Decado writes "Blizzard has just announced that Sam Raimi is to direct the new World of Warcraft movie. 'Raimi, acclaimed director of the blockbuster Spider-Man series, will bring the forces of the Horde and the Alliance to life in epic live-action film. Charles Roven's Atlas Entertainment will produce alongside Raimi's Stars Road Entertaiment.' While it's still early in the process, does this offer hope that someone might finally make a good movie based on a game IP?"

angry tapir writes "Microsoft has made its second release under the General Public License in two days with software for Moodle, an 'open-source course management system that teachers use to create online learning Web sites for their classes[, which] has about 30 million users in 207 countries.' It comes on the heels of Redmond contributing drivers to the Linux community. No reports as yet on dropping temperatures in hell."

AlejoHausner writes "To find one terrorist in 3000 people, using a screen that works 90% of the time, you'll end up detaining 300 people, one of whom might be your target. A BBC article asks for an effective way to communicate this clearly. 'Screening for HIV with 99.9% accuracy? Switch it around. Think also about screening the millions of non-HIV people and being wrong about one person in every 1,000.' The problem is important in any area where a less-than-perfect screen is used to detect a rare event in a population. As a recent NYTimes story notes, widespread screening for cancers (except for maybe colon cancer) does more harm than good. How can this counter-intuitive fact be communicated effectively to people unschooled in statistics?"

LinuxScribe writes "Red Hat, Mozilla, Novell, Oracle, and Sun are among the 50-plus member Open Source for America coalition that will be officially announced today by Tim O'Reilly at OSCON. The OSA will be a strong advocate for free and open source software, and plans to boost US Federal government support and adoption of FOSS. From their website: 'The mission of OSA is to educate decision makers in the US Federal government about the advantages of using free and open source software; to encourage the Federal agencies to give equal priority to procuring free and open source software in all of their procurement decisions; and generally provide an effective voice to the US Federal government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits.'"

suraj.sun passes along a report from a Seattle TV station that has been investigating reports of Apple iPods overheating and bursting into flames. "An exclusive KIRO 7 Investigation reveals an alarming number of Apple brand iPod MP3 players have suddenly burst into flames and smoke, injuring people and damaging property. It's an investigation that Apple has apparently been trying to keep out of the public eye. It took more than 7 months for KIRO 7 Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy to get her hands on documents concerning Apple's iPods from the Consumer Product Safety Commission because Apple's lawyers filed exemption after exemption. In the end, the CPSC released more than 800 pages which reveal, for the very first time, a comprehensive look that shows, on a number of occasions, iPods have suddenly burst into flames, started to smoke, and even burned their owners. ... Apple refused to comment, and refused to answer all of the other questions [the reporter] has been asking of the company since November."

The Register covers security firm Secunia calling out Adobe for its insecure distribution practices with regard to Adobe Reader. (Here is Secunia's note.) The accusation is that the way Adobe provides Reader extends the software's window of vulnerability once an exploit has begun to circulate. Version 9.1 of Reader, which is what you get when you visit the official download site, contains 10 vulnerabilities that were patched by later releases. "Adobe Systems has been taken to task for offering outdated software on its downloads page that contains dozens of security vulnerabilities, several of which are already being exploited in the wild... Visitors who obtain Adobe Reader from the company's official downloads page will find that it installs version 9.1 of the program on their computers, even though the most recent version was 9.1.2 at time of writing. That could put users at considerable peril given the number of vulnerabilities fixed in the two iterations that have come since 9.1, complains Secunia..."

An anonymous reader writes "In a bid to better understand the art of an effective ski turn researchers have recently built a robot to simulate the exact movements of a skier. The team of researchers from Kanazawa University in Japan built the ski robot to investigate the existing movements of skier's turns and see if there is any room for improvement on current techniques."

mknewman sends in an MSNBC piece on a promising way to keep bats from straying into wind farms — by using radar. "Bats use sonar to navigate and hunt. Many have been killed by wind turbines, however, which their sonar doesn't seem to recognize as a danger. Surprisingly, radar signals could help keep bats away from wind turbines, scientists have now discovered. ...some researchers have raised concerns that wind turbines inadvertently kill bats and other flying creatures. ... The bats might not be killed by the wind turbine blades directly, but instead by the sudden drop in air pressure the swinging rotors induce... The researchers discovered that radar helped keep bats away, reducing bat activity by 30 to 40 percent. The radar did not keep insects away, which suggests that however the radar works as a deterrent, it does so by influencing the bats directly and not just their food. Radar signals can lead to small but rapid spikes of heat in the head that generate sound waves, which in turn stimulate the ear. A bat's hearing is much more sensitive than ours. It may be so sensitive that even a tiny amount of sound caused by electromagnetic radiation is enough to drive them out."

dusty writes "Laser Focus World has a story on researchers from Ford, GSI, and The University of Liverpool and their success in using near-infrared lasers instead of spark plugs in automobile engines. The laser pulses are delivered to the combustion chamber one of two ways. One, the laser energy is transmitted through free space and into an optical plug. Two, the other more challenging method uses fiber optics. Attempts so far to put the second method into play have met some challenges. The researchers are confident that the fiber-optic laser cables' technical challenges (such as a 20% parasitic loss, and vibration issues) will soon be overcome. Both delivery schemes drastically reduce harmful emissions and increase performance over the use of spark plugs. So the spark plug could soon join the fax machine in the pantheon of antiquated technologies that will never completely disappear. The news release from The University of Liverpool has pictures of the freakin' internal combustion lasers."

