Microsoft has patented the process of shutting down your computer, which as a former Windows user I find surprising as everyone knows Microsoft’s real innovation was the Blue Screen of Death. Microsoft may have shown admirable restraint in not patenting the computer crash, but the film industry has shown no such restraint–in fact it is hiring the cybermafia to crash Web sites with offending material.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/09/01/1456235/Microsoft-Patents-OS-Shutdown?from=rss via Byline An anonymous reader writes “You would think that shutting down software could be fairly simple from an end user’s view. If I ask you to shut it down, would you mind shutting it actually down, please? Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, because you need to ask the user if they really want to shut down and if unsaved documents should be saved. And that warrants a patent that also covers Mac OS X. Next time you shut down Windows, remember how complicated it is for Windows to shut down. Perhaps that is the reason why this procedure can take minutes in some cases.”
Meanwhile the film industry has come up with it’s own unique method for “shutting you down”: hiring cyber hitmen to take down services that happen to have copyrighted material on their Web sites.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/0047234/Film-Industry-Hires-Cyber-Hitmen-To-Take-Down-Pirates?from=rss via Byline thelostagency writes “Girish Kumar, managing director of Aiplex Software says his company is being hired by the film industry to attack online pirates. He says if a provider did not do anything to remove the link or content hosted on its site, his company would launch what is known as a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the offending computer server. From the article: ‘Kumar said that at the moment most of the payment for his company’s services came from the film industry in India. “We are tied up with more than 30 companies in Bollywood. They are the major production houses.” As for Hollywood films, he said they, too, used his services.’”
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/09/augmented-reality-twinkle/
It’s a pen! It’s a voice recorder! It’s both–and Livescribe’s advocates claim it will revolutionize note-taking in class.
Season seven of this venerable intermedia festival finds newly minted U-Me MFAs mixing it up with the likes of Fluxus mainstay Dick Higgins and DJ paul j. bosse, the “junky but funky beat mechanic.”
The 
Famed science fiction author Neal Stephenson has unveiled a digital novel platform created with a cabal of interactive fiction / martial arts enthusiasts. To judge from initial glimpses of their first interactive novel, The Mongoliad, this “new” platform is more of a combination of older ideas: part interactive CD-ROM (Voyager in the 1980s), part paid subscription (the New York Times in the 1990s), and part user-generated content (Wikipedia in the 2000s). At least the authors have given up on