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Robotics

Submission + - Military drone could fuel self with corpses (foxnews.com)

spacefiddle writes: "I don't even know what to make of this. The Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — yes, some nut named it EATR — is apparently designed to "extract energy from biomass in the environment" where it operates. The blue-sky write-up envisions cutting these things loose in the field for "years" as they seek organic matter. Developed by Robotic Technology Inc., their own page on the EATR(tm and patent pending) calls it "foraging." I really hope this submission is accepted just 'cause i can't wait to see the tags on this one..."
Mozilla

Submission + - Hillary asked for Firefox during State Townhall

bheer writes: "MozillaLinks reports that Secretary of State was asked to allow use of Firefox within State at a recent townhall meeting, to many cheers. Undersecretary Pat Kennedy cited cost of deployment as a factor in not allowing Firefox. (Video at 26m30s, Transcript). The article concludes by asking Mozilla to do more to make enterprise-wise deployment of Firefox simpler."
Games

Bethesda Speaks On Gamebryo Engine, Final Fallout 3 DLC 101

PsxMeUP writes "Game Observer conducted an interview with Ashley Cheng, Production Director at Bethesda. He answered questions about the Gamebryo engine, why they prefer it over other engines and the advantages it presented while making Fallout 3. Cheng also talks a bit about what inspired their designers while making Fallout 3 and what is in store for the PS3. Apparently, much of the team has read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which inspired the look and story of Fallout 3. Bethesda, according to Cheng, will never create a game like Final Fantasy because the Gamebryo engine is better at handling 'open ended worlds ripe for exploration.'" Meanwhile, Bethesda's Jeff Gardiner spoke recently about the game's fifth and final DLC release, Mothership Zeta, which finds players aboard an alien spaceship in orbit. He said, "The player will have a handful of tasty alien technologies to play with. There are new fire arms and melee weapons, which will comprise the most powerful weaponry in the game."
Security

Submission + - Schneier Calls Google OS Security Claims 'Idiotic'

The Narrative Fallacy writes: "While Google says that that it is "going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates," according to security expert Bruce Schneier, such claims are "idiotic." adding that "it was mathematically proved decades ago that it is impossible — not an engineering impossibility, not technologically impossible, but the 2+2=3 kind of impossible — to create an operating system that is immune to viruses." Other security experts suggest that it's at least possible for Google to make a more secure and user-friendly operating system. "With the caveat that nothing out there is going to be 100 percent secure, and new systems ... are going to have more problems than code that's been battle-tested for a long time, I think the Google guys are right," says Brian Chess, cofounder and chief security officer at cybersecurity vendor Fortify Software. "They could make a system that is significantly better from a security standpoint than the systems most people use today." Google has a chance to start over from a user expectation point of view and could, for example, make top security a default setting in the OS, instead of requiring users to change their setting to make their OS more secure, says Chess. "The question is, is the system going to be able to do a reasonable job of defending itself even in the face of a certain amount of user error? I think they've got a pretty good shot at it.""
Music

Submission + - United Breaks Guitars

The Narrative Fallacy writes: "When United Airlines broke Dave Carroll's $3500 Taylor guitar in the the spring of 2008, he contacted them to ask for compensation. After all, he and other passengers watched from the plane as United baggage handlers actually threw his guitar around on the tarmac. United said they wouldn't pay for the damages, so Carroll wrote a catchy song about how much United sucks."
Cellphones

Submission + - Apple rejects iPhone app, files a patent for it (tuaw.com) 1

recoiledsnake writes: Yet another app has been buried in the iPhone Application Graveyard . While this is nothing new, the kicker this time is that Apple has filed a patent on karaoke functionality in the iPod application a few weeks after rejecting the iKaraoke app for duplicating functionality that doesn't exist... yet. Maybe the $99 iPhone Developer Program fee should include a crystal ball for testing apps for duplicating Apple programs' functionality before submitting them so that precious time and resources of app developeres is not unnecessarily wasted. Jobs himself had responded to accusations of political censorship of iPhone applications in the past.
The Internet

Submission + - Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: "Major browser vendors have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, forcing the W3C to drop audio and video codecs from HTML 5, the forthcoming W3C spec that has been viewed as a threat to Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions on the situation, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' HTML 5 editor Ian Hickson wrote to the whatwg mailing list. Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>."
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - PS3 Cell Faster than Core i7 965 XE

billdar writes: "PS3News is reported on transcoding tool that allows for the conversion of video material on the Full HD format, with the help of a PlayStation 3 with faster than real-time performance. Connected to a PC via a gigabit ethernet, the PS3 performs as an external, dedicated video encoder. All encoding is handled by the PS3 which runs an embedded version of Yellow Dog Linux entirely from ROM, thus shifting the CPU-intensive processing away from the workstation. According to the article, the PS3 "Cell processor clocked a performance of 29 FPS, that is 1.2 times real-time conversion — the cell has a similar performance as the CUDA Badaboom encoder in combination with an Nvidia Geforce GTX-285. By comparison, Intel's current top-CPU, the Core i7 965 XE, does it still at 18 FPS — normal desktop CPUs even create only about 5 FPS.""
Medicine

Submission + - Drug kills cancer (technologyreview.com)

Amanda Callahan writes: "A drug tailor-made to strike at a tumor cell's Achilles heel shrinks or stabilizes tumors in patients with certain treatment-resistant hereditary cancers while causing few side effects. The results of the early-stage trial were published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine."

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