An anonymous reader writes "LARP fans at Bowling Green State University may have to contend with a crippled game of Humans vs. Zombies after the University banned Nerf guns on campus. In the live-action game, players are either humans or zombies. The goal of the game is to change all the humans into zombies, or for the humans to evade capture by zombies for a certain amount of time. To defend themselves against zombies, humans may use Nerf guns. Players (most likely the human ones) are petitioning the University to lift the ban. The game had troubles back in 2006, when participating students were arrested. That issue has since been cleared up."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "LARP fans at Bowling Green State University may have to contend with a crippled game of Humans vs. Zombies after the University banned Nerf guns on campus. In the live-action game, players are either humans or zombies. The goal of the game is to change all the humans into zombies, or for the humans to evade capture by zombies for a certain amount of time. To defend themselves against zombies, humans may use Nerf guns. Players (most likely the human ones) are petitioning the University to lift the ban. The game had troubles back in 2006, when participating students were arrested. That issue has since been cleared up."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's how old Scripting News is, in years.

double (clock.now () - date ("4/1/97")) / (60*60*24*365.25)

10.98654578

Pretty close to 11!

Hot dam.

It's always amusing when errant emails get sent around. For example, we still get plenty of emails every day from people angry at Amazon.com for the way Amazon signs people up for their Amazon Prime program (the way it's billed on credit cards, we're the first Google search on the name, and people who don't read, somehow think that we, at Techdirt, billed them). Slashdot points us to an amusing article about the guy who owns DoNotReply.com, which is now set up as a blog highlighting some of the more ridiculous emails he gets. The reason he gets so many emails is many systems just put "donotreply" in the "from" field, and people still reply -- and it all goes to this guy. Most interesting is that he's given up explaining this to people (except in a few exceptional cases), because they tend to just get angry at him.

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KentuckyFC writes "A scrambled Rubik's cube can be solved in just 25 moves, regardless of the starting configuration. Tomas Rokicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has proven the new limit (down from 26 which was proved last year) using a neat piece of computer science. Rather than study individual moves, he's used the symmetry of the cube to study its transformations in sets. This allows him to separate the 'cube space' into 2 billion sets each containing 20 billion elements. He then shows that a large number of these sets are essentially equivalent to other sets and so can be ignored. Even then, to crunch through the remaining sets, he needed a workstation with 8GB of memory and around 1500 hours of time on a Q6600 CPU running at 1.6GHz. Next up, 24 moves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KentuckyFC writes "A scrambled Rubik's cube can be solved in just 25 moves, regardless of the starting configuration. Tomas Rokicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has proven the new limit (down from 26 which was proved last year) using a neat piece of computer science. Rather than study individual moves, he's used the symmetry of the cube to study its transformations in sets. This allows him to separate the "cube space" into 2 billion sets each containing 20 billion elements. He then shows that a large number of these sets are essentially equivalent to other sets and so can be ignored. Even then, to crunch through the remaining sets, he needed a workstation with 8GB of memory and around 1500 hours of time on a Q6600 CPU running at 1.6GHz. Next up, 24 moves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two iphone snapshots from a recent Boing Boing tv shoot at a club called the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco, which led to this BBtv episode about the bedazzling internet personality Leslie "Shazam! You're Glamorous!" Hall.

Here's Leslie Hall's online store (Hefty Hideaway), where you can buy CDs and t-shirts and stuff.

Below: click the little audio-looking widget and listen to a Leslie and the LYs song that appeared in that BBtv ep -- "BLAME THE BOOTY," remixed by Ninja Science Laboratories. How fierce is that shit, seriously?

It was a friendly meeting today, but not without the usual competitive spirit between the Mozilla camp and the Microsoft camp.

