Home 
KVCS Newsletters 2012 Newsletters
News & Reviews from around the net
Maps Meeting Location
If you've seen the latest round of games, you'll know what I mean when I say that we've clearly entered a new era in PC visuals. The latest games use larger textures, better lighting, much more detailed geometry, and (finally!) decent anti-aliasing to make everything look better. They're clearly a generation beyond anything we've seen before....
This is the first in our series of reboots that need the boot. Look for the next installments this Saturday and Sunday on Ars Technica.
There's no movie franchise closer to my heart than 20th Century Fox's Aliens series of movies—I grew up watching Alien and Aliens , and for better or for worse the movies helped make me into the upstanding individual I am today (Ha! Take that , child psychologists!). The best thing that can be said about the Aliens vs. Predator series of spin-off films is that they are at least fun popcorn fare—no one, not even the studio executives, could argue that the films are good by any stretch of the imagination.
But Aliens vs. Predator has for decades been a pairing that makes the...
Stealthy Mac OS X spyware that was digitally signed with a valid Apple Developer ID has been detected on the laptop of an Angolan activist attending a human rights conference, researchers said.
The backdoor, which is programmed to take screenshots and send them to remote servers under the control of the attackers, was spread using a spear phishing e-mail , according to privacy activist Jacob Appelbaum. Spear phishing is a term for highly targeted e-mails that address the receiver by name and usually appear to come from someone the receiver knows. The e-mails typically discuss topics the two people have talked about before. According to AV provider F-Secure, the malware was discovered during a workshop showing freedom of speech activists how to secure their devices against government monitoring.
The malware was signed with a valid Apple Developer ID allowing it to more easily bypass the Gatekeeper feature Apple introduced in...
These days, when physicists talk about light, they like to divide it into two categories: classical and non-classical. Of course, classical light is the boring, everyday stuff that anyone gets delivered to their doorstep roughly 12 hours every day. But non-classical light is harder to get hold of and, for physicists, obtaining non-classical light states seems to be just one step short of world domination (provided your definition of world domination involves doing quantum cryptography and quantum computing).
But like cheap knock-off goods, genuine non-classical light can be hard to distinguish from ordinary, old-fashioned classical light. Until now, that is. A group of researchers, mainly from Oxford, have figured out a new way to distinguish the two brands of light. It is very clever and relatively simple. So simple that I just have to tell you all about it.
Classical/non-classical? And who cares?
...
It's May 15th, 2013. At 10:30pm, my good friend Gabe and I are standing in line at a movie theater on the northwest side of Indianapolis. At this stage of my life, there are precious few things for which I will willingly wait in line for more than 15 minutes, but this is one of them: the premiere of a new Star Trek film.
We are surrounded by fellow fans. T-shirts emblazoned with the logos of various science fiction and fantasy franchises abound. My own shirt bears a zombie mosaic from The Walking Dead ; many others simply display the familiar arrowhead emblem of Starfleet and the single declarative word "TREKKIE."
As we wait, the moviegoers who attended the 8:00pm showing of this "fan sneak" start to exit the theater. Among them is a boy clad in a red Starfleet tunic and cradling a model of the USS Enterprise in...