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Comment Donate it to a public blood bank (Score 1) 321

Recently a consumer interest show in Quebec did a report on private cord banks.
One of the big sticking point is that the window of actual usefulness is relatively short as there is only a small quantity of stem cells available, and usually once someone is over 50kg there is not enough stem cells for treatment.

Here is the link in french
http://www.radio-canada.ca/emissions/la_facture/2011-2012/Reportage.asp?idDoc=208988

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 1) 599

$20,000 buys a HELL of a lot of gasoline.

Well let's do more math. I'm driving an Altima, that costed about 29k new.

40k - 29k = 11k for gasoline.
I'm spending about 60$ per week on gasoline, so that comes out to 3120$ per year.
I always lease for 4 years ( I just don't have the time to always fix the car ) so that comes to 12480$ overall.
The average price I pay for gas is probably around 1.28$/liter. The prices in QC tend to follow a sin wave of +/- 10c on a graph, trending up or down. Not only that, but the supply for Montreal comes from the Brent barrel, which tends to be more expensive then regular oil.

Most of my commute is (return) well within the 35 miles EV range, and from what I understand the heating is electric.

This is before the subsidy in QC for the Volt (not sure how much, but afaik it's in the 5 to 7k range).

So in my case it would make sense to switch to a Volt or even a LEAF once the lease on my current car finishes.

One of the problem with the Prius in Montreal is that you need heating 6 months in a year. Last I heard, the heater was still powered through the gas engine which means that I'm using fuel most of time. Also having to use gas to go about 30kph is retarded.

Your Rights Online

Filesonic Removes Ability To Share Files 412

Ihmhi writes "In the wake of the Megaupload takedown, Filesonic has elected to take preventative measures against a similar fate. The front page and all files now carry the following message: 'All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.' Whether or not this will actually deter the U.S. government from taking action remains to be seen."

Comment Re:Probably not (Score 2) 428

I also saw people complaining how Megaupload didn't take down some files, even if someone reported them as pirated content. However, only copyright owner is able to fill a proper DMCA notice. You can not, as a random citizen, submit a DMCA notice and expect the file to be taken down. Let alone just reporting a 'pirated file' via email.

There is a lot of copyright management companies out there that do the work for the *AA. There is no provided way to validate a specific takedown. Say you run a site like MegaUpload and you receive a takedown notice from a gmail account. Could you really beleive in the email as being done in good faith? What about all those companies that don't even take the time to publish SPF records.

As reported by MegaUpload, 70% of fortune 500 companies had accounts linked to them. How would you sort out what is infringing from what isn't? It could happen that works in progress and final works get distributed internally that way.

What about remixes?

As for just having a bunch of regexes, Hotfile lawsuits against Warner show how it can fail (see: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/hotfile-turns-tables-accusing-warner-brothers-of-dmca-abuse.ars )

There is also the the matter of volume. In the indictment, it says that Carpathia (a hosting provided) provided 25PB to megaupload. This would be a lot of files to verify. And even then you could make a lot of false positive and a lot of false negative. It is not specified how much data capacity was at Leaseweb, however the amount of servers was similar.

As for deleting the files, the DMCA doesn't require that. It says:

"(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;"

Removing the link in question would disable access to the material, which is what MegaUpload did.

Science

EU Scientists Working On Laser To Rip a Hole In Spacetime 575

astroengine writes "Those pesky physicists are at it again; they want to build a laser so powerful that it will literally rip spacetime apart. Why? To prove the existence of virtual particles in the quantum vacuum, potentially unravel extra dimensions and possibly find the root of dark matter. The $1.6 billion Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility (known as ELI) will be built somewhere in Europe by the end of the decade and physicists are hoping the ten high-powered lasers — delivering 200 petawatts of power at a target for less than a trillionth of a second — will turn up some surprises about the very fabric of the Universe."
Iphone

Apple Bans Game App That Criticizes Smartphone Production 213

An anonymous reader sends word that Apple has removed from the App Store a game called Phone Story, which walks players through the creation of a smartphone, highlighting many of the negative aspects. There are four brief stages: running a mining facility in the Congo, saving suicidal factory workers, handing out phones to oblivious consumers, and generating e-waste through planned obsolescence. Apple said Phone Story violated sections 15.2, 16.1, 21.1, and 21.2 of the App Store guidelines, which make reference to "objectionable or crude content" and "offensive or mean-spirited commentary." A short video of the game has been posted at Kotaku.

Comment Fixing voter turn out (Score 1) 405

Instead of spending so much money on the hopeless white elephant of online voting, they should just give out 50 to 100$ cash at the polling station to everyone who actually votes.

Even an online voting system where the whole software stack is open source, hardware is standard commodity hardware, with feeds of the votes cast provided live to all political parties, and with the software stack and hardware specs provided to the parties and independent observers, it would still be impossible to protect against the gazillions of issues on the voter's computers that could still affect the results.

Image

Senate Bill Could Make It Illegal To Upload Lip-Synced Videos Screenshot-sm 239

An anonymous reader writes "According to Copyright lawyer Ben Sidbury, Senate bill 978 could make it a criminal act for someone to lip sync to a song and post the said video on Youtube, even if credits are given. 'The way the statute is written... It would now criminalize anybody that performs a copyrighted work, which is essentially nowadays any song under the sun. In theory at least, the record companies or the Department of Justice could go after a 9-year old or a 12 year old or a 30 year old for publicly performing a song.' said Sidbury."

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