Mozilla engineering VP, Mike Schroepfer explained that Microsoft tends to implement technology already approved by the standards working groups, in a different way, and then says their implementation is the standard. Sounds like something Hillary Clinton would do, until you realize that the Mozilla guys do it too. Basically everyone does it, when they feel the competitive technology is implemented by someone smaller or less significant than themselves. And since this is a very immature business, everyone feels that way about everyone else, so it's something of a miracle when interop happens.

It has always been thus.

When Netscape, the company that spawned Mozilla, wanted to implement a format for content syndication in 1999, they did it outside of the W3C because they were sick of the dirty politics bigger companies that felt more significant had been using against them. There was prior art, but they trampled it, because (you guessed) they felt more significant than those that came before.

The trick is to get over that feeling, and to adopt something specifically because it comes from someone you feel superior to.

Be the change you seek.

I pointed out to Mike that three real religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, religious causes that great wars have been fought over, for 2000-plus years, are just forks of the same religion and bible with emphasis placed on different characters, they are basically compatible. Isn't that amazing?

In tech, where wars are between nerds who drink Jolt and read Microserfs, and couldn't fight a real war if our lives depended on it, why can't we at least agree to use the same names for elements of our XML that do the same damned thing?

Something to think about!



End of editorial.

I need a new command in Twitter -- a temporary unfollow, or viewed another way, a block-with-timeout. Same idea.

I need it when someone is at a conference I don't care about, live-blogging every detail. After 30 or 40 updates, I gotta stop it, it's interfering with other posts. But I don't want to complain. I just want to go silently. But tomorrow when the event is over, I want to (silently) resume the follow.

Problem with normal unfollow, is that: 1. I have to remember to re-follow and 2. When I do, they'll get an email. This is confusing and can cause hurt feelings. Not my intention. I just don't want all the details of this conference (or someone live-blogging an event I'm watching live or on TV).

This isn't the first time we've seen stories like this, but Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft are suing the maker of a Warcraft "bot" that allowed players to automate certain activities. If this sounds familiar, you might recall people freaking out over bots in Second Life as well. It all goes back to the same point that it's dangerous to move real-world laws into virtual worlds. Those real world laws are designed to matter due to scarcity and the physical constraints of the real world. However, the whole point of a virtual world is that you're not limited by those constraints -- and you are only limited by the constraints programmed into the world. If the creators of the world don't program in certain constraints, it makes little sense to force them on the world through a real-world legal process. Why not just program in those constraints? So, if such a bot is really a problem, program a way to stop it from working and kick the user out for violating terms of service. But to bring a real lawsuit (using copyright, no less) makes little sense here.

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Eye Log writes "The United States is a big fan of leaning on other countries to tighten IP and copyright protection, but has a tendency to ignore its own obligations when it doesn't get its way. 'Two ongoing cases illustrate the point. First, the European Union is pushing for the US to change a pair of rules that it calls "long-standing trade irritants." Despite World Trade Organization rulings against it, the US has not yet corrected either case for a period of several years... Apparently, it's easy to get hot and bothered when it's industries from your country that claim to be badly affected by rules elsewhere. When it comes to the claims of other countries, though, even claims that have been validated by the WTO, it's much easier to see the complexity of the situation, to spend years arguing those complexities before judges, and to do nothing even when compelled by rulings.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

About 3 hours into my flight it dawned on me. I had to take a leak. I wasn’t expecting a rendezvous with great design, but there it was in the most unlikely of places. The airplane lavatory (and, BTW, why don’t they call it a bathroom or restroom or toilet — who calls it a lavatory in everyday life?).

When you lock the door the lights turn on. When you unlock the door the lights go off. Perfect. It’s sorta like being in a huge refrigerator, but in reverse. In this case when you close (lock) the door the light goes on.

Anyway, I thought it was great design. Why should two things that always happen together (lock the door and turn on the light) be a two step process with different controls? Just make it one step, one control. Lock and light, one switch. Great thinking. I wonder who invented that.

