GamePolitics reports that M-rated games have been taken as evidence a case involving the death of a 55-year old man in Louisiana. The connection? Jack Thompson says: "Nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hitman or a videogamer." GP goes on to point out the lunacy of this claim. From the site: "Funny, that. A quick Google search on 'shot in the face' turns up 921,000 entries."

geoffrobinson writes "Jonathan Last, writing for a lay audience in the Philadelphia Inquirer, comments on Sony's push for the Blu-ray format: 'Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. One of life's more satisfying ironies, however, is that the same fate often befalls those who fixate on history... ...Obsessed with owning proprietary formats, Sony keeps picking fights. It keeps losing. And yet it keeps coming back for more, convinced that all it needs to do is push a bigger stack of chips to the center of the table.'"

simoniker writes "Wonder how video game magazines are still alive and kicking, in the age of the Interweb? Here's 'a quick tour of all the game magazines you can find in U.S. bookshelves right now', with plenty of commentary and cover scans, from Nintendo Power to EGM: 'The output isn't quite what it was ten or even five years ago, but there's still a remarkable amount of print getting churned out each month -- and what's more, nearly all of it these days is written for 'core' gamers like you and me.'" I enjoy most of Ziff's magazines (EGM, CGW). I also happily pay through the nose for the British Mag Edge, which is the finest gaming magazine in the world.

A reader writes:"The Official Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu 6.06 Desktop Guides, the Official Ubuntu Server 6.06 Guide and the Official Ubuntu Packaging Guide are all now available in print from on-line publisher Lulu. The best part? All of these guide are cheap, in fact the only cost is that of manufacture and shipping, both Canonical and Lulu do not make any profit on the books at all. The Official Ubuntu Desktop Guide for example only costs $6.49 plus postage and contains 98 pages in total. Free downloadable PDF files are available for download on the Ubuntu Documentation Project Lulu website as well as on-line copies at http://help.ubuntu.com. All of the guides are available in many different languages thanks to the Ubuntu Translation Teams. Currently there are about 10 different languages available, more translations will be added to the store as they are compleated in Canonical's on-line project management web site Launchpad. All the guides are dual licenced under the GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licences. This is a really good idea to give Linux users cheap and reliable printed Linux manuals. Lets hope other distributions follow Ubuntu's lead on this one, some of the Gentoo manuals for example available in print this cheap would be really great to see."

Bender writes "What would happen if you took NVIDIA's multi-GPU teaming capability, SLI, and stuck it onto a single graphics card? Probably something like the GeForce 7950 GX2, a 'single' video card with dual printed circuit boards, dual graphics processors, dual 512MB memory banks, and nearly twice the performance of any other 'single' video card. Add two of these to a system, and you've got the truly extreme possibility of Quad SLI. We've seen early versions of these things benchmarked before, but the latest revision of this card is smaller, draws less power than a single-GPU Radeon X1900 XTX, and is now selling to the public."

lessthan0 writes "Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the backbone of e-commerce on the web. It is the protocol used to encrypt communications between a web browser and web server, though it can also be used for other applications. To use SSL on your own web server, you often need to deal with an external company called a certificate authority (CA). Three major considerations come into play when choosing a CA: trust, audience, and cost."

Quill345 writes "The days of high-paying technology-based jobs right out of highschool are over. As writers for ACM report, the skill-sets required for jobs have grown over time. Academia has responded to the evolution with novel programs recruiting women and integrating IT into MBA programs. And as technology finds its way into every aspect of business life, the NSF is creating a grant program to fund service science, a blend of IT into other industries. Researchers at City University of NY are working on an NSF-funded project to infuse technology into Liberal Arts courses taken by students who are in primary tech-producer or tech-consumer majors. What are these crucial modern skills? Knowledge of laws like the DMCA? Interpersonal and group work skills? Experience with different technology platforms? The ability to discriminate between useful and useless information sources?"

