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Submission + - Slashdot Alum Samzenpus's Fractured Veil Hits Kickstarter

CmdrTaco writes: Long time Slashdot readers remember Samzenpus,who posted over 17,000 stories here, sadly crushing my record in the process! What you might NOT know is that he was frequently the Dungeon Master for D&D campaigns played by the original Slashdot crew, and for the last few years he has been applying these skills with fellow Slashdot editorial alum Chris DiBona to a Survival game called Fractured Veil. It's set in a post apocalyptic Hawaii with a huge world based on real map data to explore, as well as careful balance between PVP & PVE. I figured a lot of our old friends would love to help them meet their kickstarter goal and then help us build bases and murder monsters! The game is turning into something pretty great and I'm excited to see it in the wild!

Comment Documentary on the engines (Score 5, Informative) 179

There is a great documentary on YouTube on the subject of the engines and United Launce Alliance's work on buying them from Russia to be fitted to launch vehicles. The Russians were doing things with their engines which Americans thought impossible until they were demonstrated first-hand. This video has those initial tests towards the end of the file.

The Engines That Came in From The Cold
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment Doom 3 BFG will be supporting the Rift (Score 5, Informative) 69

As John Carmack supports the open-source community, he released the source code (not the game assets) into the wild as an open source project. I myself have downloaded, compiled, and played the game using this code and it works well. There is even integrated support for the original version of the Rift inside. While he was unable to release all of the code for the game due to patent issues (lookup Carmack's Reverse), the game is completely playable on homemade Rift units at this time. Once Oculus releases the offical SDK for the Rift, it will be a short time before I or another member of the open-source community takes care of the problem. Just lookup a fork on GitHub called Doom-3-BFG-VR and I will be there doing anything I can to help.
Please, to anyone planning on playing Doom 3 like this, purchase the game and copy the assets rather than finding nefarious ways of finding them. Support awesomeness such as id Software and its remaining founder.
--
Big shout out to John Carmack for the foresight to allow gamers the ability to again enjoy a game which is otherwise, past its prime. For the record, Quake 3 has also been released as well so expect to see MANY mods for both franchises very shortly and again, thank you Mr. Carmack.

Comment Who would want these strings of: (Score 1) 185

011000110110110001100101011101100110010101110010 01100111011010010111001001101100 anyways?

An ex that wants to know what you've been up to, your grocery mega-mart so they can sell you want you don't know you need yet, that fellow on the phone with a funny accent (anyone smell vodka) who says he's from your credit card company and know's you're on vacation pumping gas in your pretty, new GM vehicle so he must be for real but is now asking your pin number so he can prove he's speaking to the right person, your dear old uncle Sam who just wants to check up on you, or your boss who swears that he saw you at the club but can't say anything because he shouldn't have been there either and while he now has proof of where you were, is driving the '12 model with newly activated service.
But hey, I'm outraged that they are going to track me only when I discontinue service. They shouldn't have told me this because now it's gonna take a senator or three, several committees, and many hours of CSPAN to make me feel better that they are only tracking me always, and only with my knowledge and permission. Poor poor guppies.

Comment I don't know what angers me more: (Score 1) 185

People's cowardness, or their stupidity...

Wow, they are tracking people after they cancel they cancel the service. I couldn't be more furious. This is an outrage! Say... I wonder if people are even aware they everything they do is being tracked by somebody else, uploaded through the air freely with an encryption that may or may not yet have been broken and if if not, is being stored "securely" until another party wants to buy the harmless "sanitized" data. Damn guppies, cell phones are bad enough but now people are driving in a machine that is constantly spewing everything you do and see for the whole world to know, that is if they haven't already uploaded it themselves to Facebook or tweeted it to a bunch or people who really don't care about what they are doing except that one lone friend who isn't a real friend at all, or a person for that matter. Just another machine aggregating data for whomever has the money for these harmless bits of ones and zeros.

