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PC Games (Games)

King's Quest Fan Project The Silver Lining Is Back 61

Posted by Soulskill from the every-cloud-has-something-something dept.
LoTonah writes "After eight years of development and a Cease & Desist from Vivendi, King's Quest fan project The Silver Lining is back in action. From the website: 'We are extremely happy to announce that our project, The Silver Lining, will definitely see the light of day! In a wonderful turn of events, Activision reached out to the Phoenix Online team a few months ago with a desire to revisit their decision regarding The Silver Lining. After negotiations, the C&D has been officially rescinded, and Phoenix Online has been granted a non-commercial license to release The Silver Lining! Our team is ecstatic about this, and as hard as we've worked for eight years, it's the tireless belief and support of you, our fans, that has made this possible.' The first episode of the project is due to be released on July 10."
It's funny. Laugh.

Anti Terror Honor System 74

Posted by CmdrTaco from the yeah-that'll-work-out-fine dept.
Fortunately for us, the FAA has imposed the honor system as our next best defense against terrorism. Hopefully this will allow them to increase the volume of non-bladder liquid I'm allowed to take on planes.
Space

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson from the toil-and-trouble dept.
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."
Transportation

Prototype Vehicle For the Blind 238

Posted by timothy from the this-needs-a-playstation-analog-too dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A student team from Virginia Tech Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory have created a vehicle which allows the blind to drive. The vehicle uses a laser range finder to determine distances and alerts the driver through voice commands and vibration. Tomorrow [Friday] morning, the vehicle will have its first public test drive at the University of Maryland. At last, Braille on drive-up ATMs may finally be vindicated."
Privacy

FBI Files a "Secret Justification" For Gag Order 167

Posted by kdawson from the just-trust-us dept.
An anonymous reader notes a story up at Ars on the FBI's continuing penchant for secrecy. "Clearly, the FBI isn't ready to give up its Bush-era secrecy addition just yet. ...in the case of Doe v. Holder, the FBI is carrying out a secret investigation using secret guidelines on what is and is not constitutional, and as part of that investigation they've compelled the secrecy of a service provider and are using a secret justification to argue that nobody's First Amendment rights are being violated."

Comment Re:if people stopped being afraid, (Score 1) 306

by FormerUpper (#24712229) Attached to: Wealthy Mexicans Getting Chipped in Case of Abduction

It would be so much harder to manipulate elections. Then people would be able to think about actual issues instead of electing the Repub^W guy who promises to magically get rid of all the bad people.

Anyway, Americans only need to turn off the TV, and shun Hollywood: That's where crime and violence 24 hours a day (whether news or fiction) is designed to keep you all in a continuous state of fear. And it's working beautifully. In America (and its satellite states), strangers are terrified of each other. That's not true of many other countries and cultures, and we can blame Rupert Murdoch for the global infantilisation and tabloid-isation of media that could be used for intelligent and progressive purposes.

It would be so much harder to manipulate elections. Then people would be able to think about actual issues instead of electing the Repub^W guy who promises to magically get rid of all the bad people.

Anyway, Americans only need to turn off the TV, and shun Hollywood: That's where crime and violence 24 hours a day (whether news or fiction) is designed to keep you all in a continuous state of fear. And it's working beautifully. In America (and its satellite states), strangers are terrified of each other. That's not true of many other countries and cultures, and we can blame Rupert Murdoch for the global infantilisation and tabloid-isation of media that could be used for intelligent and progressive purposes.

Not true of other countries? Like Mexico? RTFA
The Internet

Submission + - Why the coming exaflood won't drown the Internet (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by High Waters
High Waters writes: Ars Technica examines predictions of an exaflood of data that some alarmists believe will overwhelm the Internet. 'Doomsday predictions about the collapse of the Internet have never been hard to come by. Most recently, concern has focused on the rise of Internet video, one of the key drivers of traffic growth over the last couple of years. Should Internet traffic surge more quickly than networks can keep up, the entire system could clog up like a bad plumbing job.' But a closer look reveals that many of those raising the alarm about an exaflood are generally doing so to make the case against 'Net neutrality regulation. 'There's a reason that "exaflood" sounds scary. It's supposed to. Though Brett Swanson's Wall Street Journal piece tried to avoid alarmism, it did have an explicitly political point in mind: net neutrality is bad, and it could turn the coming exaflood into a real disaster'
Government

Submission + - A Law to Spy Back on Govt. Surveillance Cameras (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: As the Senate begins debate today on wider new surveillance legislation, Instapundit blogger and University of Tennesee law professor Glenn Reynolds has an interesting op-ed as part of Popular Mechanics' cover story on the looming power of spy cameras in America. He cites numerous court cases to argue that our privacy concerns may be backwards, and that there should be a new law for citizen rights — that if Big Brother can keep an eye on us in public spaces, we ought to be able to look back. From the accompanying podcast: "Realistically I don't think we're going to get much in the way of limits on government and business surveillance. So I think we should be focusing more on making it safe, on making it a double-edged sword. And I'd actually like to see a law..."
Education

Submission + - Old Software or Open Source? 7

Submitted by Pakled
Pakled writes: I teach a high school multimedia course. We were scheduled to get new software this year but due to several pointy haired bosses, no software was ordered. The software I have to teach is Flash 5, Dreamweaver 2000, Photoshop 7 and (god help me) Movie Maker. The question is: is it better to teach old commercial software or their open source counterparts (Komposer, Gimp, etc.)?

Is the steep learning curve and slightly less uniform design worth a little student frustration to teach them software written in the past 5 years?
Biotech

Submission + - Arctic "Doomsday Seed Vault" brought onlin 1

Submitted by Anonymous Cow
Anonymous Cow writes: A giant refrigerated genetic bank built into the island of Svalbard has been brought online. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway is designed to house up to 4.5 million seeds in the case of a catostrophic event. The bank is funded by the Norwegian government, Monsanto Corporation, and the Gates, Rockefeller, and Syngenta Foundations. The Global Crop Diversity Trust has completed construction of the doomsday vault and is getting the facility ready to preserve the genetic heritage of the world's agriculture for future generations. There will be no full-time staff, but the vault's relative inaccessibility will facilitate monitoring human activity. Spitsbergen was considered ideal due to its lack of tectonic activity and its permafrost, which will aid preservation. Locally mined coal will provide power for refrigeration units which will further cool the seeds to the internationally.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Dev board aims Linux, Google Apps at Microsoft (linuxdevices.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: For $60, developers and Linux hackers can now buy the guts of the recently unveiled $200 Everex TC2502 Linux PC that Walmart is selling. The compact, ultra-efficient, x86-compatible "gOS Dev Board" has a micro-ATX form factor and 1.5GHz Via processor, and comes with "gOS," a lightweight open source Linux distro based on Ubuntu 7.10 and aimed at letting people use Google Apps as their main computing environment. Is this the beginning of Google's Microsoft take-down?
Handhelds

Submission + - Where in the US can you get JUST a Cell Phone? 6

Submitted by arakon
arakon writes: I am looking around for a cell phone for my technically challenged mother and all she wants is just a phone, and yet there seem to be no carriers in the US that carry a plain cell phone with good reception and battery life. All of them bundle camera's, pda's, mp3 players and a kitchen sink with a battery life of 2 hours, all for the low price of $350 or more...

Having looked around, the Motorola F3 is exactly what she wants but it doesn't seem to be available in the US. If we order it online will it work on US carriers? Are there any comparable products out there with a similar feature set and price range available for US networks? I appreciate the help.

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