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Submission + - Is the music industry hunting tab sites now? (guitarnoise.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Guitar Noise, a popular site among aspiring guitar players, has been served a take down notice from attorneys representing the NMPA (National Music Publishers Association) and the MPA (The Music Publishers Association of the United States, Inc.) Perhaps the new frontier in the discussion of intellectual property rights online is the collection of sites that distribute tabs and sheet music that was reverse engineered by fans. Perhaps this is emblematic of a new trend of litigious exploits. The question that begs to be answered is whether the dissemination of lyrics and musical instructions harms the industry, and if it does, by how much.

Submission + - F.D.A. Approves Vaccine for Prostate Cancer (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by reverseengineer
reverseengineer writes: The US Food and Drug Administration has given its first approval for a therapeutic cancer vaccine. In a clinical trial 'involving 512 men, those who got Provenge (sipuleucel-T) had a median survival of 25.8 months after treatment while those who got a placebo lived a median of 21.7 months. After three years, 32 percent of those who got Provenge were alive, compared with 23 percent of those who got the placebo.'

“The big story here is that this is the first proof of principle and proof that immunotherapy works in general in cancer, which I think is a huge observation,” said Dr. Philip Kantoff, chief of solid tumor oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the lead investigator in Dendreon’s largest clinical trial for the drug. “I think this is a very big thing and will lead to a lot more enthusiasm for the approach.”
Medicine

Submission + - Docs Perform First Remote Control Heart Surgery (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by ByronScott
ByronScott writes: Doctors at a British hospital have just carried out the world’s first surgery using a remote controlled robot! The procedure fixed a patient’s irregular heart rhythm, and although the doctor was in the same hospital as the patient — just through the wall in another room — developers of the RC surgery technology believe this is the first step towards long-distance operations. Imagine a doctor in London performing surgery on your heart in New York!

Submission + - Ubisoft Authentication servers are down (ubi.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After demanding their paying customers to be always online on order to play the latest Ubisoft games it seems that they are having a little problem at this moment: their authentication servers are down. A lot of people are allready complaining in the forum, and according to The Escapist Magazine an Ubisoft employee stated: "I don't have any clear information on what the issue is ..."
It's funny. Laugh.

Fans Come Together To Complete Star Wars Uncut 179

Posted by samzenpus from the in-a-backyard-far-far-away dept.
eldavojohn writes "Star Wars Uncut has taken a novel approach to remaking Star Wars IV: A New Hope. You merely sign up for a 15 second clip, film it and submit it. The trailer is now complete and I will suspect you might enjoy the high quality (and low quality) of some of the already accepted scenes. 251 scenes remain in need of claiming with 688 claimed and 291 finished. Do your part to remake one of the greatest movies by filming fifteen seconds of yourself and your friends!"
Security

EVE Bans Exploiters; Dropping 2% of Users Cuts Average CPU Usage 30% 261

Posted by Soulskill from the and-stay-out dept.
Earthquake Retrofit writes "Ars has a story about EVE Online banning thousands of accounts for real-world trading of in-game money for profit. From the article: 'Those who buy and sell ISK, the game's currency, are not only exploiting the game, but unbalancing play. That's why the company decided to go drastic: a program they called "Unholy Rage." For weeks they studied the behavior and effects these real-money traders had on the game, and then they struck. During scheduled maintenance, over 6,000 accounts were banned. [Einar Hreiðarsson, EVE's lead GM,] assures us that the methods were sound, and the bannings went off with surgical precision. ... While the number of accounts banned in the opening phase of the operation constituted around 2 percent of the total active registered accounts, the CPU per user usage was cut by a good 30 percent.' Looks like they got the right 6,000.' Further information and more graphs are available from the EVE dev blog."
Earth

A Sixth Region In the Magnetosphere 69

Posted by timothy from the difracting-imposed-distinctions dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "As you probably know, Earth's magnetosphere, 'the invisible bubble of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surrounds and protects the planet from the periodically lethal radiation of the solar wind,' was discovered in 1958. Until now, it was believed to comprise five regions, including the ionosphere or the Van Allen radiation belts. Now, a US research team has discovered a sixth region, called the warm plasma cloak."
Math

The End of Individual Genius? 364

Posted by Soulskill from the at-least-until-zefram-cochrane dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A recent study suggests the downfall of individual researchers, who are being rapidly replaced by enormous research groups. Quoting: '... in recent decades — especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 — the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding. And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.'"
The Media

BBC Brings DRM-Free Content To Linux Users 131

Posted by timothy from the gnu-linux dept.
eldavojohn writes "The BBC is planning to release some of its programmes to users of GNU & Linux. You won't see Doctor Who or Dragons' Den on there anytime soon, but they have been working with Canonical & Collabora on getting this out there for Totem users. The developer blog mentions that the sheer number of options in the open source world actually makes this difficult to accomplish."

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