eldavojohn writes "In the ongoing BP debacle, the Obama administration imposed a six-month moratorium on offshore drilling and a halt to 33 exploratory wells going into the Gulf of Mexico. Now a federal judge (in New Orleans, no less) is unsatisfied with the reasons for this and stated, 'An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.' The state's governor agrees on the grounds that blocking drilling will cost the state thousands of lucrative jobs." The government quickly vowed to appeal, pointing out that a moratorium on 33 wells is unlikely to have a devastating impact in a region hosting 3,600 active wells. And reader thomst adds this insight on the judge involved in the case: "Yahoo's Newsroom is reporting that the judge who overturned the drilling moratorium holds stock in drilling companies. You can view his financial disclosure forms listing his stock holdings online at Judicial Watch (PDF)."

alphadogg writes "Cisco has finally publicly acknowledged it won't add support for new third-party devices to its security information and event monitoring appliance, ending months of speculation about the future of its Monitoring, Analysis and Response System. Some claim it's the beginning of the end for MARS as a multi-vendor SIEM device. 'MARS customers can expect non-Cisco network device data and signature updates to continue for currently supported third-party systems, but no new third-party devices will be added,' Cisco declared in a statement, noting that 'Cisco MARS continues to focus on supporting Cisco devices for threat identification and mitigation.' Cisco's SIEM competitors this week have eagerly grabbed at the topic of Cisco MARS freezing third-party support because of a Gartner research memo published Oct. 29 in which analyst Mark Nicolett stated, 'Cisco has quietly begun informing its customers of a decision to freeze support for most non-Cisco event sources with its [MARS].'"

Gamespot reports that convention companies IDG and Gen Con LLC are talking about an event merge. IDG has already gotten the nod from the ESA for their 'GamePro Expo', and expects to attract no less than 25,000 gamers in October of next year. If Gen Con joins the fray, that will add table-top roleplaying, board games, and the like into the mix for some sort of nerdapalooza. From the article: "If the two events co-locate at the LACC, the current plan is to see Gen Con base its exhibits in the convention center's West Hall, with the IDG game event placing its exhibitors in both South Hall and the lower-level Kentia Hall. One impediment to the two groups linking up could be due to the current success IDG is having selling its upcoming game event into the industry. If it can sell out the LACC's nearly 550,000 square feet of expo space on its own, there may be no need nor reason to bring Gen Con into the mix." If this goes through, there would be no need for the Gen Con Indy event, which would only be held a few months before. I knew E3's demise was no good.