Slashdot.org

Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot 1521

After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it's finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I created this place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college. Since then it has grown to be read by more than a million people, and has served Billions and Billions of Pages (yes, in my head I hear the voice). During my tenure I have done my best to keep Slashdot firmly grounded in its origins, but now it's time for someone else to come aboard and find the *future*. Personally I don't have any plans, but if you need to get ahold of me for any reason, you can find me as @cmdrtaco on twitter or Rob Malda on Google+. You could also update my mail address to be malda at cmdrtaco dot net. Hit the link below if you want to read some nostalgic saccharine crap that I need to get out of my system before I sign off for the last time.
NASA

NASA Discovers 7th Closest Star 137

Thorfinn.au says "Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered the coldest class of star-like bodies, with temperatures as cool as the human body. Astronomers hunted these dark orbs, termed Y dwarfs, for more than a decade without success. When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see. WISE's infrared vision allowed the telescope to finally spot the faint glow of six Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years. 'WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects, and was able to spot their feeble light with its highly sensitive infrared vision,' said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'They are 5,000 times brighter at the longer infrared wavelengths WISE observed from space than those observable from the ground.'"
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Sports Bars Changing Channels For Video Gamers 351

dtmos wrote in to say that "This summer, StarCraft II has become the newest bar room spectator sport. Fans organize so-called Barcraft events, taking over pubs and bistros from Honolulu to Florida and switching big-screen TV sets to Internet broadcasts of professional game matches. As they root for their on-screen superstars, StarCraft enthusiasts can sow confusion among regular patrons... But for sports-bar owners, StarCraft viewers represent a key new source of revenue from a demographic—self-described geeks—they hadn't attracted before."
Security

Researchers Report Spike In Boot Time Malware 132

wiredmikey writes "In their most recent intelligence report, Symantec researchers pointed out a massive increase in the amount of boot time malware striking users, noting there have already been as many new boot time malware threats detected in the first seven months of 2011 as there were in the previous three years. Also known as MBR (master boot record) threats, the malware infect an area of the hard disk that makes them one of the first things to be read and executed when a computer is turned on. This enables the threats to effectively dodge many security defenses."
Businesses

MakerBot Gets $10 Million Investment 160

First time accepted submitter chrisl456 writes "MakerBot Industries, makers (hah!) of 3D printers / personal fabrication devices, just got a big boost in the form of $10 million from an 'all-star lineup.' Replicators, here we come!"

Submission + - Facebook Data Collection Under Fire Again (computerworld.com)

JohnBert writes: "A German privacy protection authority is calling on organizations there to close their Facebook fan pages and remove the social networking site's "Like" button from their websites, arguing that Facebook harvests data in violation of German and European Union law.

The Independent Centre for Privacy Protection (ULD), the privacy protection agency for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, issued a news release on Friday saying Facebook builds a broad, individualized profile for people who view Facebook content on third-party websites.

Data is sent back to Facebook's servers in the U.S., which the agency alleges violates the German Telemedia Act, the German Federal Data Protection Act and the Data Protection Act of Schleswig-Holstein. The agency alleges the data is held by Facebook for two years, and wants website owners in the state to remove links to Facebook by the end of next month or possibly face a fine."

NASA

Humanoid Robot Wakes In Space, Tweets 91

DeviceGuru writes to note that "Robonaut 2 (aka R2), the first humanoid robot to become a permanent resident of the International Space Station (ISS), was awakened from stasis this week after six months in orbit. R2s first words? 'Those electrons feel GOOD!' The success of R2's activation on the ISS paves the way for putting R2 through its first movements in orbit on Sept. 1, when R2 will be sent commands for moving its arms and hands. Assuming these and other tests proceed without a hitch, R2 will start assisting the ISS crew with simple tasks in 2012. Coffee? Tea? Cigarettes?"
Patents

Interview With 'Idiot' Behind Key Software Patent 223

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, an appeals court ruling opened the door to making it easier to kill software patents. It turns out that the guy whose name was on the actual patent didn't even realize it was at the center of the debate, and doesn't like software patents very much. 'So I was thinking — great they invalidated software patents, lets see what crappy patent written by an idiot they picked to do it — then I realized the idiot in question was me.'"
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows 8: estimated transfer time is no more (extremetech.com) 1

MrSeb writes: "Ahh, the Windows Explorer progress dialog. For years it has been struggling to figure out how to calculate how long our copy and delete operations would take, sliding the progress bar back and forth in a seemingly random, haphazard way, the laws of time all but ceasing to exist — five seconds remaining one moment and 13 minutes the next. That’s (almost) all going to change, with the arrival of a greatly improved file management experience in Windows 8. Copy, move, delete, rename, and conflict resolution are all being overhauled for Windows 8 — and it's about time!"

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