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DigitalDame2 writes "eBay power sellers, angered by the recent eBay policy changes, have been hitting back the auction site with listing boycotts and now with accusations of fake listings and forum censorship. EBay admitted that a "bug" in its system had accidentally placed listings from eBay-owned shopping.com onto eBay.com late Friday night. A California-based seller's new eBay listings did not allow users to actually bid on his items. "This guy has over 35,000 items. And there is no button for a 'buy it now' and no button for making a bid." As a result, sellers are threatening to take their complaints to the Federal Trade Commission, but eBay is not backing down." Normally I wouldn't really care, but I think this is interesting because eBay is so dominant in their field, that there is no real alternative. Watching how things like this play out is interesting to me because I want to believe that the internet will require everyone to be more responsible or lose. But the real question for me is at what point does total marketplace dominance trump that.

coondoggie writes "South Korea officials today said they hope to build two robot theme parks for $1.6 billion by 2013. The parks will feature a number of attractions that let visitors interact with robots and test new products. "The two cities will be developed as meccas for the country's robot industry, while having amusement park areas, exhibition halls and stadiums where robots can compete in various events," the ministry said. The theme parks are not a big surprise because South Korea loves its robots. Earlier this year the government of South Korea said it was drawing up a code of ethics to prevent human abuse of robots — and vice versa."

Krishna Dagli writes "The road works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the surface. Just as traveling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes."

SomeoneGotMyNick writes "I was told by our department head that we should get together a list of reference books that we may want. Apparently, we have a large reference material budget and nobody knows what to spend it on. If we don't spend it, we may lose future reference material budgeting next year. For a quick background, we are a programming department utilizing Visual Studio 2005 (I know, some of you are going Boo, Hiss) and we use VB and ASP.NET (Do I hear more boos and hisses?). We also use Javascript, AJAX, and most of us are wishing to hone our skills in designing creative websites. You know, ones with a good visual impact. Although I'm perfectly capable of picking books on the proper subject, I usually have a problem picking the right book on the subject. My experience in buying books results in good books, but not excellent books. Hoping that the Slashdot community used a variety of books on similar subjects, I'd appreciate some recommendations, hopefully with a reason why you found the book to be an excellent reference. And please, DB400 book references would be a plus!!"

jsin writes "If Vonage is forced to close up shop, what alternatives exist for their customers? What other pure VOIP companies exist and do any of them compare to Vonage in the areas of price, reliability and support?"

Kanuck writes "An interesting piece has flown by lately, but I didn't see it mentioned here. There's a new service called Fotowoosh that's currently accepting signups for their beta. It can apparently take an image, preferably a landscape, and "pop it up" by labeling each region of an outdoor image as ground, vertical, or sky. By using these as judgements, it can literally "pop-up" the image into a 3D model, with it outputting in VRML. They have examples available on their site — looks pretty interesting, perhaps it can beat off Microsofts Photosynth?"

Joel Merrick writes "If you would like to voice your concern about software patents, head along to http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/softwarepatents/ and sign the petition. The deadline date for signatures is 20th February 2007 The online e-petition site is run by 10 Downing Street so, hopefully, should provide some worth."

Jeremy Rayner writes "Groovy 1.0 has finally been released.

It has been a long road, lasting over three years, but at last I can recommend Groovy as a stable, production proven and well documented programming language for the Java platform. (not to mention a very helpful and large user community)

This release coincides with the launch of the Manning book Groovy in Action, which gives an in depth reference to Groovy 1.0

[Full Disclosure: I'm a core committer for Groovy and I was a technical reviewer for this book]

Groovy 1.0 Highlights:

• A formal syntax based closely on Java 1.5, with added Groovy bits.
• Groovy can easily run source from the command line, ant, embedded in code
  (simply place groovy-all-1.0.jar in your classpath)
• Close ties with Spring, Lucene and other real world Java products.
• Fantastic for reducing the verbosity of common tasks in Java

more..."

QASec.com writes "An unpatched vulnerability in Adobe Acrobat Reader allows all websites hosting a PDF file to be affected by Cross Site Scripting."