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Submission + - The Gary Gygax Memorial (escapistmagazine.com)

Submitted by Allen Varney
Allen Varney writes: My Escapist article 'The Tower of Gygax: Honoring the man who started everything' outlines efforts to build a monument to D&D co-creator Gary Gygax in his home town, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Two squabbling factions of Gygax's heirs, who get along like the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea, have independent projects. They've reached a truce, but they don't yet have a site or a final design.

Comment Re:Poor Design (Score 4, Insightful) 150

Took me 2 minutes to come up with that.

Uh-huh. And in the two years the professional CoH designers and coders were thinking daily about this problem, in their two years of doubtless intensive meetings, not one of them ever once considered your idea. Right? The only possible alternative is that perhaps your two-minute inspiration isn't a perfect solution -- that it may even have unsuspected shortcomings. Nah, that couldn't be. Yeah, they're just dumb.

Comment Incessant Acrobat JavaScript nagging (Score 4, Interesting) 211

by Allen Varney (#27763887) Attached to: Adobe Confirms PDF Zero-Day, Says Kill JavaScript
It's fine that Adobe recommends disabling JavaScript in Acrobat, but it would be nice if, once you disable JavaScript, Acrobat didn't thereupon constantly nag you to re-enable it "from now on for all documents" every time you open a .PDF. "It looks like you've disabled JavaScript! Can we please turn it back on forever, you poor ignorant dimwitted user you?"

Comment Steve Pavlina's dream - synchronicity (Score 1) 532

by Allen Varney (#25965323) Attached to: Teacher Sells Ads On Tests

Don't know if anyone saw this post yesterday by Steve Pavlina on his "Personal Development for Smart People" blog. At the end of a long postmortem about his recent "juice feast" experiment, he described a vivid dream he'd had the week before:

I had a dream that I was taking a class at some school. This school was having budget challenges, so they decided to sell advertising to raise more money. There was an ad network, similar to Google Adsense (actually it could have been Adsense), that placed context-sensitive ads on school assignments. So the teacher of any class could upload an exam to this ad network, the exam would be scanned, and context-sensitive ads would be provided to be printed on the exam. Then the school would get some money based on how many students were in the class to see these ads. For placing a single ad on an exam or assignment, the classroom might earn an extra $5 for its budget. So over the course of a year, each class could earn well over $100 in ad revenue for the school. These are fairly non-intrusive logo/branding ads, so the students wouldn't be overly distracted from seeing ads on their exams and other assignments. [...]
If this dream vision catches on the real world -- there's no reason it can't be done with today's technology -- you might see a little note at the top of your biology exam that says, "Sponsored by Scientific American." Or maybe you're taking a computer programming class, and one of your assignments includes a student discount coupon for a popular programming library. [...].
Would you tolerate context-sensitive ads on your class assignments? What if it meant you paid lower tuition -- or all your textbooks were free? What if it meant your school could afford better educational resources? What if it meant your teachers were better compensated? And what if the department chairs and/or teachers had the discretion of being able to accept or reject individual ads, so they never approved anything they felt was inappropriate?
You know⦠this doesn't sound like such a crazy idea after all.
Databases

Submission + - Database design tools for Linux

Submitted by FredDC
FredDC writes: I am looking for a database design tool for Linux, but so far I haven't been able to find anything good. I was wondering what other people are using?
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - Angband GPL dream almost real

Submitted by konijn
konijn writes: Angband is together with Nethack and ADOM one of the 5 big roguelikes. Ever since january 20, 1997 the maintainers have been dual licensing their code and now we are looking to find the last of the missing contributors to get it 100% GPL. We need your help to find these last people and get them to support our GPL initiative! You can find more information here : http://entai.co.uk/projects/angband/opensource/ , the list of missing people is here : http://entai.co.uk/projects/angband/opensource/lis t.html
Power

Submission + - High altitude wind farms?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Why plant a rotor on the ground to generate electricity in fickle, turbulent surface winds? Here is a possible green-friendly solution that is far above any other in reality as well as in concept:

From the site: "Here we are with very high gasoline prices, now starting to pay real attention to global warming, and seriously considering nuclear fission, with all its dangers from both accident and terrorist attack, as the best potential solution. And yet the energy we need is only a few miles above us in tremendous quantity, it is clean, non global warming energy, potentially more economical than nuclear, and we are ignoring it."

