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willdavid writes to tell us InformationWeek is reporting that McAfee, in their annual report, has warned investors that "ambiguous" open source licenses "may result in unanticipated obligations regarding [McAfee] products." "McAfee said it's particularly troubling that the legality of terms included in the GNU/General Public License -- the most widely used open source license -- have yet to be tested in court. 'Use of GPL software could subject certain portions of our proprietary software to the GPL requirements, which may have adverse effects on our sales of the products incorporating any such software,' McAfee said in the report filed last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Among other things, the GPL requires that manufacturers who in their products use software governed by the license distribute the software's source code to end users or customers. Some manufacturers have voiced concerns that the requirement could leave important security or copyright protection features in their products open to tampering."

Tubs writes "According to MadPenguin.org's latest article, Fedora 8 from Red Hat is a serious threat to Ubuntu. The author writes, "I was never that swept up with past releases of Fedora. There was nothing compelling about it. But for the first time, I cannot help but feel that the Fedora team has been spoon fed an extra helping of Wheaties, which has put them into overdrive with their accessibility efforts."

DrNASA writes "George Lucas says that he will make two more live-action films based in the "Star Wars" era. "But they won't have members of the Skywalker family as characters," he said."

MicroBarcode writes in about the color barcode technology that Microsoft developed but shelved two years back because nobody adopted it. The technology promised a way to link packaging to Web sites — and once cell phone cameras get good enough, Microsoft hoped lots of people would use it. It seems the technology has finally found a home: the ISAN International Agency has inked a deal with Microsoft. The color barcodes, consisting of red, green, yellow, and black triangles, will appear on XBox 360 games and other products beginning later this year.

DG writes "According to this Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility News Release, National Park Service employees are no longer allowed to comment on the age of the Grand Canyon:

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. [... ...] "In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. "It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is 'no comment.'""

MrHanky writes "OpenOffice.org 2.1 has been released, introducing several new improvements and support for 64 bit Linux. Get it while it's still hot, but don't forget to read the release notes. It'll be interesting to see if there are any sorely needed speed improvements."

An anonymous reader writes "An Israeli company called Lumus-Optical has unveiled designer-looking glasses featuring twin microdisplays and mini projectors, to be demoed at CES.
From the Engadget article (http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/12/lumus-optical- unveils-microdisplay-packin-designer-glasses/):
"The firm's latest prototype boasts dual 640 x 480 resolution displays as well as two wee projectors on each arm; the Lumus glasses can accept video inputs via an undisclosed connection, and projects an image akin to a "60-inch screen from 10 feet away." Its Light-guide Optical Element (LOE) technology allows the imagery to be reflected back on to the lenses so users can view them, all while being transparent enough to allow you to focus on the humans, trees, road block, or board room presentation ahead of you.""

An anonymous reader writes "Nobody can login to Everquest servers for several hours... even website was down for quite awhile also... no word from Sony... probably their latest rootkit..."

brewing writes "WebProNews has a great interview with Google's Vanessa Fox. She covers the topics of sitemaps (why they are and are not important), PageRank, and text to code ratio (does it actually impact your rankings on Google?). Full Interview Here"

Cintia Barreto writes "http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=20135&hed =DivX+CEO+on+Video%2C+YouTube%2C+iPod DivX CEO Jordan Greenhall talks with Red Herring reporter on the company's strange start. It began with tracking down a French hacker known simply as Gej, who had hacked together the earliest version of the DivX video codec."

yerp writes "Here's one I hope we never see as a slashdot Poll. The Indian Council of Medical Research has released a story entitled "Indian men don't measure up." which describes how a poll of 1400 civilians has turned up some of the worst news in centuries...that they have below average length penises. Here's the link to the reuters story ."

Ninja Spydr writes "Apparently Llamas have more use than gracing the covers of Perl books.

"If terrorists ever unleashed a biological weapon, unusual molecules normally found in the blood of llamas could quickly help warn of the attack, scientists now report.

Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and their colleagues experimented with antibodies, which act as the red flags and magic bullets of the body's personal defense arsenal."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20061206/sc_li vescience/llamasenlistedtothwartbiologicalweapons"

Kalak writes "Windows Vista includes a new activation scheme for enterprise users that can connect to a non-Microsoft server, called PKS, to authenticate. This allows for non-internet computers to activate once every 180 days without having to connect directly to the internet (along with other enterprise scenerios). The PKS server has been obtained, though not released yet, and hacked to run from a VMware image, allowing pirated copies of Vista to be activated."

Tango42 writes "After hovering just above the key level for days, SCO's share price has finally dropped below $1.00. If it stays below $1.00 for 30 consecutive days, the process of having the stock delisted will begin, which could spell the end for SCO — if they don't go bankcrupt sooner, or course."

pete314 writes "Microsoft has been provided with a number of test models of Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child computers and is trying to get Windows Installed on them. The current design runs an custom version of Red Hat's Fedora Linux distro. Running Windows will take quite some additional memory: the OLPC has 512Mb of Flash, where XP requires a minimum of 1.5Gb storage."