suggested running homebrew code on Xbox360 would be possible soon. The vulnerability works in kernel 4532 and 4548 but was fixed by Microsoft in kernel 4552 (released on Jan 09, 2007) after they were notified about the exploit."

+ - Best practices for a lossless music archive

Submitted by Sparagmei on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @09:04PM

Sparagmei writes "I'm a big music fan, and I like listening to the music I own on various pieces of digital gear. Right now my library's at about 20,000 tracks, ripped from CDs to MP3 at 256kbps (enough that I can't tell the difference on my low-end playback gear).

However, with the MP3 judgment rippling through the world, I'm interested in perhaps moving to a different compression standard. Before I do that, I'd like to ask a question: what lossless format would you recommend for making a digital "master library", which could be (relatively) easily downsampled to a compressed format? Important factors would be true losslessness, filesize (smaller than PCM WAV would be nice), embedded metadata (id3v2-like), existence of automated ripper software, and (to a lesser extent) open-source implementation of such software. Widespread playback implementation of the lossless codec is not an issue for me; the lossless library would likely be burnt to archival DVD media and stored after being downsampling with the chosen compressor.

The reason I ask is this: I've got a 20,000-track re-ripping job ahead of me. I'd like to do that just once, lossless, so that years from now, when I decide to jump from Vorbis to "komprezzor_2039_1337" or whatever, I don't need to drag out the old plastic discs. Thanks!"

+ - Stock Market Drop Blamed on Computer Error

Submitted by

WebHostingGuy

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @08:51PM

WebHostingGuy writes "Today the Dow Jones Industrial Index dropped a little over 3% in value. Stock market swings come and go but it is interesting that the sudden drop in the stock market is the result of a computer glitch. According to MSNBC, the computers running were not properly calculating trades. This led to the switch to a backup system which led to several seconds delay which impacted the Dow. Even now after the close of the market spokesmen for the NYSE Group Inc. could not confirm if all closing share prices were even valid."