mpthompson writes "Samsung has partnered with a Korean university to develop a robotic sentry equipped with a 5.5mm machine gun. Meant for deployment along the DMZ between North and South Korea, the $200,000 robot employs sophisticated pattern recognition software for targeting humans. No three laws here, but the robot does include a speaker that can be used to politely issue a warning before taking the target out. The promotional video is both scary and funny at the same time."

Gammu writes "Dan Bricklin helped create one of the most successful computer metaphors of all time, and he never got rich. He, and another engineer, started Personal Software to create the computer spreadsheet VisiCalc, which established the Apple II as the standard microcomputer for small businesses and attracted the attention of IBM to the market. Josh Coventry recently interviewed Bricklin about VisiCalc and his newer projects, including a Wiki-style spreadsheet." WikiCalc was discussed back in February on Slashdot and reviewed by NewsForge in March. NewsForge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

An anonymous reader writes "There's a federal case in the Northern District of California where copyright for open source is being challenged. The free software project JMRI discovered that a commercial company was using some of their files in a product, in violation of the license. They added a copyright claim to an ongoing legal action about cybersquatting, software patent abuse, etc. The patent case was covered on Slashdot back in June but the copyright part is new. The other side came back with an argument that copyright law didn't apply, simply because they software was 'being given away for free.'"

bart_scriv writes "While lots of ink is being spilled on the Wii/PS3 war, the real battleground for gamers may be in China, where companies Shanda and Netease are fighting for supremacy in the world's largest potential gaming market. The article looks at the companies' dramatically different business models (traditional subscriptions vs. virtual item sales), and offers screen caps of the companies' most popular online games: 'China is even expected to surpass tech-happy South Korea next year as Asia's biggest gaming market. China's overall Internet user base is enormous — about 120 million this year and growing fast. Yet it's a business in flux, and there is a huge debate among companies in this arena about whether to stick to a subscription fee model or go with a free-to-play one to build up a huge online consumer base. The lost revenues would be more than made up by sale of virtual goods (such as ammo for avatars, and so on) and also music and online movies to the legions of gaming fans attracted to its site — or so the theory goes.'"

GuNgA-DiN writes, "Today marks the 16th anniversary of the World Wide Web. According to the timeline on the W3.org site: 'The first web page [was] http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Unfortunately CERN no longer supports the historical site. Note from this era too, the least recently modified web page we know of, last changed Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT (though the URI changed.)' A lot has happened in 16 years and this little 'baby' has grown into quite the teenager."

GameSpot reports that GameStop will have too few units for preorders on launch day. Employees are being "asked" to wait until the second shipment of consoles to purchase units, to ensure customers can receive what they paid (and waited in the cold) for. From the article: "For launch day, preorders will be filled in the order they were received, and those who had a preorder but are denied a system on day one will receive something for their troubles. GameStop will give those unfortunate customers (as well as unfortunate employees) a free used game or DVD valued at $19.99 or less when they eventually wind up purchasing the system. Those who reserved a system won't need to wait long to find out if they can expect a system on launch day. Starting tomorrow, customers who preordered a PS3 will be contacted personally by phone and updated on the status of their reservation, the rep said."

narramissic writes, "At an event today to formally open-source Java, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and CEO, and Rich Green, the company's senior VP of software had an exchange in which Schwartz put Green on the spot about using GPL for OpenSolaris: 'Are you averse to changing the license, Rich Green?' Schwartz asked. 'Certainly not,' Green responded, prompting the Sun CEO to fire back in a half-joking manner: 'Will you GPL Solaris, Mr. Green?' 'We will take a close look at it,' Green said, adding that it was possible that the familiarity and comfort level many developers have with the GPL may result in Sun adopting it for OpenSolaris." Another note about Sun's decision to use the GPL for Java comes from reader squiggleslash, who writes: "According to Jonathan Schwartz, the decision of Novell and Microsoft to '(suggest) that free and open source software wasn't safe unless a royalty was being paid' is what prompted Sun to finally come down on using the GPL for Java. So I guess every cloud has a silver lining."

i4u writes, "Wicked Lasers has done the unthinkable. They took the sparse blue laser diodes used in Blu-ray Disc drives and are making cool laser gadgets out of them, called Sonar. You can own one of these very limited edition lasers for $1,999.99. The price is that high because Wicked Lasers buys Blu-ray Disc players and removes the Blu-ray diode for the Sonar laser."

