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itwbennett writes "According to Harvard magazine, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted at its meeting on May 11 to require instructors to officially inform the Registrar 'at the first week of the term' of the intention to end a course with a formal, seated exam, 'the assumption shall be that the instructor will not be giving a three-hour final examination.' Dean of undergraduate education Jay M. Harris 'told the faculty that of 1,137 undergraduate-level courses this spring term, 259 scheduled finals--the lowest number since 2002, when 200 fewer courses were offered. For the more than 500 graduate-level courses offered, just 14 had finals, he reported.'"

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devjj writes "For the past year or so I have been trying (and failing) to figure out a reasonable solution for bringing my large media library to my living room. All of my media lives on an Ubuntu server that sits on my network. It's been very reliable and it's fast enough for streaming purposes. My content is exposed via SMB. It's the living room side where I keep running into problems. I am currently using Windows 7 and XBMC, but the case is too big and noisy, I don't particularly care for Windows, and the whole thing just seems overkill. What I want is a device that can present a decent UI that the non-Slashdot crowd would be able to use, but that is still powerful enough to stream full-fidelity 1080p. I dream of a small box that can transcode video over a network, but that's probably a pipe dream. The new Apple TV would be great if it could connect to network shares. What say you, Slashdot? Is what I'm looking for possible, or should I just give in to the iTunes/Amazon/whatever juggernauts?"

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dh003i writes "Canon has developed a 8 x 8 inch CMOS digital sensor. It will be able to capture an image with 1/100th the light intensity required by a DSLR and will be able to record video at 60 fps in lighting half the intensity of moonlight. There are already many excellent quality lenses designed to cover 8 x 10 inches, although Canon may develop some of their own designed specifically for their requirements."

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Hugh Pickens writes "Ryan Lawler writes on GigaOm that although many have touted the availability of Flash on Android devices as a competitive advantage over Apple's mobile devices, while trying to watch videos from ABC.com, Fox.com and Metacafe using Flash 10.1 on a Nexus One over a local Wi-Fi network connected to a 25-Mbps Verizon FiOS broadband connection, mobile expert Kevin Tofel found that videos were slow to load, if they loaded at all, leading to an overall very inconsistent experience while using his Android device for video. "While in theory Flash video might be a competitive advantage for Android users, in practice it's difficult to imagine anyone actually trying to watch non-optimized web video on an Android handset," writes Lawler. "All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad.""

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donniebaseball23 writes "EA's Medal of Honor reboot doesn't ship until October 12, but it's already seen a fair amount of controversy thanks to the publisher's decision to allow people to play as Taliban in multiplayer. The controversy just got escalated another notch, reports IndustryGamers, as the world's biggest games retailer GameStop has decided it won't sell the title at its stores located on US military bases. The new Medal of Honor won't be advertised at these stores either. GameStop noted that they came to this decision 'out of respect for our past and present men and women in uniform.'"

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donniebaseball23 writes "EA's Medal of Honor reboot doesn't ship until October 12, but it's already seen a fair amount of controversy thanks to the publisher's decision to allow people to play as Taliban in multiplayer. The controversy just got escalated another notch, reports IndustryGamers, as the world's biggest games retailer GameStop has decided it won't sell the title at its stores located on US military bases. The new Medal of Honor won't be advertised at these stores either. GameStop noted that they came to this decision 'out of respect for our past and present men and women in uniform.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "A new paper up for prepublication from the controversial solid-state physicist Godfrey Louis claims that the cells Louis collected from a Keralan red rain incident divide and produce daughter cells at 121 degrees Celsius. While unusual, this is not unheard of as the paper recalls cells cultivated from hydrothermal vents are known to reproduce at 121 C as well. Of course, caution is exercised when dealing with the possible explanation surrounding the theory of panspermia but the MIT Technology Review says researchers 'examined the way these fluoresce when bombarded with light and say it is remarkably similar to various unexplained emission spectra seen in various parts of the galaxy. One such place is the Red Rectangle, a cloud of dust and gas around a young star in the Monocerous constellation.'"

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Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that in his new book, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity. 'Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,' Hawking writes. 'It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.' Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. Writing in his bestseller A Brief History Of Time in 1988, Hawking wrote: 'If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.'"

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crimeandpunishment writes "The top man in telecommunications at the United Nations is weighing in on the Blackberry battle ... and he says share the data. The UN's telecom chief says governments have legitimate security concerns, and Research in Motion should give them access to its customer data. In an interview with the Associated Press, Hamadoun Toure said 'There is a need for cooperation between governments and the private sector on security issues.'"

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