Fiscus asks: "Alcohol is a part of most peoples lives, and I'm sure many Slashdot readers rely on a couple of 'cleansing ales' as the week draws to an end. While most of us drink alcohol, not many decide to start brewing their own - now is your chance! And if you already homebrew, a new forum has been setup to speak with fellow brewers. Homebrewing can open up a whole variety of benefits; brew your favourite beer, experiment, make rocket fuel, as well as impressing friends. The new forum, is Australian based, however everyone is welcome and I would love to see some Slashdot readers down there sharing advise/tips/recipes for the christmas homebrewing season! Happy Homebrewing!"

candiman asks: "I am involved in developing a peer-reviewed journal to serve a large group of researchers who currently have no publication that suits their needs. To keep costs (both production and subscription) down we are looking to do it online, with one or two printed editions each year. We are a not-for-profit organization - we aim to break even, not make money. As the most web savvy person involved I am charged with developing the actual system. To save on wheel development time I have been looking for existing, free (beer and speech), management systems. We need something that is (relatively) easy to use for tech (but not web) savvy people. It must be easily extendable as the journal grows in size. It must be standards based (we don't want to be locked into any sort of proprietary formats). The ability to support subscribers and the ability to maintain both free and subscriber sections would also be useful (we are planning to charge a low annual subscription to access the journal's most recent edition - after three months the papers will be released to the free area). Does the Slashdot community have an suggestions or experience in this area?"

Slashback tonight brings you quick updates on the stolen copy of Newton's Principia, Linux at Wal-Mart (dot com), Free software vs. free software in India, and food for the desperate computerist. Read on!

EyesWideOpen writes "Wired News is running two articles about numerous case mods to Macs. The first article is about Japanese mods that include painted PowerBook lids, a black iMac and a 'Beer Server G3' among others. The other article features mods such as the Philco radio Mac, a Mac writing tablet and an awesome G4 tower that lights up with fluorescent blue neon and has a LCD screen mounted in the front panel that can mirror the desktop or display other visualizations."

Slashback is back, with a largish handful of updates and new information about previously run stories. Topics this go-round include Xbox sales in Australia, the Novell / MySQL connection, Adam Smith (no, not that Adam Smith)'s bizarre anti-GPL statement mentioned yesterday, and more. Read on for the details.

ackthpt writes "Code named Red Storm, Cray and Sandia National Laboratories (US Dept. of Energy) to build a 100 Teraflop super computer employing AMD's Opteron (Hammer) processors. Alluded to in the WSJ (non-free-as-in-beer subscription required), also in Infoworld, and Reuters."

Spike and others wrote in about this ongoing saga: subsidiary of Vivendi claims that a subsidiary of News Corporation cracked their satellite TV smart cards and posted for public download. (See our previous stories.) Two new stories from the Associated Press and Yahoo note that although the two companies are apparently dropping the original lawsuit (since News Corp. is making a large investment in Vivendi), Echostar is now claiming they were hacked too and the U.S. Justice Department is investigating possible criminal charges.

An anonymous reader writes "Just submitted on the XBox developers list, a new Xbox game (iso) is available. 'The battle for world dominance is raging. And now, you can play the game on your xbox(tm). Choose alliance with either Tux or Clippy, and finish the mother of all disputes right here and right now. This game is free (as in beer), and will run on any xbox that has been modified for use with the GNU/Linux operating system. The game runs on top of xbox-linux from Sourceforge's xbox-linux project.' The game features include: Industry heroes like CLIPPY, TUX, BIL, STV, RMS, LNS; Battle cries, each unique to the in-game characters, ranging from "Developers! Developers! Developers!" to "GNU!"; Anti aliased alpha-transparency graphics; Explosions." I have no idea if they're serious, and it doesn't matter.

Bart writes "The BBC reports One of the world's first research centres dedicated to studying the social, political and economic effects of the net has opened in Oxford" I've offered to trade CowboyNeal to them as a research subject for a case of beer. I think studying the effects of the internet on him will save lives. See? Someone is thinking of the children.

JustinMette writes "Are you an independent game developer trying to make it in the industry? If so, you will probably be extremely interested to read about the upcoming IndieGamesCon 2002 hosted by GarageGames. You can read all about the conference in an interview with Jay Moore, GarageGames Marketing Manager. And yes, the conference is sponsored by a Brewery with the official "indie" beer, Spank Dog Ale! "World Domination through Collaboration" (official conference motto), Justin Mette 21-6 Productions Inc."

