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Translation of Macrovision Response to Jobs on DRM 284

BoboB-69 writes "Daring Fireball has posted a humorous, and accurate PR-speak to Plain English translation of Macrovision's CEO's response to Steve Jobs' Open Letter on DRM. Highly recommended reading for slashdotters everywhere."
Television

Aqua Teen Stunt Costs Turner and Agency $2M 557

evw writes "The NYTimes reports that the Turner Broadcasting System and the ad agency responsible have reached a $2M settlement with the city of Boston and state and federal agencies that treated the light boards placed around the city as an act of terrorism (as covered earlier on /.) Half of the money is to cover direct costs associated with the response. The other $1M goes to 'goodwill funds' that will be used for response training and public outreach."
Space

Submission + - Astronaut Arrested, Charged with Kidnapping

NoTheory writes: According to the New York Times, U.S. Navy Capt. Lisa Nowak, who flew last July on a shuttle mission to the international space station, drove 900 miles from Huston, Texas to Orlando, Florida to confront a woman she perceived to be a rival for a fellow astronaut.

Dressed in a wig and a trench coat, Nowak boarded an airport bus that Shipman took to her car in an airport parking lot. Shipman told police she noticed someone following her, hurried inside the car and locked the doors, according to the arrest affidavit.

Nowak rapped on the window, tried to open the car door and asked for a ride. Shipman refused but rolled down the car window a few inches when Nowak started crying. Nowak then sprayed a chemical into Shipman's car, the affidavit said.

During a check of the parking lot, an officer followed Nowak and watched her throw away a bag containing the wig and BB gun. They also found a steel mallet, a 4-inch folding knife, rubber tubing, $600 and garbage bags inside a bag Nowak was carrying when she was arrested, authorities said.
Space

Submission + - Astronauts Gone Wild

timeOday writes: Looks like somebody just blew a chance to inaugurate the 200-mile-high club. Lisa Nowak, a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle Discovery in July, was arrested Monday on charges of battery and attempted kidnapping after allegedly trying to subdue a romantic rival with pepper spray and abduct her from a parking lot at Orlando International Airport. It seems both women were chasing astronaut Bill Oefelein, a Navy commander. Police have recommended Nowak be held without bond.
User Journal

Journal SPAM: The EFF Cracks Secret FBI Printer Tracking Codes 2

Almost all printers secretly print dots without your consent, which are invisible to the naked eye. Apparently Xerox (Docucolor series), and possibly others, have included this technology. This is being used by the FBI to keep an eye on groups such as Greenpeace and United for Peace and Justice. As an effort of their Machine Identification Code Technology project, the EFF has cracked the code, and provided a

User Journal

Journal Journal: Where to go after a life of IT work? 4

I have been working in the IT field for the past 20 years, and after getting hired by the largest financial company in the world, I thought I might have finally found a place to retire from.

However, after working here for less than 6 months, I find myself, not exactly burnt out, but longing for a complete career field change.

Since all of my experience has been IT related, I'm not sure where I could go from here.

Slashdot.org

Submission + - Blame IT for everything...Priceless

bcalifornian writes: "Are IT department really as corrosive & as negative on the end users as the author of a recent Slashdot submission "Is A Bad Attitude Damaging The IT Profession?" thinks? Sure we all know a few BOFH administrators & developers who probably have a low opinion of the end users, but are we blatantly disrespectful of our business folks as a community & lack professional conduct? This essay"Blaming IT for everything...Priceless" is inspired to tell the IT story from a bigger picture perspective & hopefully answers some of the questions that were raised."
Wii

Submission + - Wii Sports Experiment

rgriscom writes: "A man known as "heysuburbia" has conducted an experiment monitoring the physical changes resulting from 6 weeks of Wii Sports training. He consistently played 30 minutes of Wii sports every day and recorded the changes in his weight, BMI, calories burned, body fat %, and heart rate. The results are surprising. This opens a new door for Nintendo to market the Wii towards gamers who want to get fit, and anyone else who just wants some exercise without leaving the house."
It's funny.  Laugh.

When Celebrities Speak on Science 574

Timberwolf0122 writes to mention that the website Sense About Science is encouraging stars not to comment on scientific issues without at least checking their facts. A somewhat amusing article on the BBC matches up a few comments made by celebrities with the factual reaction from experts in the field of study tackled by their blunder.
Power

Wal-Mart Is Pushing Compact Fluorescent Bulbs 923

While we all know from reading the internets that Wal-Mart is irredeemably evil, the world's largest retailer has committed to get compact fluorescent lightbulbs into 100 million homes this year. CFLs are found in only 6% of households today. These energy-saving bulbs use 75% less electricity than incandescents and produce far less greenhouse gas to manufacture and use. Wal-Mart seems determined to use its marketing prowess to do what hasn't successfully been done in the CFL's 25-year history: to convince consumers to pay more upfront for large savings over the product's lifetime.

Diebold Disks May Have Been For Testers 182

opencity writes "The Washington Post reports on the two Diebold source disks that were anonymously sent to a Maryland election official this past week. Further investigation has lead individuals involved to believe the disks came from a security check demanded by the Maryland legislature sometime in 2003." From the article: "Critics of electronic voting said the most recent incident in Maryland casts doubt on Lamone's claim that Maryland has the nation's most secure voting system. "There now may be numerous copies of the Diebold software floating around in unauthorized hands," said Linda Schade, co-founder of TrueVoteMD, which has pressed for a system that provides a verifiable paper record of each vote."

Flickr Search Hack Powered by Mouse-Made Doodles 79

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Retrievr gives budding artists an impractical but addictive way to find photographs on Flickr: a search engine powered exclusively by mouse-made doodles. From the article: 'Retrievr, Mr. Langreiter says, "doesn't look at specific forms." Art history buffs might like to think of it as photo-search by way of Impressionism. The Retrievr engine dissects a photo like a gallery connoisseur who lost his bifocals: It focuses on regions of colors rather than specific shapes and lines. "It is, actually, a simple scheme," says Mr. Langreiter. Retrievr creates and stores a compact representation of each photo in its database. The system pulls only the most important features — broad shapes, blocks of color and spatial relationships between different colored areas — out of detailed images to create shorthand approximations of every photo. (The storage mechanism extracts the 120 "strongest" features from an image to create something called a "wavelet transform," which contains much less data than the photo itself and facilitates lightning-fast searches.)'"

How Steve Jobs Got Green Overnight 194

Francois writes "At Apple's last special event, Steve Jobs insisted on how environment friendly Apple's new iPod packagings are supposed to be. I don't think he's ever gone that route before. 'We've got some new packagings for the new Nano as well. And it's 52% less volume. This turns out to be an environmentally great thing. Because it dramatically reduces the amount of fossil fuels we have to spend to move these things around the planet.' Not only is it obvious they shrank the packaging to reduce the cost of shipping around the planet and sell lower than the Zune, but furthermore: there's a reason why he insisted that much, and it's not so very nice."

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