D-Fly writes "Charlie Demerijian at the Inquirer got a look at some insider specs on the PS3, and says, Sony screwed up big time with the Cell processor; the memory read speed on the current Devkits is something like 3 orders of magnitude slower than the write speed; and is unlikely to improve much before the ship date. The slide from Sony pictured in the article is priceless: 'Local Memory Read Speed ~16Mbps, No this isn't a Typo.' Demerjian says when the PS3 comes out a full year after the XBox360, it's still going to be inferior: 'Someone screwed up so badly it looks like it will relegate the console to second place behind the 360.'" This is the Inquirer, so take with a grain of salt. Just the same, doesn't sound too good for Sony or IBM.

BBCWatcher writes "Mike McCurry, former Clinton Administration Press Secretary turned telecommunications industry lobbyist, reacts to his many new critics in the battle over Net Neutrality: "There are millions and millions of good Democrats who get paid by corporations," he said, "and I think every time we bash corporations, we just turn off people who are in the middle of the political spectrum." Among others, top political blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga responded swiftly to McCurry's latest assertions: "What a dishonest piece of sh[..] McCurry has become. This is an anti-corporatist jihad, is it? Is that why we are aligned with Microsoft, Google, and eBay? And when did the Christian Coalition and the Gun Owners of America join the 'left'? What a pathetic attempt to marginalize those of us working for net neutrality....McCurry is now a sad, sad, pathetic man.""

Rick Zeman writes "According to the Washington Post, since Americans gained statutory privacy for their medical records backed by the US Federal Government (via HIPAA), the Bush administration has received thousands of complaints alleging violations but has not imposed a single civil fine and has prosecuted just two criminal cases saying that they were pursuing 'voluntary compliance.'" From the article: "'It's like when you're driving a car,' said consultant Gary Christoph of Teradata Government Systems of Dayton, Ohio. 'If you are speeding down the highway and no one is watching, you're much more likely to speed. The problem with voluntary compliance is, it doesn't seem to be motivating people to comply.'"

Ant writes "Neatorama and Popular Science share a CNN story about Russian astronauts repairing the International Space Station (ISS) with improvised tools because they lost the real ones. How? 'It's a lot like your house,' said Paul Boehm, lead spacewalk officer. 'You set your car keys down somewhere and hopefully you find them again later when you try to remember it.' Uh, yeah, but we're idiots -- you're astronauts. Nonetheless, nice to see the Do It Yourself (DIY) spirit at work in space."

Compu486 writes "In an effort to show that quality dance gaming systems can be done affordably, Inventgeek.com has put together an article showing how to make DDR systems better than arcade quality for not a lot of cash. Using this type of system and the free stepmania, hopefully schools in West Virginia can save some scratch and buy some modern text books."

Joe Lau writes to mention a story running on the Xinhua News Agency site, reporting a proof for the Poincare Conjecture in an upcoming edition of the Asian Journal of Mathematics. From the article: "A Columbia professor Richard Hamilton and a Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman have laid foundation on the latest endeavors made by the two Chinese. Prof. Hamilton completed the majority of the program and the geometrization conjecture. Yang, member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in an interview with Xinhua, 'All the American, Russian and Chinese mathematicians have made indispensable contribution to the complete proof.'"

peterfa writes "The BBC reports that the U.K. 'All Party Parliamentary Internet Group' wants companies to label their DRMed products. Consumers will see a label on the product before they buy. The label will spell out clearly just how easy it is to copy media, and what they can and cannot do. This is in response to Sony BMG and their virus-like DRM. The group claims the industry is turning media into a rent system, rather than a purchase system."

Roland Piquepaille writes "There are many teams of U.S. scientists working on robots able to find improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq before they can kill American soldiers. Today, let's look at an effort going on at Florida State University (FSU) to build unmanned ground vehicles that could save soldiers' lives. The researchers are creating complex algorithms to control these robots who will have to integrate many different factors such as the type of ground surface or obstacles that might block the vehicle's path. Some of these robots, which also could be used for civilian missions, are currently being tested at FSU. Read more for additional references and pictures of these robots which will have to navigate among dense obstacles."