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Submission + - Pinball: A Resurgence in Retro Gaming from an Unlikely Place

Submitted by woohoodonuts
woohoodonuts writes: The Professional & Amateur Pinball Association is creating a webchannel that will livestream content from their national circuit of tournaments ranging from Southern California to New York City. The most recent circuit tournament in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA sold out of all 400 tournament openings in less than three weeks, months in advance of the event. With several new companies in the process of creating machines and hundreds of new competitive events springing up worldwide at a record pace, is the retro silverball rising to prominence once again?
Entertainment

Submission + - PAPA announces $100,000 North American Pinball Cir (papa.org)

Submitted by woohoodonuts
woohoodonuts writes: The Professional and Amateur Pinball Association are announcing the inaugural season of the PAPA Pinball Circuit. Beginning March 30th through April 1st at Pinburgh, the world's largest match-play pinball event held annually in Scott Township outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Circuit will include ten high quality pinball tournaments ranging from The Southern Pinball Festival in Orlando, Florida to the Northwest Pinball Championships held annually in Seattle, Washington. Each event will feature highly competitive pinball action within a variety of tournament formats.

The PAPA Pinball Circuit offers a combined prize pool of over $100,000 and culminates in an invitational tournament where the winner of each game receives $100 in addition to thousands more awarded according to how each player finishes.

For more information on the PAPA Pinball Circuit or any of its events, please visit www.PAPA.org. For information and videos on how to play hundreds of pinball machines at a more competitive level and prepare yourself for the Circuit, visit PAPA's sister site at www.pinball.org.
Crime

Submission + - Born bad: Genes influence criminal behavior (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Your genes could be a strong predictor of whether you stray into a life of crime, according to research at UT Dallas. The Texas study focused on whether genes are likely to cause a person to become a "life-course persistent offender," characterized by antisocial behavior during childhood that often progresses to violent or serious criminal acts later in life. Researchers relied on data from 4,000 people drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health using what is known as the twin methodology . Says the study's lead researcher: "The overarching conclusions were that genetic influences in life-course persistent offending were larger than environmental influences."
Government

Submission + - Revolutionary Wants Technology to Transform Libya (wsj.com)

Submitted by
pbahra
pbahra writes: "It isn’t often you get the chance to meet a real revolutionary. It is a term cheapened by misuse, but Khaled el Mufti is a revolutionary. It is no exaggeration to say that the role he played in the Libyan uprising last year was crucial; had he and his telecoms team failed, it isn’t hard to think that Col. Muammar Gadhafi might still be in power. Today, Mr. Mufti is a telecoms adviser to the interim government and heads the e-Libya initiative, a bold plan to use the transformative powers of technology to modernize the Libyan state, overturning 40 years of corruption and misrule under Gadhafi. Mr. Mufti is an unlikely revolutionary, a softly spoken network-security engineer with a degree from Imperial College in London. Almost by chance he was in his native Libya when the revolution took place, working on a project with BT in the capital, Tripoli. When a large protest was called for Feb. 17 in Benghazi, he told his BT colleagues to leave, and he headed for Benghazi. It was quickly apparent that the key communications technology for the rebels wasn’t the internet, but the mobile network. “Having shut off international calls, we thought it was very likely he would shut down the mobile network.” In utmost secrecy Mr. el Mufti and a small team started to plan and build their own system. They had one major stroke of luck."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Hello Apache 2.2 and Mod Perl 2.0 3

Journal by PerlJedi
This is a journal entry testing our first release moving Slashdot on to modern versions of apache and ModPerl. Though this test instance is not available to the public yet, it will be comming soon... (this weekend provided all tests go smoothly between now and then).
Horray for modern software!
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Wireless Proximity Detection 1

Submitted by Cinnamon Whirl
Cinnamon Whirl writes: As a chemist, I work in a both lab and office enviroments, and need access to data in both, without causing undue clutter in either. My company has recently purchased two Win7 tablets for trial usage with electronic lab notebooks, propietry software, SAP, email etc. These are also useful for sharing in meetings, etc.

As part of this project, I have been wondering whether we can use these tablets to detect other devices by proximity. Examples could include finding the nearest printer or monitor or, perhaps trickier, could two roaming devices find each other? Although lab technology is rarely cutting edge, I can see a day when all our sensors and probes will broadcast data (wireless thermocouples are already available), and positioning information will become much more important.

