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Announcements

Pigs CAN fly! New Footage of Dukenukem Forever.->

Submitted by
extremrams
extremrams writes "Today, George Broussard leader of 3DRealms, teased us with a new Screenshot of the upcoming Teaser Video, which will be released tomorrow. After all these years, we have finally something new to look at :) It looks like the 3DRealms is finally back with Duke, and we can get ready to kick some ass! Click here for a mirrored version of the screenshot."
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The Courts

Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat

Submitted by 1shooter
1shooter writes "In the article titled "Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat & Novell- Just Like Ballmer Predicted" are details the first lawsuit against Linux vendors Red Hat and Novell. Groklaw link to article: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071011205044141

The patent appears to cover the use of multiple virtual desktops like in KDE and Gnome. Lots of prior art and surprise, Microsoft finger prints discovered behind the scenes."
Education

FBI to restrict student freedoms->

Submitted by
amigoro
amigoro writes "US university students will not be able to work late at the campus, travel abroad, show interest in their colleagues' work, have friends outside America, engage in independent research, or make extra money without the prior consent of the authorities, according to a set of guidelines given to administrators by the FBI. Feds are going around briefing top universities including MIT about "espionage indicators" aimed at identifying foreign agents and terrorists who might steal university research."
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Businesses

Amazon's troubles with payment options

Submitted by FreedomOfChoice
FreedomOfChoice writes "Amazon is having undisclosed problems with their payment providers. In letters to customers who have contacted customer service, Amazon states they have have disabled payments by bank account because of problems with payment providers. Customers who make a large number of purchases from third-party merchants cannot use credit cards because such orders are almost always marked as fraud (rightfully so), so Amazon has effectively and discretely turned off these customer's only option for making purchases. Given the limited options for making payments on Amazon, is it time they adopt more (Paypal, Google Checkout)?"
Privacy

Internet defamation suit tests online anonymity->

Submitted by
The Xoxo Reader
The Xoxo Reader writes "Reuters reports that two women at Yale Law School have filed suit for defamation and infliction of emotional distress against an administrator and 28 anonymous posters on AutoAdmit (a.k.a. Xoxohth), a popular law student discussion site. Experts are watching to see if the suit will unmask the posters, who are identified in the complaint only by their pseudonyms. Since AutoAdmit's administrators have previously said that they do not retain IP logs of posters, identifying the defendants may test the limits of the legal system and anonymity on the internet. So far, one method was to post the summons on the message board itself and ask the defendants to step forward. The controversy leading to this lawsuit was previously discussed on Slashdot here.""
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Businesses

Business Week shows offshoring bad for the economy->

Submitted by
Obasan
Obasan writes "A 'gaping flaw' in the way economic numbers are computed may be the cause of a disconnect between GDP growth claims and actual growth, especially in terms of real wages, a phenomenon many of us are at least anecdotally familiar with. Business week calls this gap "phantom-GDP", gains in reported GDP that cannot be correlated with domestic production."
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Role Playing (Games)

The Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer

Submitted by
jellie
jellie writes "The New York Times Magazine has a story about real-money trading in massively multiplayer online games titled "The Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer". The author provides some background of the practice and interviews several players. To describe the scale of the virtual-money industry, the author mentions a 2001 paper by an economist from the University of Indiana: "Updated and more broadly applied, Castronova's results [based on his paper from 2001] suggest an aggregate gross domestic product for today's virtual economies of anywhere from $7 billion to $12 billion, a range that puts the economic output of the online gamer population in the company of Bolivia's, Albania's and Nepal's.""

I request a weekend in Havana with Phil Silvers!