Thursday Morning Tech News

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But that's about to change. Where one-armed bandits have always been standalone devices with a single game hard-wired into their circuitry and rotors, the industry is getting set to unroll a new generation of machines in which the games will be stored on back-office servers and downloaded at the whim of gamblers. According to executives from two of the biggest slot machine manufacturers, the so-called server-based gaming, or SBG, technology is slated to be the biggest news at next month's Global Gaming Expo (G2E) in Las Vegas, the casino industry's huge annual trade show.

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Red Hat will finance outside programmers' efforts to obtain patents that may be used freely by open-source developers, the top Linux seller said Tuesday at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here. At the same time, the Open Source Developer Labs launched a patent commons project, which will provide a central list of patents that have been donated to the collaborative programming community. The threat of patent-infringement lawsuits has long dogged collaborative development, leading some open-source programming advocates to turn against the patent system altogether. The initiatives signal a new willingness on the part of the open-source community to combat the threat of patent-infringement lawsuits more directly--and within the existing patent system.

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The big question is how many people will buy a satellite internet service. So far, it has only really found acceptance in areas beyond the reach of DSL or cable modems. But IPSTAR also hopes to compete directly against the wired services. "There are a lot of eyes on this satellite," says John McCarthy of Loral Space and Communications in New York, which built the craft.

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Huntington's disease, which affects one in 100,000 people, has a prognosis so terrifying that many people with the gene in their family decline to be tested, preferring to live in ignorance of their fate. Symptoms usually develop between the age of 30 and 50, and include uncontrollable twisting movements, progressing rapidly to disability, dementia and early death. The pig brain cells used in the treatment are not neurons but come from the lining of a brain structure known as a choroid plexus. They have a nurturing role, mopping up toxins, producing cerebrospinal fluid and secreting a range of hormones and proteins called neurotrophins that are essential for brain cell function and protection. In Huntington's disease, there is a significant reduction in these chemicals.