tinkertim writes "According to a Yahoo article, a school district in Libertyville, IL will be holding students accountable for illegal actions discussed in their MySpace blogs even if such actions in no way involved the school or another student. A spokesperson for the school district was quoted as saying: 'The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron,' he said. 'It is called the World Wide Web.' Supposedly, no direct monitoring or snooping will be done unless the school receives a report from a concerned parent, community member or other student."

DigitalDame2 writes "Steve Wozniak, co-inventor of the Apple personal computer (along with Steve Jobs), hosted the first annual Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge. Wozniak's favorite invention is one that shows where to clip your dog's claws without injuring the dog. The Strawjet, a creation that weaves straw left over from a harvest into building materials, won the grand prize."

westlake writes "Short, funny, and to the point, a good read from the NYT about the realities of blogging in the corporate world." From the article: "Most experienced employees know: Thou Shalt Not Blab About the Company's Internal Business. But the line between what is public and what is private is increasingly fuzzy for young people comfortable with broadcasting nearly every aspect of their lives on the Web, posting pictures of their grandmother at graduation next to one of them eating whipped cream off a woman's belly. For them, shifting from a like-minded audience of peers to an intergenerational, hierarchical workplace can be jarring."

lee1 writes "New Scientist reports on an 'interactive computer display that keeps track of multiple users by differentiating between their touch'. The system consists of a touch-sensitive screen that can be operated by several users simultaneously. When a user touches the screen an electrical signal is sent through their body and picked up by a receiver located in their chair, telling a computer precisely where the screen was touched and by whom. Applications could include system access control, safer vehicle controls, and smarter videogames. The bottom line, in the words of one of the inventors: 'If the controls know who is operating them, they can behave appropriately.' The movie even has funkier than average background music."

An anonymous reader wrote in to mention a Popular Science article about the money issues involved in a tiered internet. From the article: "With a tiered Internet, such routing technology could be used preferentially to deliver either the telecoms' own services or those of companies who had paid the requisite fees. What does this mean for the rest of us? A stealth Web tax, for one thing. 'Google and Amazon and Yahoo are not going to slice those payments out of their profit margins and eat them,' says Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a nonprofit group that monitors media-related legislation. 'They're going to pass them on to the consumer. So I'll end up paying twice. I'm going to pay my $29.99 a month for access, and then I'm going to pay higher prices for consumer goods all across the economy because these Internet companies will charge more for online advertising.'" Update: 05/26 16:54 GMT by Z : The article is hosted on CNN, but is original material from Popular Science. Post updated to reflect this.

kukyfrope writes "Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America's Executive VP of Sales and Marketing, talks about what went wrong with GameCube and how Nintendo will not make the same mistakes when launching Wii. Reggie admits that the initial software lineup for the GameCube was simply not 'diverse and strong enough from a first and third-party perspective,' and by Nintendo's showing at E3 2006, the Wii will launch with a wide variety of games for may types of gamers."

zoobid writes "NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox have joined together and filed an injunction against Cablevision over their plan to introduce remote DVRs to their customers. 'They argue that while precedent may allow for legal time-shifting among home TV viewers, Cablevision's plans should require a special license from the broadcasters.' Cablevision's plan to create a centrally-hosted DVR was previously covered here on Slashdot."

Shantyman writes "ZDNet has a counterpoint to the negative impressions of Vista's Beta 2 going around. Entitled Vista Beta 2, up close and personal, Ed Bott writes: 'I've spent the last three months running beta versions of Windows Vista on the PCs I use for everyday work. February and March were exasperating. April's release was noticeably better, and the Beta 2 preview - Build 5381, released to testers in early May - has been running flawlessly on my notebook for nearly three weeks.'"

jayintune writes "2old2play has an interesting article up on the recent push for more laws on videogame sales to children. It goes over the history of violent crime amongst teens and how it relates to the new surge in videogame-related legislation. Do laws really help our children or is it ultimately the parents role to decided?" From the article: "I'd say by the time a kid is three or four, he or she should know it's not okay to hit someone else. The child should be aware violence is not an acceptable response. Parents, grandparents, older siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers... anyone older than a child should reinforce certain societal values and traits. Kids should and mostly do know better. I talked with a psychologist who told me children can separate reality from fiction at about nine or ten years of age. Well, "pre-teen" is what he said. At that age, they know what's on TV isn't real, what's in a video game isn't real. Video games are easier; they're basically just moving cartoons."

coondoggie writes to mention an article at NetworkWorld about the outsider status of Ethernet in some high-speed data centers. From the article: "The latency of store-and-forward Ethernet technology is imperceptible for most LAN users -- in the low 100-millisec range. But in data centers, where CPUs may be sharing data in memory across different connected machines, the smallest hiccups can fail a process or botch data results. 'When you get into application-layer clustering, milliseconds of latency can have an impact on performance,' Garrison says. This forced many data center network designers to look beyond Ethernet for connectivity options."

Dotnaught writes "Honda researchers to have developed a way to control robots using human brain waves. Using brain signals read from a person in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, a robotic hand mirrored the movement of the human controller, spreading its fingers and making a 'V' sign."

daria42 writes "An article at ZDNet pits the software collaboration kings against each other. IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino 7 goes head to head against Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server 2003. 'If you don't have the resources dedicated to developing collaborative applications, don't have complex application or integration requirements or if you are focused on the Microsoft solution stack, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is going to be hard to beat,' the review concludes."

goldaryn writes "Valence Media, the parent company of Torrentspy.com, one of the web's largest torrent search engines, has filed a lawsuit against the MPAA for allegedly hiring a hacker to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets. From the suit: 'The Motion Picture Association of America willfully and intentionally obtained without authority, conspired to obtain without authority, purchased, procured, used and disclosed private information that it knew was unlawfully obtained through unauthorized access to Plaintiffs' computer servers and private email accounts, in violation of United States and California privacy and computer security laws.'"

mjgp2 writes to mention a BBC article about an agreement which will begin construction on the second most expensive scientific collaboration, after the ISS : the world's first large-scale fusion reactor. From the article: "The seven-party consortium, which includes the European Union, the US, Japan, China, Russia and others, agreed last year to build Iter in Cadarache, in the southern French region of Provence ... He said that the participants would aim to ratify their agreement before the end of the year so construction on the facility could start in 2007. Officials said the experimental reactor would take about eight years to build. The EU is to foot about 50% of the cost to build the experimental reactor. If all goes well with the experimental reactor, officials hope to set up a demonstration power plant at Cadarache by 2040. "

Octagon Most writes "Yahoo and eBay have announced a broad partnership in their efforts to compete against Google and Microsoft." From the article: "In addition, Yahoo Web search features will be integrated into a co-branded version of the eBay toolbar, and the companies said they would explore developing 'click-to-call' ad technologies on their respective Web sites. 'Click-to-call' provides a link inside an advertisement that allows consumers to directly call the advertiser to pursue a transaction."