smileytshirt writes to mention a story on the News.com.au site about George the AI, the latest in a line of chatbots intended to mimic real human behavior. What makes AI George different than, say, ALICE is the recent addition of an avatar: a Flash animated body that reacts mostly in real time to the emotional impact of the conversation. From the article: "One can now have an oral discussion with him over the Internet, 'face to face'. George appears on the website www.jabberwacky.com and takes the form of a thin, bald man with yellow glasses who wears a white turtleneck sweater. He can smile, laugh, sulk and bang his fist on his virtual table. He can turn on the charm and wax romantic. But he can also turn coarse at times. It isn't as if George only learned good manners. "

Thundgelmir writes "Yahoo news has an article about how pirate radio is taking on the FCC. It describes the growing trend of low-power FM stations, and their crusade to be heard across the country and around the internet." From the article: "Over four days, a dozen men and women shyly bumped shoulders as they studied schematics and tinkered with romex connectors, resistors, microphone cords, meters, sockets and capacitors — the stuff of illegal radio stations. 'We're not stealing anything. We're claiming something that's rightfully ours,' he says. His goal is to create FM radio stations faster than the FCC can shut them down ... 'It's always been our position that if enough people go on the air with their stations, the FCC will be overwhelmed and unable to respond.'"

Luke Hachmeister writes to mention a light piece at GideonTech on some of the truly terrible portrayals of technology in film. From Hackers to AntiTrust, Hollywoood just can't stick to reality. From the article: "Harrison Ford plays a security expert at a bank. He falls prey to a scheme to steal money for a gang that has taken hostage of his family. The film tried very hard to keep it a rollercoaster ride of thrills. From the beginning, you have Harrison Ford typing furiously to stop a hacker by writing new firewall rules. At least this time, these rules didn't float around in a rainbow of colors ala Hackers. What really puts Firewall at the top of the list, is the dumbest and non-believable use of an iPod to date. This is 2006, not 1995, you can't just make stuff up like this anymore. In the middle of the film, Harrison Ford happens to not only be a security expert, but an Apple hardware developer too."

Lambticc writes "The BBC is running an article about how a US firm has successfully bred cats to reduce the production of the protein which causes an allergic reaction. Since the result was achieved through selective breeding, there should not be any complaints from the anti-GM lobby." From the article: "The cats will not cause the red eyes, sneezing and even asthma that some cat allergy sufferers experience, except in the most acute cases. Despite costing $3,950 (£2,104), there is already a waiting list to get one. Allerca first started taking orders for genetically engineered hypoallergenic cats back in 2004."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Obviously, computers can't have an opinion. What computers are very good at, though, is scanning through text to deduct human opinions from factual information. This branch of natural-language processing (NLP) is called 'information extraction' and is used for sorting facts and opinions for Homeland Security. Right now, a consortium of three universities is for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which doesn't have enough in-house expertise in NLP. Read more for additional references and a diagram showing how information extraction is used."

david.emery writes "In an article in the Washington Post entitled If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP, post technology columnist Rob Pegoraro points out the 5 year legacy of Windows XP. The article starts 'Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion?' This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP, although it does fail to credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors." More from the article: "Consider stability, the single biggest selling point of XP. The operating system was meant to stop individual programs from crashing the system, and it succeeded. It takes an especially malignant program to send my copy of XP to a 'blue screen of death.' But that's not the only way XP can crash. Drivers, the software that lets XP communicate with hardware components, can still lock up the system. If you've seen an XP laptop fail to wake up from standby, you can probably blame it on buggy drivers."

fragmentate writes "Wired News is reporting: 'In response to the hundreds of soldiers coming home from war with missing arms or legs, Darpa is spending millions of dollars to help scientists learn how people might one day regenerate their own limbs. Prosthetics are getting better all the time, but they will never be as good as the limbs we were born with. So two teams of scientists at 10 institutions across the country are competing to regrow the first mammalian limb ... The researchers' first milestone is to generate a blastema — a mass of cells able to develop into various organs or body parts — in a mammal.' Apparently this is a relatively new area of research, even Wikipedia's stub on blastemas is very terse."

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm a widower caring for my very disabled child. I have family who check in on me often, but not reliably, and not every day. How can I rig up a 'dead-man's switch' that will alert family or emergency services should something happen to me, so that my child can be cared for? Her medical needs are significant enough that being alone for even an hour could be fatal for her. We do occasionally get out of the house, so a GPS type cellphone and a heart-rate monitor watch would seem to be the ticket, but how to link the two and get the desired dialing behaviour?"

