Comment hammered to death? (Score 1) 360
or am i the only that can't get to the donhopkins server?
Submission + - European physicists take photo of neutrino
An anonymous reader writes: European physicists said Tuesday they had sent an elusive particle known as a neutrino on a 730-kilometer (456-mile) trip under the Earth's crust and taken a snapshot of the instant it slammed into lab detectors. In the October 2 event, a neutrino hit one of the 60,000 bricks that had been installed in San Grasso, leaving a tell-tale track of a muon on the film.
The experiment is important, say the investigators, as it could help explain one of the biggest mysteries about the Universe — its missing mass.
When scientists tot up the mass of all the visible matter in the Universe, they arrive at a total of just 10 percent of what they know to exist.
For years, neutrinos were not thought to have any mass, although that theory has been challenged by experiments at Japan's SuperKamioKande lab, which suggested that they may have a mass, albeit a very tiny one.
Submission + - Cryptic Studios Releases Animation Rig Under GPL
Gnpatton writes: "Kotaku is reporting that video game developer Cryptic Studios announced today at OGDC that it is turning to Open Source and is releasing its Animation Rig under the GPL. Speaking to Kotaku Shayne Herrera said, 'Our goal is to foster a community of animators by providing them the power to generate animations without having to worry about supporting a toolset. Since we were already developing the rig for our core technology team, we decided to release it to the public under the GNU GPL.' It seems that more and more companies are turning to open source. With this move from Cryptic Studios and other video game companies, could more video game developers benefit from open source?"
Submission + - Censorship, Stagnation, and the HD-DVD Code
An anonymous reader writes: http://www.thefuturewatch.com/censorshipequalsstag nation.html
Submission + - 70 Expert Ideas for Better CSS Coding
Patrick Griffin writes: CSS isn't always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren't sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements. The article 70 Expert Ideas for Better CSS Coding includes over 70 expert tips, which can improve your efficiency of CSS coding. It also has most interesting and useful CSS ideas, methods, techniques and coding solutions as well as basic techniques you can probably use in every project you are developing, but which are hard to find once you need them.
Submission + - Mini DNA replicator could benefit world's poor
bob_calder writes: "From New Scientist: A pocket-sized device that runs on two AA batteries and copies DNA as accurately as expensive lab equipment has been developed by researchers in the US.
The device has no moving parts and costs just $10 to make. It runs polymerase chain reactions (PCRs), to generate billions of identical copies of a DNA strand, in as little as 20 minutes. This is much faster than the machines currently in use, which take several hours.
Victor Ugaz of Texas A&M University
Journal reference: Angewandte Chemie International Edition (DOI: 10.1002/anie.200700306)"
Feed Nanotechnology May Be Used To Regenerate Tissues, Organs (sciencedaily.com)
Research at Northwestern University has shown that a combination of nanotechnology and biology may enable damaged tissues and organs to heal themselves. In a dramatic demonstration of what nanotechnology might achieve in regenerative medicine, paralyzed lab mice with spinal cord injuries have regained the ability to use their hind legs six weeks after a simple injection of a purpose-designed nanomaterial.
Submission + - OpenOffice + Linux = Crap
ramboando writes: Open Kernel Labs founder Professor Gernot Heiser had some blunt words for the OpenOffice community — the product isn't ready to compete with the big boys. In this story, he says: "If you want to be successful in open source it can't just be a 'me too' product. Anything that's not the best technology will not work ... enterprise is willing to pay for the best. OpenOffice is not the best ... it's the first thing that made me move from Linux to Mac," Heiser said. "Open source is creating the most pure Darwinist environment possible. It's brutal survival of the fittest," he said, surprising the crowd at CeBIT's Open Source Business session today. "Only the best software will be able to survive. Regardless of how free it is, enterprise will not use it unless it is better," Heiser added. Sun's Simon Phipps basically said he was talking crap.
Submission + - Banking on the Virtual
rceuniverse writes: "Further melding Virtual and Real Worlds, the popular Real Cash Economy Sci-Fi Virtual World of Entropia Universe has just auctioned off 5 real life banking licenses for an astounding $400,000 USD. The licenses will allow the owners to offer banking and lending services to the participants of Entropia Universe.
http://rceuniverse.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5 817"
RFID Guardian Protects Your Privacy 65
An anonymous reader writes "A new device devised by Amsterdam graduate student Melanie Rieback is designed to serve as a portable firewall for RFID tags. The portable battery-powered RFID Guardian uses an access control list to filter RFID queries, blocking queries that aren't approved. Rieback, who is also known for being the first researcher to develop a proof of concept RFID virus, hopes to offer version 3.0 of the RFID Guardian to the public at cost."
Journal SPAM: Democrats Won't Stop Bush's Mercenary Armies in Iraq 1
According to the Government Accountability Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite G.I. Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. "We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense," said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha.
