2muchcoffeeman - Slashdot User

Submission + - Judge Rules Twitter Images Cannot be used Commercially (reuters.com)

Submitted by trekkie314 on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @05:55PM

trekkie314 writes: Reuters reports that a Manhattan District Judge has ruled that AFP and the Washington Post infringed a photographer's copyright by re-using photos he posted on his Twitter account. The judge rejected AFP's claim that a Twitter post was equivalent to making the images available for anyone to use (drawing a distinction between allowing users to re-tweet within the social network and the commercial use of content). The judge also ruled against the photographer's request that he be compensated for each person that viewed the photos, ruling instead that damages would be granted once per infringing image only. This last point should might interesting implications in file-sharing cases--can it set a precedent against massive judgements against peer-to-peer file-sharers?

From the article: "The case is Agence France Presse v. Morel, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 10-02730."

Submission + - Mac or PC? A developer's viewpoint (varonis.com)

Submitted by FreaKBeaNie on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @11:23AM

FreaKBeaNie writes: An enterprise developers' take on what it is like to develop for OSX compared with developing for Windows in .Net. "Since Mac OS X is based on the NeXTStep operating system which is a UNIX-like operating system based on the Mach Kernel and BSD, you might expect that the development environment would be very barebones. The opposite is true – we have been extremely pleased with the maturity and robustness of OS X, Xcode, Objective C and Cocoa...Cocoa is at least as powerful as .NET, if not more powerful in some aspects. As in .NET, support for common things like UI, file management, localization and multi-threading are built into the framework and are very easy to make use of. "

Submission + - IBM's Watson Gets A 'Swear Filter' After Learning The Urban Dictionary (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by

redletterdave

on Thursday January 10, 2013 @04:42PM

redletterdave writes: "IBM's super-computer Watson briefly went from "smart" to "smart ass" with the help of the Urban Dictionary. According to Eric Brown, an IBM research assistant, he and his 35-person team wanted to get Watson to sound more like a real human. After teaching IBM's super-computer the entire Urban Dictionary, however, Watson simply couldn't distinguish polite discourse from profanity. Watson unfortunately learned all of the Urban Dictionary's bad habits, including throwing in overly-crass language at random points in its responses; in answering one question, Watson even reportedly used the word "bullshit" within an answer to one researcher's question. In the end, Brown and his team were forced to remove the Urban Dictionary from Watson's vocabulary, and additionally developed a smart filter to keep Watson from swearing in the future."

Submission + - Symbian Sells Millions, Despite Nokia Pushing Windows Phone (slashdot.org)

Submitted by

Nerval's Lobster

on Thursday January 10, 2013 @04:09PM

Nerval's Lobster writes: "During the fourth quarter of 2012, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones—a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices. The Lumia line runs Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, which largely replaced Symbian as Nokia’s smartphone software of choice. Despite that shift and Nokia's emphasis on Windows Phone, however, the company still sold 2.2 million Symbian smartphones during the quarter. The question remains whether Nokia should have gone with Windows Phone in the first place, or embraced an alternate platform such as Android; an anti-Elop camp has emerged in recent months, arguing that Symbian was still a viable platform before Elop consigned it to the dustbin of tech history. For now at least, both sides seem to be right: Symbian still sells despite Nokia’s attempts to take it increasingly offline, and Lumia phones are selling well. It’ll take more time—perhaps a lot more time—before the ramifications of Elop’s bet become clear."

Submission + - Sniffing Out Signs of Life After Disasters (acs.org)

Submitted by

MTorrice

on Thursday January 10, 2013 @01:53PM

MTorrice writes: "With every breath, people exhale a plume of chemicals. Now German researchers have developed a method to quickly and easily detect this chemical signature of life with a portable device. The team hopes that the approach can help firefighters and other first responders find people trapped inside rubble after earthquakes, terrorist attacks, or other calamities."

