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Journal Journal: TSR's Letters to some anonymous FTP Sites

Journal by Antiocheian

This is one of the letters TSR sent to anonymous FTP sites in 1994 to force them to remove AD&D related material. It wasn't only meant to remove copyrighted material. Anything bearing an AD&D term such as "THAC0" or "Greyhawk" was infringing, according to the letter, and was meant to be removed. Some people in the AD&D-L mailing list asked TSR which terms were infringing and the response they got was to hire a lawyer.

Submission + - Optical illusion of downed aircraft (abc.net.au)

Submitted by dippityfisch
dippityfisch writes: The top of a building caused an alert and search in Darwin airport (Australia) as poor weather and conditions caused an optical illusion that looked remarkably like a light aircraft crash.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - PSN issues on March 1 & DRM intricacies

Submitted by XAD1975
XAD1975 writes: As of 00:00 GMT the night of Feb 28 to March 1, 2010, Playstation Network seems to be experiencing issues with all "old" consoles, i.e. not the Slim model.

It has been reported on boards that the older models were locked out of PSN which implies no online gaming and, more troubling, no solo gaming for those games that require identification with Sony's servers, typically those purchased on the PSN Store.

However, at this time, still no news from Sony on the issue.
Patents

Submission + - City Caller ID hit with Patent Infringement 3

Submitted by pyr02k1
pyr02k1 writes: The developer of a free Android application that looks up a callers city location by the phone number is being threatened with Patent Infringement by Cequint. The software in question does a simple lookup by the incoming numbers zip code to tell where the caller is located. Cequint claims to hold 2 patents on the ability to perform the action in question, despite the information in question being freely available information. The City Caller ID application has since been pulled from the Android Marketplace. The Developers post is located at http://techdirt.com/blog.php?company=cequint&edition=techdirt and the patents are http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=ZWUKAAAAEBAJ&dq=6353664 and http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=QIR_AAAAEBAJ&dq=7200212 ... when something like this happens, where can a small developer turn?
Science

Submission + - True tales of Russian Ingenuity (edgeofphysics.com)

Submitted by edgeofphysics
edgeofphysics writes: We have all heard of the urban legend of how the Russians used a pencil in space even as NASA spend millions developing a pen that would write in zero gravity. But here's a story of a simple but ingenioius Russian effort to retrieve a part of an underwater neutrino telescope that got severed and sank to the bottom of Lake Baikal in Siberia. Read about how a physicist fished it out from a depth of 1.4 kilometres, without divers or submersibles.
Games

8-Year Fan-Made Game Project Shut Down By Activision 265

Posted by Soulskill from the of-doors-and-ways-out dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Activision, after acquiring Vivendi, became the new copyright holder of the classic King's Quest series of adventure game. They have now issued a cease and desist order to a team which has worked for eight years on a fan-made project initially dubbed a sequel to the last official installment, King's Quest 8. This stands against the fact that Vivendi granted a non-commercial license to the team, subject to Vivendi's approval of the game after submission. After the acquisition, key team members had indicated on the game's forums (now stripped of their original content by order of Activision) that Activision had given the indication that it intended to keep its current fan-game licenses, but was not interested in issuing new ones."

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