paulelaguna writes "The dream of owning a household robot is starting to become reality, particularly for people in Japan. There are robots to help you do the dishes, move furniture, and even robotic wheelchairs to help you get around. Really, the only question that remains for us is when do we move?"
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Senate Candidate Sued By Copyright Troll
The Iso writes "Las Vegas based company Righthaven found two articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal about Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle reprinted on her web site without permission, so it did what it always does: bought the rights to the articles from the Review-Journal and sued the alleged infringer, seeking unspecified damages."
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UK Music Industry Calls For Truce With Technology
Stoobalou writes "The British music industry has called for a truce with the technology firms with whom it has till now fought a bitter battle over rights, royalties and file sharing. Feargal Sharkey, CEO of lobby group UK Music, told a conference in London this week that it was time for the music and technology industries to set aside their differences and strive instead toward a common goal: nothing less than the total global domination of British music."
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The New Difficulties In Making a 3D Game
eldavojohn writes "MSNBC spoke with the senior producer of a new stereoscopic 3D game called 'Killzone 3' and highlighted problems they are trying to solve with being one of the first FPS 3D games for the PS3. The team ran into serious design problems like where to put the cross hairs for the players (do they constantly hover in front of your vision?) and what to do with any of the heads up display components. Aside from the obvious marketing thrown in at the end of the article (in a very familiar way), there is an interesting point raised concerning normalized conventions in all video games and how one ports that to the new stereoscopic 3D model--the same way directors continue to grapple with getting 3D right. Will 3D games be just as gimmicky as most 3D movies? If they are, at least Guerrilla Games is at least making it possible for the player to easily and quickly switch in and out of stereoscopic 3-D while playing."
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4chan Gives 90-Year-Old Vet a Great Birthday
Hugh Pickens writes "Members of 4chan aren't known for doing things that are cute and heart-warming and when they decide to go after someone, it's typically to subject them to ridicule. But not this time. Someone at 4chan decided that the Internet should get together and wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday, and soon Lashua's local branch of the American Legion was deluged by birthday calls from people as far away as Sweden. The account someone set up for Mr. Lashua's birthday on Facebook had 3,956 'likes' and over 500 comments, most of which wished him a happy birthday and thanked him for his military service. It's not clear how 4chan originally came across a photo of Lashua, but a member of the site posted a snapshot of a flyer that was on the bulletin board at a store in Ashburnham, Massachusetts asking for guests to attend the nonagenarian's birthday on at the American Legion hall and the post took off. In contrast to their usual behavior, 4chan members 'were giving him nice phone calls and sending him nice notes' and discouraging those who wanted to do something stupid or mean. 'They were all being.. well, shucks, awful nice.'"
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Transition Metal Catalysts Could be Key To Origin of Life
An anonymous reader writes "One of the big, unsolved problems in explaining how life arose on Earth is a chicken-and-egg paradox: How could the basic biochemicals - such as amino acids and nucleotides - have arisen before the biological catalysts (proteins or ribozymes) existed to carry out their formation? In a paper appearing in the current issue of The Biological Bulletin, scientists propose that a third type of catalyst could have jumpstarted metabolism and life itself, deep in hydrothermal ocean vents."
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Fine-Structure Constant Maybe Not So Constant
Kilrah_il writes "The fine-structure constant, a coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, has been measure lately by scientist from University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and has been found to change slightly in light sent from quasars in galaxies as far back as 12 billion years ago. Although the results look promising, caution is advised: 'This would be sensational if it were real, but I'm still not completely convinced that it's not simply systematic errors' in the data, comments cosmologist Max Tegmark of MIT. Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., acknowledges that 'it's a competent team and a thorough analysis.' But because the work has such profound implications for physics and requires such a high level of precision measurements, 'it needs more proof before we'll believe it.'"
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Ideas For a Great Control Room?
lewko writes "Our company is about to build a central monitoring facility and I'm looking for ideas/suggestions about the best hardware and the best way to make it comfortable for those manning a screen. It will be manned 24x7 and operators will be monitoring a variety of systems including security, network, fire, video and more. These will be observed via local multi-monitor workstations and a common videowall. This is going to be a massively expensive exercise and we only get one chance to get it right. The facility is in a secure windowless bunker and staff will generally be in there for many hours at a time. So we have to implement design elements which make it a 'happy' place. At the same time, it has to be ergonomically sound. Lastly, we will be showing it to our clients, so without undoing the above objectives, it would be nice if it was 'cool' (yet functional). Whilst Television doesn't transfer to real life always, think 'CTU' from 24."
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Ideas For a Great Control Room?
lewko writes "Our company is about to build a central monitoring facility and I'm looking for ideas/suggestions about the best hardware and the best way to make it comfortable for those manning a screen. It will be manned 24x7 and operators will be monitoring a variety of systems including security, network, fire, video and more. These will be observed via local multi-monitor workstations and a common videowall. This is going to be a massively expensive exercise and we only get one chance to get it right. The facility is in a secure windowless bunker and staff will generally be in there for many hours at a time. So we have to implement design elements which make it a 'happy' place. At the same time, it has to be ergonomically sound. Lastly, we will be showing it to our clients, so without undoing the above objectives, it would be nice if it was 'cool' (yet functional). Whilst Television doesn't transfer to real life always, think 'CTU' from 24."