An anonymous reader writes "Google plans to introduce a new shopping feature in time for the holiday season. Soon products on Google Base will be searchable via the regular search box. Simultaneously, Google intends to de-emphasize its own Froogle shopping search engine; Google intends for Froogle to no longer be a standalone Web site." From the article: "When people search for products on Google.com, the system will present them with another search box so that they can refine their query, according to Bear Stearns & Co analysts. After people refine their query, Google takes them to a second page populated with product results from the Google Base listings service. 'Ranking will be determined by the attributes that the sellers listed for the product as well as by relevancy,' the analysts wrote. Currently, Google has no plans to monetise this product-search capability with display ads or listing fees, but that could change, they wrote. "

walterbyrd writes "Linux Journal has published an article by Glyn Moody, about the Microsoft sponsored study: The Economic Impact of Microsoft Windows Vista (pdf). Apparently Moody feels that the economic effects of MS-Vista being delayed in Europe would not be as dire as Microsoft would have the world believe." From the article: "The implication is that the European Commission would be crazy to jeopardize these wonderful benefits by clipping the wings of this digital golden goose, or even grounding it completely. The white paper looks tremendously professional, and is filled with tables, bar and pie charts; it has suitably serious discussions of methodology, and even introduces a few measured caveats: who could doubt its conclusions? What makes this FUD so impressive is that this attention to detail obscures the sleight of hand that is going on here. The white paper may predict sales by the "Microsoft ecosystem" of over $40 billion in six of Europe's biggest economies, but what this figure hides is the fact that income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe."

Marc Light asks: "I repair computers as a side line cause I want to keep up on what's going on in the world of computer technicians. When someone comes to me with a problem, if I have to reinstall I first try to convince them to install Ubuntu. For now I only have 25% of success, mostly because they usually use an app. or some hardware that would complicate their experience too much. When I install Windows, I also install Firefox, OpenOffice, VLC, Winamp (not open source but if they eventually switch to Linux, XMMS won't scare them), and CDex to drive them off Windows Media Player and DRM. I then take 15 to 30 minutes free of charge to explain to them the basics of their new software. For my part, I mostly got positive response. I'd say 80% of it is positive feedback. My questions to Slashdot readers: Do you think that computer technicians can make a difference in the adoption of OSS? And if they're for OSS, should they try to put some pressure on their users/clients?"

StupidSexyFlanders writes "The Washington Post ran a story about students protesting their school's use of anti-plagiarism site Turnitin.com, which checks papers they've written against a database of 22 million other papers. From the article: "Members of the new Committee for Students' Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights." Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"

ClausValca writes "Doing some late-night surfing last night and came across a post over at Cybernet News: Limited Time Only: Vista 5728 Available To The Public. Although apparently intended for the TAP and Technical Beta Testers....it is available for download to the public via this Microsoft public download page for Vista 5728. There is a link on that page as well for direct download of the latest 64-bit flavor of that version as well. An Ars Technica post also has some background info on the new release. Techweb is reporting that Microsoft is specifically asking for feedback on this release, so make sure and let them know what you think."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In UMG v. Lindor the RIAA is trying to include song files it doesn't have copies of as part of its 'distribution' argument. The defendant Marie Lindor is asking the Court to preclude them from doing that. She points to the RIAA's own interrogatory response in which the record companies swore that their case was based upon their investigator seeing a screenshot and then downloading 'perfect digital copies'. They produced eleven (11) copies of song files, but want to be able to prove twenty seven (27) other songs for which they can't produce the files."

frustrated Dilbert asks: "We are a very small IT dept where the manager participates in the day-to-day operation of IT services. The problem is that he almost never talks to upper management and doesn't get involved in the business side until someone gives him a specific project to handle. The result is that IT is considered to be firefighters when things fail, and generally plumbers that fix stuff when other PHBs create new projects. We run all the mission-critical stuff in a line of business that can not work without technology. The IT PHB fails to see which sides of the business we need to support and which are second in line. I end up doing my stuff and a lot of his duties of picking up the direction of the business and making strategic decisions. The company is actually great to work for, but I was not hired (or paid) for teaching my boss to run his shop in addition to tech stuff. He simply wasn't made for it and got promoted into something he can't cope with. I'm getting really tired of having to do management and not get any credit and would love to have him replaced, but I hate having to rat on him too. How can I get a more organized workplace when my boss isn't capable of thinking ahead?"