As Slashdot and Ars Technica have reported, the saga of Prenda Law has taken a new and perhaps final turn. Today Judge Wright has finally released his long-awaited order. It is a scathing 11 page document, suggesting Prenda masterminds John Steele and Paul Hansmeier should be handed over for criminal investigation. The order itself is "thoroughly peppered with Star Trek references", as Ars so elegantly put it, and even begins with a famous Spock-quote. So how can we - the citizens of cyberspace - show our appreciation and admiration of Judge Wright - a civil worker who has gone above and beyond his duties in a case many others might have just dumped in the trash? The answer is: A crowd funded statue! I proudly present to you: The unofficial Otis D. Wright, II Statue Fundraiser. The possible themes are endless - Judge Wright could very well see himself as Hulk, Q, a Borg king, or a Starfleet Captain. Could this be the first truly crowd funded piece of art to go down in history ... perhaps even with your name on it? (Disclosure: I am the initiator of the IndieGoGo campaign).

With surprisingly little attention from the media, Microsoft has kicked off the World Partner Conference (WPC) 2008 in Houston, Texas. It is the 9th time that Microsoft are bringing their partners together and this year over 10.000 people and 1700 Microsoft partners are attending the conference.

Much like last year, Hosting and Software as a Service (SaaS) are big topics, although there is also room for the expanding Dynamics suite of Business solutions (with a primary focus on the Dynamics CRM solution). In addition Microsoft has revealed the release date for Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008. Both will be available to customers on November 12, although they are already available to Microsoft Partners for testing.

Windows Home Server has some attention this year as well. Microsoft started pushing their Home Server product more seriously at CeBit in March, and that trend is still holding.

Channel Insider has a few more details, and Steve Ballmer's keynote tomorrow may reveal more interesting bits from Redmond.

My faith in Slashdot is fading by the minute. And for the first time in ages I feel I might be missing out on important news in the IT industry when reading Slashdot.

Why?

I recently submitted an important story about a lawsuit against Intel in the EU. In fact, the EU has sued Intel on antitrust charges (just as severe as the ones brought up against Microsoft) and the potential fine is literally billions of dollars. This story was news in a number of other media, including Groklaw, Computerworld, News.com, CNN, BBC, cNet and ArsTechnica. And for some mystery reason, the Slashdot admins decided this was not newsworthy.

I cant believe it - it's the worlds largest CPU manufacturer who gets sued by the most powerful legal entity in Europe - and not a word on Slashdot!

I have submitted lots of stories before, so this is not about being disappointed I didn't make the index page. I can totally accept my small-time regular stories not being picked up by the almighty Slashdot. But this is different.

My follow-up post on the subject (Intel had an official comment/pressrelease about the case) was also rejected. My sarcastic "ask Slashdot" article where I bitched about the lack of this particular story (from ANY source for Christ's sake) was also rejected, although this was no big surprise to me :-)

In the future I will rely less on Slashdot for my news reading. I counted on Slashdot for all the big news - it has been my way of keeping me informed about the IT industry for years. Now Slashdot has proven that the main news moderators are totally clueless about what is newsworthy and was is not. So I guess I will start looking for other sources.

Am I all alone in this impression? Or am I totally out of sync with the real world - and Intel getting sued by the EU for billions of dollars is not important news at all?