Ant writes "Dark Horizons reports after much talk and posturing over the future of "The Terminator" franchise/series in recent years, something surprising has happened: The Halcyon Company has acquired the franchise rights to the popular movie series and intends to make a new trilogy that would anchor their movie company..."

weighn writes "One factor driving the move of political statements to YouTube, and away from old-style street protest, is that on the Internet the chances of being personally associated with a protest are lower. Mounting your political message online is also safer in countries where taking part in a protest can result in your death or injury at the hands of your country's army. We've seen how street protests and online polls alike are being shunted aside and ignored. What is the future for the common person who yearns to be heard?"

Readers VE3OGG and FFFFHALTFFFF write in with three pieces of a global picture that is emerging of governments and corporations moving away from Microsoft and towards open source. First, France: the French automaker Peugot Citroen has announced that over the next several years they will be integrating up to 20,000 Novell SUSE desktops as well as 2,500 SUSE servers into their facilities. (Let's hope that, in Novell, Peugeot Citroen hasn't bought a lemon.) Next, Sweden: the Swedish Armed Forces has made a decision to migrate its Windows NT servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Finally, Russia. VE3OGG writes: "It would seem that after the recent Russian piracy debacle that could see a school headmaster jailed in a Siberian work camp for purchasing pirated copies of Windows for his school, the Ministry of Education in Russia has decided that the school boards will no longer be purchasing any commercial software."

gevmage writes "Gary Reign, a guy with apparently way too much time on his hands, built a home theater in his basement. This is not unusual. However, the room is designed, floor to ceiling, as the bridge of a Star Trek style starship. See his photo page for details."

paulraps writes "Notorious Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to get around troublesome international copyright laws. The organization, the world's largest bit torrent tracker, has set its sights on Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a 'micronation' and claims to be outside UK jurisdiction. With a target price of £500m it won't be cheap, but Pirate Bay says contributors will become honorary citizens."

holy_calamity writes "Hot on the heals of a UK government report that predicted robots would demand citizens rights within fifty years, an Arizona state lawyer has suggested that sub-human robots should have rights too. Harming animals far below human capabilities is thought unethical — would you ever feel bad about kicking a robot dog? And can we expect militant campaigners to target robot labs as they do animal labs today?"

El Lobo writes "Looks like things are heating up again in the browser wars. Google has been openly supporting Firefox, so now Yahoo is displaying a new feature on search results pages for FireFox users. It appears that Yahoo is pushing downloads of IE7 from Microsoft and including itself as the default search engine installed in the file menu area." I got the invitation to download IE7 when running Firefox on a Mac, and even when running IE5 under CrossOver; but not when running IE7 under Parallels.

flanksteak writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology is going to recommend the decertification of all electronic voting machines that don't create paper records. Although it sounds like this recommendation may have been in the works for a while, the recent issues in Sarasota, FL (18,000 missing votes) have brought the issue a higher profile. The most interesting comment in the story comes near the end, in which the author cites a study that said paper trails from electronic voting machines aren't all they're cracked up to be."

Warren Ellis is reporting that many Second Life vendors are closing up shop due to the recent explosion of a program called "Copybot," designed to clone other people's possessions. From the article: "The night before last, I was looking around a no-fire combat sandbox, where people design and test weapons and vehicles, when an argument broke out; a thing going by the name Nimrod Yaffle was cloning things out of other people's inventories, and claiming he could freely do it because he'd been playing with Copybot with employees of SL creator/operators Linden Lab. All hell broke loose, in the sort of drama you can only find on the internet. Linden Lab's first official response? If you feel your IP has been compromised by Copybot, we'll sort of help you lodge a DCMA complaint in the US. Businesses started shutting down moments later." Update 20:43 GMT by SM Several users have mentioned that the Second Life blog has a few thoughts on this issue and quite a few comments from users already.

mofomojo writes, "Democracy Now! reports that a new study by the Center for Media and Democracy says Americans are still being shown corporate public relations videos disguised as news reports on newscasts across the country. In April, the Center identified 77 stations using Video News Releases in their newscasts; the findings led to an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission. A followup study has found that 10 of those stations are still airing VNRs today, for a new total of 46 stations in 22 states." From the article: "Most of the VNRs have aired on stations owned by large media conglomerates such as News Corp., Tribune, and Disney. They've also been sponsored by some of the country's biggest corporations including General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, and Allstate Insurance."

jamie writes "On 'Larry King Live' Wednesday night, Bill Maher said many of 'the people who really run the underpinnings of the Republican Party are gay... Ken Mehlman, OK, there's one I think people have talked about. I don't think he's denied it.' When CNN re-aired the interview, the mention of Mehlman was edited out with no indication anything was missing. When a minute-long video of the original vs. censored clips was posted on YouTube, a DMCA takedown removed it (the original poster plans to resubmit a shorter clip he hopes will qualify as fair use — good luck, since the DMCA doesn't recognize fair use). Relatedly, the Washington Post today was caught silently editing its published stories to make them less informative. Unnamed GOP officials are also saying that Mehlman will step down from his post when his term ends in January."

divisionbyzero writes "Many people have asked for it so that the government will have to deal with it. So here it is: a guide to stealing an election that uses electronic voting machines written by Jon Stokes over at Arstechnica. From the article: "In all this time, I've yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it's time to hit the panic button: In this article, I'm going to show you how to steal an election.""

Wellington Grey asks: "Often during our heated political discussions on slashdot, several people will mention their desire to leave the country. As an American living in England, which sees much the same problems as the US, I often wonder where these Americans would go. So, I pose two questions for the restless: 1) Where would you live, if not in America and 2) What's stopping you from going?"

wesleyye writes, "This morning I attempted to copy and paste a youtube.com URL to two of my friends via Yahoo IM. But they kept complaining they did not see anything. Actually they saw all the text message lines except the line with the youtube URL. Is YIM blocking the competitor out?" We verified in this office that a fully formed youtube.com URL could not be passed on YIM; changing the URL to read youtubex.com caused it to go through. Any other URL we tried worked. Update 10/10/2006 20:58 GMT by SM: Additional testing shows that there is something else going on for well formatted URLs. Even search results from search.yahoo.com had trouble when included with other text on the same line. Still awaiting comment from Yahoo!.