Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton wants to make online dating better. Here's how he wants to do it. "Suppose you're an entrepreneur who wants to break into the online personals business, but you face impossible odds because everybody wants to go where everybody else already is (basically, either Match.com or Yahoo Personals). Here is a suggestion that would give you an edge. In a nutshell: Each member lists the criteria for people that they are looking for. Then when people contact them, they choose whether or not to respond. After the system has been keeping track of who contacts you and who you respond to, the site lists your profile in other people's search results along with your criteria-specific response rate: "Lisa has responded to 56% of people who contacted her who meet her criteria." Read on for the rest of his thoughts.

In January we had the chance to ask the designers of Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition a few questions about the new version of the classic tabletop game. The Wizards of the Coast Community Manager, Mike "Gamer_Zer0" Lescault put our questions to members of the development team, including: Andrew Collins, Chris Perkins, Scott Rouse, and Sara Girard. Some of the questions weren't quite answered in as much detail as I would have liked. That said, they've given us a great opportunity to follow up on their responses. If you have a follow-up question, put it in a comment below (one question per comment please). We'll pass on five of the best, and the designers will answer your question on-camera at the Dungeons and Dragons Experience at the end of this month. We'll post the video to the site early in March. This is a great chance to put a face to some legendary designer names, and get your unanswered issues resolved. Get asking.

dynamo52 writes "I'm a freelance network admin serving mainly small business clients. Over the last few months, I have noticed that any time I run any type of bandwidth testing for clients with Comcast accounts, the results have been amazingly fast — with some connections, Speakeasy will report up to 15 Mbps down and 4 Mbps up. Of course, clients get nowhere near this performance in everyday usage. (This can be quite annoying when trying to determine whether a client needs to switch over to a T1 or if their current ISP will suffice.) Upon further investigation, it appears that Comcast is delivering this bandwidth only for a few seconds after any new request and it is immediately throttled down. Doing a download and upload test using a significantly large file (100+ MB) yields results more in line with everyday usage experience, usually about 1.2 Mbps down and about 250 Kbps up (but it varies). Is there any valid reason why Comcast would front-load transfers in this way, or is it merely an effort to prevent end-users from being able to assess their bandwidth accurately? Does anybody know of other ISPs using similar practices?"

foobarx writes "Digital artists have created a humanoid robot which uses brainwave activity recorded during sleep to playback an interpretation of your dreams. The artists, Brendan Burns and Fernando Orellana used machine learning to find patterns in the brainwaves and then matched these patterns to dreams which they remembered having. Others have noted the possible hazards of this new technology."

mmtux writes: "As technology becomes more advanced, I am increasingly worried about privacy in all aspects of my life. Unfortunately, whenever I attempt to discuss the matter with my friends, they show little understanding and write me off as a hyper-neurotic IT student. They say they simply don't care that the data they share on social networks may be accessible by others, that some laws passed by governments today might be privacy-infringing and dangerous, or that they shouldn't use on-line banking without a virus scanner and a firewall. Have you ever attempted to discuss data security and privacy concerns with a friend who isn't tech-savvy? How do you convince the average modern user that they should think about their privacy and the privacy of others when turning on their computer?"

meteorit found a story about rumors of an Alienware phone based on Google's Android phone OS. As Dell has a history of bombing with handhelds, it would be interesting to try the Alienware brand instead. And I'm not exactly sure where they get off claiming that their drawings are the first pictures of the thing. Cheesy renderings designed explicitly for your website are not quite pictures of a product... they are artists impressions.

At the Newsweek blog LevelUp, journalist N'Gai Croal wrote this week about the sometimes-precarious position of videogames in popular culture. The frustrations of legislators, lawyers, and 'pro-family' groups aside, the popularity and record sales of the gaming industry would seem to indicate rising stock for gaming as an art form in the US. And yet, there are some folks who see gaming as just another fad, which in some time will be equal in popularity to comic books or tabletop roleplaying. N'Gai starts to form his response by noting that learning to play videogames is considerably easier than developing an appreciation for literature of any kind. He then goes on to note that the (oft-cited) lack of weighty subjects in gaming is more due to the 'pop culture' nature of the hobby than the medium itself. "Popular fiction generally outsells literary fiction. Summer blockbusters generally out-gross arthouse films. Is this any different from, say, Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat out-NPD-ing BioShock last year, or Madden doing the same to Shadow of the Colossus in 2005?" He discusses some ways to address that, but do you have any solutions? Or are games doomed to be the playthings of adolescent boys for the rest of the century? (And yeah, I resent the 'comics ghetto' label too.)

ericatcw writes "According to ComputerWorld, with two hours of free Wi-Fi soon to arrive at Starbucks consumers should expect more hotspots to go free as well as more attractive bundles from the likes of AT&T, Verizon and providers. While T-Mobile is hurting, indie coffeehouses and chains such as Caribou Coffee, Tully's and others that already offered free Wi-Fi, insist they are not, saying their ambiance and superior brew will help them retain customers."