Slashback brings you another flurry of updates (below) on the recently reported Mozilla security leak, the Greek gaming ban (you'll never guess), the mega-hour TiVO mod mentioned earlier today, the long-term healthiness of the Atkins Diet, and more. Read on for the details.

yalla writes: "After being in Pottenstein, Coniston and Bouillon, the Linuxbierwanderung is taking Place in Doolin, Ireland. As every year, we're holding lectures, take a lot of hikes and obvisiously enjoy the local beer. This time we even got our own beer: The 'Black Tux' (Stout), 'Reddish Brown Beer' (Red Ale) and the 'Holy Penguin Pee' (which is a Lager). The beer was sponsored by the Irish Linux User Group. Our network setup is sort of weird, like last year; we connected the camping-site via wireless LAN and directional antennas with 'The Hall,' the local community center, which is the central gathering place for all activities."

As reported in this Wired article, joelav22 writes that an "Iowa college plans to go completely paperless. There are no libraries, just work stations for e-books and online information. the article supports that 'The school plans to be an entirely paper-free campus. Last year, about 75 telecommunications students participated in a pilot program to go paperless. Each student used a Compaq iPaq handheld to access e-textbooks, syllabi and class materials, and to take notes and exams.' less time spent in a library equals more time for beer and filming amateur Girls Gone Wild digital video!"

defectorg writes "R2-D2 Interactive Astromech Droid is coming to us this summer. Equipped with innovative speech recognition technology, infrared scanning technology and working sonar navigation, this R2-D2 recognizes 40 spoken phrases, plays six exciting games, and sings three tunes. It even has a retractable arm that lets it hold a 12-ounce beverage! Now this would be a nice thing to hack wireless lan iinto, let it notify new mail, read news and most important, ~/bin/let_r2d2_get_a_cold_beer_somehow.pl."

Several readers sent in notes about their Slashdot Meetup experiences; we'll start with tuxedo-steve 's report from Melbourne: "Just a quick wrapup from the Melbourne, Australia /. Meetup. We ran into problems due to the assigned meeting place being closed at the scheduled meetup time, but ended up getting a fair few people (20-30 probably) herded up before moving to a bar that would provide us with service. A good night ensued, fueled by tech-related conversation and a fair amount of beer for those so inclined. For those yet to have their meetup, be sure your meeting place is going to be open!" Below are a few more local reports -- feel free to add yours in the comments.

Jim Gleason sent us a notice of the upcoming Linux Beer Hike 2002: ""Linuxbierwanderung," a.k.a. The Linux Beer Hike or LBW for short, is an annual summer event in which Linux users from around the world meet in a region with a high density of brew pubs. The objectives are valorous - hike to the pub, drink beer and exchange ideas until closing time, then hack Linux through until it's morning again. Upwards of 100 people plan to rendez-vous on the west coast of Ireland to enjoy the fast bandwidth and attend one of the ad hoc technical seminars. Pints of local ale and traditional Irish music should only help foster a nourishing environment for a week's worth of serious Linux use. Funded by a small voluntary donation from each attendee, it is unclear if one can obtain a receipt. This sounds like a tax-deductible business trip to me."

MattE writes: "Alton Brown, for those who aren't familiar, has a cooking show on the Food Network called Good Eats. His new book isn't so much a cookbook, in the current sense of a book that contains a heck of a lot of recipes. (It does, in fact, contain recipes, but it really isn't what the book is about.) See the Perl cookbook, for a translation of this idea to programming. It is a book about cooking that covers science and technique first; Recipes are only example code. He says he is a 'culinary cartographer.'" This sounds like a fun book -- for the rest of Matt's review, read on below.

Lew Pitcher writes "Well, it took a Canadian court to find that a Canadian citizen can own the domain name canadian.biz without being a beer (or a beer company). The Toronto Star is reporting that the Ontario Superiour Court has overruled ICANN's decision to take domain canadian.biz from its current owner and give it to Molson's Breweries (makers of "Canadian" brand beer). A spokesperson for Molsons gave the obligatory statement about disappointment in the decision, and indicated that it was too early to determine if Molsons would appeal the decision. Score one against the bad guys."

hensley writes "There is a (not quite) new effort by the IETF to standardize a framework for network applications, called BEEP, the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol. Standardized in RFC3080, it takes care of all lower level tasks an application level protocol has to like framing, authentication and capabilities negotiation in a modular and lightweight way. In the current issue of Internet Packet Journal (a quite nice and free-as-in-beer technical publication by Cisco) is a well written Introduction to this framework. Why isn't anyone adopting this protocol besides some Java libraries like beep4j and PermaBEEP and a C library called RoadRunner. I couldn't find any applications based on this protocol, regardless of it's promised capabilities. Is everybody still inventing his own application layer protocol?"

dcsmith writes: "This article at the Need To Know web site reports that the free(as in beer) e-mail arm of Yahoo has been replacing certain words in messages received by yahoo.com e-mail accounts. In an apparent attempt to forestall cross-site scripting attacks, 'mocha' becomes 'espresso' and 'free expression' becomes 'free statement'... My personal favorite - since medieval contains the text "eval", it is altered to 'medireview' ... Check Google for the number of web sites containing medireview." Kwelstr points to this story at New Scientist as well.