debatem1 writes "Apparently, anti-violent-video-games crusader Jack Thompson is at it again, this time writing a letter to the mother of Strauss Zelnick, Chairman of Take-Two, the company that produces the GTA series of video games. In it he compares Zelnick to a member of the Hitler Youth, advocates beating the young Zelnick, and contemplates the existence of a Ted Bundy merit badge for boy scouts."

praps writes "Two German companies have patented technology for sending scented text messages between mobile phones. The chip, which carries a range of around 100 pre-defined scents, has been developed by the Institute of Sensory Analysis and interactive services firm Convisual and will be on the market in one to two years. Naturally, the makers think that the chip will be used for sending pleasant odors to friends and family — vanilla, rose and Christmas cinnamon are on the list — but surely the claim to be able to send 'the smell of the beach and sunshine' is a little optimistic? SMS stink bombs cannot be far away."

Netcraft confirmed it ... Slashdot was dying for several hours (along with SourceForge, which shares a corporate overlord and router). Some planned downtime from our provider apparently didn't come back up quite as planned. Sorry for the inconvenience. On the upside, we're moving to a new network and hardware soon, so the site should be much faster and more stable rsn.

An anonymous reader writes "Tamir Khason from Israel has blogged about the direct connection between the amount of facial hair and the success of computer languages. Very funny, and it's the truth."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The authors of the Zeus malware have added an end-user license agreement to their product. The buyer is, of course, permitted to infect as many computers with Zeus as they please, but they have no right to distribute it for 'any business or commercial purpose not connected with this sale,' and they can't examine the source, use it to control non-Zeus botnets, or send it to anti-virus companies. Oh, and they commit to paying for future upgrades, too — wouldn't Microsoft love to be able to add that term to their EULA. While it seems silly to imagine Zeus's authors going to the authorities for violations of this EULA, if they're anything like the Russian Business Network, they probably have an extra-judicial means of contract enforcement named Ivan. That said, this is by no means the first EULA-encrusted malware."

Simon (S2) writes to mention that Europe's second Galileo navigation satellite reached orbit this past weekend. Galileo is promising to offer several technological advances in comparison to the US-based GPS system but no longer promises to be a guaranteed service. "The Galileo programme now seems certain to go ahead, after a prolonged and painful shift from partly-private financing of the construction to public funds taken from unspent EU farm subsidies. This money would normally have been returned to donor nations, with the UK, Germany and the Netherlands as the biggest three. London MPs have expressed doubt as to whether the UK will receive value for the money it will pay, but have acknowledged that the British government doesn't actually have any choice about Galileo under EU funding rules."

rbf writes "A girl I like at my university, a graduate student in mathematics, will be having a birthday next month. She had thought of throwing a nerd-themed party — show up with tape on your glasses, pants hiked up, etc. However, she decided against it because most of her friends are math nerds and wouldn't even have to dress up! So my question for the community is: What fun party ideas would appeal to a group of mostly math-major nerds?"

Wired reports that the US Defense Intelligence Agency has just acquired three PC-based video games which they will use to train the next wave of analysts. The games are short, but they have branching story lines that change depending on how a trainee reacts to various problems. Quoting: "'It is clear that our new workforce is very comfortable with this approach,' says Bruce Bennett, chief of the analysis-training branch at the DIA's Joint Military Intelligence Training Center. Wired.com had an opportunity to play all three games, Rapid Onset, Vital Passage and Sudden Thrust. The titles may conjure images of blitzkrieg, but the games themselves are actually a surprisingly clever and occasionally surreal blend of education, humor and intellectual challenge, aimed at teaching the player how to think."

rafaelmizrahi writes "WiiMan the Super Hero is a full action figure costume of a super hero that functions as a Nintendo WiiMote remote. Having trouble playing Wii? WiiMan to the rescue. This GarageGeeks project combines Gaming, Technology and Useless Activity to the extreme. Rafael Mizrahi, an artificial vision and experience explorer at Feng-GUI and a GarageGeeks member along with Yael Hertzog built this custom costume that acts as a fully functional Nintendo WiiMote remote with buttons, bluetooth, accelerometers, and an IR cam. BTW, last year, they built another hero, The Guitar Hero Noid, a robot built with Tal Chalozin that plays the PlayStation game Guitar Hero." (You might have better luck reaching the GarageGeeks site's Google cache.)

