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Hard Drives Shipping with Star Trek 271

crimeandpunishment writes "Paramount Pictures is trying to live long and prosper by selling Seagate Technology hard drives with the latest Star Trek movie on board ... along with 20 other films. The 500GB hard drive will sell for a special promotional price of $100. It's the latest way for Hollywood to combat falling DVD sales due to piracy."

Submission + - Open Source Document Revision

SmoothBreaker writes: Coming into a new company, I have been tasked with sourcing Document Control software to meet ISO:9001 standards. From everything I can find, ISO places no requirements on the software itself, aside from maintaining control of documentation and process. This was discussed eleven years ago. I'd like software that allows intuitive use for our less savvy users, and in a perfect world, graphical access to previous revisions of a document. I've used Microsoft's Sharepoint, which the higher-ups like simply because its Microsoft, but thankfully they trust their Tech Department to find the cream of the crop. What experience do Slashdotters have with this kind of software, and what would you recommend to use, and what should I avoid?
Censorship

Venezuela's Last Opposition TV Owner Arrested 433

WrongSizeGlass writes "AP is reporting the owner of Venezuela's only remaining TV channel that takes a critical line against President Hugo Chavez was arrested Thursday. 'Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of Globovision, was arrested on a warrant for remarks that were deemed "offensive" to the president,' Attorney General Luisa Ortega said. This comes on the heels of last week's story titled Venezuela's Chavez To Limit Internet Freedom."

Comment Legal Implications (Score 1) 1027

I'm not sure at all about this, because I'm not terribly sure of how this would work in the legal system, but.. couldn't they be setting themselves up for a class-action lawsuit? I frequently do not have internet access, or if I do it pops in and out. If I buy an application, and because of the developer's intentional ham-stringing, the application shuts itself down, would I have legal recourse? This isn't an issue like a developer being held accountable for buggy code, because this is clearly an intended part of the program just a thought, don't know if it has much merit
Microsoft

Bill Gates Knows What You Did Last Summer 303

theodp writes "Give Bill Gates your 'pictures, videos, documents, e-mail, instant messages, addresses, calendar dates/scheduling information (e.g., birthdays, anniversaries, appointments), voice mail, phone logs, RSS feeds, subscriptions, bookmarks, mail lists, project management features, computing device data, tasks and location data,' and he'll improve your 'quality of life.' That's the promise behind a patent issued Thursday to Bill Gates and his 20 co-inventors for 'Personal Data Mining', which Microsoft notes 'can include a monetization component' that 'could initiate an auction to sell information to the highest bidder.'"
Games

Over 160 Tutorial Videos Created For Unreal Dev Kit 48

As a follow-up to Epic Games' release of a free version of the Unreal Engine last month, the company has now posted over 160 video tutorials which demonstrate the various uses of the Unreal Development Kit. Roughly 20 hours of footage were created by technical education company 3D Buzz, with topics ranging from user interface to game physics to cinematics.
Google

Submission + - Google Launches Public DNS Resolver (blogspot.com)

AdmiralXyz writes: Google has announced the launch of their free DNS resolution service, called Google Public DNS. According to their blog post, Google Public DNS uses continuous record prefetching to avoid cache misses- hopefully making the service faster- and implements a variety of techniques to block spoofing attempts. They also say that (unlike an increasing number of ISPs), Google Public DNS behaves exactly according to the DNS standard, and will not redirect you to advertising in the event of a failed lookup. Very cool, but of course there are questions about Google's true motivations behind knowing every site you visit...
Education

Submission + - Children Using Technology Have Better Lit Skills (bbc.co.uk)

eldavojohn writes: A UK study of three thousand children aged nine to sixteen suggests something that may not come as a shock to geeks: using technology increases a child's core literary skills. As Researcher Obvious put it, "The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills." And for those of us worried about a world of "tl;dr" and "Y U H8n?" the research claims that 'text speech' does not damage literacy. The biggest shortcoming of this research is that it appears the children graded their own writing in that their methodology was an online survey designed to ask the children which technology they use and then follow up with asking them how well they write to determine which children have better literacy skills.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Swedish Court Gets One Right: Won't Shut Down OpenBitTorrent

With the movie industry's lawyers recently demanding that ISP Portlane (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091118/1218246994.shtml) shut down the OpenBitTorrent tracker, claiming (without any evidence) that it was just a rebranded version of The Pirate Bay's tracker, it seemed possible that the Swedish courts would roll over again. However, in a bit of a surprise, the court has pointed out that it's a big stretch to hold

Government

Submission + - FCC Preparing Transition to VoIP Telephone Network (fcc.gov)

mantis2009 writes: The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published a request for public comment on an upcoming transition from the decades-old circuit-based Public Switched Telephone Network to a new system run entirely with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. This is perhaps the most serious indication to date that the legacy telephone system will, in the near future, reach the end of its life. This public commenting phase represents a very early stage in what will undoubtedly be a very complex transition that makes this year's bumpy switch from analog to digital television look relatively easy.
The Courts

Journal Journal: I finally get an invitation to Federal Court! 5

I got a letter today that I at first assumed was a practical joke or a fraud (of the pre-internet Nigerian 419 scam variety -- and Yes, those were on paper before they hit the Internet).

The letter has a return address "CENTRAL VIOLATIONS BUREAU" (could you be any more vague) with a return address of a P.O. Box in San Antonio, Texas. I immediately smiled, thought "Well, they've got the wrong guy -- I haven't been in San Antonio, or Texas overall, for a few years now."

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