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Comments: 25 + -   Earth As an Extrasolar Planet on Saturday July 24, @03:00AM

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 24, @03:00AM
from the how-else-to-test dept.
space
sciencehabit writes "Astronomers have a theory that they can detect whether a planet light years away will be habitable by just looking at how its sun is reflected in its atmosphere. To test the idea, they pretended that they were observing Earth from a distant object — in this case, the moon. And sure enough, they picked up critical components for life in Earth's atmosphere: ozone, oxygen, sodium, and nitrogen."
Read More... 25 comments story

Comments: 135 + -   Study Finds 0.3% of BitTorrent Files Definitely Legal on Saturday July 24, @12:08AM

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 24, @12:08AM
from the can-we-call-that-vanishingly dept.
piracy
Andorin writes "It's common knowledge that the majority of files distributed over BitTorrent violate copyright, though the exact percentage is unclear. The Internet Commerce Security Laboratory of the University of Ballarat in Australia has conducted a study and found that 89% of files examined were in fact infringing, while most of the remaining 11% were ambiguous but likely to be infringing. Ars Technica summarizes the study: 'The total sample consisted of 1,000 torrent files—a random selection from the most active seeded files on the trackers they used. Each file was manually checked to see whether it was being legally distributed. Only three cases—0.3 percent of the files—were determined to be definitely not infringing, while 890 files were confirmed to be illegal. ' The study brings with it some other interesting statistics; out of the 1,000 files, 91 were pornographic, and approximately 4% of torrents were responsible for 80% of seeders. Music, movies and TV shows constituted the three largest categories of shared materials, and among those, zero legal files were found."
Read More... 135 comments story

Comments: 104 + -   Utah State Prof Says Hybrids Don't Kill More Pedestrians on Friday July 23, @09:16PM

Posted by timothy on Friday July 23, @09:16PM
from the hard-experiment-to-re-run dept.
power
thecarchik writes "Preliminary data seemed to show that hybrids were more likely to be involved in pedestrian crashes or hit cyclists. But now EV enthusiast Mark Larson (he's also an Emeritus Professor of Spanish at Utah State University) has analyzed some additional data and found this not be the case at all. He used 1994-2008 figures from the Fatality Reporting System maintained by the NHTSA and found that the rate of pedestrian fatalities has in fact fallen over that same period."
Read More... 104 comments story

Comments: 261 + -   What To Do With an Old G5 Tower? on Friday July 23, @07:36PM

Posted by timothy on Friday July 23, @07:36PM
from the such-a-beautiful-exterior dept.
mac
lunatic1969 writes "I've got an old G5 PowerPC tower that's sitting in a spare room not seeing much in the way of use. I'd like to stick a Linux distribution on it and maybe breathe some life back into it. I've got a few vague ideas — it might be a handy file server, streaming video for a security system, or simply just to have a spare box around. My question is therefore in two parts: First, are there any particularly creative projects or ideas anyone has for an old G5, and second and most important, which distribution currently offers the best support for this box?"
Read More... story

Comments: 49 + -   Breaking Open the Video Frontier, Despite MPEG-LA on Friday July 23, @06:54PM

Posted by timothy on Friday July 23, @06:54PM
from the starting-point dept.
media
JimLynch writes "Did you know that nearly every video produced for Web viewing has been, at one point or another, in MPEG format no matter in what format the video is ultimately saved? According to Chris 'Monty' Montgomery, nearly every consumer device outputs video in MPEG format. Which means that every software video decoder has to have MPEG-licensed technology in order to process/edit video." An interesting snippet: "But there's hope on the horizon. Besides the codecs and formats from the Xiph.Org Foundation, the new WebM format announced by Google in May will ideally provide consumers and developers with another alternative. Montgomery has thrown Xiph.Org support behind WebM, because Google's financial muscle (not to mention their free license) will have a real chance to break the hold MPEG-LA has on the market."
Read More... 49 comments story

