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Science

Submission + - Vegetative state man "talks" by brain scan (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by c0lo
c0lo writes: Severely brain-injured Scott Routley hasn’t spoken in 12 years. None of his physical assessments since then have shown any sign of awareness, or ability to communicate, thus being diagnosed as vegetative (vegetative patients emerge from a coma into a condition where they have periods awake, with their eyes open, but have no perception of themselves or the outside world).

Scott Routley was asked questions while having his brain activity scanned in an fMRI machine. British neuroscientist Prof Adrian Owen said Mr Routley was clearly not vegetative.
"Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind. We have scanned him several times and his pattern of brain activity shows he is clearly choosing to answer our questions. We believe he knows who and where he is."

As a consequence, medical textbooks would need to be updated to include Prof Owen's techniques, because only observational assessments (as opposed to using mind-readers) of Mr Routley have continued to suggest he is vegetative.

The professor in an earlier interview functional MRI machines are expensive (up to $2 million), but it’s quite possible that a portable high-end EEG machine, costing about $75,000, can be used at a patient’s bedside.

Phillip K Dick's world is one step closer.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot:How to add new tech to old van? 1

Submitted by
Dslice_allstar
Dslice_allstar writes: "I have a '77 GMC Van that I would like to take into the 21st century with some good tech. I have several large LCD monitors, and I want to hook at least one up for watching movies and doing some mild PC gaming. I am concerned about power, i.e. using an inverter and not frying the computer every time the van starts/stops, and I'm worried about whether the alternator will support a computer/monitor setup as well as LEDs and the like. Would a UPC backup be a good idea? I would also like to be able to play music over the sound system, preferably off the computer. Should I be thinking mini ITX HTPC, or would a netbook better serve my purposes? How would you all pimp out an old conversion van?"
Google

Submission + - Youtube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music Owned By "Rumblefish" (google.com) 2

Submitted by eeplox
eeplox writes: I make nature videos for my Youtube channel, generally in remote wilderness away from any possible source of music. And I purposely avoid using a soundtrack in my videos because of all the horror stories I hear about Rumblefish filing claims against public domain music.

But when uploading my latest video, Youtube informed me that I was using rumblefish's copyrighted content, and so ads would be placed on my video, with the proceeds going to said company. This baffled me.

I disputed their claim with Youtube's system, and Rumblefish refuted my dispute and confirmed that:

"All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content:

Entity: rumblefish Content Type: Musical Composition"

So I asked some questions, and it appears that the birds singing in the background of my video are Rumblefish's exclusive intellectual property.

My only option at this point is to lawyer-up and fight it out in the courts, which of course isn't going to happen over a Youtube video that'll only be seen by a few hundred people. More likely I'll just end up deleting the video.
Piracy

Submission + - Warner Bros sued for pirating Louis Vuitton tradem (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "You have to love a case where Warner Brothers, copyright maximalist extraordinaire, gets sued for "piracy", in this case for using a knock-off Luis Vuitton bag in a recent movie. This lawsuit has been described as "awkward" for Warner; I have to agree with that characterization. Louis Vuitton's 22-page complaint (PDF) alleges that Warner Bros. had knowledge that the bag was a knock-off, and went ahead, and used it, anyway. Apparently Warner Bros. takes IP rights seriously only when its Warner's IP rights that are involved."
Oracle

Submission + - First Look: Oracle NoSQL Database (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a first look at Oracle NoSQL Database, the company's take on the distributed key-value data store for the enterprise. 'There are dozens of small ways in which the tool is more thorough and sophisticated than the simpler NoSQL projects. You get a number of different options for increasing the durability in the face of a node crash or trading that durability for speed,' Wayner writes. 'Oracle NoSQL might not offer the heady fun and "just build it" experimentation of many of the pure open source NoSQL projects, but that's not really its role. Oracle borrowed the best ideas from these groups and built something that will deliver good performance to the sweet spot of the enterprise market.'"
Games

Submission + - Linux 3D games run faster on PC-BSD (phoronix.com)

Submitted by koinu
koinu writes: Phoronix has published benchmarks comparing 3D games on Ubuntu Linux 11.04 and the FreeBSD Linux ABI emulation on the 8.2 release of PC-BSD, which is a desktop variant of FreeBSD. Most results show that the emulated Linux layer on FreeBSD performs better than Linux natively. It is pretty interesting, because most people would expect that an additional abstraction layer would generally slow down the execution of binaries.

