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The Internet

NZ File-Sharers, Remixers Guilty Upon Accusation 449

Posted by kdawson from the how-laws-are-made dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Next month, New Zealand is scheduled to implement Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act. The controversial act provides 'Guilt Upon Accusation,' which means that if a file-sharer is simply accused of copyright infringement he/she will be punished with summary Internet disconnection. Unlike most laws, this one has no appeal process and no punishment for false accusation, because they were removed after public consultation. The ISPs are up in arms and now artists are taking a stand for fair copyright."
Internet Explorer

Microsoft's Thumbtack, an Answer To Google Notebook 107

Posted by timothy from the portal-of-calls dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Live Labs have introduced a new service that lets users collect snippets of information from Web sites and share the collections with others. It's similar in concept to Mozilla's Joey, a defunct project that let people copy and paste portions of Web pages onto a single page that they could access from their mobile phones or another computer. Thumbtack is also like other available services, including Google Notebook. But Thumbtack developers think their service has a difference. 'Thumbtack stands apart in its ability to introspect on incoming data in order to automatically classify it and extract structure from it using machine learning,' according to the FAQ about the service."

Comment Re:Quite a letdown... (Score 5, Interesting) 297

by ejdmoo (#26006167) Attached to: Scientists Achieve Mental Body-Swapping

If you've ever done an experiment like this (there are smaller scale versions), they are very weird. I can't imagine a full body experience.

Example:
The one I have done involves sitting behind someone, eyes closed, and having your nose stroked (by a third party) while you stroke someone else's nose in front of you. After a few seconds, your brain "clicks" and you feel like you have an incredibly long nose. This is because of the feedback loop where your brain feels something on your nose and your finger simultaneously, and your mental body image just changes instantly.
Operating Systems

Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS 272

Posted by kdawson from the in-the-tree dept.
Linux Blog recommends an interview up on the O'Reilly site with Greg Kroah-Hartman, long-time Linux kernel hacker and the current Linux kernel maintainer for the USB driver core. He updates the free Linux driver program announced almost two years ago, which has really caught traction now with more than 300 developers volunteering. The interviewer begins by asking about Kroah-Hartman's claim that the Linux kernel now supports more devices than any other operating system ever has. "[One factor is] the ease of writing drivers; Linux drivers are at normally one-third smaller than Windows drivers or other operating system drivers. We have all the examples there, so it's trivial to write a new one if you have new hardware, usually because you can copy the code and go. We maintain them... forever, so the old ones don't disappear and we run on every single processor out there. I mean Linux is 80% of the world's top 500 super computers right now and we're also the number one embedded operating system today. We've got both sides of the market because it's — yeah it's pretty amazing. I don't know why, but we're doing something right."
Software

Algorithms Can Make You Pretty 288

Posted by timothy from the too-late-for-me dept.
caffeinemessiah writes "The New York Times has an interesting story on a new algorithm by researchers from Tel Aviv University that modifies a facial picture of a person to conform to standards of attractiveness. Based on a digital library of pictures of people who have been judged 'attractive,' the algorithm finds the nearest match and modifies an input picture so it conforms to the 'attractive' person's proportions. The trick, however, is that the resultant pictures are still recognizable as the original person. Here's a quick link to a representative picture of the process. Note that this is a machine-learning approach to picture modification, not a characterization of beauty, and could just as easily be used to make a person less attractive." Note: As reader Trent Waddington points out, the underlying research was mentioned in an earlier story as well.
Biotech

Virtual Fence Could Modernize the Old West 216

Posted by CmdrTaco from the too-strange-for-a-topic-icon dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "For more than a century, ranchers in the West have kept cattle in place with fences of barbed wire, split wood and, more recently, electrified wires. Now, animal science researchers with the Department of Agriculture are working on a system that will allow cowboys to herd their cattle remotely via radio by singing commands and whispering into their ears and tracking movements by satellite and computer. A video of Dean Anderson, a researcher at the USDA's Jornada Experimental Range at Las Cruces, NM., shows how he has built radios that attach to an animal's head that allow a person at the other end to issue a range of commands — gentle singing, sharp commands, or a buzz like a bee or snake — to get the cattle to move where one wants them to. Anderson says it would cost $900 today to put a radio device on one head of cattle, but he says costs will fall and the entire herd wouldn't have to be outfitted, just the 'leaders.' Much of the research has focused on how cattlemen can identify which cattle in their herds are the ones that the others follow."
Portables

Submission + - HTC refuses to fix defective, misadvertised device (engadgetmobile.com) 6

Submitted by Shadow7789
Shadow7789 writes: After months of complaints by customers, claiming poor video performance on a plethora of recent devices (which were advertised as multimedia devices), HTC has decided to announce that it will not be providing fixes for the affected devices, instead claiming that the "overall value of its devices based on their combination of functionality and connectivity exceeds their ability to play or render high-resolution video."
Handhelds

Submission + - Driver issues plague HTC handhelds (htcclassaction.org)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: The latest and greatest HTC SmartPhones and PocketPC's, including the TyTN II, are plagued with driver issues, namely missing or grossly underperforming video, touchscreen and camera drivers. After months of complaining to HTC and them hardly even acknowledging the issue, there is now even talk of a possible lawsuit to get HTC to fix the problems.

Affected devices include the "PDA of the year" HTC TyTN II (Kaiser, AT&T Tilt, T-Mobile MDA Vario III, Vodafone v1615), the "iPhone killers" HTC Touch / Touch Dual / Touch Cruise, the HTC Titan (Sprint Mogul, Verizon XV6800) and several other less known devices.
Music

Submission + - Multiformat Listening Test at 64kbps 1

Submitted by
prospective_user
prospective_user writes: "Do you think you have good ears? Think again.

The community at Hydrogenaudio has prepared a Public Listening Test for comparison of the most popular audio codecs (AAC, Vorbis, and Microsoft's WMA included) in a battle to see how they stand at compressing audio at 64kbps.

Many of the participants right now have expressed their surprise at being unable to determine which is the original and which is the compressed version of 18 samples covering a vast amount of musical styles.

The results of this test (and other that are conducted at Hydrogenaudio) will be used by the developers of the codecs to further improve the "transparency" and let this kind of test be even harder.

Everyone is invited to participate and show how good your listening is!"

PS3 Launch Details Announced 796

Posted by Zonk from the that's-a-lot-of-quarters dept.
Sony's conference offered up reassurance that a number of their titles will be playable at this year's E3. The controller will sense movement, allowing the player to move an onscreen avatar 'naturally'. They also released the system's launch details. The North American PS3 launch will occur on Nov. 17th, 2006. The 20GB HDD version will retail for $499, and the 60GB HDD version will go for $599. They promise 4 million launch units by December 31st. Update: 05/09 03:57 GMT by Z : Apparently, not only does the $499 system have a smaller harddrive, but it has fewer features as well.

Google Moving PRC Records Out of China 267

Posted by Zonk from the covering-their-bases dept.
Lam1969 writes "Google says it is moving search records out of China and back to the U.S. to prevent the Chinese government from accessing them, reports Computerworld. Additionally, the company will let Chinese users know when search results are being censored. According to Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, 'Some of the people want to query about democracy, but most of them just want to know about their pop stars.'"

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