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Fidel Castro, Internet News Junkie
pickens writes "The LA Times reports that 84-year-old Cuban ex-President Fidel Castro consumes 200 to 300 news items a day on the World Wide Web. In a recent interview he called Web communication 'the most powerful weapon that has existed' and extolled its power to break a stranglehold on the media by 'the empire' and 'ambitious private groups that have abused it' adding that the Internet 'has put an end to secrets.... We are seeing a high level of investigative journalism, as the New York Times calls it, that is within reach of the whole world.' Well, not the whole world. Cuba has the lowest level of Internet penetration in the Western Hemisphere (lower than Haiti), plus severe government restrictions and censorship affecting those who do have access. In addition Cuban law bans using the Internet to spread information that is against what the government considers to be the social interest, norms of good behavior, the integrity of the people or national security."
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Gubernatorial Candidate Wants to Sell Speeding Passes for $25
If Nevada gubernatorial candidate Eugene "Gino" DiSimone gets his way $25 will buy you the right to drive up to 90mph for a day. DiSimone estimates his "free limit plan" will raise $1 billion a year for Nevada. From the article: "First, vehicles would have to pass a safety inspection. Then vehicle information would be loaded into a database, and motorists would purchase a transponder. After setting up an account, anyone in a hurry could dial in, and for $25 charged to a credit card, be free to speed for 24 hours."
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UN Tech Group Finds Most Expensive Broadband
destinyland writes "In the Central African Republic, broadband internet service costs 3891% of the average monthly income. 'Put another way, a month's broadband service costs more than three years' average wages in the country,' notes one technology blog, 'compared with less than two hours' earnings in Macau.' A United Nations' technology group released the figures in a new report in advance of a September 19 summit on the digital divide in developing countries. ('We are trying to avoid a broadband divide,' said Dr. Hamadoun Toure, the secretary general of the UN's International Telecommunications Union.) Their agency noted that the rate for broadband penetration is below 1% in many poor countries, with monthly costs higher than the average monthly income. 'By contrast,' notes the BBC, 'in the world's most developed economies, around 30% of people have access to broadband at a cost of less than 1% of their income.' And the report also estimates that there are 5 billion cellphones in the world — though some people may own more than one."
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The Last of the Punch Card Programmers
Peter Cus writes "Cluny Lace, an English lacemaking manufacturer, has reverted to 19th-Century Leavers machines in order to stay competitive. These 19th-Century machines use Jacquard punch cards. Ian Elm, thought to be the last of the card punchers, says young people don't want factory work: 'Younger people coming into a trade want a guarantee of a career out of it, and this is so uncertain.'"
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Yellowstone Hot Spot Shreds Ancient Pacific Ocean
jamie passes along this excerpt from DiscoveryNews: "If you thought the geysers and overblown threat of a supervolcanic eruption in Yellowstone National Park were dramatic, you ain't seen nothing: deep beneath Earth's surface, the hot spot that feeds the park has torn an entire tectonic plate in half. The revelation comes from a new study (abstract) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that peered into the mantle beneath the Pacific Northwest to see what happens when ancient ocean crust from the Pacific Ocean runs headlong into a churning plume of ultra-hot mantle material."
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Researchers Develop "Tea Bag" Water Filter
cybernanga writes "A group of researchers in South Africa has developed a filter that can purify water straight from the bottle. The filter sits inside a tube fitted on top of a bottle and purifies water as it is poured on a cup. From the article: 'The designer behind the filter, Dr Eugene Cloete, from the Stellenbosch University in South Africa, says the filter is only as big as an ordinary tea bag. He says the product is cost-effective and easy to use. "We are coming in here at the fraction of the cost of anything else that is currently on the market," says Dr Cloete on BBC World Service.'"
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Judging You By the Online Company You Keep
theodp writes "Network analysis uses data about your social network interactions to make assumptions and predictions about your behavior. The Economist notes the upside for companies looking to sell products. But don't forget about the downside, warns Adrian Chen, of living in a world where network analysis is used by financial firms to determine risky borrowers by looking at social ties, or by Internet businesses to determine which customers are more equal than others (nice to see Microsoft's back on the forefront of some tech!). So, did Mom envision Social Network Analytics when she gave you that you-are-the-company-you-keep lecture?"
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Leaders Aren't Being Made At Tech Firms
theodp writes "In this article Vivek Wadhwa laments that short shrift is paid to management training these days at many high-tech firms. You can't be born with the skills needed to plan projects, adhere to EEOC guidelines, prepare budgets and manage finances, or to know the intricacies of business and IP law, says Wadhwa. All this has to be learned. Stepping up to address the problems of 'engineering without leadership,' which may include morale problems, missed deadlines, customer-support disasters, and high turnover, are programs like UC Berkeley's Engineering Leadership Program and Duke's Masters of Engineering Management Program, which aim to teach product management, entrepreneurial thinking, leadership, finance, team building, business management, and motivation to techies."
