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Comment Re:Yes, Nintendo owns your Wii (Score 1) 258

by MadJo (#32665412) Attached to: New Wii Menu Update Targets Homebrew Again

it's disgusting to see misappropriation on this level and scale by corporations.
It's definitely not an incentive to buy more of their crap.

Funny thing, that EULA, you can only read it after you bought the device... I can only hope that one day shrink wrapped EULA and other such licenses will be banned. But that hope is very slim.
The Media

Gizmodo Not Welcome at 2010 WWDC 395

Posted by timothy from the not-until-you-apologize-mister dept.
recoiledsnake writes "Gizmodo is reporting that Apple has refused to answer its request to attend the company's big Worldwide Developers Conference keynote this Monday. Apple's move to ban Gizmodo seems a direct repercussion of Apple's prototype leak by Gizmodo and subsequent actions of Apple to get the prototype back. Meanwhile, Gizmodo said that it would resort to a live blog to cover the event in case of the ban. This comes a few days after San Mateo County authorities announced that a 'special master' had been appointed to assist in the search of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's belongings: goods seized as part of a police investigation into the disappearance (and Gizmodo acquisition) of one of Apple's prototype iPhones. It's the very device that's rumored to be announced at the Monday keynote."
Open Source

Google WebM Calls "Open Source" Into Question 185

Posted by Soulskill from the branding-is-everything dept.
snydeq writes "As open source becomes mainstream, vendors are under pressure to market their offerings using the 'open source' brand to the highest degree possible — a trend that may eventually degrade the meaning of 'open source' as we know it, Savio Rodrigues writes. Witness WebM, which Google has positioned as an open alternative to H.264. After examining the software license, some in the open source community have questioned whether WebM should be classified as open source software. Google did not use an OSI-approved license for WebM, meaning that, at least in theory, WebM cannot be considered open source under the OSD — the 'gold standard' by which many government and business open source policies are defined. Moreover, when prodded for OSI review, Google required that the OSI agree to 'changes to how OSI does licenses' as a precursor to submitting a license for OSI review and approval. 'When Google, one of the largest supporters of open source, goes out and purposefully circumvents the OSI, what signal does this send to other vendors? How important is using an OSI-approved license likely to be in the future if other vendors follow Google's lead?'" An anonymous reader adds: "It turns out that libvpx, Google's VP8 library, isn't compatible with the GPLv2. Google is apparently aware of the problem and working on a solution.
Software

Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets 168

Posted by StoneLion from the sure-it-can dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Even humans sometimes fail to recognize sarcasm and irony; can machines do better? An algorithm that identifies sarcastic tweets (PDF) on Twitter and sarcastic sentences in product reviews on Amazon will be presented next week in the International Conference for Weblogs and Social Media in Washington, DC, and in the Computational Natural Language Learning in Sweden in July. A team from the Hebrew University, Israel, has developed an algorithm that identifies sarcastic sentences by using a machine learning technique in which a small number of sarcastic sentences act as seeds for the software to learn and generalize upon. The algorithm can then identify sarcastic sentences that are nothing like the examples. The variety of recognized sarcastic sentences is impressive, though the results are not perfect. But again, we don't do it so well ourselves, do we?"
Space

Jupiter Is Missing a Belt 187

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-holds-up-its-pants dept.
mbone writes "Jupiter just went through Superior Conjunction (i.e., went behind the Sun as seen from the Earth), so it has been out of view for a while. Now that it has returned, it is different — the South Equatorial Belt (SEB) is missing. The SEB has about 10 times the surface area of the Earth, so this is not a small change. Here are a series of photos of Jupiter's new look. The Great Red Spot typically inhabits the southern border of the SEB, but it doesn't seem to be affected by the change. It's a pity that this happened at Superior Conjunction, and that there is no satellite in Jupiter orbit, so details of the change are largely missing. The SEB has previously gone missing in 1973 and 1990. Since no one really knows what makes the Jovian belts, no one knows why they disappear either. If the belts are really just material from deeper layers coming to the surface, it is possible that the convection has stopped for some reason, or that high-altitude clouds have covered it over."

Comment What?! It's all Google's fault? (Score 1) 290

by MadJo (#30245958) Attached to: Newspapers Face the Prisoner's Dilemma With Google

"while Google's search engine 'prevents them from making decent money online — by massively fragmenting traffic, by undermining brand power, and by turning news stories into fungible commodities.'"

- How about offering accidental readers incentive to visit your main page more often?
- How about leveraging Google's search results to boost your own brand power?

If you wait on Google to boost your own brand then you're doing it wrong.
And it's the newspapers that treat news as commodities, not Google.

Let's not lay the blame for mainstream newspapers' failure to grasp the 21st century.

Comment Re:Um.. Can someone tag this "phishing"? (Score 5, Insightful) 156

by MadJo (#30071084) Attached to: Hollywood Backs Swedish Movie Streaming Site

Welcome to the rest of the world.
It's often that us non US-people only get a sparse page with a few fields to enter your data in, only to find out that the service you thought you were registering for doesn't work yet in your country.

Call it phishing if you like, but it's par for the course. It's just that you US-ians don't notice it as often.
The Almighty Buck

Jack Thompson Sues Facebook For $40M 421

Posted by samzenpus from the just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe dept.
angry tapir writes "Jack Thompson has sued Facebook for US$40 million, saying that the social networking site harmed him by not removing angry postings made by Facebook gamers. The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Thompson is best known for bringing suit against Grand Theft Auto's Take Two Interactive, Sony Computer Entertainment America, and Wal-Mart, arguing that the game caused violent behavior."

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