Quintessant - Slashdot User

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 07, 2010 @08:23PM from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.

ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

Swine Flu Outbreak At PAX 374

Posted by timothy on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @03:09PM from the crowd-I-walked-through-too dept.

whisper_jeff writes "There's been a confirmed outbreak of Swine Flu at PAX. Those who attended and are feeling under-the-weather after the con should not write it off as a typical convention cold and go see a doctor to make sure, just in case." The linked post also lists the airplane flights of the cases known so far, so if you flew from Seattle on Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday for any reason, you might want to compare your itinerary.

Texas Makes Zombie Fire Ants 398

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 13, 2009 @10:20PM from the what-could-go-wrong dept.

eldavojohn writes "What do you do when a foreign species has been introduced to your land from another continent? Bring over the natural predator from the other continent. Scientists in Texas have introduced four kinds of phorid flies from South America to fight fire ants. These USDA approved flies dive bomb ants and lay an egg inside the ant. The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie that wanders around for two weeks before the head falls off and the ant dies. A couple of these flies will cause the ants to modify their behavior and this will be a very slow acting solution to curb the $1 billion in damage these ants do to Texas cattle ranches and — oddly enough — electrical equipment like circuit breakers. You may remember zombifying parasites hitting insects like cockroaches."

New Drug Helps to Dampen Bad Memories 255

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @01:05PM from the reset-button dept.

wile_e_wonka writes to tell us Researchers at Harvard and the Montreal-based McGill University are working on a drug that would allow psychiatrists to dampen painful memories in their patients when combined with therapy. "They treated 19 accident or rape victims for ten days, during which the patients were asked to describe their memories of the traumatic event that had happened 10 years earlier. Some patients were given the drug, which is also used to treat amnesia, while others were given a placebo. A week later, they found that patients given the drug showed fewer signs of stress when recalling their trauma."

Comment Interesting. (Score 1) 545

by Quintessant on Friday April 13, 2007 @10:24PM (#18727901) Attached to: Should Schools Block Sites Like Wikipedia?

See, there are some issues I find with that. Primarily among them is the fact that while wikipedia does have unconfirmed and user moderated information, it does have a very large redeeming quality. Most articles on Wikipedia list all of their sources. Using wikipedia articles proper may not be the best idea, but when researching, I often use wiki sources as a spring board for articles and useful information. Now, at the present moment, I work as a writing tutor for college students of all levels (from fresh to phd, so far), and the policy on use of wikipedia varies geatly from teacher to teacher. Ironically, the director of my university's library is a big advocate of using wikipedia, whereas there is a resounding opinion in departments like English and Philosophy that wikipedia has no value whatsoever. I personally don't recommend using wikipedia articles in research, but am quite the advocate to use it for the source material, and I recommend that to every student that I tutor. Personally, I suppose I can see why a school would ban wikipedia, but I think that their time would be better spend blocking other websites and mirror sites, rather than something which has potential use like Wikipedia.

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