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Pope Says Technology Causes Confusion Between Reality and Fiction 779

Posted by samzenpus from the where's-the-reset-button dept.
Pope Benedict XVI has warned that people are in danger of being unable to discern reality from fiction because of new technologies, and not old books. "New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality. The image can also become independent from reality, it can give birth to a virtual world, with various consequences -- above all the risk of indifference towards real life," he said.
Security

The Nuclear Bunker Where Wikileaks Will Be Located 187

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-we-have-a-party-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget has photos of 'Pionen White Mountains, the nuclear bunker in which Wikileaks will locate some of its servers. It was excavated 98 feet underground, in a rock hill in the center of Stockholm, Sweden, during the Cold War.' It looks like they hired the same interior designer who decorated Batman's lair."
Operating Systems

Nokia N900 Linux Smartphone Running OS X 251

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the mr-johnson's-dog dept.
Rovaani writes "There is a video floating around of a Nokia N900 smartphone running the full desktop Mac OS X 10.3. From the author, Tomi Nikkanen: 'I believe this makes the N900 the first smartphone ever to run a full version of Mac OS X (at any speed, slow or otherwise). As you can see from the heavily edited video, it took almost 2 hours to reach the "About my Mac..." window. Keep your eye on the time display as that will give you an impression of just how uselessly slow it is.'"
Image

Political Affiliation Can Be Differentiated By Appearance 262

Posted by samzenpus from the if-it-looks-like-a-liberal-and-quacks-like-a-liberal dept.
quaith writes "It's not the way they dress, but the appearance of their face. A study published in PLoS One by Nicholas O. Rule and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University used closely cropped greyscale photos of people's faces, standardized for size. Undergrads were asked to categorize each person as either a Democrat or Republican. In the first study, students were able to differentiate Republican from Democrat senate candidates. In the second, students were able to differentiate the political affiliation of other college students. Accuracy in both studies was about 60% — not perfect, but way better than chance."
The Courts

Prison Bans D&D For Mimicking Gang Structure 496

Posted by kdawson from the step-away-from-the-polyhedral-dice dept.
Trepidity writes "In a case that has been winding its way through the courts for a while now, a Wisconsin prison banned inmates from playing Dungeons & Dragons, using the justification that 'one player is denoted the Dungeon Master... [who] is tasked with giving directions to other players... [which] mimics the organization of a gang.' The prison also cited some sparse evidence that a handful of non-inmate D&D players once committed some crimes that allegedly were related to their D&D playing. On Monday the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the regulation (PDF) against challenges from inmates. The court appeared skeptical of the ban, sarcastically referring to it as the 'war on D&D,' but upheld it nonetheless as having a 'rational basis.' Law professor Ilya Somin suggests that the court may have had no choice, given how deferential rational-basis review usually is."
Movies

YouTube To Allow Video Rentals 215

Posted by samzenpus from the viral-rentals dept.
poopdeville writes "Starting Friday, Google and YouTube will allow movie rentals. The first five films available to rent through YouTube will cost $3.99 for a 48-hour viewing period. Movie studios will be able to set their own prices, with rental viewing windows ranging from one to 90 days. YouTube will get an unspecified commission from each rental. Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuch expects YouTube to generate about $700 million in revenue this year, an estimated 55 percent increase from 2009. If YouTube hits that target, it likely will turn profitable, helping to justify the $1.76 billion in stock that Google paid for the site more than three years ago."

Comment Re:Not SVG (Score 1) 300

by Nick Novitski (#30822224) Attached to: Open-Source JavaScript Flash Player (HTML5/SVG)

2) There's no XHTML2. The future is HTML5.

...which supports XHTML syntax and the application/XHTML+XML mimetype. XHTML syntax is still quite alive and well, and usable by anyone who feels like using it, like myself (I find the rigor makes things easier to read and write). Perhaps you don't like its strictures, but luckily there's room for both of our syntactical preferences in the W3C tent.
Science

Human Males Evolve At a Faster Pace Than Females 454

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can't-say-i'm-surprised dept.
Tisha_AH writes "A report by the Whitehead Institute indicates that the human Y chromosome present in males is evolving at a furious pace. Across the chromosome there can be as much as a 33% difference within humans alone. The portions of the chromosome evolving fastest are related to sperm production."

Comment Re:$300 is not the real price (Score 1) 315

by Nick Novitski (#30477068) Attached to: $300 Sci-Fi YouTube Video Lands $30m Movie Deal

The value of your time is whatever someone is paying you for it. If nobody is paying you for it, then that time is worth $0.

I think the (monetary) value of your time is whatever you are or could be getting paid for it. In the example of the contractor you gave, if the contractor could have done billable work for another project in the extra three hours (though perhaps that's unlikely), then regardless of what you did or didn't pay, the hours were worth whatever he could have got for them. He sacrificed their monetary value in order to gain what he thought was a superior value in client goodwill (avoiding leaving mistakes in, appearing forthright and not greedy, etc).

Other commenters have noted that the auteur is a well-known publicity director, so presumably time that he spent making this video could have been spent on other things, and thus has non-zero value.
PlayStation (Games)

Is Console Gaming Dying? 496

Posted by Soulskill from the who-needs-consoles-when-you-can-play-on-your-phone-right dept.
mr_sifter writes "PC gamers love to obsess over whether PC gaming is dying, but bit-tech thinks it's time to look at the other side and examine if console gaming is really as secure as publishers would have us believe. All three console manufacturers suffered from the recession — this year, Sony announced its first net loss in 14 years; a stunning ¥989.9bn, which includes record losses of ¥58.5bn in its gaming sector. Microsoft also announced its first loss since it went public in 1986 in the second quarter of this financial year, with a $31 million US loss coming straight from the Entertainment and Devices division, which is responsible for the Xbox 360. Not even Nintendo has escaped the financial plague either, with sales of the Wii dropping by 67 percent in the US, 60 percent in Japan and 47 percent in the rest of the world. In addition to reduced profitability, casual games and the rise of the iPhone further suggest the current model is not invulnerable."

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