Slashdot Mirror

Several Slashdot readers shared this report overnight: A gunman shot four people, none fatally, at his Middleton, Wisconsin workplace Wednesday morning before he was killed in a shootout with police, Middleton Police Chief Charles Foulke said. Authorities had not released the man's name or age, but police said he was from Madison and worked at WTS Paradigm, a software company at 1850 Deming Way where the shooting occurred. Police said a motive for the shooting was not yet known. Foulke said the shooter had been in the building before he began shooting at fellow employees around 10:29 a.m. One of the four people injured was just grazed by a bullet police say was fired from a handgun. Citing UW Health, a local NBC affiliate reported that two victims are in serious condition and one is in critical condition. "In a situation like this, you learn how great a community really is," WTS Marketing Manager Ryan Mayrand said. "We cannot thank the Middleton Police Department, the Dane County Sheriff's Office and other emergency personnel enough for their amazing response."

"Jeff Bezos has leapfrogged Bill Gates again for the title of world's richest billionaire..." announced CNN Money. An anonymous reader quotes their report. Amazon stock jumped 13.5% on Friday after the company turned in another incredible earnings report -- more than a quarter-billion dollars in profit in three months. Bezos owned nearly 80 million shares in Amazon as of August, according to the most recent available data from FactSet. He made more than $10 billion from the one-day stock surge and is now worth well over $90 billion. At the end of trading on Thursday, Gates occupied the top spot in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $88 billion. Bezos had $83.5 billion, and his big day on Friday was more than enough to close the gap.
In July sales for Amazon's self-created holiday "Prime Day" were actually higher than they were on Black Friday. Amazon's sales for the quarter were $11 billion higher than they were a year ago -- increasing 29% even before an additional $1.3 billion from Whole Foods sales, for total sales over three months of $43.7 billion.

Amazon now also projects that their yearly revenue from AWS will be $2 billion higher.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There have been some well-publicized incidents in which student groups or other protesters have interfered with scheduled appearances by right-wing speakers at U.S. universities. In response, a number of states have considered "campus free speech" bills based on model legislation produced by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank. Different bills introduce specific penalties for students who shout down the speech of others and prevent college administrators from disinviting speakers, to give two examples. One such bill is being debated in Wisconsin. Faculty and university officials in the state are concerned about what else might be prevented by the bill's overly vague language, according to the local Cap Times. As often happens with bills relevant to science education, the debate has also elicited some rather bizarre comments from the bill's sponsors. The trouble comes from this section of the bill: "That each institution shall strive to remain neutral, as an institution, on the public policy controversies of the day, and may not take action, as an institution, on the public policy controversies of the day in such a way as to require students or faculty to publicly express a given view of social policy." While the bills' scope is focused on public events involving invited speakers, there are a couple key questions here. University officials want to know how far this requirement "to remain neutral" extends. For example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has spoken out against proposed bans on stem cell research on campus. Would the university run afoul of this law if it did so again?

Billosaur writes "A judge has ordered the University of Wisconsin-Madison to turn over the names and contact information for the 53 UW-M students accused of file sharing over the university's networks by the RIAA. 'U.S. District Judge John Shabaz signed an order requiring UW-Madison to relinquish the names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Media Access Control addresses for each of the 53 individuals.' The ruling came as no surprise to the university, which had previously rejected the request of the RIAA to hand out their settlement letters to alleged copyright violators on their campus. The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway, as the IP addresses the RIAA has for the violations may be mapped to computers in common areas, making it difficult to determine just which people may have made the downloads."

AdamBLang writes "Previously covered on Slashdot, Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle today signed legislation that "will require the software of touch-screen voting machines used in elections to be open-source. Municipalities that use electronic voting machines are responsible for providing to the public, on request, the code used." Madison's Capital Times reports "the bill requires that if a municipality uses an electronic voting system that consists of a voting machine, the machine must generate a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector that is visually verifiable by the elector before he or she leaves the machine.""

AdamBLang writes "Madison Wisconsin's Capitol Times reports 'With only four dissenting votes, the state Assembly easily passed a bill that would require that electronic voting machines create a paper record. The goal of the legislation is to make sure that Wisconsin's soon-to-be-purchased touch screen machines create a paper ballot that can be audited to verify election results.' Slashdot has previously reported on this bill." More from the article: "Wisconsin cannot go down the path of states like Florida and Ohio in having elections that the public simply doesn't trust ... By requiring a paper record on every electronic voting machine, we will ensure that not only does your vote matter in Wisconsin, but it also counts."

user_granstro writes "Madison, Wisconsin is the next city to face the shambling undead hordes. At 2pm on Saturday, October 22, zombie fans will assemble in full costume to kick off Zombie Lurch 2005. Organizer Maddie Greene, a self-styled zombie expert, says of the event, "I think that any bystander could jump right in and become a zombie with the proper groaning and limping and attitude.""

The Wisconsin State Journal has the news of an acquittal in a drunken homicide charge against a Madison-area 30 year old. The defendant admitted to being intoxicated before the crash that killed his passenger. The jury found him innocent after he presented his defense: the passenger caused the crash by forcing him to attempt a manuever they'd done in Grand Theft Auto. "In an emotional testimony on Thursday, DeMeo said that Alexander had put his hand on DeMeo's knee and made him push the accelerator down hard, then grabbed the emergency brake and sent the car into a skid. DeMeo said that Alexander was trying to perform a maneuver that both had done in a video game, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, that they played regularly."

broKenfoLd writes "In an earlier post, we looked at the future of Matrix-esque control over computers. In that article, monkeys got to play the games. Today at UW in Madison, WI, it's the humans who are playing video games just by thinking about it. While this is cool for us power gamers, it has many more impressive applications, including limb replacement."