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Submission + - Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition announced

Submitted by bigstrat2003
bigstrat2003 writes: For the past day, Wizards of the Coast has had a countdown to "4dventure" on their web site. The countdown ran out at 6:30 eastern time today (and the web site promptly crashed), but stories are already appearing on the rest of the web. Wizards also has had their 4th edition forums up for a couple of days.
Education

Submission + - Science Involved in Entertainment Implies Laziness

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "All the advances in technology were meant to make our lives easier and in most cases they did so, but with what price? We have become so lazy we don't even go shopping. We just look for something on the Internet, we order and we get the object delivered at home. We don't even have to go to the bank as we pay on-line and the money transfer is made by the bank. Going shopping was one of the favourite "hobbies" for women all over the world, but now they choose to do other things. The application of science to entertainment has made us lazy: TV, DVD, computers, MP3 players...Why go out when we have everything at home? Why spend time cooking when you have the sandwich-maker which gets you out of every trouble? Why bother washing and ironing when you have the dry-cleaning at the corner of the street and they do everything fo you? Why do the house-cleaning when there are persons who earn a living from this? There is a solution for everything..but to have all these you need money, money earned by hard work. So far, technology hasn't solved this problem. Comfort and stability are to be obtained only with great efforts and many sleepless nights. To get the best products you have to work a lot, because high quality means a great deal of money. Read full article : http://articles.famouswhy.com/the_application_of_s cience_to_entertainment_has_made_us_lazy/"
The Courts

Student, Denied Degree For MySpace Photo, Sues 823

Posted by kdawson from the striking-back dept.
gwoodrow writes "We've all heard the 'fired because of MySpace' stories, where a simple blog or picture gets someone canned. But now one of the targets is fighting back. (The offending picture in this case was a snap from Halloween 2005 of the student in a pirate outfit drinking from a cup.)" From the article: "Teacher in training Stacy Snyder was denied her education degree on the eve of graduation when Millersville University apparently found pictures on her MySpace page 'promoting underage drinking.' As a result, the 27-year-old mother of two had her teaching certificate withheld and was granted an English degree instead. In response, Snyder has filed a Federal lawsuit against the Pennsylvania university asking for her education diploma and certificate along with $75,000 in damages."
Handhelds

Submission + - Ubuntu Linux for mobile phones?

Submitted by WrongSizeGlass
WrongSizeGlass writes: The BBC is reporting the 'Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded' project aims for an October 2007 release for Ubuntu Linux for mobile phones.

From the article:
A version of the increasingly popular Linux operating system Ubuntu will be developed for use on net-enabled phones and devices"

It will be developed by the Ubuntu community, along with staff from Intel.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - No ad skipping for you!

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: ABC and ESPN have struck a deal with cable operator Cox Communications Inc. to offer hit shows and football games on demand, but with the unusual condition that Cox disables the fast-forward feature that allows viewers to skip ads. This agreement only applies to Cox's video-on-demand service and will not affect viewers using digital video recorders to fast forward through ads.

In addition, the companies will also test technology that will place ads in shows based on ZIP Codes and geographic area.
Enlightenment

Submission + - War on Drugs a Costly Sham

Submitted by
wagneww
wagneww writes: "We humans are a predictable lot; we continually ignore history, are afraid of everything, and act emotionally rather than rationally, especially when it comes to the vexatious and controversial subject of drugs in society. We don't learn from our mistakes; destined to repeat them over and over on a recurring loop of denial. Wash over some orchestrated religious propaganda and you have a recipe for disaster.
The author of the recently released autobiography; "Cheating the Hangman: True Confessions of a Heroin Trafficker" knows what he's talking about when it comes to illegal drugs. Wade Agnew has been using them daily for forty years. He started with alcohol, quickly dismissing it after the revelation of marijuana in 1968 while at University. This discovery would dictate the course of his life. For all the details of his terrifyingly authentic tale go to;
http://www.cheatingthehangman.com.au/home_book.htm l