An anonymous reader writes "Why have a key to open your front door when you can have an RFID tag implanted in your arm that will do the trick? Computerworld has a story up about the outgoing Linux Australia group president's hacked home, in which just about anything from watering the lawn, to opening his blinds, or checking the mail can be controlled through a software environment. Jonathan Oxer is an electronics and coding whiz who apparently has an RIFD tag implanted in his arm that opens his front door, and his front gate is hooked up with gigabit Ethernet — able to tell him when someone enters the property or send him a virtual email or sms to say he has real mail. Apparently the iPod Touch has just inspired him to begin linking all his little hardware hacks together into the one single, software controlled handheld touch device. I wonder if Steve Jobs ever thought the Touch would end up being used this way?"

Stanislav_J writes "It happens to the best of us: you drop off your laptop at the local branch of some Super Mega Electronics McStore, go to pick it up, and they can't find it. Lost, gone, kaput — probably sucked into a black hole and now breeding with lost airline luggage. It would make any of us mad, but Raelyn Campbell of Washington, D.C. isn't just mad — she's $54 million mad. That's how much she is asking from Best Buy in a lawsuit that seeks 'fair compensation for replacement of the $1,100 computer and extended warranty, plus expenses related to identity theft protection.' Best Buy claims that Ms. Campbell was offered and collected $1,110.35 as well as a $500 gift card for her inconvenience. (I guess that extra 35 cents wasn't enough to sway her.) Her blog claims that Geek Squad employees spent three months telling her different stories about where her laptop might be before finally acknowledging that it had been lost. For those who follow economic trends, this means that a laptop's worth is roughly equivalent to that of a pair of pants."

vm writes "NOVA's recent documentary, "Astrospies," was written and co-produced by journalist and NSA expert, James Bamford. It details the U.S. Air Force's orbiting spy station program begun in the 1960s, the Manned Orbital Laboratory. Designed from a heavily modified Gemini 2 capsule and launched from a Titan III booster rocket, MOL was basically intended to be a Hubble telescope pointed at Earth with the sole intention of collecting photo intelligence on the Soviets using an impressive array of optics and gyro balanced cameras operated onboard by specially trained astronauts. The lab was never launched, however, due to the competing Corona unmanned spy satellite program funded by NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office. Partly spurred by the success of the Apollo missions, the Soviets, meanwhile, sent cosmonauts to its own succesfully launched spy platform, the Almaz. In addition to an onboard film lab and a space-to-ground image relay system, it included an alarming first in manned space exploration; a 23mm aircraft cannon — which is rather ironic in light of Russia and China's recent attempts to ban space weaponry. At a time when we're still unearthing details about the post 9/11 domestic spying debacle, it's a fascinating look at the history of technology used to look over our neighbors' fences." There is more to the story but what these sorts of stories always make me wonder, is since this was the 60s, what are they doing NOW!

Technical Writing Geek writes "The Haiku project, which began shortly after the death of BeOS in 2001, aims to bring together the technical advantages of BeOS and the freedom of open source. 'The project has drawn dozens of contributors who have written over seven million lines of code. Although Haiku is nearly feature-complete, there are still numerous bugs that must be fixed before it is ready for day-to-day use. The design principles behind Haiku are very closely aligned with those of BeOS. The central goal of the Haiku project is to create an operating system that is ideally suited for use on the desktop--this differs significantly from Linux and other open-source operating systems which are intended for use in a diverse range of settings including server and embedded environments.'"

An anonymous reader writes about a new robot submersible that uses temperature differences in the sea to power operation for more than twice as long as previous, battery-dependent vehicles. "The torpedo-shaped glider moves through the ocean by changing its buoyancy to dive and surface, unlike motorized, propeller-driven undersea vehicles. To power its propulsion, the submersible gathers thermal energy from the ocean. When it moves from cooler water to warmer areas, internal tubes of wax are heated up and expand, pushing out the gas in surrounding tanks and increasing its pressure. The compressed gas stores potential energy, like a squeezed spring, that can be used to power the vehicle. To rise, oil is pushed from inside the vehicle to external bladders, thus increasing the glider's volume without changing its mass, making it less dense. The oil can be shifted inside to increase the density and sink the vehicle."

stoolpigeon writes "Ars reports that Starbucks is replacing T-Mobile with AT&T as their Wi-Fi provider. AT&T broadband customers will be able to access the service for free. Starbucks card users will get 2 hours a day free. 2-hour, daily, and monthly rates will be lower than they were with T-Mobile. Starbucks says that their previously announced deal to tie in with iTunes will continue under AT&T. For now AT&T isn't offering free Wi-Fi to iPhone users, but says it expects to accommodate them soon. Quoting the article: 'The companies didn't specify exactly when the rollout would begin, only saying that it would take place this spring... [The company plans] to install all new equipment at Starbucks as part of this agreement, so the changeover won't be as simple as flipping a switch.'"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "There's a growing revolt among Microsoft TechNet & MSDN subscribers who are frustrated that they can't yet get Vista SP1 and test their software on it. This can't be good news for anyone hoping that SP1 will have better compatibility. While SP1 has been released to manufacturing, and pirate copies are easy to find, Microsoft is withholding it from subscribers until early March. According to the article, some frustrated users are upset enough that they plan to abandon TechNet entirely and turn to piracy." Update: 02/12 17:37 GMT by KD : Sean0michael writes, "Aaccording to the Technet blog, they have pushed up the date to before the end of February, though no exact date is mentioned."