xTg - Slashdot User

Teachers Fake Gunman Attack 863

Posted by samzenpus on Monday May 14, 2007 @09:33AM from the stop-crying-teacher-would-never-really-kill-you dept.

Anti_Climax writes "Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables. It'll be interesting to see what happens to these teachers after the charges brought against students in recent months."

Vonage May Have Way Around Patent Disputes 87

Posted by Zonk on Thursday May 10, 2007 @05:06PM from the clever-clever-company dept.

nevillethedevil writes "Bloomberg is reporting that Vonage may have found a way around the current patent issues they have been facing with Verizon and others. They are applying technological solutions to a legal problem, changing the way that Vonage's communications software operates at a basic level to ensure that they no longer infringe on patent claims. 'Vonage's new technology can be installed through software downloads and shouldn't be costly to deploy, Citron said. The company will continue to appeal the court decision that requires it to pay Verizon damages for infringing patents on technology that translates Internet-based calls to standard lines.'"

Games of the Future - User Generated Content 44

Posted by Zonk on Thursday May 10, 2007 @04:54PM from the make-your-own-game-leave-the-designers-alone dept.

The biggest news of GDC 2007 was almost certainly the bright future of the PlayStation 3. Home was interesting, to be sure, but the title that captured the imagination of attendees was Little Big Planet. Edge had a thorough look at the game in their April issue, and now it seems like there might be a downloadable version of the four-player game used to demo the community/toybox at the conference. This 'games 3.0' thing has a lot of people sitting up and taking notice, including Flash and Shockwave developers. GameDaily spoke with MTVN's David Williams about the user-generated content possibilities being added to Shockwave.com and the AddictingGames sites. "In yet another sign of the web 2.0/game 3.0 phenomenon, one of the new features of the site is a game upload feature. User-created content is bound to have an increasingly profound effect on this industry. Already, the company has received 200 new game submissions in the past month, empowered by a game sponsorship program, which pays developers of popular games for integration on AddictingGames and provides them with enhanced distribution and marketing."

Spy Chief Hints At Limits On Satellite Photos 309

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 08, 2007 @10:22PM from the don't-look-there dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, says that the increasing availability of commercial satellite photos may require the government to restrict distribution. 'I could certainly foresee circumstances in which we would not want imagery to be openly disseminated of a sensitive site of any type, whether it is here or overseas,' he said. This would include imagery on Web sites such as Google Earth, because the companies that supply the photos get help from the NGIA with launches." I had never heard of this particular intelligence agency. During the early months of the invasion of Afghanistan they bought up all satellite imagery over that country, worldwide, in a tactic later dubbed "checkbook shutter control."

DMCA Takedown Notice For a Fake ID 563

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 08, 2007 @04:45PM from the points-for-chutzpah dept.

TrippTDF writes "Rachel Hyman, an artist and bartender in New York City, maintains a blog where she regularly posts images of fake IDs she confiscates from would-be underage drinkers, along with a description of the confiscation. Recently, one of her posts (Google cache) was taken down when the owner of the fake ID invoked the DMCA against Blogspot. Can one claim a forged document as a copyrighted work of art?"

IBM to Lay Off Half of Global Services Division 553

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday May 04, 2007 @03:46PM from the pink-slips dept.

Rolgar writes "Cringely says that IBM has begun massive layoffs in a quiet manner, starting with 1300 employees, but by the end of the year, the total will rise to at least 100,000 and probably closer to 150,000 employees, nearly 40% of their U.S. workforce. Some people will be temporarily retained as contractors at a fraction of their salary, and eventually, IBM will also dump many of the unprofitable customer contracts worked on by Global Services or outsource the work to Asia. If these people are looking for work, that could seriously drop wages for technical workers in the US since they will have to compete with these people for available jobs."

Comment The web is not Utopia (Score 1) 69

by xTg on Wednesday September 22, 1999 @01:30AM (#1668025) Attached to: Weaving The Web

Once again the uneducated public is informed how perfect a society of interconnected, networking souls are the true path to righteousness. The web is nothing more than advertising we pay for. I argue that TBL's day of information sharing for the sake of research went away a long time ago. The web developer of tomorrow is closely aligned with the corporate lawyer / PR man. Closely screen ANY information to ensure that no individual can gain access to the REAL truth.

Maybe the real thinkers should be looking forward to that next technology which will move us past the web and onto the next frontier of human evolution?

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