That the "War on Drugs" was the brainchild of the Nixon administration; the most seriously paranoid US president of the 20th Century, tells us a great deal about its genesis and "raison d'etre". Every society that has existed since the beginning of time has used "consciousness altering" substances, often in highly spiritual circumstances. This should have told us something, but apparently not.
Ignorance and political ambition are a volatile mix. At the start of the 21st Century, Australia was experiencing a flood of heroin. Established by refugees after the war in S.E.Asia, the Vietnamese community was now well integrated into mainstream society. Many of these citizens were ethnic Chinese with strong family links back to their homeland. With the opening up of the post-war Viet Nam, they became the conduit for Thai and Burmese white powder heroin then flooding into Australia. This community was very wary of officialdom, and notoriously difficult to penetrate. As a consequence the country was experiencing a huge drop in the price of heroin on the streets of major cities. It even penetrated far flung inland country towns. The price per gram fell to unprecedented lows, and the purity was astounding high by world standards.

"I was well and truly retired by then, and could only look on with envy as no4 white powder flooded into Australian cities," says Wade from his home in Brisbane. "People were making serious money from the glut of high quality heroin."
An unfortunate consequence of the high purity was a sharp rise in the number of overdoses on the streets of Australian cities. Addicts unused to such purity were dropping like flies. At one point police in Cabramatta; a Vietnamese enclave in western Sydney; now the heroin capital of the country, begged whoever was distributing a particularly pure shipment (close to 95%) to cut their drugs to curb the death rate.
Not long after, the local market began to experience a serious heroin drought, and the conservative Australian government began crowing, claiming its "Tough on Drugs" policy had been responsible. This drought was quickly followed by an avalanche of Methamphetamines. This was no coincidence; the two phenomena were inextricably linked. It quickly became evident that the Australian Government was taking credit for decisions of criminals. The "War on Drugs" has little or no effect on the availability of illegal drugs on the streets of Australia or anywhere else for that matter. All it does is pump-prime organized crime, and turn otherwise law abiding citizens into criminals.
The following are excerpts from a report into the heroin glut entitled; "The Case for an Inquiry into its Causes and the Flood of Methamphetamines" by W.M. Bush; no relation.

"The article disputes the claim by the Federal Government that Australian law enforcement financed by its Tough on Drugs Strategy was primarily responsible for the heroin drought and resulting fall in overdose deaths. Law enforcement agencies, notably the Australian Federal Police through its Commissioner, have revealed intelligence to the effect that Asian crime syndicates have assessed that there is a large and very profitable market in Australia for amphetamine-like drugs, and that they have made a marketing decision to promote them rather than heroin.
The evidence suggests strongly that the prime causes of the drought were a series of poor opium harvests in Burma and these marketing decisions. No other explanation fits the known facts including;
        The drought being confined to Australia
        A big rise in availability of amphetamine-like drugs imported through the same channels as heroin
        The known large rise in recent years in production in South East Asia of these artificial drugs
        The greater profit derivable from them than from heroin
        Their lower vulnerability to law enforcement interdiction.
If law enforcement had an effect it was probably only a subsidiary factor. The evidence is strong that there would have been no drought in the absence of the other factors."

"If anyone should know about the profits to be made when drugs are made illegal, it's me. I spent thirty years selling drugs; it's not for the faint hearted, but there are huge amounts of money to be made", says Wade. "I only use marijuana these days; I can't afford the high cost of heroin. "I inhale the vapours with a marijuana vaporizer. In fact I import them for the local and world market; I sell the VapoHead Herbal Vaporizer. Marijuana Vaporizers are bloody brilliant. You can check them out on my website at;"
http://www.cheatingthehangman.com.au/

I still use heroin occasionally when I have the funds. The quality in Australia is the envy of addicts everywhere; almost always white powder, and usually with 50% purity or higher. However it's very expensive, reflecting the difficulty of getting it safely ashore. If I could afford to, I would certainly use heroin more often," Wade adds with a grin."
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Brazilian Game Site Chooses Hybrid Mainframe-Cell

Submitted by vmdave9
vmdave9 writes: http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb050807-story01.html

When people think of multiuser games, they are rarely thinking about mainframes. But if you stop to think about it for a second, the workload management and high bandwidth capabilities of the mainframe would make it ideally suited to simulated worlds if the machine only had some serious number-crunching power to bring to bear on the visual simulation of the virtual worlds in a game.

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