Epic Games president Michael Capps did an interview recently with GamesIndustry, and he had some interesting things to say about the future of downloadable content, and how it will affect the retail games market. He also discussed the trend toward social gaming, and Epic's plans in that regard. Quoting: "I'm not sure how big it is here [in Europe], but the secondary market is a huge issue in the United States. Our primary retailer makes the majority of its money off of secondary sales, and so you're starting to see games taking proactive steps toward that by ... if you buy the retail version you get the unlock code. I've talked to some developers who are saying 'If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay USD 20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free.' We don't make any money when someone rents it, and we don't make any money when someone buys it used — way more than twice as many people played Gears than bought it."

wattrlz writes "Apparently the current champion of v1*gr4 spamming solicited some of the wrong email boxes. Alexy Tolstokozhev was recently found murdered in his palatial spam-bought estate near Moscow. The implications of this hands on method of system administration are staggering." Update: 10/12 15:28 GMT by Z : Good story. Unfortunately, probably a fake.

We last interviewed CmdrTaco, along with Hemos, in January 2000. Slashdot's 10th anniversary seems like a good time to put Rob back on the hot seat. He's older now and married, his former hobby site now has well over one million registered user IDs, and Linux has gone from "upstart" operating system to a normal part of the IT landscape. So ask away, one question per post. Expect to see answers to at least 10 of the highest-moderated questions next week. And if you miss your chance to participate in this interview, don't worry. We'll probably do another one with CmdrTaco sometime between 2014 and 2017. CT: Also the clock is ticking if you want to sign up for a Slashdot 10-Year Anniversary party if you want a T-Shirt or a shot at the $1k ThinkGeek gift certificate.

iandoh writes "Cool research: Geologists at Stanford University and the US Geological Survey have drilled a 2.5 mile deep borehole into the San Andreas fault. They've extracted over one ton of rock from 2 miles down, and they'll be installing sensors down the length of the borehole."

J Cardella writes "On August 31, Jatol.com — a hosting company that had operated for five years, providing excellent support and reasonable prices — disappeared, leaving hundreds, if not thousands of people without access to their Web content and email. There is speculation that Jatol may have stopped paying their host, Fastservers. The evidence is that Fastservers has been turning off the machines with Jatol's customers' content. Jatol had already collected September hosting fees from their customers (including myself). The story gets stranger. The owner of Jatol.com, Tim Tooley, has also disappeared. He was apparently very ill for some time, and speculation on the thread goes from his skipping the country to lying dead in his home. Fastservers apparently is unwilling to turn the machines back on, so people could get their content, without authorization from Tooley."

An anonymous reader writes "Writing local Web applications can be quick, easy, and efficient for solving specific Intranet problems. Learn why a Web browser is sometimes a better interface than a GUI application and why experienced Web developers find themselves struggling to learn a GUI toolkit, and descover that a simple CGI script would serve their needs perfectly well, if not better."

shadowspar writes "A Canadian province has pulled several models of Konami slot machines out of service after a news investigation revealed that they briefly flash a jackpot result on the screen every time they are played. Konami claims that the 'subliminal' jackpot images are unintentional and the result of a bug, but other US and Canadian jurisdictions are looking at pulling the machines as well."

swehack writes "The guys over at winhistory.de managed to get their Windows XP Professional running on a very minimal box: an Intel Pentium clocked down to 8 MHz with 20 MB of RAM. (The installer won't work with less than 64 MB, but after installing you can remove memory.) The link has plenty of pictures of their progress in achieving this dubious milestone. They deserve a Golden Hourglass award for 'extreme waste of time.' What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?"

njkid1 passed on a link to GameDaily's coverage of the new, confirmed, N-Gage. Nokia's ill-fated device is returning, and this time they're already touting some big names attached to the project. EA Mobile and Gameloft, along with other (unnamed) studios are slated to bring new games to the beleaguered handheld gaming appliance. What do you think about this? Will a new N-Gage be able to pull you away from your DS?

yavori writes "Internet Explorer 7 has kicked in at last on all MS Windows OS running PCs because of the fact M$ decided to force it's users to migrate through update. In fact this has started a IE7 Web Developers Nightmare. The article actually explains that most of the small company B2C sites may just fall from grace because of IE7 incompatibility. One of the coolest thing IE7 is unable to do is actually processing form data when clicked on an INPUT field of TYPE IMG... which is pretty uncool for those using entire payment processes with such INPUT fields."

GrumpySimon writes "Wikipedia has blocked the entire country of Qatar from editing pages. Whilst the ban is due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, the fact that this belongs to the country's sole high-speed internet provider has the unintended consequence of stopping Qataris from editing the wiki. The ban has raised concerns about impartiality — the majority of Al Jazeera journalists operate out of Qatar, for example. This raises a number of issues about internet connectivity in small countries — what other internet bottlenecks like this exist?" Update: 01/02 13:32 GMT by Z : Jim Wales wrote in the comments that the story is 'completely false'. Either way, the ban has been lifted and anonymous editing is once again possible from Qatar.

Isaac Bowman writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Virgina has a proposed law that would require sex offenders to register their email and IM screen names in an attempt to monitor and control their presence on social networking sites like MySpace."

DECS writes "It has been widely reported that Apple secured a patent worth a "billion dollars." According to a patent attorney involved in the issue, Apple will be "after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to pay royalties." The good news is that all the news reports were based on misleading hyperbole. " Don't let the title fool you; the essay is a good background on patents, the horror stories of some of them but also why companies feel compelled to seek patents as a business "safety" precaution.

netbuzz writes "Dilbert's Scott Adams kicked off the idea in his November 19th blog post, saying there isn't anything wrong with this country that President Bill Gates couldn't cure in less time than it takes to get a new operating system out the door. Today, the idea is moving forward with a brand-new 'Bill Gates for President' Web site. Adams is also back on the campaign trail, flogging the site and Gates' candidacy." A blog post at Network World includes a lot of eye-rolling about this idea, but neither Adams nor the folks at the 'Gates for President' website seem to be taking this lightly.