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Dubai's Police Chief Calls BlackBerry a Spy Tool
crimeandpunishment writes "Does the battle over the Blackberry ban in the United Arab Emirates have its roots in a spy story? Dubai's police chief says concern over espionage (specifically, by the US and Israel) led to the decision to limit BlackBerry services. The UAE says it will block BlackBerry email, messaging, and web services on October 11th unless it gets access to encrypted data. Comments by Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim are often seen as reflecting the views of Dubai's leadership, and would appear to indicate a very hard line in talks with Research in Motion."
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Radiohead Helps Fans Make Crowd-Sourced Live Show DVD
Kilrah_il writes "After having a go with a Name-Your-Price album and an open-source video, Radiohead is again breaking new ground, this time with a fan-based initiative. A group of fans went to one of the band's shows in Prague, each shooting the show from a different angle. By editing it all together and adding audio from the original masters provided by the band, they have created a video of the show that is 'Strictly not for sale — By the fans for the fans,' adding, 'Please share and enjoy.' Can this be the future of live show videos?"
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The Joke Known As 3D TV
harrymcc writes "I'm at IFA in Berlin — Europe's equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show — and the massive halls are dominated by 3D TVs made by everyone from Sony, Samsung, and Panasonic to companies you've never heard of. The manufacturers seem pretty excited, but 3D has so many downsides — most of all the lousy image quality and unimpressive dimensionality effect — that I can't imagine consumers are going to go for this. 'As a medium, 3D remains remarkably self-trivializing. Virtually nobody who works with it can resist thrusting stuff at the camera, just to make clear to viewers that they’re experiencing the miracle of the third dimension. When Lang Lang banged away at his piano during Sony’s event, a cameraman zoomed in and out on the musical instrument for no apparent reason, and one of the company’s representatives kept robotically shoving his hands forward. Hey, it’s 3D — watch this!'"
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DoD Takes Criticism From Security Experts On Cyberwar Incident
wiredmikey writes "Undersecretary of Defense William J. Lynn is being challenged by IT security experts who find it hard to believe that the incident which led to the Pentagon's recognizing cyberspace as a new 'domain of warfare' could have really happened as described. In his essay, 'Defending a New Domain,' Lynn recounts a widely-reported 2008 hack that was initiated when, according to Lynn, an infected flash drive was inserted into a military laptop by 'a foreign intelligence agency.' Critics such as IT security firm Sophos' Chief Security Adviser Chester Wisniewski argue that this James Bond-like scenario doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The primary issue is that the malware involved, known as agent.btz, is neither sophisticated nor particularly dangerous. A variant of the SillyFDC worm, agent.btz can be easily defeated by disabling the Windows 'autorun' feature (which automatically starts a program on a drive upon insertion) or by simply banning thumb drives. In 2007, Silly FDC was rated as Risk Level 1: Very Low, by security firm Symantec."
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Nasty Data-Stealing Bug Haunts Internet Explorer 8
Trailrunner7 writes "There's an unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 that enables simple data-stealing attacks by Web-based attackers and could lead to an attacker hijacking a user's authenticated session on a third-party site. The flaw, which a researcher said may have been known since 2008, lies in the way IE8 handles CSS. The vulnerability can be exploited through an attack scenario known as cross-domain theft, and researcher Chris Evans originally brought the problem to light in a blog post in December. At the time, all of the major browsers were vulnerable to the attack, but since then, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all have implemented a simple defense mechanism. The upshot of this is that if a victim has visited a given Web site, authenticated himself to the site, and then visits a site controlled by an attacker, the attacker would have the ability to hijack the user's session and extract supposedly confidential data. This attack works on the latest, fully patched release of IE8."
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Google To Pay $8.5 Million In Buzz Privacy Settlement
eldavojohn writes "Google's Buzz service will cost the company $8.5 million in settling a class action lawsuit related to the privacy debacle from the days after its release. Ars reports: 'In the proposed settlement submitted to the court this week, Google agreed to make efforts to better educate Buzz users on issues of privacy and the particular privacy features that Buzz offers. Additionally, Google also agreed to pay out $8.5 million to a fund which will be disbursed as cy pres awards for organizations that focus on Internet privacy policy or education.' In other words, the victims (Buzz users) won't see any of that money, but it will be used to promote healthy Internet privacy policies." Several readers have also noted that Google has simplified its privacy policy, condensing a number of product-specific policies into one and adding a privacy tools page in an effort to make everything more easily understood.
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Simon Singh Talks With Wired About His Libel Battle
smellsofbikes writes "Wired has a short but pithy interview with Simon Singh about his defense against a libel suit brought by the British Chiropractic Association, in which he spent more than $200,000 and emerged victorious."
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