Comment Re:Catholics and condoms (Score 1) 775

by AxminsterLeuven on Thursday May 15, 2008 @05:27AM (#23415360) Attached to: Vatican Says Alien Life Plausible

Next week they'll be approving a new brand of condoms. They're open at both ends ...

And they're soaked in holy water, so the infant is instantly baptized at conception. A lot of R&D went into this, I am told.

Synthetic DNA About To Yield New Life Forms 240

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 18, 2007 @02:19AM from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.

mlimber sends along a Washington Post story about the immanence of completely artificial life: "The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive... Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core 'operating system' for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands."

Michael Meeks On ODF and OOXML 184

Posted by kdawson on Saturday September 29, 2007 @08:05PM from the down-with-clippy dept.

biscuitfever11 writes "ZDNet has up a great interview with Michael Meeks, the distinguished Novell engineer, who's currently deeply involved in open document format and OpenOffice.org. In the interview, Meeks takes Microsoft to task on its alternative format OOXML and argues that Microsoft should adopt ODF — but says that realistically they never will. He also mentions his favorite example to explain the benefits of open source software to a nontechnical person: the flexibility of open source would have allowed us to free ourselves from Clippy, the world's most despised paperclip, by changing a single line of code."

ATI Driver Flaw Exposes Vista Kernel to Attackers 248

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday August 10, 2007 @07:34AM from the sneaking-in dept.

Shack0ption writes "An unpatched flaw in an ATI driver was at the center of the mysterious Purple Pill proof-of-concept tool that exposed a way to maliciously tamper with the Windows Vista kernel. The utility, released by Alex Ionescu and yanked an hour later after the kernel developer realized that the ATI driver flaw was not yet patched, provided an easy way to load unsigned drivers onto Vista — effectively defeating the new anti-rootkit/anti-DRM mechanism built into Microsoft's newest operating system. Ionescu confirmed his tool was exploiting a vulnerability in an ATI driver — atidsmxx.sys, version 3.0.502.0 — to patch the kernel to turn off certain checks for signed drivers. This meant that a malicious rootkit author could essentially piggyback on ATI's legitimately signed driver to tamper with the Vista kernel."

Feed The Register: OLPC project goes into production (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed on Monday July 23, 2007 @07:32AM

First machines being made

The One Laptop per Child project has started production, with the first children in the developing world expected to receive their computers in October this year.

Feed The Register: Belgian ISP will appeal order to block file-sharing (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed on Monday July 23, 2007 @05:52AM

Claims ecommerce directive trumps copyright directive

Belgian ISP Scarlet has appealed against a surprise court ruling forcing it to filter customers' traffic for unlawful file sharing. The Belgian ISP Association says the trial judge did not examine the law closely enough.

Feed The Register: Brainless civil servant amazes doctors (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed on Monday July 23, 2007 @05:32AM

Frenchman's skull a 'huge fluid-filled chamber'

A French man whose skull was mostly occupied by a "huge fluid-filled chamber" was able to operate perfectly well as a civil servant - despite having "little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue", Reuters reports.

Feed The Register: University boffins squeeze 500GB onto a DVD (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed on Friday July 06, 2007 @08:12AM

Aiming for a terabyte

The University of Berlin, with partners Budapest University of Technology and Economics and Universita Politecnica delle Marche in Italy, has managed to store 500GB of data on a regular HD DVD or Blu-ray disc.

Submission + - Arrest under new NY piracy laws

Submitted by AxminsterLeuven on Friday July 06, 2007 @08:11AM

AxminsterLeuven writes: The Beeb is carrying a story on new tightened New York anti-piracy legislation: A man has been been arrested, after smuggling video recording equipment into a theatre showing the new Transformers movie. "Kalidou Diallo, 48, has been charged with unauthorised use of a video camera in a cinema. Under upgraded legislation, he could face six months in jail and fines of up to $5,000 (£2,487) if found guilty," the BBC reports.

Journal Journal: XBox 360 Fix Will Cost $1.15 billion.

Journal by ozmanjusri on Friday July 06, 2007 @07:54AM

Microsoft has admitted that the XBox 360s' "Red Ring of Death" is a real problem, and has set aside more than a billion dollars for warranties on the troubled console.

In what is likely to be the largest warranty payout of all time, Microsoft will repair or replace all failed consoles, reimburse customers who have already paid for repairs and extend the warranty from one year to three.

Feed Wired: NASA Contractor Designs Lunar Habitat. Move-In Date: 2020 (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Friday July 06, 2007 @01:12AM

ILC Dover's blow-up pods need a few tweaks before they can take on the moon's harsh environment.

Mozilla Releases Thunderbird 2.0.0 311

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 19, 2007 @07:59AM from the come-and-get-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Mozilla Corporation has released Thunderbird 2.0.0. Among the improvements are Message Tagging, updated UI, Advanced Folder Views, Better New Mail Notification and Full Support for Windows Vista and 64-bit versions of Windows."

EU Rejects Microsoft Royalty Proposal 274

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 05, 2007 @01:36AM from the no-money-for-you dept.

pallmall1 writes "According to MSNBC, The Financial Times has reported that the EU is going to drastically reduce or even eliminate Microsoft's proposed royalties on interoperability information required to be released by the EU's antitrust ruling issued three years ago. According to a confidential EU document, "Microsoft will be forced to hand over to rivals what the group claims is sensitive and valuable technical information about its Windows operating system for next to no compensation...". Even Neil Barrett, the expert picked by both Microsoft and the EU to oversee Microsoft's compliance with the 2004 ruling, says a zero percent royalty would be 'better.'"

Microsoft Joins OpenAjax Alliance 104

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday March 21, 2007 @10:52AM from the conspiracy-theorists-activate dept.

Kurtz writes "Microsoft has joined The OpenAjax Alliance, which is focused on accelerating the use of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or Ajax, technologies. Microsoft said it agreed to join the alliance to work with other vendors to evolve Ajax."

Vista Security — Too Little Too Late 483

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @09:02AM from the five-years-work dept.

Thomas Greene of The Register has a fairly comprehensive review of Vista and IE7 user security measures. The verdict is: better but not adequate, and mostly an attempt to shift blame onto the user when things go wrong. From the review: "[Vista is] a slightly more secure version than XP SP2. There are good features, and there are good ideas, but they've been implemented badly. The old problems never go away: too many networking services enabled by default; too many owners running their boxes as admins and downloading every bit of malware they can get their hands on."