New submitter skade88 writes "With the Linux Steam beta giving Ubuntu and its large userbase all the love, other Linux gamers understandably want to be let in on the fun. For the beta, Valve has provided Steam as a Debian package. Many hungry Linux gamers have reported that they have Steam running on their favorite distro, but that still leaves the legal debate. What is the legal threshold needed to get Steam in the repos of your preferred flavor of Linux? Will Valve's one-size-fits-every-OS license be flexible to work on Linux or will it delay the dream of a viable gaming world for Linux? We are so close to bridging the last major hurdle in finally realizing the year of the Linux desktop: Gaming. Lets hope the FOSS community and Valve can play together so we all win."

MojoKid writes "iOS 6, by all appearances, has a streaming problem. This is separate from the network issues that led Verizon to state that it wouldn't bill people for overages that were caused by spotty Wi-Fi connectivity. The issue has been detailed at PRX.org with information on how the team saw a huge spike in bandwidth usage after the release of iOS 6, and then carefully tested the behavior of devices and its own app to narrow the possible cause. In one case, the playback of a single 30MB episode caused the transfer of over 100MB of data. It is believed that the issue was solved with the release of iOS 6.0.1, but anecdotal evidence from readers points to continued incidents of high data usage, even after updating. If you own an iPhone 5 or upgraded to iOS 6 on an older device, it is strongly recommend to check your usage over the past two months, update to iOS 6.0.1, and plan for a lengthy discussion with your carrier if it turns out your data use went through the roof."

itwbennett writes "Judge Susan Illston has said she will approve a $22.5 million settlement deal between Google and the FTC over the company's practice of circumventing privacy protections in Apple's Safari browser to place tracking cookies on user's computers. Judge Illston also expressed concern about what will happen to the tracking data Google collected, since the settlement doesn't call for Google to destroy the data."

MrSeb writes "The dream of faster-than-light travel has been on the mind of humanity for generations. Until recently, though, it was restricted to the realm of pure science fiction. Theoretical mechanisms for warp drives have been posited by science, some of which actually jive quite nicely with what we know of physics. Of course, that doesn't mean they're actually going to work, though. NASA researchers recently revisited the Alcubierre warp drive and concluded that its power requirements were not as impossible as once thought. However, a new analysis from the University of Sydney claims that using a warp drive of this design comes with a drawback. Specifically, it could cause cataclysmic explosions at your destination."

Hugh Pickens writes "For years lawmakers had heard warnings about holes in corporate and government systems that imperil U.S. economic and national security. Now Ward Carroll writes that in the face of what most experts label as a potential 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' threat, Republicans have stalled the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 with a Senate vote of 51–47 against the legislation. This drew a quick response from the staff of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta: 'The U.S. defense strategy calls for greater investments in cybersecurity measures, and we will continue to explore ways to defend the nation against cyber threats,' says DoD spokesman George Little. 'If the Congress neglects to address this security problem urgently, the consequences could be devastating.' Many Senate Republicans took their cues from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businesses that framed the debate not as a matter of national security, but rather as a battle between free enterprise and an overreaching government. They wanted to let companies determine whether it would be more cost effective — absent liability laws around cyber attacks — to invest in the hardware, software, and manpower required to effectively prevent cyber attacks, or to simply weather attacks and fix what breaks afterwards. 'Until someone can argue both the national security and the economic parts of it, you're going to have these dividing forces,' says Melissa Hathaway, a White House cyber official in the Bush and Obama administrations. 'Most likely, big industry is going to win because at the end of the day our economy is still in trouble.'"

New submitter lebijoutier writes "According to Slate, '[Patrick] Tresset, for one, discovered a novel way to stay mentally healthy with the help of drugs and still pursue what was once his life's work: He created robots that can draw portraits. Far from a mere novelty, his research is telling us more about both the creative process in humans and how we relate emotionally to machines. ... Most of us still don't have robots in the home, but for decades now, we've been waiting for machines to do our bidding. Tresset believes that it might be a good idea to imbue all personal robots with some sort of artistic skill to encourage an emotional bond — it might allow for more trust, perhaps, though you can also see how overly identifying with a machine might create some existential questions.' The article also has a fascinating video of five of his robots sketching a single human."

ndogg writes "Netflix now works on Linux... sort of. The folks at iheartubuntu have figured out a way to get Netflix to run on the Windows version of Firefox using Wine (with a number of custom patches) and Silverlight. They plan on releasing packages for it all soon. Currently, it seems they have only had success with 32-bit, while compiling for 64-bit is tricky."