A few months ago there were rumors that Motorola might sell off its struggling handset division to another provider, however there didn't seem to be many interested buyers. It appears that Motorola has chosen option two instead: spin off the business to survive (or fail) on its own. The business accounts for the largest chunk of Motorola's earnings, but it is also a huge drag on earnings. Basically, the other parts of Motorola had been subsidizing the handset business. It's still rather amazing how slow Motorola is to come out with interesting handsets that people want. It had a huge success with the Startac in the 90s and then took nearly a decade before finding another hit with the RAZR. But just as with the Startac, it milked the RAZR concept for all it was worth and now is left in the dust while other firms are putting out much more innovative phones. Spinning off the business may separate it from the other parts of Motorola's business, but unless it starts designing phones people actually want, it's not going to make much of a difference.

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The Avian Flu Watch pool on Flickr is a clearinghouse for anyone to contribute photos and other information related to the pandemic that may be coming to a town near you. From the Flickr pool description (photo from Ilyasansri's stream):

The purpose of this group is for people to share news and information about the potential influenza pandemic (avian flu or bird flu, Influenza A, strain H5N1) which is currently brewing in several countries in southeast Asia.

Pointers to GOOD information sources are encouraged, as well as photos of news headlines and other images related to this topic.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

SeanAhern writes "If you're an aspiring young nanotechnologist with an idea for a new product, you'll be happy to hear that the DOE has created five facilities called Nanoscale Science Research Centers, that you can rent. These Research Centers are located in National Labs scattered around the country: Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois; Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York State; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California; Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[image: Xeni Jardin, 2007, cc]

The government of Guatemala recently enacted a series of new laws intended to curb corruption within the country's $100 million adoption industry. Guatemala is one of the world's top "sender" countries for children adopted by US families, second only to China. Babies are big business there.

This Central American nation is among the world's poorest, and its legal system is among the world's most corrupt. Add all of that up, factor in the social disruption that results from decades of civil war, and you end up with a climate where babies are sometimes sold like animals and the rights of birth mothers are routinely abused.

The Guatemalan government seems eager to make a punitive example out of one high-profile adoption agency in particular -- Casa Quivira. The country's biggest baby-bust yet broke this week, and involves two attorneys who represented that agency, which was once considered the most "legit" in the country.

The attorneys have been charged with fraud and human trafficking:

The probe of Casa Quivira — where 46 children in the process of being adopted by U.S. families were seized in a government raid last August — turned up a slew of irregularities, including at least five cases in which birth mothers were allegedly given false identities to avoid having to seek permission from family members and a judge to give up their babies.

Eighteen other mothers could not be found under the identities that case files provided, prosecutors said.

Link to AP story, here's a related item by the same reporter, about the same agency; here's another.

I've spent a fair amount of time in Guatemala, since I was a teenager. I am familiar with first-person testimonies from a number of sides of this story: indigenous women who claim to have been robbed of their kids (or otherwise abused in the adoption process); attorneys and human rights workers who represent them; American families who began with the best of intentions but realized halfway through how corrupt the adoption system there really is.

- - - - - - - - - -

IMAGE: I snapped this photo during a stealth visit to another adoption facility in Guatemala that has been described as a "baby-laundering" facility, run by an offshoot cell of a US-based evangelical megachurch. During this visit, they proudly told me they "cured" AIDS and HIV in some of these children through prayer to Jesus.

The people who operate this agency obtain children from mostly indigenous, mostly displaced, all poor birth mothers; the agency is believed to routinely falsify or alter documentation, or change the names of children or parents, and arrange adoption transactions with US families as a source of income.

The children and teens there are locked in rooms when unsupervised, not allowed contact with family members who sometimes show up to reclaim them, and barbed wire fence rings the property perimeter. It felt like a prison.

- - - - - - - - - -

Below, screengrab of the website for Casa Quivira. They have promotional videos on YouTube. Seems the "CQ in the news!" section of their website hasn't been updated in a while.

(thanks, Martha Clayton and Jolon Bankey).