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Submission + - Mt. Gox halts USD withdrawals (paritynews.com) 1

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: World’s largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, has halted US dollar withdrawals of customer funds in the US citing reasons of system improvement. According to Mt. Gox the exchange has experienced a huge number of requests for deposits as well as withdrawals from both established markets as well as new markets following which its bank hasn’t been able to process transactions on time in a smooth manner which has led to difficulties for its overseas clients especially those in the US. The exchange reassured that the deposits in USD, transfers to Mt. Gox, deposits and withdrawals in other currencies will remain unaffected during this period. Mt. Gox will be resuming the USD withdrawals for its US clients once the improvement of its systems is complete.
Google

Submission + - Patent 5,893,120 Reduced to Math (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: US Patent #5,893,120 has been reduced to mathematical formulae as a demonstration of the oft-ignored fact that there is an equivalence relation between programs and mathematics. You may recognize Patent #5,893,210 as the one which Google was ordered to pay $5M for infringing due to some code in Linux. It should be interesting to see how legal fiction will deal with this. Will Lambda calculus no longer be "math"? Or will they just decide to fix the inconsistency and make mathematics patentable?
Medicine

Submission + - Patient Reportedly Cured of HIV by Stem Cells (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: An HIV-infected man who received stem cell treatment for leukemia from a donor with natural resistance to HIV infection appears to have been cured of HIV, according to a report on the NAM aidsmap website. The treatment, which was carried out in 2007, opens the possibility of a cure for HIV infection through the use of genetically engineered stem cells.

Submission + - SHA-3 Finalists Known

Submitted by Skuto
Skuto writes: NIST just announced the final selection of algorithms in the SHA-3 hash competition. The algorithms that are candidates to replace SHA-2 are BLAKE, Grøstl, JH, Keccak and Skein. The selection criteria included performance in software and hardware, hardware implementation size, best known attacks and being different enough from the other candidates. Curiously, some of the faster algorithms were eliminated as they were felt to be "too fast to be true". A full report with the (non-)selection rationale for each candidate is forthcoming.
The Internet

Submission + - UK RNLI Dig Own 100Mbps Fibre Optic Broadband (ispreview.co.uk) 1

Submitted by
MJackson
MJackson writes: "The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) in Humber, a large tidal estuary situated on the east coast of Northern England, has just become one of the UK's most remote-rural locations to have a next generation 100Mbps Fibre Optic FTTH broadband link installed. The deployment is being sponsored by FibreStream and amazingly the groundwork's were completed by the lifeboat crew literally digging their own fibre. We'd do the same on our road but the government would probably object."
Games

Submission + - While My Guitar Gently Beeps

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "As the world prepares to Meet the Beatles all over again on 9-9-9, the NY Times Magazine takes a look at the making of Beatles: Rock Band, and asks a Fab Four tribute band to take the game for a test drive (not surprisingly, they fare well). 'As huge as Guitar Hero and Rock Band have been over the past few years,' says Harmonix Music Systems co-founder Alex Rigopulos, 'I still think we're on the shy side of the chasm because the Beatles have a reach and power that transcends any other band.' The Beatles: Rock Band follows the group's career from Liverpool to the concert on the roof of Apple Corps in London in 1969 (Trailer). The first half of the game recreates famous live performances; the second half weaves psychedelic dreamscapes around animations of the Beatles recording in Studio Two. 45 songs deemed the most fun to play, rather than the band's most iconic numbers, come with the game. Will you be buying in?"
The Courts

Submission + - BetOnSports Founder Pleads Guilty to Racketeering 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The founder of Internet- and telephone-based gambling operation BetOnSports has entered guilty pleas to three US charges, including a racketeering charge and will forfeit US$43.7 million to the US government as part of a plea agreement, In his guilty plea, Gary Stephen Kaplan says that beginning in the mid- to late-1990s, he set up businesses in Antigua and later Costa Rica to provide sports betting services to US residents through Web sites and toll-free telephone numbers that terminated in Houston or Miami, and then were forwarded to Costa Rica by satellite transmitter or fiber-optic cable. Some of Kaplan's Web servers were located in Miami and were remotely controlled from Costa Rica. People became customers by depositing money in a BetOnSports account. By 2004, the BetOnSports organization's principal base of operations in Costa Rica employed about 1,700 people had nearly 1 million registered customers and accepted more than 10 million sports bets. Now bankrupt, BetOnSports took in $1.25 billion in 2004, with 98 percent of that revenue coming from bets made through its Web site by clients in the United States. "Gary Kaplan made millions of dollars by making it too easy for people to gamble away their hard earned money without having to leave their homes," John Gillies, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in St. Louis, said in a statement. "Today's guilty plea should have a lasting effect because Kaplan was not only the founder of BetOnSports, he was also one of the pioneers of illegal online gambling.""
Space

Submission + - Sun's outer atmosphere mystery solved (spacefellowship.com) 1

Submitted by
xp65
xp65 writes: "The mystery of why temperatures in the solar corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, soar to several million degrees Kelvin (K) --much hotter than temperatures nearer the sun's surface--has puzzled scientists for decades. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan's Hinode satellite reveal the culprit to be nanoflares. Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of heat and energy. "They occur within tiny strands that are bundled together to form a magnetic tube called a coronal loop," says Klimchuk. Coronal loops are the fundamental building blocks of the thin, translucent gas known as the sun's corona. The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth, our place in the universe."
Earth

Submission + - new hope for predicting earthquakes (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by
Kristina at Science News
Kristina at Science News writes: "Interviews with several geophysicists reveal that new data and new understandings about how earthquakes really happen inspires some hope in pursuing the short-term prediction of earthquakes. Read about the latest ideas on what we do and do not know about when large earthquakes happen, and see what two Italian scientists have to say about the large quake that hit central Italy in April."
The Almighty Buck

Game Devs Using One-Time Bonuses to Fight Used Game Sales 229

Posted by Soulskill from the thanks-so-much dept.
ShackNews reports on an emerging trend which sees game publishers offer one-time bonus codes to unlock extra content for certain titles. Rock Band 2, for example, comes with a code which will allow free 20-song download, but is only usable once. NBA Live '09 has functionality to update team rosters on a daily basis, but will only do so for the original owner. "'This information and data is very valuable and it wasn't free for us,' an EA representative explained on Operation Sports. 'T-Mobile is paying for it this year for all users who buy the game new. This is a very expensive tool to use, and if you don't buy it new, then you'll have to pay for this. It isn't greed at all.'"

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