skelator2821 wrote in with another account of a police action gone way overboard. From the article: "To the 12-year-old friends planning to build themselves a den, the cherry tree seemed an inviting source of material. But the afternoon adventure turned into a frightening ordeal for Sam Cannon, Amy Higgins and Katy Smith after they climbed into the 20ft tree - then found themselves hauled into a police station and locked into cells for up to two hours." skelator2821's basic question in all of this: "What is this World coming to? Do you think they went to far?" Well? Do you?

lisah writes "NewsForge's Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier has been reporting from OSCON all week and wrote a great wrap up of the event. He even had the foresight to take along a video camera while rubbing elbows with some of what Brockmeier calls the 'leading minds in open source.' Caught on tape: Kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, Python creator Guido van Rossum, Jeff Waugh of Canonical, Greg Lund-Chaix of OSL, and OSCAMP 2006 organizer Brandon Sanders."

thelancer asks: "Early last year, Australian cable got TechTV. But not for long. It turned out the fix was already in, and TechTV left Australian screens at the end of 2006 when G4 pulled the plug on international distribution. As someone who only got a taste, but desperately wanted more (of what I saw in the first two months, not nearer the end), I've done the rounds and read some stories on the buy out, but nothing has given me the who, when, and the all important why? And they all assume you know the history. Can the Slashdot crowd put together a more complete picture on what really happened at TechTV?"

An anonymous reader writes "PhysicsWeb is reporting that German scientists may have found a way to significantly reduce the radioactive decay time of nuclear waste. This could render the waste harmless in just tens of years and make disposal much less difficult as opposed to current standards. From the article: 'Their proposed technique - which involves slashing the half-life of an alpha emitter by embedding it in a metal and cooling the metal to a few degrees kelvin - could therefore avoid the need to bury nuclear waste in deep repositories, a hugely expensive and politically difficult process. But other researchers are skeptical and believe that the technique contradicts well-established theory as well as experiment.'"

dice writes to tell us that grad students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are creating the first biometric vending machine. The current machine comes equipped with a barcode scanner, a fingerprint reader, and a web cam for facial recognition. One student dubbed it the "most over-designed soda machine in the world." The project, code-named "SodaVision," is the brainchild of associate professor Stefan Savage, but it was the students who really made it come to life. And yes, it runs Linux.

The Register has an answer for the problem of what to get the graphics buff who has everything, Nvidia's new 64x SLI GPU rig. While it doesn't come cheap, a mere $17,500, it will offer rendering at around 80 billion pixels every second and a combined resolution of around 148 megapixels. The new hardware is being targeted at content creators and people doing scientific modeling, and is due to ship in September.

simoniker writes "As you may have heard, Steve Purcell's beloved Sam & Max franchise is finally returning, thanks to TellTale Games. The new episodic PC game's designer Dave Grossman has been expounding on the new game, suggesting that having a fanboy niche is actually good: 'We work small enough that we don't need to have the license that's the biggest movie of the year... if we just have kind of a small devoted fanbase, we can make something that's kind of personal and fun.' The TellTale biz guys also comment on development team size. 'Actually it's about seven core people, and then the team grows to about fourteen for a couple months, but the production cycles are short, the teams aren't huge, our tools are very tailored to be efficient.' Maybe Sam & Max is finally getting done because it's been scaled correctly for its audience?"

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "According to a recent press release, the OpenGL Architecture Review Board has voted to transfer control of the OpenGL API standard to the Khronos Group, an industry working group that seems mostly known for its focus on mobile applications. Apple Computer has also just joined the group, presumably because of their interest in OpenGL for the OS X platform. I wonder what affect, if any, this will have upon the future development of the OpenGL standard."

The Open Voting Foundation's disclsosure that only one switch need be flipped to allow the machine to boot from an unverified external flash drive instead of the built-in, verified EEPROM drew more than 600 comments; some of the most interesting ones are below, in today's Backslash story summary.