Submission + - Synthetic Poop Created to Treat Gastrointestinal Infections (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula on Thursday January 10, 2013 @10:45AM

Zothecula writes: If the clostridium difficile bacterium becomes over-abundant in a person’s colon, the results can include gastrointestinal problems such as severe diarrhea. Ordinarily, c. difficile populations are kept in check by the usually-present beneficial gut bacteria. If those “good” bacteria are killed off as a side effect of taking antibiotics, however, the nasties can take over. The treatment? Well ... it often involves having another person’s stool implanted in your gut via enema. Yikes. Fortunately, a less icky treatment is in the works, that involves the use of a “synthetic poop” known as RePOOPulate.

Submission + - America's Real Criminal Element: Lead (motherjones.com) 1

Submitted by 2muchcoffeeman on Sunday January 06, 2013 @04:15PM

2muchcoffeeman writes: The cause of the great increase in violent crime that started in the 1960s and peaked in the 1990s may have been isolated: lead (chemical symbol Pb). This leads directly to the reason for the sharp decline in violent crime since then: lead abatement programs and especially the ban of tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline starting in 1996.

There are three reasons why this makes sense. First, the statistics correlate almost perfectly. Second, it holds true worldwide with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates. Third, the chemistry and neuroscience of lead gives us good reason to believe the connection. Decades of research has shown that lead poisoning causes significant and probably irreversible damage to the brain. Not only does lead degrade cognitive abilities and lower intelligence, it also degrades a person’s ability to make decisions by damaging areas of the brain responsible for emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility.

Another thing that stands out: if you overlay a map showing areas with higher incidence of violent crime with one showing lead contamination, there's a strikingly high correlation.

Comment Well, duh! (Score 1) 3

by 2muchcoffeeman on Sunday January 06, 2013 @04:05PM (#42497721) Attached to: What are the Unwritten Rules of Deleting Code?

If they were written down they wouldn't be the "unwritten rules of deleting code," would they?

Submission + - Death of Printed Books May Have Been Exaggerated 1

Submitted by razor88x on Saturday January 05, 2013 @08:24PM

razor88x writes: Although just 16% of Americans have purchased an e-book to date, the growth rate in sales of digital books is already dropping sharply. At the same time, sales of dedicated e-readers actually shrank in 2012, as people bought tablets instead. Meanwhile, printed books continue to be preferred over e-books by a wide majority of U.S. book readers. In his blog post Will Gutenberg Laugh Last?, writer Nicholas Carr draws on these statistics and others to argue that, contrary to predictions, printed books may continue to be the book's dominant form. "We may be discovering," he writes, "that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been, rather than an outright substitute."

Submission + - brightbridge wealth management-Windows messenger live to close (brightbridgewealth-management.com)

Submitted by

hapernfa

on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @10:53PM

hapernfa writes: "Microsoft has announced it intends to “retire” its instant message chat tool and replace it with Skype’s messaging tool. The news comes 18 months after the software giant announced it was paying $8.5bn (£5.3bn) for the communications software developer. Brightbridgewealth-management report, Microsoft said Windows Live Messenger (WLM) would be turned off by March 2013 worldwide, with the exception of China. It reflects the firm’s determination to focus its efforts on Skype.
WLM launched in 1999 when it was known as MSN Messenger. Over time, photo delivery, video calls and games were added to the package’s text-based messages. According to internet analysis firm Comscore-Brightbridgewealth-management, WLM still had more than double the number of Skype’s instant messenger facility at the start of this year and was second only in popularity to Yahoo Messenger.
But the Brigthbridge report suggested WLM’s US audience had fallen to 8.3 million unique users, representing a 48% drop year-on-year. By contrast, the number of people using Skype to instant message each other grew over the period.
“When a company has competing products that can result in cannibalization it’s often better to focus on a single one,” said Brian Blau from the consultancy Gartner.
“Skype’s top-up services offer the chance to monetize its users and Microsoft is also looking towards opportunities in the living room.
“Messenger doesn’t seem like an appropriate communications platform for TVs or the firm’s Xbox console – but Skype does.”
He also noted that the firm had opted to integrate Skype into its new Windows Phone 8 smartphone software, eclipsing the effort to integrate WLM into the message threads of the operating system’ previous version. To ease the changeover, Microsoft is offering a tool to migrate WLM messenger contacts over. The risk is that the move encourages users to switch instead to rival platforms such as WhatsApp Messenger, AIM or Google Talk. But Microsoft is at least partially protected by its tie-up with Facebook last year. Skype video calls are now offered as an extra to the social network’s own instant messaging tool."

