Matt W writes "The New York Times (free as in beer reg, blah blah) has an article about a recent reconstruction of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. After being butchered by studios, Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega have restored most of the scenes and score. Film Forum on Houston St. in NY City will be showing the film for two weeks." Collect all three! I don't think they're using Georgio Morodor for the soundtrack for this one.

ZaMoose writes: "Not to beat on the poor America's Army servers any further, but their sitrep for today featured the following interesting tidbit: "That's not all. We're also working on an in-game browser, linux port, and host of other features. Yes, we've been busy the past week!" (emphasis mine). For those not familiar with AA:Operations, it is a free (as in beer) first person shooter developed under the watchful eye of the US Army. It received mounds of praise at this year's E3 and was released to Windows users July 4th." Well, it says Linux server port, anyhow. And JD writes: "Apex Designs have announced that their GTA-style game Payback is coming to Linux. The port appears to already be fully playable as there is a status report here which includes some early screenshots. (And their website doesn't require IE. :)"

A Nominal Coward asks: "I've been doing some research into making my communications more secure, everything from email to news, from IRC to www. Most of the information I've found repeats one suggestion, 'tunnel your connections over SSL.' Yet while everyone claims this is the best thing to do, no one seems to explain how. I haven't been able to find a faq, howto, or demonstration of how to set this up properly; just lots of people saying 'SSL is good.' What am I missing? I've downloaded and installed stunnel, a free (speech & beer) SSL tunneling proxy, but - don't laugh - now what? All I've managed to do is make an SSL connection to an IRC server a friend set up specifically for that purpose. Where do I go from here in order to secure my other connections, like mail, news, and web? Do I have to subscribe with providers who explicitly provide SSL access, if so, which are recommended? I would appreciate advice from others who have managed to get this working."

WeeMan writes "Remember that cool video/film you might have seen in your high school science class "Powers of Ten"? Well Florida State University (FSU) has their own well done Java version of Powers of Ten. For those who have not seen it, basically it's a continuous zooming in of images by powers of ten, starting with galactic superclusters/walls and ending at the quantum scale. The FSU site also has some cool close up images of many chip designs here, Java virtual microscopy there, and plenty of other cool applets and microscopy images (like microscopic images of beer from around the world : )"

MonkeyBot writes "Nintendo has posted news from the E3 convention concerning big name titles and their release dates. The new Metroids for the Cube and GBA, Legend of Zelda for the Cube, and a new Mario Game for the Cube are just a few of the titles for which new information is available. It'll be just like I'm a kid again, but with better graphics (and beer)!"

Spider-Man shocked analysts and critics last week, racking up a record-breaking $114 million opening weekend for Sam Raimi's warm-hearted adaptation about the web-slinging arachnoid-nerd from Queens who gets the bad guy but really wants the girl. Spider-Man embodies the simplest, most elemental tenets of myth, especially when compared to the increasingly elephantine Skywalker saga, which seems more like a graduate program than a story each time there's a new movie. I'll bet Peter Parker's adventure surpasses the upcoming opening weekend of Attack of the Clones and teaches George Lucas something about the power and nature of myth.

Reader cpfeifer contributes the review below of O'Reilly's Programming Jabber: if your job (or hobby) includes instant messaging in all its glory, Jabber is a free-beer, free-speech framework for setting up instant messaging systems not bound to a single server in the middle. As cpfeifer points out, instant messaging can mean a lot more than popping an on-screen note to your friend in Des Moines -- machines and programs can use a general purpose communication system like this, with no human middleman required.

Spudley writes "Beer is a subject close to many slashdot-readers' hearts, so you'll be pleased to learn that Mitsubishi has invented a glass that can tell when it's empty, and order a refill from the bar. Of course, it'll still have to be filled the old fashioned way, but at least the bar staff will know which ones need refilling - the... ehm... empty ones." I like that it's dishwasher safe. Drunk people can't be trusted to hand wash glass.

seawasp writes "Synthezising nanotubes from vodka and whisky with simple equipment making it much cheaper and more available to future science projects such as the development of smaller electronic components. Read more about it at Daily Yomiuri On-Line. Just a note, I hope for the sake of my life they won't extract nanotubes from beer."

bLanark asks: "I've used a variety of programming languanges over the years, but recently started using Java commercially (as opposed to just playing at home). As soon as I was on that Java project, I became a rampant stallion, never left my wife alone, sexually. She even started sleeping in the spare room just to get some rest on some nights! Soon, I was back on C++ (due to a budget cut and re-org). I am no longer a stallion (I won't go into more details!). My theory is that java's so easy, so after conquering an API a day (JDOM, Swing,...) I just came home and carried on conquering. Now, I have to work for a living again, and it doesn't leave much energy. Do other slashdotters have similar experience? Is lisp tantric? Do assembler programmers favour wham-bam-that's-the-end-of-that-non-maskable-inter rupt-where's-the-remote-control-honey-can-you-get- me-a-beer? What's the best programming language for attracting sexual partners? What about Operating Systems? Does MS == S&M?" Does C/C++ dampen your love life? Does Perl please your partner? Can you jive with Java? Inquiring minds want to know.