Kethinov writes "My Congresswoman, Zoe Lofgren, a prominent opponent of the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act, has introduced two bills to the U.S. House of Representatives designed to protect the free and open internet, expand the protections of the Fourth Amendment to digital communications, and protect against the introduction of any further SOPA-like bills. Since these are issues Slashdotters care deeply about, I wanted to open up the bills for discussion on Slashdot. The bills are: ECPA 2.0 and the Global Free Internet Act. Is my Congresswoman doing a good job? Is there room for improvement in the language of the bills? If you're as excited by her work as I am, please reach out to your representatives as well and ask them to work with Rep. Lofgren. It will take a big coalition to beat the pro-RIAA/MPAA establishment politics on internet regulation."

AT&T said Friday it is ahead of schedule for 4G LTE network deployments and has now reached 103 U.S. cities. Previously, AT&T had predicted it would reach 100 cities by the end of 2012. All the major U.S. carriers are in a race to build widespread LTE networks offering greater speeds to help smartphone and tablet data users take advantage of wireless video streaming, gaming and other functions.

Twitter's new updates for its website and mobile apps have an emphasis on finding and sharing content. On Twitter.com, users will soon be able to e-mail Tweets, regardless of whether the recipient uses Twitter. The advantage of passing a Tweet along this way is that it retains any photos that were attached the post. This feature, which is rolling out now, is available through the “More” link, which appears on the far right side of every Tweet. Twitter has also given a facelift to search results on both its mobile apps and website. Results pages now show photos and videos at the top in a grid-like view, as shown below, and include media such as headlines and photos directly in the results stream.

Recently my wife came to me, laptop in hand, wanting to know why some Word documents looked different than others. In other words, some spanned the entire width of the screen and had very large text, while others seemed to show the entire page at once, with much smaller text. Occasionally she'd see a file with two side-by-side pages, as shown in the above screenshot. What's working all this weird Word voodoo? No, it has nothing to do with font size: It's all about the zoom. Word's zoom control affects how much of any given document is visible on your screen at a time. The higher the zoom, the bigger your document will appear—and the less of it you'll see.

as a result of Microsoft's failure to show users of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 a court-mandated browser choice screen, but that doesn't appear to have done the organization any lasting harm. annual report released Thursday. with Google is responsible for the majority of those revenues, the foundation said.

Once Upon A Time from Wino Sutarmin Kadir at Fun Record is borderline spooky, but there's no dripping blood involved. This TrueType outlines font looks hand-hewn, maybe by a resident scarecrow wielding a calligraphic pen for the first time, and (unless you look really closely) looks almost like intertwined sticks for the letters. Once Upon A Time includes all upper and lower case letters, but unfortunately no punctuation or numbers at all. This rather limits its use: Even though Once Upon A Time could easily be used for display or even text purposes, unless you are very creative with your copy you'll probably only be able to use for poster statements (no exclamations, mind you). Once Upon A Time is available free for personal use. For commercial use, please contact Wino (pronounced ) for license details. The "Try it for free" button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

Nintendo's , and the new console is already garnering criticism for missing some key features Nintendo promised. TVii, a social and interactive TV programming guide won't ship until December, and video-streaming apps for Amazon on Demand, Hulu Plus, Netflix, and YouTube also are no shows at launch. And if you're planning on storing a lot of data on your brand new Wii such as games and other digital content, you'd better opt for buying the top-end model or invest in some dedicated external hard drives. The Wii U will still be sold in two models, basic and deluxe. The $300 basic model features 8GB of storage and the $350 deluxe model has 32GB. Despite criticisms, the Wii U is already generating excitement among gamers, critics, and analysts. Best Buy plans midnight release events at its locations across the U.S., and some prospective Wii U owners are already lining up at the Nintendo World store in New York City, reports.