Sapien__ - Slashdot User

Submission + - Scientists use MRI machines to read minds... kinda

Submitted by NigelTheFrog on Friday March 13, 2009 @06:47PM

NigelTheFrog writes: Researchers in England have used fMRI to map the activity in volunteers' hippocampi (hippocampuses?). From these scans, they could pinpoint exactly wher they were in a virtual reality landscape.

"Specific parts of each participant's hippocampus were active after that person had navigated to particular places in the room. A few practice rounds provided fodder for creating algorithms for each participant that correlated different brain activity patterns with different virtual locations. The algorithms, the team found, could in turn "predict" new virtual locations, not those used during practice rounds, based on each person's pattern of brain activity."

OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide 48

Posted by samzenpus on Monday October 06, 2008 @02:05PM from the read-all-about-it dept.

Martin Ecker writes "Mobile phones and other embedded devices are getting more and more powerful each year. The availability of dedicated hardware for 3D rendering is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and the latest mobile phones come with 3D hardware acceleration that rivals the power of desktop graphics hardware. OpenGL ES 2.0 is the latest version of a cross-platform, low-level graphics API to utilize these new resources available in embedded devices. The OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide published by Addison-Wesley Publishing aims to help the reader make use of the full power of OpenGL ES 2.0 to create interesting 3D applications." Keep reading for the rest of Martin's review.

Submission + - Fedora 8 officially released (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Cat in the Hat on Thursday November 08, 2007 @11:44AM

Cat in the Hat writes: Fedora 8 has been officially released. Ars Technica has a run-down of what's new in Fedora 8, including the PulseAudio sound daemon, Nodoka visual style, and a new authentication system. 'Another major change in Fedora 8 is the new PolicyKit authentication system that makes authority escalation more secure. Instead of providing root access to an entire program when it needs higher privileges, PolicyKit makes it possible to isolate individual operations that require higher privileges and put them into system services that can be accessed through D-Bus. Another advantage of PolicyKit is that it will give administrators more control over which users and programs have access to individual operations that use escalated privileges.'

Submission + - Software companies sues popular Australian forum (whirlpool.net.au) 3

Submitted by Pugzly on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @07:25AM

Pugzly writes: In a recent announcement on the Whirlpool front page, it appears that accounting software maker 2clix is sueing the founder of the forums as the founder "allowed statements 'relating to the Plaintiff and its software product that are both false and malicious' to be published on the Whirlpool forums."
Hopefully sanity will prevail, but it is the legal system...

Journal Journal: How to prepare for alien invasion

Journal by Alien54 on Friday April 27, 2007 @12:35AM

When the aliens finally invade Earth, you may wish you had listened to Travis Taylor and Bob Boan. And if the invasion follows the plot of a typical Hollywood blockbuster, they might also be the guys called in at the last minute to save the day. After all, they have written "An Introduction to Planetary Defence"

Submission + - Comet McNaught Visible in Broad Daylight

Submitted by AbsoluteXyro on Sunday January 14, 2007 @04:35AM

AbsoluteXyro writes: As the amateur astronomers among us already know, Comet McNaught has been gracing the early morning and late evening skies... as it approaches the Sun, some estimate it has the potential to become 40 times brighter than Venus, or a magnitude of -8.8! In fact, it has recently been reported at SpaceWeather.com that Comet McNaught is now visible in broad daylight! From the article: "It's fantastic," reports Wayne Winch of Bishop, California. "I put the sun behind a neighbor's house to block the glare and the comet popped right into view. You can even see the tail."

Submission + - NASA Will Go Metric on the Moon

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08, 2007 @07:17PM

An anonymous reader writes: Space.com is reporting that NASA has decided to use the metric system for its new lunar missions. NASA hopes that metrication will allow easier international participation and safer missions. The loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter was blamed on an error converting between English units and metric units. 'When we made the announcement at the meeting, the reps for the other space agencies all gave a little cheer,' said a NASA official.

Submission + - Blurring images to hide information is not secure

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06, 2007 @08:25PM

An anonymous reader writes: Dheera Venkatraman explains in a webpage how an attacker might be able to extract personal information such as check or credit card numbers, from images blurred with a mosaic effect, potentially exposing the data behind hundreds of images of blurred checks found online, and provides a ficticious example. While much needs to be developed to apply such an algorithm to real photographic images, he offers a simple, yet obvious solution: cover up the sensitive information, don't blur it.

Submission + - The Times on Botnets

Submitted by

ThinkComp

on Saturday January 06, 2007 @05:29PM

ThinkComp writes: "The New York Times has a story on the proliferation of botnets which describes the problem as getting worse. The article cites a number of security researchers who paint a depressing picture of the state of internet security, and concludes with the suggestion that for home users, buying a new "updated" PC may be the only real solution. Unfortunately, as most of us know, given the number of outstanding flaws in software and the ingenuity of malicious software authors, that might not even help. The story fits perfectly with our own ongoing research into spam coming from malicious HTTP POST requests to corporate "Contact Us" pages routed through open proxy servers. Look out for those newline characters!"

Submission + - The 5 Strangest Materials

Submitted by

MattSparkes

on Wednesday January 03, 2007 @07:40AM

MattSparkes writes: "This article describes 5 bizarre materials with strange properties. There are liquids you can walk on, liquids that will escape containers by creeping up the sides, and magnetic liquids that can easily show you the shape of magnetic fields."

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