damiam writes "GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 3 has been released. Changes include new versions of Nautilus, Yelp, and the control center, as well as bugfixes all around. Download it from gnome.org or one of the mirrors." Jeff Waugh adds: "The possibility of a complete beer freeze at GUADEC has inspired another kickarse release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop. It's awesome stuff, definitely worth trying out. You should find GARNOME handy if there are no packages available for your distro."

jarit0z writes: "In Robert Cringely's latest column he toys with the idea of creating a TV show to go along with his rants. The show would be freely (as in beer) distributable, to hopefully keep bandwidth costs down. And it would also be freely (as in speech) modifiable, since he would also be releasing the "source" or raw footage of the show. Very interesting ideas if you ask me."

vern@austin802.11.com writes: "Imagine being able to IRC someone to pass the popcorn! The Austin Wireless Group has helped establish what may well be the country's first Wireless Enabled Theatre. The Alamo Draft House movie theater in Austin, Texas now has 802.11b wireless broadband Internet access that covers all screens in their complex. This "retrofit" theater had every other row replaced with tables and offers dinner and drinks with the show. So, you can park your laptop, order a burger/beer, then email in a movie review all w/o disturbing your fellow patrons. Cool! :)"

Peter Wayner writes: "Metaphors drawn from biology have always fascinated computer scientists. No one speaks of subroutines that cp themselves through undocumented remote procedure calls because talk of 'computer viruses' carries all of the portent and weight of polio, anthrax, German Measles and tuberculosis. Invoking these mysterious and deadly images is more colorful than tech speak, even if most of the so-called viruses are closer to the common cold than the black plague. Why use a three-letter acronym when a biological metaphor is available?" Wayner wrote the following review of Peter J. Bentley's book Digital Biology, which may just answer that question.

An anonymous reader sent in: "According to The Register, AvantGo is shutting down unregistered (unpaid) "custom channels" with more than eight subscribers. Until now, AvantGo has been free (as in beer). What alternatives are there for Web sites that wish to distribute free information to PalmOS devices? Blazer and Eudora Internet Suite require wireless connections; Plucker is open-source and almost does the trick but doesn't automatically synchronize and the installation is way too complicated for the average user. Is there an alternative to paying AvantGo thousands of dollars? All I want to do is give away information, not charge for it."

dotslash writes "The new Morpheus Preview Edition client [download.com] is actually just a fork of Gnucleus an open source GPLd Gnutella client. Upon installation Morpheus PE displays the GPL and asks the user to accept. It is currently being distributed without source in violation of article 3 of the GPL. Gnucleus developers are not too happy about this. This Morpheus client is being downloaded by thousands of frustrated Morpheus users who have been cutoff the FastTrack/Kazaa network and are now migrating to Gnutella. The violation of the GPL is blatant and will also be the first glimpse of the GPL for many of these new users. It seems like the executives at MusicCity have decided that they prefer free 'as in beer' not 'as in speech.'" Update: 03/03 05:10 GMT by T : It looks like the source is available now, gpl.txt and all.

soyle asks: "Most of my family recently aquired webcams, but we all run different operating systems (Mac OS 9, Linux and Windows 98). Searching through the web for software that supports most of the above yielded pretty much nothing at all. I contacted one vendor who provides a free-beer version of a MacOS/Windows solution, but the person I spoke to said they they thought a linux port would require too much effort. However, if anyone had a basic skeleton for an application providing basic video/sound in/out, they'd be willing to work with the developers in order to plug in their own transport-code and develop a useable application. So my question is really twofold: Does anyone know of an existing video conferencing application that supports all three major desktop platforms? Does anyone know of an application whose developers would be willing to work with said company?"

i am fartacus writes: "Good news for thirsty beer lovers in a strange town, this will help you find the nearest pub... hmmm beer .... and help you stay on time. " The gist of this is that it's a watch with a GPS transmitter that can show you the distance and direction to the 4 nearest pubs. Ingenious!

q[alex] writes "Caldera International has done a very good thing. They have released the "Ancient" Unices they inherited when they purchased SCO under a "BSD-style" license. The license is available here, instructions on finding the source are here. Caldera (and before that SCO) had required people to obtain a free (as in beer) but somewhat restrictive license in order to get these old sources. The new BSD-style licensing only applies to the 16-bit PDI-11 versions and some of the early 32-bit releases (excluding System III and System V), but it's still very cool."

Strange Beer writes: "The Washington Post is running a story discussing many of the roadblocks and speedbumps that Telcoms and ISPs have encountered while trying to rollout broadband. Not surprisingly, most of the obstacles were built by them." The government approach is dysfunctional. Broadband prices are going up - 25% or more in the last six months. Simultaneously rollouts have stopped except in metropolitan areas, and the Bell monopolies are busy finishing off the last independent DSL providers. This is the "free market" in action (government-sponsored monopolies crushing independents), and therefore unquestionable in the US today, and it's also the reason why people aren't getting high-speed access. The only solution suggested in this article is to essentially browbeat citizens into overpaying for high-speed service that they don't want and probably isn't offered in their area, solely so that the MPAA can sell us movies on demand, if they ever decide to do so. What exactly is the thought process here?