Submission + - Cryptic codes in Oslo-terrorist manifest (no.net)

Submitted by repvik
repvik writes: The 1500 page manifest of terrorist that killed 77 people in Oslo and on Utøya two weeks ago, contains a series of seemingly encrypted URLs. There are 46 of them, and the initial part of the URLs appear to be GPS coordinates. An effort to analyze the codes have been launched.
Technology

Submission + - Scientist Creates 3D Scanner App for iPhone (physorg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A research scientist at Georgia Tech has created a 3D scanner app for the iPhone which uses the phone's screen as a light source to quickly capture digital 3D models of faces and other objects. The app, called Trimensional, can output directly to a 3D printer to make physical copies of objects, which a few people have already tried. An Android version is in the works.
GNOME

Submission + - ALS sufferer used legs to contribute last patch (gnome.org) 1

Submitted by
krkhan
krkhan writes: "This is a little old but seeing as it didn't make it to /. at the time I think it deserves a headline now. Adrian Hands was suffering from ALS and had lost motor skills when he used his legs to type in Morse code and fix a 9 year old bug in Gnome. The patch was submitted three days before he passed away."
Open Source

Submission + - Nmap Developers release a picture of the Web (nmap.org)

Submitted by iago-vL
iago-vL writes: The Nmap Project recently posted an awesome visualization of the top million site icons (favicons) on the Web, sized by relative popularity of sites. Once again proving that they're the kings of scanning, this project used the Nmap Scripting Engine, which is capable of performing discovery, vulnerability detection, and anything else you can imagine with lightning speed. We saw last month how an Nmap developer downloaded 170 million Facebook names, and this month it's a million favicons. I wonder what they're going to do next?

Submission + - Retrieving a stolen laptop by IP address alone? 1

Submitted by CorporalKlinger
CorporalKlinger writes: My vehicle was recently burglarized while parked in a university parking lot in a midwestern state. My new Dell laptop was stolen from the car, along with several other items. I have no idea who might have done this, and the police say that without any idea of a suspect, the best they can do is enter the serial number from my laptop in a national stolen goods database in case it is ever pawned or recovered in another investigation. I had Thunderbird set up on the laptop, configured to check my Gmail through IMAP. Luckily, Gmail logs and displays the last 6 or 7 IP addresses that have logged into your account. I immediately stopped using that email account, cleared it out, and left the password unchanged — creating my own honeypot in case the criminal loaded Thunderbird on my laptop. Last week, Gmail reported 4 accesses from the same IP address in a state just to the east of mine via IMAP. I know that this must be the criminal who took my property, since I've disabled IMAP access to the account on all of my own computers. The municipal police say they can't intervene in the case since university police have jurisdiction over crimes that take place on their land. The university police department — about 10 officers and 2 detectives — don't even know what an IP address is. I even contacted the local FBI office and they said they're "not interested" in the case despite it now crossing state lines. Am I chasing my own tail here? How can I get someone to pay attention to the fact that all the police need to do is file some RIAA-style paperwork to find the name associated with this IP address and knock on the right door to nab a criminal and recover my property? How can I get my laptop back — and more importantly — stop this criminal in his tracks?
Security

Submission + - McAfee Retracts Bug Damage Estimate (zdnet.com.au) 1

Submitted by bennyboy64
bennyboy64 writes: McAfee has changed its official response on how many enterprise customers were affected by a bug that caused havoc on computers globally. It originally stated it affected 'less that half of 1 per cent' of enterprise customers. Today McAfee's blog states it was a 'small percentage' of enterprise customers. ZDNet is running a poll and opinion piece on whether McAfee should compensate customers. ZDNet notes a supermarket giant in Australia that had to close down its stores as they were affected by the bug, causing thousands of dollars to be lost.
Windows

Submission + - New Crossover release with improved compatability (codeweavers.com)

Submitted by solanum
solanum writes: On March 2nd Crossover 9.0 was released. CrossOver 9 features a new user interface that focuses on making installation of Windows software quicker and easier than previous versions. Another new feature is CrossOver's ability to download installation "recipes" directly from CodeWeavers online Compatibility Database. "If another CrossOver user has figured out how to use CrossOver to install a Windows application, they can upload that installation recipe to our database," said Jeremy White, CodeWeavers chief executive officer. "As we go forward, and build this online storehouse, CrossOver will begin to automatically install that same application for other users. This enables us to move closer to a world where CrossOver will begin to run the majority of Windows apps, and not just an officially supported subset. "In other words, our diabolical plot for world domination is going exactly as planned," he added.

Early reviews and comments are positive and my own experience is that many more Windows applications work in this new version than previously.

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