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Submission + - Slashdot for charity (and think of the children) (dnbnor.no) 1

Submitted by m0rphin3
m0rphin3 writes: A Norwegian bank, DnBNOR, has a special Christmas campaign going on.
For every signature they get on "the world's longest gift-label" they will donate 1 Norwegian Krone to a children's charity. They also have a webcam so you can see the label being printed.
Could we use the Slashdot effect for something good this Christmas? The Norwegian buttons and input fields are "Skip Intro", followed by "Your name" and a captcha.

Happy slashdotting!
Privacy

Submission + - Lower Merion School District settles 'webcamgate' (philly.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Associated press and the Philadelphia Inquirer are reporting that the Lower Merion School District has settled in the suit it has face for eight months after it was discovered that laptops issued to students were recording students in their own homes. We have covered this previously on 2010-08-17 (and earlier?)
Windows

Submission + - Will Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 Onslaught Threate (ostatic.com)

Submitted by Thinkcloud
Thinkcloud writes: Microsoft unveiled its Windows Phone 7 lineup, including handsets from nine manufacturers and support fro over 60 carriers. In the wake of the announcements, you can also expect many new mobile applications to be announced for Microsoft's mobile platform. Microsoft has struggled in a mobile market that increasingly comes down to an Apple vs. Android face-off, though, and there is every reason to believe that Android will continue to be the mobile platform that shows marked growth over time. How might Microsoft stave off the open source threat that Android represents?
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Final Fantasy XIV launches to scathing reviews

Submitted by RogueyWon
RogueyWon writes: Now that the massively-multiplayer Final Fantasy XIV has been on the shelves for a couple of weeks, the reviews are starting to arrive; and it appears that the game is the subject of a critical battering unprecedented in the history of the main Final Fantasy series. First it was the Amazon user reviews, then Gamespot weighed in, describing the game as a "step backwards for the genre" and now IGN has described it as "an arduous experience that, in its current state, isn't worth playing". Given the general dissatisfaction that surrounded the release of the (offline) Final Fantasy XIII earlier in the year, many long-time fans of the series must now be wondering whether the magic hasn't departed.
Science

Submission + - Isaac Newton, Alchemist (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "It wasn't easy being Isaac Newton because he didn't like wasting time: Newton didn't play sports or a musical instrument, gamble at whist or gambol on a horse. Newton was unmarried, had no known romantic liaisons and may well have died, at the age of 85, with his virginity intact. But, as Natalie Angier writes in the NY Times, it is now becoming clear that Newton had time to spend night upon dawn for three decades of his life slaving over a stygian furnace in search of the power to transmute one chemical element into another. "How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic psuedoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold," writes Angier. Now new historical research describes how alchemy yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. "Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry," says Dr. William Newman, "and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation." Newman adds that Newton's alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays that can be recombined with a lens. “I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton’s breakthroughs in optics,” says Newman. “He’s not just passing light through a prism — he’s resynthesizing it.”"
Crime

The Bomb Squad Olympiad Starts Today 43

Posted by samzenpus from the explosions-for-all-ages dept.
The bomb suit relay and the robot obstacle course are just two of the events you can enjoy at the Bomb Squad Olympiad. Over the next three days squads from across South Carolina will compete and showcase their bomb defusing capabilities for the public. I hear the deep fried dynamite is especially good.

Submission + - New CCTV site in UK pays people to watch

Submitted by pyrosine
pyrosine writes: Have you ever felt like being paid for watching live CCTV footage?
The BBC are reporting CCTV site, "Internet Eyes" is doing exactly that. Offering up to £1000 to people who report suspicious activity, the scheme seems an easy way to make money.
Not everyone is pleased with the scheme though, the Information Commissioner's Office is worried it will lead to voyeurism or misuse, but what difference does it make when you can find said webcams with a simple google search?

Submission + - Who gets your Twitter account when you die? (badlanguage.net)

Submitted by mstibbe
mstibbe writes: Death is inevitable but the law decides what happens to our goods when we go. The new question is: what happens to our virtual identity and our online assets? The law says nothing about our ‘digital legacy’. What can we do about it? Do you need a sort of digital will? Also, a link to a detailed legal analysis and summary of several companies' policies.
Privacy

Submission + - Online Ad Groups Rally to Duck Privacy Regulations (ecommerce-guide.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Can a new icon solve the online privacy debate, and keep federal regulators at bay? A broad group of the leading advertising associations aims to find out.

On Monday, the world will wake up to the Digital Advertising Alliance, a new coalition headed by one of the architects of the industry's self-regulatory strategy. At its core will be a new icon labeled "forward i," a symbol to appear next to online ads that the group hopes will become a universally understood emblem that alerts consumers that information is being collected.
Classic Games (Games)

Breathing New Life Into Old DirectDraw Games 274

Posted by Soulskill from the new-love-to-old-games dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I bought a bunch of old Wing Commander games for Windows, but they use DirectDraw, which Microsoft has deprecated. They don't work too well under Windows 7, so I ended up reimplementing ddraw.dll using OpenGL to output the games' graphics. I wrote an article describing the process and all the fun workarounds I had to come up with, and released all related source code for others to hack on."
Classic Games (Games)

The Best Video Games On Awful Systems 272

Posted by Soulskill from the diamond-in-the-rough dept.
Buffalo55 writes "For the most part, classic games manage to reappear on different systems. Just look at Nintendo. The publisher has done an excellent job bringing NES, SNES, Genesis and even old school Neo Geo titles to the Wii's Virtual Console, while Microsoft's Game Room brings the best of Atari's 2600 into the living room. Of course, not every console was a success. The '90s, in particular, saw quite a few flops from companies like Panasonic, Sega and Atari. Just because a system is a failure, though, doesn't mean all of its games suck. On the contrary, most of these machines have a few gems that fell between the cracks once the console croaked." What overlooked game on a failed platform would you like to see revived?
Music

'u' — the First Authentic Klingon Opera On Earth 165

Posted by samzenpus from the only-a-filthy-targ-would-miss-it dept.
j0ris writes "The Klingon are passionate opera-lovers, but little is known about their highly evolved form of musical expression. Floris Schonfeld is the initiator and director of 'u', the first authentic Klingon opera on earth. He studied Klingon music theory for over a year, and together with several experts developed various indigenous Klingon instruments. The Terran Klingon Research Ensemble has been set up to further develop a coherent Klingon musical practice amongst human musicians. 'u' premieres on September 9 in The Hague, Netherlands. An invitation by Klingon language expert Marc Okrand has been sent to Kronos, home planet of the Klingons, via radio telescope."
Classic Games (Games)

How Death Rally Got Ported 89

Posted by Soulskill from the not-the-opposite-of-starboarded dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Last year, I got the opportunity to port Remedy Entertainment's Death Rally to modern platforms off its original MS-DOS sources. I wrote an article about the porting process for Game Developer magazine, and now I've posted the text of the article for general consumption. 'The source software platform was DOS, Watcom C, and some Dos4GW-style DOS extender. The extender basically meant you could use more than 640k of memory, and would not need any weird code for data larger than 64k. The game displayed in VESA 640x480 and MCGA 320x200 graphics modes, all with 8-bit palettes; there was no true color anywhere. There were also some per-frame palette change tricks that emulators have trouble with. The source code was mostly pure C with a couple dozen inline assembly functions. There were a few missing subsystems, specifically audio and networking, which would have to be replaced completely anyway, as well as one file for which the source code was lost and only a compiled object was available.'"

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