Via Joystiq, an IGN story giving some background on the Portal project, the interesting FPS/Puzzler that Valve has planned to go out with Half-Life 2: Episode 2. The article interviews the team behind the technology, and gives some insight on what it must be like to have the best senior year of college ever: "Along with the other members of the Portal team, we were students at DigiPen Institute of Technology located in Redmond, WA, next to the Nintendo of America campus. During our senior year, the seven of us created a game called Narbacular Drop, which was an early test of our ideas about portal-based gameplay. Every year, DigiPen puts on an expo for graduating seniors to show their game projects to prospective employers. A couple of Valve people attended, and they asked us to come to the Valve offices and show it to Gabe Newell. Gabe watched our demo and basically hired us on the spot. It was kind of shocking. We stood around in the parking lot afterwards gibbering to ourselves for about 20 minutes."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Computer scientists at Brigham Young University (BYU) have developed a new software tool to perform 'virtual surgery'. This tool, dubbed 'Live Surface,' will allow surgeons to visualize in 3-D any part of a patient's anatomy with just a few clicks of a mouse. Similar software already exists, but according to the Deseret Morning News, Live Surface is interactive and fast. This software can be used for better diagnosis by physicians, but it might even suppress the need for some exploratory surgeries. The researchers add that Live Surface might even been used for special-effects in movies or games by extracting an actor's performance from a video clip."

An anonymous reader writes "Gamers With Jobs has an interesting piece this morning on the nature of collectibility in games. While primarily a personal account of one man's journey into the hell that is Magic: the Gathering, it raises interesting questions about the difference between real-world and virtual-world collecting, and the economic motivations behind both." From the article: "I sit down. I play. I get schooled by a 12-year-old for two hours as he teaches me the ropes with a condescension reserved for teenagers with grownups by the throat. Each game is a bet — loser gives the winner the top card off his deck: Ante. I leave a dozen cards short. I had discovered a great game, and people to play it against. But that's not why the night sits burned into my brain with razor sharp clarity. No, it's because that Tuesday night in San Francisco, I became a collector."

An anonymous reader writes "TechDirt brings into focus one of the largest problems in the net neutrality debate, not the issues themselves, rather it's the people involved and the lies they like to sling. An example of this is certainly the number of lobbyists that are being looked to as 'experts' and getting their opinions published as such. One specific example was a recent piece published in the Baltimore Sun by Mike McCurry, a lobbyist working for AT&T who claimed that with new legislation working for net neutrality Google wouldn't have to pay a dime. In response, TechDirt has suggested that McCurry should swap telco bills with Google, somehow I doubt it will happen."

DreamWinkle writes "If you've spent the last few years playing old King's Quest VGA updates and longing for Space Quest and Day of the Tentacle, you'll be interested to know that the Adventure genre might be facing a resurgence — at Nintendo's hand. The adventure game was killed off by the console (poor controls and too much competition), and so it's ironic that Nintendo might be able to pull it from the grave. An article at About.com looks at how Nintendo could use its virtual console to make adventure games profitable again." From the article: "The reason that adventure games are disappearing is because they don't compete well with other genres. Trying to create an adventure game that meets the graphical standards of an audience taught to expect Elder Scrolls IV makes the whole endeavor far less appealing. However, building a product to compete with Geometry Wars might be more doable. Adventure games are not disappearing because no one is buying them; they're disappearing because people are buying other types of games far more often. "

An anonymous reader writes to mention a New York Times article entitled Life After Earth. The article looks at 'bio-vaults,' be they in the frozen north or on the moon, which might allow the human race to continue on after a globally catastrophic event. From the article: "The trouble with doomsday, Dr. Shapiro argues, is that it is almost always rendered in popular culture as grandiose, though in reality, many minor incidents present substantial everyday threats. In 1918, an influenza strain killed some 30 million people; a possible new bird flu strain spurs contemporary panic. In January 2003, a computer virus shut down airlines, banks and governments. That same year, a tree fell on power lines outside Cleveland, resulting in a blackout for much of the Northeast. Doomsday can be understated."