Comments: 63 + -   BioWare's Star Wars MMO To Have Space Combat on Friday July 23, @06:28PM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 23, @06:28PM
from the just-in-case-they-weren't-busy-enough dept.
pcgames
An anonymous reader writes "Big news for Star Wars fans looking forward to BioWare's upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG — space combat has been confirmed for the game. Players will be able to fly around the galaxy in their own personal starships, avoiding asteroid belts, landing in dangerous territory and battling other vessels. The initial news makes it sound like a cross between Mass Effect's galaxy map and a traditional space fighting game, where players will have to find 'hotspots' on the galaxy map in order to enter a particular zone."
Read More... 63 comments story

Comments: 94 + -   Google Schedules Chrome 6, 7, and 8 For This Year on Friday July 23, @06:10PM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 23, @06:10PM
from the incrementing-and-iterating dept.
software
An anonymous reader writes "Google said that it will be releasing a new stable version of Chrome every six weeks, which is about twice as fast as the release pace today. The goal is to make new features available when they are done and to make Chrome releases more predictable. Has anyone complained that there were too few new Chrome releases? Mozilla has been releasing a major new browser update twice a year and Microsoft is on an 18-24 month pace. Firefox's 4.0 Beta 2 is scheduled for release soon, and it appears that Mozilla is somewhat paranoid about the Black Hat Conference. 3.6.6 was planned to be the original 'Black Hat release'; now we are at version 3.6.7 and Mozilla has already a build candidate of 3.6.8 that will be released depending on news coming out of Black Hat."
Read More... 94 comments story

Comments: 236 + -   PC Gamers Too Good For Consoles Gamers? on Friday July 23, @05:35PM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 23, @05:35PM
from the commence-flame-war-now dept.
inputdev
thsoundman sends in a blog post from Rahul Sood, CTO of HP's gaming business, who claims there was once a project in development at Microsoft to let Xbox users compete against PC users playing the same game. According to Sood, the project was killed because the console players kept getting destroyed by their PC counterparts. He wrote, "Those of us who have been in the gaming business for over a decade know the real deal. You simply don't get the same level of detail or control as you do with a PC over a console. It's a real shame that Microsoft killed this — because had they kept it alive it might have actually increased the desire of game developers and gamers alike to continue developing and playing rich experiences on the PC, which would trickle down to the console as it has in the past."
Read More... 236 comments story

Comments: 200 + -   Pentagon Workers Tied To Child Porn on Friday July 23, @05:26PM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 23, @05:26PM
from the your-tax-dollars-at-work dept.
crime
finalcutmonstar tips a Boston Globe report on details released today of Operation Flicker (PDF), an investigation of subscribers to child porn websites, which seems to have implicated a number of government employees in sensitive positions. Quoting: "Federal investigators have identified several dozen Pentagon officials and contractors with high-level security clearances who allegedly purchased and downloaded child pornography, including an undisclosed number who used their government computers to obtain the illegal material, according to investigative reports. The investigations have included employees of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — which deal with some of the most sensitive work in intelligence and defense — among other organizations within the Defense Department. The number of offenders is a small percentage of the thousands of people working for sensitive Pentagon-related agencies. But the fact that offenders include people with access to government secrets puts national security agencies 'at risk of blackmail, bribery, and threats, especially since these individuals typically have access to military installations,' according to one report by the Defense Criminal Investigative Service from late 2009."
Read More... story

Comments: 89 + -   Droid X Gets Rooted on Friday July 23, @05:01PM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 23, @05:01PM
from the root-root-root-for-the-home-team dept.
cellphones
An anonymous reader writes "The Droid X forums have posted a procedure to root the new Motorola Droid X, putting to rest Andoid fans' fears that they would never gain access to the device's secrets due to a reported eFuse that would brick the phone if certain boot files were tampered with. Rooting the phone is the first step in gaining complete control over the device."
Read More... 89 comments story

Poll There is no...
try
spoon
sunshine when she's gone
third rule of the fight club
devil, it's just Cowboy Neal when he's drunk
option 7
[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:239 | Votes:16980

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