Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Education

Busy Lives Prompt Speedier Board Games 153

Posted by Zonk from the play-faster-dangit dept.
BusylikeBum writes "Michelle Hastings admits she's sometimes cheated to get through a game of Candy Land with her 5-year-old daughter, Campbell. The board game can take just too long, she said. Disney Monopoly is another big offender. 'A game like that, it could literally take you days,' said Hastings, of Holliston, Mass. 'A lot of times, you don't play games because they take so long.' Board game makers are heeding pleas of parents like Hastings and introducing games tailored to busy lives and shorter attention spans that take only about 20 minutes to play." This is especially interesting to me, given the US adoption of more serious, lengthy German board games in the last few years.
Security

Submission + - Hackers offer subscription, support for malware

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Organised gangs are taking a page out of security vendors' books and setting up their own websites that offer support and subscriptions for malware and spyware.

From the article: "For subscriptions starting as low as $20 per month, enterprises can sell "fully managed exploit engines" that spyware distributors and spammers can use to infiltrate systems worldwide, said Gunter Ollmann, director of security strategies at IBM's ISS X-Force team.

Many exploit providers simply wait for Microsoft's monthly patches, which they then reverse engineer to develop new exploit code against the disclosed vulnerabilities, Ollmann said. "Then all you've got to do is just subscribe to them on a monthly basis."
Science

Harvesting Energy in the Sky 261

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the pie-in-the-sky dept.
withoutfeathers writes "The Economist magazine has an article on Flying wind farms. Mind you, we're not talking about ordinary, terrestrial windmills here. We're talking about actual airborne — up to 10km in the sky — wind farms intended to harvest the immense supply of energy in the jet stream. On the surface, the idea seems a little eccentric but, in fact, San Diego (California, US) based Sky WindPower has, apparently, thought their concept through pretty thoroughly and believes they can not only make this work, but do so profitably. The article discusses several other ideas for high-flying wind farming including a Dutch proposal to use pairs of kites to drive a generator."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft asks UK to petition for OpenXML

Submitted by
nevali
nevali writes: "Microsoft UK has put up a petition to urge the British Standards Institute to support the ISO fast track process for Microsoft's OpenXML format. The only problem with this is that, being a petition, there's no easy way to tell them you'd really prefer OpenXML not being an ISO standard."

Slashdot Top Deals

One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.

Close