A flying wind farm might just be the way to go to lower our reliance such energy producing staples as fossil fuels and their immediate pollution, the admittedly intermittent production from solar or ground-level winds, and the long-term storage concerns of nuclear waste.
NASA

Submission + - NFL cheerleader is also NASA engineer

Submitted by A Smitten Rocket Scientist
A Smitten Rocket Scientist writes: As reported in Sports Illustrated, Summer Williams is a full time aerospace engineer who works on the International Space Station. But she's got a side gig as a cheerleader for the Houston Texans! The fantasy woman of Slashdot readers everywhere actually exists....
Privacy

Submission + - Re-shipping scams skyrocketting

Submitted by sorry-scammed-loser
sorry-scammed-loser writes: A new online threat, reshipping fraud, is emerging in the form of a massive organized crime ring that is recruiting people in the US and Europe as "shipment handlers", and having them re-ship items to Russia. The criminals are using stolen Visa card details to pay for shipments from many large retail and auction sites (including ebay.com and amazon.com), and having the items shipped to their recruits who re-ship them to addresses they have been provided with. I personally lost a laptop this way that I had auctioned on ebay — I shipped the laptop after verifying that the funds had been deposited into my PayPal account, and two days later was contacted by PayPal who said that the account holder had not authorized the transaction. Now I have no money and no laptop. In my case, the scammers had recruited my re-shipper through an online job posting site, which pointed her to a legit-looking website called expertdelivery.biz that claims to operate offices in Minnesota and the UK (but is hosted in Belize). This reads like an episode of "24"... Please get the word out about this scam, at this point consumer education is the best protection against perpetuation of these scams.

Sophos Reveals Latest Spam-Relaying Countries 181

Posted by Hemos from the spam-ham dept.
An anonymous reader writes "For the first time in more than two years, the United States has failed to make inroads into its spam-relaying problem. The U.S. remains stuck at the top of the chart and is the source of 23.2 percent of the world's spam. Its closest rivals are China and South Korea, although both of these nations have managed to reduce their statistics since Q1 2006. The vast majority of this spam is relayed by 'zombies,' also known as botnet computers."

Army Sent to Fight Millions of Invading Toxic Toads 273

Posted by Hemos from the can-you-lick-them-to-get-high dept.
Reporter writes "The Australian state government called for the army to be deployed against the invasion of toxic toads! Battalions of imported cane toads are marching relentlessly across northern Australia and the West Australian government wants soldiers to intercept the environmental barbarians. From the article: "The toads, Bufo Marinus, were introduced from South America into northeast Queensland state in the 1930s to control another pest: Beetles that were ravaging the sugar cane fields of the tropical northern coasts. But the toads now number in the millions and are spreading westward through the Northern Territory, upsetting the country's ecosystem in their wake. Cane toads have poisonous sacs on the back of their heads full of a venom so powerful it can kill crocodiles, snakes or other predators in minutes." More information about cane toads at Wikipedia."

Jack Thompson's Violent Game Bill Signed Into Law 368

Posted by Zonk from the happy-day-for-media-savvy-lawyers dept.
simoniker writes "Louisiana Democratic Representative Roy Burrell's HB1381 bill, covering violent videogames, has been signed into law by Governor Kathleen Blanco. The law takes effect immediately, the latest in a very long line of video game-related bills specific to one U.S. State. The measure proposed by HB 1381, which was drafted with the help of controversial Florida attorney and anti-game activist Jack Thompson, allows a judge to rule on whether or not a videogame meets established criteria for being inappropriate for minors and be subsequently pulled from store shelves. A person found guilty of selling such a game to a minor would face fines ranging from $100 to $2,000, plus a prison term of up to one year. Needless to say, the ESA will likely be mounting a legal challenge to this bill in the very near future."

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