An anonymous reader writes "CNET News has a piece in which AT&T claims that the Internet's bandwidth will be saturated by video-on-demand and such by 2010. Says the AT&T VP: 'In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.' Similarly: 'He claimed that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network.'"

spagiola writes "The Dilbert.com website just got an extreme makeover. Gone is the old, rather clunky but perfectly functional, website, replaced by a Flash-heavy website that only Mordac the Preventer of Information Services could love. Users have been pretty unanimous in condemning the changes. Among the politer comments: 'Congrats. Vista is no more lonely at the top in the Competition For The Worst Upgrade In Computing Industry, this web site upgrade being a serious contender.' You have to register to leave comments, but many seem to have registered for the express purpose of panning the new design."

explosivejared writes "It sounds farcical when you first hear it, but NBC has teamed up with an ad agency to produce actual feature programs that are centered around promoting the products of the network's sponsors. The network has already begun production on one sci-fi program entitled 'Gemini Division,' which will act as a platform for products from Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco. The programming will be broadcast via the network's 'digital properties,' e.g. the NBC web site. I guess it was only a matter of time for something like this to come along after product placement became the norm."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a Manhattan case, Warner v. Berry, the RIAA sued a man who lives in a homeless shelter, leaving a copy of the summons and complaint not at the homeless shelter, but at an apartment the man had occupied in better times, and had long since vacated. The RIAA's lawyers were threatened with sanctions by the Magistrate Judge in the case, for making misleading representations to the Court which the Magistrate felt were intentional. The District Judge, however, disagreed with imposing sanctions, giving the RIAA's lawyers 'as officers of the Court the benefit of the doubt,' and instead concluded — in his 6-page opinion (PDF) — that the RIAA's lawyers were just being 'sloppy' and had not made the misstatements for an improper purpose.'"

DrJokepu writes "Apparently the folks at the Department of Corrections of Oklahoma just forgot to use common sense when they created the state's Sexual and Violent Offender Registry. By putting SQL queries in the URLs, they not only leaked the personal data of tens of thousands of people, but enabled literally anyone with basic SQL knowledge to put his neighbor/boss/enemies on the sexual offender list. Fortunately, after the author of the blog The Daily WTF notified the department about the issue, the site went down for 'routine maintenance' on April 13 2008."

opencity writes "The Register reports that the (perhaps inevitable) robot rebellion has been avoided ... for now. 'Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.' Gizmodo also has a good photo."

Dekortage writes "How long does it take to make a burger? Students from Purdue University's Society of Professional Engineers won the 2008 Rube Goldberg contest with a device that requires 156 steps to assemble a burger. According to the team captain, 'We put 4,000 to 5,000 man-hours into this machine since September, and all the hard work has been well worth it.' That's a long time to wait for dinner." Here's a video of the winning entry in operation.

An anonymous reader writes to mention that Uwe Boll, the infamous German director behind such video game adaptations as House of the Dead, BloodRayne, Dungeon Siege and Postal, has recently admitted that he would retire from making movies if enough people want him to stop. When FearNet mentioned to Boll a petition online signed by 18,000 people requesting that he cease making films, Boll responded that '18,000 is not enough to convince me.' So how much would be enough? 'One million,' Boll said."

Will Foster, a Kettering University student, has built his own half sized Panzer tank. It took Will 2 years and around $10,000 to build his mini-tank and he says the process has been "a lot of trial and error...I'd buy a $200 part that didn't work, then go to a $300 part that didn't work before finding a $50 part that did." The tank is about as big as a small car, and can reach speeds of around 20 mph with its three-cylinder diesel engine. It runs on treads, has a cannon powered by compressed air from a scuba tank and parks wherever the hell it wants.

GnomeIllusionist writes "In their continuing tribute to Gary Gygax, Wired has created character sheets for nine celebrities. Apparently, Stephen Hawking can do 10D6 radiation damage to his enemies and Rick Astley is a 20th-Level bard. Steve Jobs' black turtleneck is actually magical armor with +6 against edged attacks." Most of them are kinda cheesy and obvious- I wonder if you can do better.

An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday Engadget Mobile received a nice letter from Deutsche Telekom / T-Moblie demanding that they stop using the color magenta on engadgetmobile.com. ("Yep, seriously" they say.) Today several sites have gone magenta in a show of solidarity."