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Sci-Fi

Alternate Star Trek TOS Pilot Found 134

Raver32 sends news that the lost second pilot for Star Trek has been found, and will be released next month on Blu-ray. "Star Trek fans know there were two pilots for the original series. The first, 'The Cage,' was rejected by NBC for being 'too cerebral' (ah, some things never change). The second, 'Where No Man Has Gone Before,' replaced the actor who played the captain with William Shatner and was more action driven. That pilot had an alternate version which was largely lost and has never aired. Apparently, a film collector in Germany acquired the print and 'recently brought it to the attention' of CBS/Paramount. CBS is now releasing this version on Blu-ray Dec. 15."
The Courts

Submission + - Blizzard Wins Bot Lawsuit, Validates EULAs (arstechnica.com)

Kalriath writes: A story on ArsTechnica and discussed on Blizzards forums talks about the recent win in early January, where judge David G Campbell agreed with Blizzard that the use of a bot violates Blizzard's EULA, terminating a users license to use the software (and validating the belief that copying an application into memory to run it does indeed constitute copyright infringement without a valid license. From the story:

As we've noted before, Blizzard's legal arguments, which Judge David G. Campbell largely accepted, could have far-reaching and troubling implications for the software industry. Donnelly is not the most sympathetic defendant, and some users may cheer the demise of a software vendor that helps users break the rules of Blizzard's wildly popular role playing game. But the sweeping language of Judge Campbell's decision, combined with his equally troubling decision last summer, creates a lot of new uncertainty for software vendors seeking to enter software markets dominated by entrenched incumbents and achieve interoperability with legacy platforms.

Looks like a field day for lawyers everywhere.

Sun Microsystems

Sun Open Sources the Netscape Enterprise Server 114

An anonymous reader writes "Brian Aker has announced that Sun has open sourced the Netscape Enterprise Server under the BSD license. This is the evolution of the original server Netscape sold in the '90s during the rise of the first bubble. Almost twenty years later, Apache's original competitor is now made available for anyone to use under an open source license."
Apple

Apple Intros 17" Unibody MBP, DRM-Free iTunes 1079

Phil Schiller delivered the keynote at MacWorld, the first after the Steve Jobs era of keynotes. Here is Engadget's live blog. The big news, predicted by many rumor sites, was the introduction of the unibody 17" MacBook Pro. As rumored, the battery is not removable, but it's claimed to provide 8 hours of battery life (7 hours with the discrete graphics): "3x the charges and lifespan of the industry standard." $2,799, 2.66 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, shipping at the end of January. There is a battery exchange program, and there is an option for a matte display. The other big news is that iTunes is going DRM-free: 8M songs today, all 10+M by the end of March. Song pricing will be flexible, as the studios have been demanding; the lowest song price is $0.69. Apple also introduced the beta of a Google Docs-like service, iWork.com.
Sci-Fi

Actor Matt Smith Will Be 11th Doctor Who 330

Jerry Smith was among a large number of readers letting us know that the 11th Doctor Who has been named. It's Matt Smith, 26, who will be the youngest actor to play the time-traveling Doctor. The head of drama at BBC Wales said this about Smith's audition: "It was abundantly clear that he had that 'Doctor-ness' about him. You are either the Doctor or you are not."

Comment What kind of boondoggle is this? (Score 5, Insightful) 177

They're paying $800 per watt, when a company is now shipping solar panels that cost under $1/watt, AND have a single, expensive point of failure? What is the point of beaming solar energy down from space, to a tropical island?

Ground-based solar including panels and batteries could be built local to each home or village, at a fraction of the cost of this over-engineered idea.

Networking

Submission + - Hardware Failure at LAX Strands 17,000.

ExplodingTurnip writes: The Los Angeles Times (registration required) reported today that a hardware problem at Los Angeles International Airport stranded more than 17,000 passengers for several hours on Saturday. The hardware failure occurred on the LAN used by the US Customs agency. From the article: "Saturday's breakdown was the result of a hardware malfunction that prevented access to the agency's local network. It was finally pinpointed and fixed by agency employees and another computer contractor nine hours after the system crashed." Airport officials criticized US Customs for not having a contingency plan, taking too long to fix the problem and for not relaxing passenger inspection standards during the entire debacle.

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