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Music

Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA Again In Tenenbaum 528

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Despite having had some time to get their act together, Obama's Department of Justice has filed yet another brief defending the RIAA's outlandish statutory damages theory — that someone who downloaded an mp3 with a 99-cent retail value, causing a maximum possible damages of 35 cents, is liable for from $750 to $150,000 for each such file downloaded, in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The 25- page brief (PDF) continues the DOJ's practice of (a) ignoring the case law which holds that the Supreme Court's due process jurisprudence is applicable to statutory damages, (b) ignoring the law review articles to like effect, (c) ignoring the actual holding of the 1919 case they rely upon, (d) ignoring the fact that the RIAA failed to prove 'distribution' as defined by the Copyright Act, and (e) ignoring the actual wording and reasoning of the Supreme Court in its leading Gore and Campbell decisions. Jon Newton of p2pnet.net attributes the Justice Department's 'oversights' to the 'eye-popping number of people [in its employ] who worked for, and/or are directly connected with, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music's RIAA.'"
Businesses

EFF Launches TOS Tracker 65

stoolpigeon writes with this quote from the EFF: "'Terms of Service' policies on websites define how Internet businesses interact with you and use your personal information. But most web users don't read these policies — or understand that the terms are constantly changing. To track these ever-evolving documents, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is launching TOSBack: a 'terms of service' tracker for Facebook, Google, eBay, and other major websites. ... The issue of terms-of-service changes — and how and why they are made — was highlighted earlier this year when Facebook modified its terms of use. Facebook users worried that the change gave the company the right to use members' content indefinitely. After a user revolt, Facebook announced that it would restore the former terms while it worked through the concerns users had raised."

Comment Re:like every other sales demo (Score 1) 210

I can't agree more wholeheartedly with the above (unclear specifications). I see it all the time in my business too.

If you go to the folllowing page: http://slashweb.org/programming/25-best-programmer-comics.html [top 25 programmer jokes], one is the classic Dilbert strip where Alice tries to nail down a client's specifications... one of my favourite jokes of all time.

Comment Re:SCI (Score 3, Informative) 78

The most well known attempt to create an interpreter for SCI games, FreeSCI, has recently been merged into the ScummVM project. Development has been going on rapidly since then, and some SCI games are already completable, with support for more to follow.

Note though that this is only in the daily SVN builds, not in the 0.13 stable builds.

Comment The Wii MotionPlus is an expansion device (Score 4, Interesting) 153

You know.. I was all ready to hate them for not making the new sensor backwards compatible with older games, but then it occurred to me that it says that the new motion sensor hooks into the base of the existing Wiimote. It may simply be that the connection there for peripherals/nunchuks doesn't allow the new sensor to supercede the existing Wiimote movement sensors.. that may be why only new games will be able to make use of the extra information.

Of course we could then always argue that Nintendo should have re-designed the Wiimote from scratch with the new sensor embedded if that's the case. If so, I would hope that they do, because there are a lot of existing Wii games that would benefit from the extra sensitivity.

Comment Delphi 5 IDE for me (Score 1) 1131

I've been using the Delphi 5 IDE for years as a text editor; in fact, I use it as one more these days than I do any actual programming in Delphi using it. I consider it to have been the optimal version of the Delphi line, in terms of starting up quickly, and it has all the useful features i need of a text editor, like support for multiple windows, each which can have multiple open tabbed files. Also it has useful support functionalities, like the ability to scan folders for a given text sequence.. just the thing when I'm looking at some old C project and need to quickly find all the references to a particular variable.

Comment It's Ironic (Score 1) 156

It's ironic that for all that it was a milestone in the development of CGI in movies, the way things are getting more and more screwed up in America, years from now no-one will be able to watch it anymore.

I read an article recently at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/3/28/132751/380 - the department of Homeland Security has classified Tron as "sensitive" because some locations were filmed at a nuclear research facility, and they're worried about 25 year old nuclear secrets being revealed. They're apparently currently trying to seize all of the footage from Disney and get all copies of the movie pulled from stores.

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The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

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