gbjbaanb writes "Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone. Headsets which read neural activity are not new, but Ms Le [president of US/Australian firm Emotiv] said the Epoc was the first consumer device that can be used for gaming. 'This is the first headset that doesn't require a large net of electrodes, or a technician to calibrate or operate it and does require gel on the scalp,' she said. 'It also doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars.'" Wait until the government can get warrantless wiretaps on the logs of those things.

yodasz writes "The New Scientist reports that a team of researchers from the UK were able to recreate a black hole's event horizon in the lab by firing a laser pulse down an optical fibre. The team's observations confirm predictions made by cosmologists and now they are trying to prove Hawking's hypothesis of escaping particles, dubbed Hawking radiation. 'The first pulse distorts the optical properties of the fibre simply by traveling through it. This distortion forces the speedy probe wave to slow down dramatically when it catches up with the slower pulse and tries to move through it. In fact, the probe wave becomes trapped and can never overtake the pulse's leading edge, which effectively becomes a black hole event horizon, beyond which light cannot escape.'"

jcgam69 writes "Hours after a federal court judge ordered Oklahoma State University to show cause why it shouldn't be held in contempt for failing to respond to an RIAA subpoena, attorneys for the school e-mailed a list of students' names to the RIAA's attorneys. But now that the RIAA has what it wanted, the group is unsure about how to go about sending out its pre-litigation settlement letters. Some of the students are represented by an attorney, meaning that the RIAA is barred from contacting them directly."

jcgam69 writes "Saturn's orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes."

CNN is reporting that the 100-day Hollywood writers walkout is now officially over. The new contract managed to snag two of the three major points the Writers Guild was looking for. The writers will now have "jurisdiction" for content created especially for new media (Internet, cell phones, etc) and will get paid for the reuse of content on new media when the studios get paid. "Leslie Moonves, chief executive officer of CBS Corp., told The Associated Press, 'At the end of the day, everybody won. It was a fair deal and one that the companies can live with, and it recognizes the large contribution that writers have made to the industry. [...] It's unclear how soon new episodes of scripted programs will start appearing, because production won't begin until scripts are completed, the AP reported. It will take at least four weeks for producers to get the first post-strike episodes of comedies back on the air; dramas will take six to eight weeks, the AP said.'"

Anneka notes that, although both Netflix and Best Buy threw logs on HD DVD's funeral pyre today, things are not all going Blu-ray's way. A Connecticut man is suing Samsung, the maker that brought the first Blu-ray players to market, over its "defective" BD-P1200 player. The lawsuit seeks class-action status. The problem is that the Samsung BD-P1200 is a "Profile 1.0" player that can't play some Blu-ray discs and Samsung has no intention (or ability) to upgrade these players via firmware. Quoting Ars: "The meager requirements of the 1.0 profile mean that Blu-ray players which fail to implement the optional features won't be able to take advantage of picture-in-picture, which requires secondary decoders. 1.0 players are also unable to store local content, lacking the 256MB of storage mandated by the 1.1 profile. Profile 1.1 discs should still play on 1.0 players, however, but the extra features will not work."

Rock, Paper, Shotgun notes that in Blizzard's never-ending quest for perfect balance, they've added a handy feature for still-dedicated Warcraft players. Players will no longer need to have the disc in the drive in order to conquer Azeroth. This kicks off a discussion by blogger Alec Meer about the role of copy protection and anti-piracy in PC gaming: "I don't need the Paint Shop Pro disc in my DVD drive whenever I want to butcher my holiday photos, after all. It was always doubly unnecessary for a game like W3, which also employs serial number checks if you want to play it online. Having the CD check as well seems like leaving a polite post-it note on the windscreen of a driver prone to double-parking. Don't bother. Just wheel-clamp the bastard. While there're still some reasons to be circumspect about online distribution systems, they do spell an end to miserably sorting through quivering towers of plastic discs or popup-heavy crack websites. This brave new world, in which the data already installed upon my hard drive is all that's required to play a game I've paid for, is one I know I want to live in."