Via 1up news, Bungie's statement that they'll have some big news to share next week about the Halo series. From their post: "A bunch of stuff is going down to celebrate the 5th anniversary of a little game we like to call Halo. In November 2001, Halo launched alongside the Xbox console, and the rest is history. Next year, Halo 3 will conclude the story arc begun all those years ago and next week, we'll take a long lingering look at the series to date. There will also be some pretty BIG surprises and maybe announcements. Who can say?" 1up has posted up a blow-by-blow account of their time with Halo 3's multiplayer, which is well worth checking out for anyone shunning Gears for Halo 2 this week.

triskaidekaphile writes, "Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, has an editorial on CNet responding to the Consumer Electronics Association's support of the Digital Freedom campaign for fair use. Sherman proclaims, 'The fair use doctrine is in danger of losing its meaning and value.' Like a true spinner, he indicates that fair use is indeed important, then states 'Let's be clear. The CEA's primary concern is not consumers, but technology companies — often large, multinational corporations which, like us, strive to make a profit... But to seize the mantra of "consumer rights" to advance that business interest is simply disingenuous.' Slashdotters, trollers, and pollsters one and all, what say you? Disingenuous or dissembling?"

Maggie McKee writes, "A new study reports that passengers on space elevators of current design could be killed by radiation. Even traveling at 200 kilometers per hour, passengers would spend several days in the Van Allen radiation belts, long enough to kill them." Looks like the elevator scientists will get this one solved before liftoff.

Via Opposable Thumbs at Ars Technica, the news at IGN that there are some annoying backwards compatibility issues with the PS3 and the PS2. Specifically, there are about 196 games that are experiencing issues. From the article: "In response to these issues, Sony's PR department pointed out that it, from the start, expected backwards compatibility to be less than 100%. It was also good enough to point out that some people can put up with playing games that lack sound. Regardless of this somewhat arrogant response, an official statement issued at the PlayStation.com site states that Sony will fix the problems with a future system update, and may even resort to individual patches for certain titles. When this will happen has yet to be specified." Qj.net has a list of some of the problem games, with their specific issues. It sounds bad, but to put this in perspective I believe there are still far more PS2 games playable on the PS3 than there are Xbox games playable on the 360.

Cam Turner writes "In late August, Slashdot reported that a lost Robert A. Heinlein novel was mere months away from being released. True enough, it was completed and released on October 18th, 2006 by Spider Robinson, himself a distinguished speculative fiction writer. On the back cover, John Varley is quoted as saying "Completing a book from notes by a dead author is almost always a mistake. But apparently Robert A. Heinlein isn't really dead. He was at the side of Spider Robinson as he wrote this book." I'd have to agree. This story is a valuable addition to any speculative fiction collection, even that of a purist Heinlein fan." Read the rest of Cam's review.

geaux writes to let us know about the release of the 28th TOP500 List of the world's fastest supercomputers. From the article: "The IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, retains the No. 1 spot with a Linpack performance of 280.6 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second, or Tflop/s). The new No. 2 systems is Sandia National Laboratories' Cray Red Storm supercomputer, only the second system ever to be recorded to exceed the 100 Tflops/s mark with 101.4 Tflops/s... Slipping to No. 3 is the IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution system, installed at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, with 91.20 Tflops/s Linpack performance." You need over 6.6 Tflop/s to make it into the top 100.

Gottesser writes, "Bev Harris of Black Box Voting has asked for the help of the Slashdot community. She would like people to take a look at ES&S's central tabulator software and start reporting on their impressions of it. This is a past release of the software but it is similar to the applications in production. Sorry, no source code." Read on for Bev's request and pointers to the code repositories. Update 23:38 GMT by SM Bev has confirmed that blackbox1.org is indeed owned by BlackBoxVoting making both a comment in the discussion and a post on the front page of blackboxvoting.org to help assuage reader fear/doubt.