What technologies exist to do this? How accurate can the detection be?
Transportation

Submission + - Autonomous Vehicles and the Law on Collision Cours 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Google's autonomous cars have demonstrated that self-driving vehicles are now largely workable and could greatly limit human error, but questions of legal liability, privacy and insurance regulation have yet to be addressed. Simple questions, like whether the police should have the right to pull over autonomous vehicles, have yet to be answered and legal scholars and government officials warn that society has only begun wrestling with laws required for autonomous vehicles. The big question remains legal liability for the designers and manufacturers as some point out that liability exemptions have been mandated for vaccines, which are believed to offer great value for the general health of the population, despite some risks. “Why would you even put money into developing it?” says Gary E. Marchant, director of the Center for Law, Science and Innovation at the Arizona State University law school. “I see this as a huge barrier to this technology unless there are some policy ways around it.” Congress could consider creating a comprehensive regulatory regime to govern the use of these technologies say researchers at the Rand Corporation adding that while federal preemption has important disadvantages, it might speed the development and utilization of these technologies (PDF) and should be considered, if accompanied by a comprehensive federal regulatory regime. "This may minimize the number of inconsistent legal regimes that manufacturers face and simplify and speed the introduction of these technologies.""
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - Keith Elwin wins pinball world championship (papa.org)

Submitted by woohoodonuts
woohoodonuts writes: August 15, 2010. Keith Elwin won the world pinball championship in Pittsburgh, PA for the third consecutive year. The weekend-long event fielded 406 players from all over the world and distributed over $36,000 in prizes. The three games chosen in the final round were Stern Cheetah, Bally The Addams Family, and Bally Creature from the Black Lagoon. Keith scored over 500 million points on his final ball with $10,000 on the line to defeat fellow American, Andrei Massenkoff, by nearly 300 million points. Next year's event will be held August 11-14, 2011 in Pittsburgh, PA.

Comment Re:Nintendo's new motto: (Score 4, Interesting) 426

by woohoodonuts (#20956861) Attached to: Wii 'Popularity Bubble' to Burst?
Bored and worried about saving for Christmas, would be more correct. While I'm still excited about the wii, I'm also sitting around waiting for the new mario Galaxy game to be released. I finished beating Zelda, never was too fond of 1st person shooters (Metroid Prime) and so am left with a small gap until the holiday season allows my game spending budget to pick up another game or two. Since I only buy a few games a year, I don't take changes. When Brawl and Galaxy come out, I'll buy. Since Nintendo has cultivated a mostly Non-hardcore gamer market, the majority of their customers are only going to buy the AAA titles because that's what they hear about in the media. Most of those will be released in the coming months.

Feed Court Wants To Hear The Case Of The Second Life Land Deal Gone Bad (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
Late last year, we described the complicated case of a lawyer suing Linden Lab for kicking him out of Second Life and "reclaiming" some property he had purchased within the world. The case was quite complex for a variety of reasons. The guy was clearly exploiting a bug in Second Life that allowed him to buy the virtual land at below market values. However, Second Life touts the fact that you own whatever it is that you buy or build in their world, so simply taking it away could be questionable. Even more importantly, since Second Life is a fairly free form world. there's an interesting legal argument that anything that can be done in the world should be allowed, even if it wasn't what Linden Lab intended. Well, we may get to hear some of those arguments as the court hearing the case has turned down Linden Lab's request to have the case dismissed. There are lots of questions raised by this case that could clearly apply to other legal issues within virtual worlds, so it should be worth paying attention to the arguments both sides make, as well as the eventual decisions (and appeals).
Security

Submission + - Personal Phishing Responsibility? (kelvinism.com)

Submitted by
kelvinn
kelvinn writes: "Like many of you, I'm in IT. Over the years I have seen every type of phishing attempt there is, yet I'm still grappling with my personal responsibility when I detect an attempt. Two days ago I received a phishing attempt from "Amazon", and reported it via Firefox's anti-phishing feature. Additionally, I went the extra step and sent an email to the compromised site's owner, the ISP of the compromised site, and the University where the phishing site actually resided. To my dismay, and surprise, the only action was by the Firefox Team. So I present this question to the Slashdot community: what do you do when you get phished?"
Security

Submission + - Cell phone viruses: No longer the next big threat?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The CEO of antivirus vendor F-Secure — a company who have long warned against the threat of cell phone viruses — seems to be backtracking on the company's stance in an interview with Silicon.com.
Back in 2005, the company said: "This is definitely not hype. We believe we are going to see a huge growth in threats targeting mobile devices."
Now, just this week the company's new CEO has stepped into the debate with this: "Independent of how we have communicated this in the past, we are making it very clear today that the threat level on mobile malware is not severe today. There are only 323 known malware on mobiles and over 300,000 on PCs. No hype. Period."
What a difference two years makes in the hype-fuelled world of the antivirus vendors.
Power

Submission + - science: fuel technology

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward Rides Again
Anonymous Coward Rides Again writes: "Someone please debunk this (from wykc tv news):

John Kanzius discovered that his radio frequency generator could release the oxygen and hydrogen from saltwater and create an incredibly intense flame. "Just like that. If that was in a car cylinder you could see the amount of fire that would be in the cylinder." The APV Company Laboratory in Akron has checked out John's amazing invention. They were amazed. "That could be a steam engine, a steam turbine. That could be a car engine if you wanted it to be." Imagine the possibilities. Saltwater as the ultimate clean fuel.

i googled this and didn't come up with too much; i hardly look to tv news stations for science... does the 2nd law of thermodynamics not apply because the energy released in salt water is so much greater than that being input by the radio waves and that being used to power the radio wave generator?"

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