An anonymous reader writes "A Dallas newspaper is claiming that the long-in-development title Duke Nukem Forever is headed for retail release in late 2008. Unfortunately, game creator 3D Realms says that's not exactly what they meant. 'What the modest Texas newspaper actually seems to suggest is that 3D Realms is "on target" to release the mythical sequel sometime this year, though company president Scott Miller adds, "we may miss the mark by a month or two" (wink, wink). Miller also hinted that "hitting the big three" (in this case, PC, Xbox 360 and PS3) is the obvious development strategy, but he continued to stress that 3D Realms has not "formally announced any platforms for DNF."'"

stoolpigeon writes "It has been well documented that the reception for Microsoft's Windows Vista has not been all that warm. Yet, visiting the web site of many PC manufacturers or visiting a retail outlet selling computers will show that most new hardware is being offered with Vista as the primary if not only option. O'Reilly's newest in their Annoyances series, "Windows Vista Annoyances", by David A. Karp, seeks to alleviate some of the pain for new Vista users. For the Vista owner who is able to put the book's suggestion into place, the edge should be taken off. For the individual considering a purchase of Vista and wondering if it can really be that bad, this book seems to indicate that yes, it is that bad." Read below for the rest of JR's review.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Once again the RIAA has dropped a case with prejudice, this time after concluding it was the defendant's daughter it should have sued in the first place. In the case of Lava v. Amurao, mindful that in similar scenarios it has been held liable for the defendant's attorney fees (Capitol v. Foster and Atlantic v. Andersen), the RIAA went on the offensive. In this case there was actually no attorney fee motion pending, making their motion all the more intriguing. The organization argued that it was the defendant's fault that the record companies sued the wrong person, because the defendant didn't tell them that his daughter was the file sharer they were looking for."

An anonymous reader writes "Torsten Lyngaas has published a set of instructions with photographs on his personal wiki that describe the steps he took to install $450 worth of extra hardware, including a GPS receiver, an FM transmitter, Bluetooth, extra USB ports, 802.11n, and an extra 4GB flash storage drive."

ianare writes "An application that gives fresh new meaning to 'digital rights management' has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians. It relies on a user's profile to control access to a multimedia archive. The need to create profiles based on a user's name, age, sex and standing within their community comes from traditions over what can and cannot be viewed. For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families. These requirements threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also about how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people, and where they were situated."

A new geological study is suggesting that what we know about the lower mantle of the Earth may have to be reevaluated. Since we are unable to actually sample the Earth at those depths, scientists rely on the use of seismic waves to study the lower reaches of the Earth. This new study suggests that material in the lower mantle has unusual characteristics that make sound move more slowly, suggesting a softer makeup than previously thought. "What's most important for seismology is the acoustic properties--the propagation of sound. We determined the elasticity of ferropericlase through the pressure-induced high-spin to low-spin transition. We did this by measuring the velocity of acoustic waves propagating in different directions in a single crystal of the material and found that over an extended pressure range (from about 395,000 to 590,000 atmospheres) the material became 'softer'--that is, the waves slowed down more than expected from previous work. Thus, at high temperature corresponding distributions will become very broad, which will result in a wide range of depth having subtly anomalous properties that perhaps extend through most of the lower mantle."

theoverlay writes "With all of the recent hype about solid-state drives in both consumer applications and enterprise environments I have a real concern about data recovery on these devices. I know there are services for flash memory restoration but has anyone been involved in data restoration projects on ssd drives? What are the limits and circumstances that have surfaced so far? What tools will law enforcement and government use to retrieve data for investigations and the like?"

egil writes "Trolltech announced this morning (CET) that they have accepted a bid from Nokia to buy the entire company. The bid was for 16 NOK per share, which values the company at an equivalent of approximately 150 million USD. The stock currently trades at 15.70 on the Oslo stack exchange, up from around 10 on Friday. The offer has already been accepted by the Trolltech BOD."