Submission + - How Websites Know Your Name, Email and Company the First Time You Visit (42floors.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @10:18PM

An anonymous reader writes: Darren Nix works for 42Floors, a business that helps people find office space. He recently received a marketing email for a service that offered to identify visitors to his website. After squeezing some information out of the marketer and playing around with a demo account, he now explains exactly how sketchy companies track you presence across multiple websites. The marketer offered to provide Nix with "tracking code that would sit in your web site" which would "grab a few key pieces of data from each visitor." This includes IP addresses and search engine data. The marketer's company would then automatically analyze the data and send back whatever personal information they've collected on that user from different websites. Thus, it's entirely possible for a site to know your name, email address, and company on your very first visit, and without any interaction on your part. Nix writes, 'A real-world analogue would be this scenario: You drive to Home Depot and walk in. Closed-circuit cameras match your face against a database of every shopper that has used a credit card at Walmart or Target and identifies you by name, address, and phone. If you happen to walk out the front door without buying anything your phone buzzes with a text message from Home Depot offering you a 10% discount good for the next hour. Farfetched? I don’t think so. ... All the necessary pieces already exist, they just haven’t been combined yet.'

Submission + - Text spammer wants FCC to declare spam filters illegal. 2

Submitted by TCPALaw on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @06:34PM

TCPALaw writes: ccAdvertising, a company purported to have “a long, long, long history of pumping spam out of every telecommunications orifice, and even boasting of voter suppression” has asked the FCC to declare spam filters illegal. Citing Free Speech rights, the company claims that wireless carriers should be prohibited from employing spam filters that might block ccAdvertising’s political spam. Without stating it explicitly, the filing implies that network neutrality must apply to spam, so the FCC must therefore prohibit spam filters (unless political spam is whitelisted). In an earlier filing, the company suggests it is proper that recipients "bear some cost" of unsolicited political speech sent to their cell phones.
The public can file comments with the FCC on ccAdvertising’s filing here.

Submission + - Microsoft to Apple: Don't Take Your Normal 30% Cut of Office for iOS (allthingsd.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @05:37PM

An anonymous reader writes: Sources tell All Things D that Apple and Microsoft are at loggerheads over the cut Apple is expected to take of Office 365 subscriptions sold through Microsoft Office for iOS, which is expected to launch sometime next year.

Submission + - Troubling trend for open source company... 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26, 2012 @02:07PM

An anonymous reader writes: I'm one of the original founders of a open source company which offers a popular open source product (millions of downloads) targeted primarily to small businesses. We have been doing this for 10 years now and we fund the development of the open source product with the usual paid support services, custom development and addons, but over the last few years we've noticed a troubling trend...

Companies that have downloaded our product from one of the many free download sites have a question they want answered, they call our support line and once we politely explain the situation and that telephone support has a reasonable fee associated with it, more and more of them are becoming seriously irate, to the point of yelling, accusing of us fraud and/or scamming them. For some reason they think a free product should have free telephone support as well, and if we don't offer free telephone support then its not really a free product.

It would appear that these same people are then resorting to social media in an attempt to "spread the word" with the same false accusations which is starting to take its toll on our reviews, ratings and in turn our bottom line.

Does the Slashdot community have any suggestions on how we can reverse this trend? How do other open source companies handle similar situations?

Submission + - Facebook asking users to vote against right to vote (cnn.com)

Submitted by

concealment

on Monday November 26, 2012 @01:58PM

concealment writes: "Facebook will hold a vote, possibly later this week, in which it will ask users to abolish their right to vote on changes to the social network's privacy policies."

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