DeviceGuru writes "Mediafly's A/V podcast aggregation service will be added to Roku's $100 digital video player set-top box this fall, the companies report. This puts the companies on a path to compete directly with Hulu.com. According to Mediafly, its service will provide free access to 'tens of thousands of audio and video podcasts' from NBC, CNN, ESPN, Comedy Central, and other sources. Roku VP Jim Funk notes that Mediafly is using a new Roku Developer Kit to ease the task of developing its add-on for the Roku box. Surely the cable companies are reading the writing on the wall!"

eldavojohn writes "Do you have ancestors who served in the British military under Henry V or fought in the Hundred Years War? Look them up online now that 250,000 medieval battle records are online and available for searching. According to the project details (PDF): 'The main campaigns of the period were to France but there were others to Flanders, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, a much wider geographical spectrum than before 1369. In addition, garrisons were maintained within England (such as that held at the Tower of London), the Channel Islands, Wales and the marches, as well as at Calais and in Gascony. In the fourteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War, the English also held some garrisons in areas of northern France, and in the fifteenth century phase, there was a systematic garrison-based occupation of Normandy and surrounding regions...'"

An anonymous reader writes "Highly sensitive financial information, including credit card details, bank account numbers, telephone numbers, and even PINs are available to the highest bidder. The information being traded on the Web has been intercepted by a British company and collated into a single database for the first time. The Lucid Intelligence database contains the records of 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans; four million are Britons. Security experts described the database as the largest of its kind in the world. The database is in the hands of Colin Holder, a retired senior Metropolitan police officer who served on the fraud squad. He has collected the information over the past four years. His sources include law enforcement from around the world, such as British police and the FBI, anti-phishing and hacking campaigners, and members of the public. Mr. Holder said he has invested £160,000 in the venture so far. He plans to offset the cost by charging members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached."

jra writes "Once every month or so, people ask here about backups, network management, and so on, but one topic I don't see come up too often is network inventory management — machines, serial numbers, license keys, user assignments, IP addresses, and the like. This level of tracking is starting to get out of hand in my facility as we approach 100 workstations and 40 servers, and I'm looking for something to automate it. I'm using RT (because I'm not a good enough Web coder to replace it, not because I especially like it) and Nagios 3. I've looked at Asset Tracker, but it seems too much like a toolkit for building things to do the job, and I don't want my ticket tracking users to have to be hackers (having to specify a URL for an asset is too hackish for my crew). I'd prefer something standalone, so I don't have to dump RT or Nagios, but if something sufficiently good looking comes by, I'd consider it. I'd like to be able to hack a bit here and there, if I must. Perl and Python, along with C, are the preferred implementation languages; least favorite is Java. Anyone care to share their firsthand experiences with this topic, and what tools they use (or built) to deal with it? "

An anonymous reader writes "Many of you may be familiar with Mike Masnick, from the site Techdirt. Beyond just chronicling tech stories for years, he's also been following various music and media industry business models as well. While he's usually among the first (like Slashdot) to express dismay at silly activities from the recording industry, lately he's been cataloging numerous success stories, like business models from Trent Reznor, Amanda Palmer, and Josh Freese. Mike and Techdirt are now taking things a step further, and wondering what would happen if they took the lessons from those success stories and applied it to a media publication: their own Techdirt. The result is 'Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy.' Check out the very special offer for the RIAA."

dusty writes "Plans to bring online the first new US nuclear plant since 1995 are on track, on time, and on budget according to the Tennessee Valley Authority. TVA had one major accident with a coal ash spill of late, and one minor one. The agency has plans and workers in place to have Unit 2 at Watts Bar, near Knoxville, online by 2012. Currently over 1,800 workers are doing construction at the plant. Watts Bar #1 is the only new nuclear reactor added to the grid in the last 25 years. From the article: 'TVA estimates the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor every year will avoid the emission of about 60 million metric tons of greenhouse emissions linked with global warming. ... TVA began construction of Watts Bar in 1973, but work was suspended in 1988 when TVA's growth in power sales declined. After mothballing the unit for 19 years, TVA's board decided in 2007 to finish the reactor because it is projected to provide cheaper, no carbon-emitting power compared with the existing coal plants or purchased power it may help replace.'"