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Television

Battlestar Galactica Pen and Paper RPG 46

Posted by Zonk from the well-frack dept.
gerbalblaste writes "Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd. has reached an agreement with Universal Studios Consumer Products Group to produce roleplaying game products based on the enormously successful, critically-acclaimed television series, Battlestar Galactica. Weis' company is known primarily for the recent release of the Serenity Role-Playing Game. From the article: 'The game book will be a full-color hardcover book featuring still images from the series as well as original artwork. It will provide rules for play, character creation, and information about the ship and crew of Galactica as well as the other main characters from the show. A Quickstart Guide will be released in early 2007 with the core product premiering in the spring. Additional products will closely follow the release of the core product. The entire line will be supported by an interactive website. Jamie Chambers (Dragonlance Campaign Setting, Serenity Role Playing Game) is helping lead a team of writers and designers dedicated to re-creating the excitement, drama, and danger of the groundbreaking television series.'"
Software

Submission + - End to Skype's Free Promotion

Submitted by webax
webax writes: "NEW YORK (Reuters) — Internet telephone service Skype said on Wednesday that it would charge customers $29.95 a year for unlimited calling in the United States and Canada, a service it had offered free since May..." http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?typ e=technologyNews&storyid=2006-12-13T175604Z_01_N13 425300_RTRUKOC_0_US-SKYPE-CHARGES.xml&src=rss http://www.skype.com/products/skypeout/

Hopefully another VoIP contender will take up the challenge and offer the internet unlimited long distance now, the free service lasted so long it almost feels like a right (=
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Sony plays off failed advertising campaign.

Submitted by
kinglink
kinglink writes: "Sony's site has finally admitted to being a shill for the site. Sony's response to the public is to shrug it off and act like there was no problem. "Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn't a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP.""
Privacy

Submission + - Sex Offender Email Registry Proposed

Submitted by
Clever7Devil
Clever7Devil writes: "The Roanoke Times in Virginia reported Attorney General Bob McDonnell's upcoming legislation proposal.

From the article:

Attorney General Bob McDonnell said Monday he will propose legislation that would make Virginia the first state in the nation to require sex offenders to register their online identities with state police.

By putting the information on the state's Sex Offender Registry, authorities hope to curb what they say is the escalating problem of sexual predators going online to find young victims through e-mail and Internet chat room banter

The Attorney General's office has been working closely with MySpace, as they hope to use this list to block sex offenders from using their service. You can read the Attorney General's press release here; and the MySpace press release here."
Censorship

Submission + - Feds attempt to seize "secret" document fr

Submitted by
Elysdir
Elysdir writes: "The ACLU recently received a "mildly embarrassing" US federal gov't document marked "Secret" (which ACLU says appears to be an overclassification). The gov't has gotten a grand jury to subpoena all copies of the government in the ACLU's possession.

From the ACLU press release:

"If the government can enforce a subpoena in this way, Shapiro explained, 'it could just as easily have subpoenaed the Pentagon Papers from The New York Times and Washington Post. The effect of the subpoena is no different than a prior restraint and it is equally unconstitutional.'""
Music

Submission + - Scanned Mozart scores now available for free

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: As reported by elmundo newspaper (Spanish), all Mozart compositions are digitized for first time and made available online for free. The Mozarteum foundation, in cooperation with The Packard Humanities Institute are behind this project. Currently there are 25,734 pages of scores, extracted from modern printed books, that can be searched by tonality, name, title, character's name (for operas), length... and there will be more (from the article):

Ulrich Leisinger, foundation's science director, explains that starting by summer of 2007 it will be possible to access all works in their original version. That is, the scores that Mozart himself wrote with his hands. They expect to get international support and colaboration with museums of Paris and Cracovia to offer 90% of original scores by Internet. He also says that in two or three years, the complete set of handwritten works of Mozart will be available to view on Internet, including letters, schemes, annotations, and other documents.
Math

Submission + - Cloaking method worked out

Submitted by goombah99
goombah99 writes: Cloaking of broadband light, ala the Romulans, has been shown to be impossible for passive, locally responsive media (i.e. No Acme invisible paint). Recently, Sir Pendry et al showed that a hollow thick shell of negative refractive index material will act as cloaking device for objects placed in the interior. A difficulty with that system is that at present broad waverlength negative index matrials are not possible. Now, David Miller describes in Optics Express a active system can be built using some simple math that would give the appearance of a cloaking for broad wavelengths. It would not be useful against temporal probes like Radar, but would give the illusion of looking through the volume of space when viewed from any angle. He discusses how simplified systems which approximate cloaking are also possible using local response properties (i.e. Acme quasi-invisible paint).
Businesses

