Hasta La Gadget!

The U.S. Air Force this week announced that it has blocked personnel access to a number of high profile news sites after they published information from the embattled whistle blowing site WikiLeaks. We heard about this news through The New York Times–members of the Air Force, not so much.

The Times was blocked on the Air Force’s computer network, along with 25 other news organizations, including England’s The Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, France’s Le Monde, and Spain’s El País.

“News media Websites will be blocked if they post classified documents from the WikiLeaks Website,” Air Force spokesperson Lt. Col. Brenda Campbell told The Times. “This is similar to how we’d block any other Web site that posted classified information.”

The Army, Navy, and Marines have not taken similar action, relying on directions from the White House and Defense Department telling federal employees to not read any of the WikiLeaks-published classified materials.

The Unreal Engine 3 already made a quite spectacular debut on iOS with Epic Games’ own Infinity Blade, but the company’s decided it’s time to finally stop teasing and give us the software to really play with it. Tomorrow’s planned update to the UDK will deliver iOS support, meaning that all the fancy tools that helped make Infinity Blade such a blindingly gorgeous game will be at your fingertips should you be feeling creative. Licensing for the Engine is free for testing and non-commercial use, but you’ll have to pay $99 if you want to sell anything you produce with it, to be followed by a 25 percent slice of your earnings beyond $5,000 and, of course, Apple’s 30 percent cut of whatever’s left. That might not sound like the best business plan in the world, but consider that Infinity Blade is estimated to have racked up over $1.5 million in sales already — we’re sure there’ll be enough change left for ice cream even after Epic and Apple have had their share.

Unreal Engine 3 dev kit adding iOS support tomorrow, Infinity Blade clones coming Friday originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Dec 2010 10:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember Dolly? She was the first cloned mammal who baa-baaaa‘d her way into the public’s heart back in 1996. Unfortunately, Dolly was euthanized in 2003 when she was suffering with a respiratory illness and possible arthritis. But don’t feel bad, there’s still more than enough Dollys to go around! Four, in fact.

The University of Nottingham recently revealed that they are the proud owners of four exact replicas of Dolly. And they’re already reached three-and-a-half and reportedly doing fine.

In the past 15 years many animals have been successfully cloned, including several lines of sheep. There’s, frankly, nothing that groundbreaking about replicating an animal anymore. The creation of this particular cuddly quartet may owe more to advancing public relations rather than scientific knowledge.

There’s a public perception that cloned animals age prematurely, largely based on the untimely demise of Dolly. However, this may not be exactly accurate. According to Dr. Keith Campbell, one of the original Dolly scientists who also helped create this new generation, several cloned sheep have gone on to live (or are currently living) full sheepy lives well into their expected life spans.However, the general public remains largely unaware of these cases.

We’ve all heard how Dolly had truncated “telomeres,” the little pieces of spare DNA on the end of chromosomes that grow shorter with age. The public perception is that these dwarfed telomeres are what led to Dolly’s downfall. But the original research team would like to remind people that that Dolly came down with a lung infection, a common affliction among sheep living in closed quarters.

With this revelation of (what will hopefully prove to be) healthy
Dollys, cloning proponents hope to alter a skeptical public’s opinion of
a technology which may prove to be a valuable tool in the fight
against hunger and disease.

These four new Dollys also trumpet just how far we’ve advanced cloning techniques. While the original cloning was quite a feat, the process of what was once considered impossible has become near routine. 

via SingularityHub

Richard Lynch sent his laptop for repairs from California to the East coast. When it arrived there, the box was full of soda cans and sheets. After getting no answers from his local UPS shop, he came up with a plan. More »

There are a lot of things to like about Google’s prototype Chrome OS machine, the CR-48, not the least of which its name that makes it sound like a relic from the future. Indeed that’s what Google wants it to be, a sort of beacon of our instant-on, cloud-based tomorrow, but that’s rubbing a few industry pioneers the wrong way. One is Friendfeed creator and former Google employee Paul Buchheit, aka the dude who created Gmail. He’s a bit confused about the overlap between Android and Chrome OS, as indeed many of us are, saying flat out that “Chrome OS has no purpose that isn’t better served by Android” — or, at least, it won’t when Android gets some tweaks to make it work better in a traditional laptop-style environment.

Meanwhile, GNU founder and free software pioneer Richard Stallman is lashing out a bit more strongly, calling cloud computing “careless computing” because it causes users to give up rights to their own content:

The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company’s server, the police can get it without showing you anything. They may not even have to give the company a search warrant.

As we’ve recently learned that is at least not the case for e-mail, but what about Google Docs and browsing history and all those private musings you made on Google Buzz? Will ease of access trump data security fears? Will Cara on All My Children ever stop having flashbacks about Jake? Important questions, these.

GNU founder Richard Stallman and Gmail creator Paul Buchheit hate on Chrome OS originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Dec 2010 09:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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