Slashdot Mirror

phillymjs writes "We're probably all familiar with Uzi Nissan and his fight to keep his nissan.com domain name from the clutches of Nissan Motors. Well, more same-name idiocy came to light today-- the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that their staff music writer, Bill Wyman, has received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, for "a seriously misleading and, arguably, an intentional, unauthorized exploitation of our client's name, goodwill and publicity value." It should be interesting to see how this one plays out, because Bill Wyman the musician was born William George Perks and changed his name to Bill Wyman in 1964. Journalist Bill Wyman was given that name at his birth in 1961."

Alex Susor writes "This article is about the new digital touch screen voting system in Georgia, the first state in the nation to adopt this method of voting statewide. Demonstration machines were set up at the recent primaries to teach voters about the new system (to be in place for the November general election) and had some big problems." Compare and contrast to systems in Florida and Germany.

An anonymous reader writes "The Atlanta Journal & Constitution is fronting a lengthy piece on the USAF's new F-22 and its upcoming shootout with the existing fleet of F-15's & 16's. One line in the article really jumped out at me: 'When avionics problems crop up now, pilots must restart the entire system as if rebooting a personal computer.' I did some googling, and this is about as much as I could find: The hardware backbone for the system is the Hughes Common Integrated Processor, which, in turn, appears to be built around the Intel i960 CPU. I couldn't find a name for the operating system, but it appears to be written in about one and a half million lines of Ada code; more on the Ada hardware integration and Ada i960 compilers is here. Any Slashdotters working on this project? If so, why do you need the inflight reboot? PS: Gamers will be interested to learn that nVidia's Quadro2 Go GPU and Wind River's VxWorks Operating System are melded in the F-22's Multi-Function Display."

An anonymous reader writes "The Atlanta Journal & Constitution is fronting a lengthy piece on the USAF's new F-22 and its upcoming shootout with the existing fleet of F-15's & 16's. One line in the article really jumped out at me: 'When avionics problems crop up now, pilots must restart the entire system as if rebooting a personal computer.' I did some googling, and this is about as much as I could find: The hardware backbone for the system is the Hughes Common Integrated Processor, which, in turn, appears to be built around the Intel i960 CPU. I couldn't find a name for the operating system, but it appears to be written in about one and a half million lines of Ada code; more on the Ada hardware integration and Ada i960 compilers is here. Any Slashdotters working on this project? If so, why do you need the inflight reboot? PS: Gamers will be interested to learn that nVidia's Quadro2 Go GPU and Wind River's VxWorks Operating System are melded in the F-22's Multi-Function Display."

Muddie writes "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that television execs and advertising agencies think product placement and the 30 second commercial spot are not getting the respect they deserves from us consumers, so in order to combat us ignoring them, there will be pop-up ads taking up the lower quarter of your screen during normal programming. Not only that, but the ads will run during relevant portions of the programming (see a guy shaving in the mirror, get a pop-up ad from a razor company). Do "They" think we just don't see enough advertising in a day? If you aren't busy throwing things through your television yet, you can read the article over here (with no pop-up ads)."

Muddie writes "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that television execs and advertising agencies think product placement and the 30 second commercial spot are not getting the respect they deserves from us consumers, so in order to combat us ignoring them, there will be pop-up ads taking up the lower quarter of your screen during normal programming. Not only that, but the ads will run during relevant portions of the programming (see a guy shaving in the mirror, get a pop-up ad from a razor company). Do "They" think we just don't see enough advertising in a day? If you aren't busy throwing things through your television yet, you can read the article over here (with no pop-up ads)."

Slashback (below) is chock full of updates to recent (and not recent) Slashdot stories, including some good news for AMD fans, and a last drizzle of news from E3.

Making your computer worth even less. Acid-F1ux writes: "Advanced Micro Devices has slashed prices of its desktop and mobile Athlon processors just days after a similar move by rival Intel. The cuts range from 17 percent to 52 percent for mobile Athlon XP chips and between 11 percent and 32 percent for desktop Athlon XP chips. On Sunday, Intel dropped prices of its Pentium 4 processors by as much as 53 percent."

Progressive Education strikes a blow. darnellmc writes: "According to this Atlanta Journal-Constitution news article GA Tech had so many students violate the school's "honor code" that they have decided to change it.

"In the wake of the investigation, Tech officials have decided to allow students in introductory computer science courses to share information and collaborate on homework, previously prohibited under the school's academic honor code."

Of course code sharing also teaches the value of Open Source ;o) . Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine."

How many letters will the next big threat have? matthew writes: "LWN is carrying the notes from the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) conference (more info at the EFF). The BPDG is the body that will be suggesting future technological control measures; they make the DMCA and CBDTPA seem like trivial problems. The BPDG conference was last week and it was open to the public so anyone could call in. You can read about what the FSF's Bradley M. Kuhn digitalspeech.org's Jonathan Watterson thought of the conference. The basic summary is that we're screwed if people don't start fighting against this kind of injustice."

This is what's called taking license. infochuck writes "Back in January, this story on Slashdot focused on Borland's licensing PR fiasco, and how they promised to remedy the situation (in short, their license permitted them to search at any time any of your computers looking for stolen software). Well, here we are, five months later, and their license hasn't changed one bit - at least not the two most unreasonable clauses, 12 and 14.4, and not in the license included with the Windows version of the Personal Edition. Download for yourself to see, but be warned, you'll have to register, which involves many questions and no less than 5 checkboxes to uncheck, as well as at least a 25MB DL. I believe pr@borland.com is still the place to write..."

Playful is good. If the last month of pre-hype hype, pre-hype, actual hype and post-hype weren't enough, you'll be pleased to read that E3 coverage continues, at Gamespy (some cool reviews), Gamegal (good photos) and other sites beginning with "Game."

darnellmc writes "Usually ants from different colonies fight till the death, but according to this article one group of ants from different queens work together. Resulting in the largest ant supercolony yet discovered. This supercolony reaches from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest Spain. Probably not an the ideal location for a cookout considering this new find. This is the kind of think that used to be science fiction."

dread minerva writes "Proof that the kids are alright: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the following article about Josh Klehr, who discovered a math theorem while sitting in study hall one day in eigth grade. The theorem is now known as the Klehr-Bliss Theorem and a paper on it is being published in The American Mathematical Monthly."

There is a story on the AP Wire today that talks about how the South American country of Guyana has decided to lift restrictions on free speech on the Internet. The article states "Programmers will begin removing software filters as early as Monday, Information Minister Moses Nagamootoo was quoted as saying in Sunday newspapers." It seems that once again, the ideals of freedom have defeated the ideas of censorship. Read more below.. It turns out that the filters were, of course, blocking unintended information.. The government had gotten complaints from end users that "the filters also prevented them from viewing sites about AIDS, anti-racism efforts and even Kenneth Starr's report urging the impeachment of President Clinton.

There is a story on the AP Wire this morning describing a new partnership between Sun Microsystems and Oracle. They are attempting to create a new type of "business computers that won't require the use of operating system programs such as those sold by rival Microsoft Corp" according to the article.

What do you think of this idea? Seems like the OS as we know it might be headed for a few changes in this case.