Submission + - Cool Holiday Gadget

Submitted by
Mary Garrett
Mary Garrett writes: "I wanted to let you know about a couple new products from Mobility Electronics: powerXtender+ — This great gadget will keep just about all portable devices powered up at peak performance no matter where you are — as it uses battery power instead of AC/DC power. So if your iPod, cell phone, digital camera, gameboy, PDA etc., needs charged, just hook it up to the powerXtender+ to keep your gadgets charged. Stowaway(R) Sierra, a next generation portable Bluetooth(R) keyboard designed specifically for smartphone users. The Stowaway Sierra portable keyboard includes five rows and full-size keys, providing the closest replication of a traditional desktop keyboard available on the market. More information is available at www.igo.com."
Privacy

Submission + - Law to Order ISPs to Cache all Internet Activity

Submitted by
Philip L. Hage
Philip L. Hage writes: "The companion to the McCain/Schumer bill for the 110th Congress dealing with online predators is a bill proposed by Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. She is planning on introducing legislation in January 2007 to force Internet Service Providers to maintain data on every American's net activity. The Justice Department has been campaigning for this for years and the notoriety of the Mark Foley incident has served as a catalyst. DeGette's initiative would require ISPs to cache senders and receivers of emails, chat room activity, IM activity and users' Internet histories for all 100 million U.S. users for an evergreen two-year period. In case a child predator or pornographer was identified, his entire Internet activity could be subpoenaed, scrutinized and provided as evidence in his possible trial. Caching 120 billion unique page views for 100 million Americans for two years to provide possible prosecutorial evidence on a thousand perverts is a misguided and dangerous invasion of Americans' privacy. While the "ends" are desirable the "means" are despicable. Currently, for business reasons, ISPs temporarily cache some of their users' Internet activity, but not in the detail specified in DeGette's proposal. ISPs do this for valid business reasons, generally to resolve possible billing disputes for periods of time matching the billing cycles."
The Internet

Submission + - Search 2.0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Which one will dominate the search engine space in the next few years? SearchMash innovations and Oli Aron algorithms powered Google? Yahoo with its research project Mindset's intent-driven approach? The whole new Live.com of Microsoft, with the advantages of being the default choice in Vista? Or the well funded upcomers, Snap, Hakia and Powerset which promise to bring better user experience and artificial intelligence applications to the game. Emre Sokullu's article discusses all these with other possibilities as well.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Jail time for playing 1st person shooters?

Submitted by pclminion
pclminion writes: According to Gamespot, the German government is considering a new law which would make it a crime to commit "cruel violence on humans or human-looking characters." Conceivably, this could mean that gibbing your Quake 3 opponent (who happens to be using a human-like character) could become an actual crime. But the law seems more general than that — is a mannequin a "human-looking character," for example? Could chopping a mannequin apart for disposal now make one a criminal? Odd stuff.
The Internet

Submission + - Congress and technology, all show and no go..

Submitted by
DrivebySoftware.com
DrivebySoftware.com writes: "Congress and technology, all show and no go.. Our wonderful bought and paid-for Corporate Republician Politicians spent the last two years promising us new technology laws. Thank God they cut out over the weekend and ended the 12 years of terror on our working middle class and poor, only a few technology-related bills had actually made it through the legislative process but there police-state bills passed. The 109th only approved a pittance of technology-related items, leaving patent reform, net neutrality and data breach notification to die in committee, shame on them. Let's hope the Democrats get it right in the 110th Congress. The 109th should get a 'F' for failure. One bill sent to President Bush would make it a federal crime to use fraudulent tactics to buy, sell or otherwise obtain private phone record information (pretexting) although it explicitly exempts the police and the spy's at the NSA from doing it. The lame ducks split for the holidays without voting on the corporate H-1B visa, looks like Corporate America didn't get a boost in the guest worker program they claim is necessary to fill critical holes for there low wage workforce. Here's one? How about hiring U.S. IT Professionals, you know the ones that are out of work. We need to write to our elected official's and tell them not to raise the H-1B visas in the 110th because it's just another form of bought and paid-for corporate welfare."
Space

Submission + - Official: Terrorist Threat to U.S. Satellites

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: The Bush administration has issued a warning about — and defended the country's right to defend against — threats from terrorists and other nations against U.S. military and commercial satellites. Popular Mechanics looks at an Air Force program that's protecting our military satellites (and their vulnerabilities) with store-bought gear and old-fashioned sleuthing.

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