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Giant Robotic Jellyfish Unveiled by Researchers 43

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, an anonymous reader writes in with news about a giant robot jellyfish. As if there weren't enough real jellyfish around to trigger our thalassophobia, researchers at Virginia Tech have created Cryo -- an eight-armed autonomous robot that mimics jelly movement with the help of a flexible silicone hat. The man-sized jellybot altogether dwarfs previous efforts, hence the upgrade from small tank to swimming pool for mock field tests. And unlike the passively propelled bots we've seen recently, Cryo runs on batteries, with the researchers hoping to better replicate the energy-efficient nature of jelly movement to eventually increase Cryo's charge cycle to months instead of hours. That's also the reason these robotic jellyfish are getting bigger -- because the larger they are, the further they can go."

Laser Fusion's Brightest Hope 115


Google Releases Street View Images From Fukushima Ghost Town 63

mdsolar writes in with news that Goolge has released Street View pictures from inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima disaster. "Google Inc. (GOOG) today released images taken by its Street View service from the town of Namie, Japan, inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011. Google, operator of the world's biggest Web search engine, entered Namie this month at the invitation of the town's mayor, Tamotsu Baba, and produced the 360-degree imagery for the Google Maps and Google Earth services, it said in an e-mailed statement. All of Namie's 21,000 residents were forced to flee after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the town, causing the world's worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl. Baba asked Mountain View, California-based Google to map the town to create a permanent record of its state two years after the evacuation, he said in a Google blog post."
The Military

United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea 567


Comment Yet another solution in search for a problem (Score 1) 278

Hey, let's forget about unfunded goverment mandates, senators busy playing blame games, clueless SEC employees, greedy intermediaries, lopsided compensation practices, and market participants that do not understand instruments that they are trading.

What we really miss is python interface to EDGAR. Some guy say so, it must be true.

Comment Video Game Art is emergent as the game is played (Score 1) 733

A video game unplayed is, to the player, all unrealized potential. When you play the game, a set of experiences emerge from those interactive sessions. Perhaps you forge a narrative in a game like Dragon Age or Mass Effect. Perhaps it's some form of finessed performance art in a game like Flower. Whatever it is, the art is there once the game has been played from its beginning to its completion. A unique advantage of the medium is the freedom to create new or different art on subsequent traversals of the game.

Interestingly, this is not fundamentally different from any other art. Would a painting or a book or any other recognized piece of art be art if there was no human to experience it? I think not. A painting is an unremarkable thing until a human being looks upon it and interacts with it emotionally. Perhaps the interaction is limited to your imagination, but there definitely is interaction.

And finally, as to the argument that you can't win art, I wholeheartedly disagree. The creator of the art has a definite sense of whether he won or lost based on how happy he is with the finished product. A game player is a co-creator in the art, since it is emergent from the playing experience, and, similarly, winning and losing is about perception.... the game just tends to make it a bit more clear whether or not you should be happy with a given outcome... but with many games it's more nebulous. Not everyone survived my first playthrough of Mass Effect 2, and yet I felt more satisfied with that result than if there had been a perfectly happy ending free of consequences.

Comment Re:Same old (Score 1) 267

I disagree. The search ain't "just like google", hence TFA.

Not as good, but just as free. That's the point.

I don't think hotmail is as good as gmail either, but it's just as free.

The browser is exactly the same - you might like chrome better (I do), but IE is just as free as Chrome.

It's not fair to intentionally misinterpret someone's point to make a different point of your own. When someone says "X is true", you aren't disagreeing when you say "No, Y is definitely not true" even when you pretend X and Y are the same thing. Now, to refute your Y argument:

The browser ain't "just like google" because Chrome isn't the property of a monopoly trying to squash the only other popular browser in use.

Chrome is the property of a monopoly trying to squash the only other search engine in use. What's the difference? It's a competitive market, and Google is doing the exact same thing to Bing that Microsoft is trying to do to Chrome. It's competition, and its healthiest when you have three or more competitors. The search market really only has two, and one of those is far more dominant than the other.

Again I say, what's the difference between the two? Both give away tons of free tools (though targeted to different markets), both give away their most visible services for free or virtually for free, both charge significant premiums for their high-end services, and both have a near monopoly in their primary market.

The only real difference between the two, is Google is newer, smaller, and hasn't tried nearly as many dirty tricks as Microsoft has. That's it. Whether Google will grow up to be as bad as Microsoft, time will tell. But I'll tell you this much - the bigger they get, the more likely it is they will become another Microsoft. Principles become harder and harder to stick to when you have more and more people who need to follow them. Google in China is a perfect example of that - it took China fucking with their servers before they decided to actually follow their "Do no evil" pledge in China. The Google of 8 years ago would have stood on that pledge to begin with and refused to do business in China if it meant censoring their searches.

Comment Re:So? (Score 1) 518

but as the horrible control mechanisms of Mass Effect 2 and others showed

We learned this long ago about the time Deus Ex:Invisible War came out. Dumbing that game down for consoles just about killed the franchise.

Hell, dumping Mechwarrior 5 for MechInsult and MechInsult 2 DID kill the Mechwarrior franchise, and Crimson Skies: MechInsult In Biplanes did the same for that franchise. Someone at Microsoft needs a beating with a cluestick.

I disagree with the idea of "a few truly great games" however. The problem for PC games is that they have to play to a "lowest common denominator." You can release something with major graphical ability, BUT it has to be able to scale back to a PC at least 4 years old to have a decent purchasing market while still looking good on those PCs. And you have to contend with the army of Dell/HP/etc users who bought a PC with an Intel "Extreme Shittiness" on-motherboard graphics card that can't even run games that were 7 years old when the PC was bought, too.

Comment Game Boy Color Emulator (Score 5, Informative) 88

Seems the developers have had some projects stored away until Ndless was released:

From the program description: "gbc4nspire is a Game Boy and Game Boy Color emulator for the TI-Nspire and TI-Nspire CAS, written from scratch in ARM assembly"

Pretty impressive, if you ask me.

Submission + - Cyber Attack Test Destroys Power Plant Generator-> 1

Somegeek writes: CNN has revealed that there was a test performed in March 2007 where the Department of Homeland Security evaluated what a cyber attack could do against a power plant. The attackers in the classified test were able to take control of the plant's control software and modify the settings of a large generator to the point where it self-destructed. The story relates that until then, they had always believed that the worst that could happen was that attackers would be able to turn something off. An economist looked at a scenario where a third of the US was without power for three months due to destroyed power plant equipment and put a price tag on the massive attack at 700 billion dollars.

They have been working on fixing the vulnerabilities that they found at power plants across the country, but how many other plant control systems need to be fixed? Is it possible to look at severing all computer connections between plant control systems and all other networks and expect them to still function?

Link to Original Source

Submission + - Will Google lose its trademark? 1

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Once upon a time, Google was the new kid on the block in the search engine arena. Then it became the big kahuna of that area. There was a time when using google as a verb would have brought a smile. But now every body and his brother and even the prim and proper, stiff upper lip and what not types like the Deputy Attorney General Ronald Smetana are using it as a verb. The quotes have been dropped, the capitalization still persists as some vestigial token acknowledging it as a neologism.

Already a number of dictionaries define google as a plain English word. If OED or some such big name dictionary includes it, would Google lose its trademark? Does Google have lawyers who assiduously take steps to protect its trademark and not allow it to become a generic word to mean "search the internet"? Didn't Xerox lose its trademark or came close to losing it? Imagine a world where Microsoft Live could be branded as "Microsoft Live Google"!
