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Music

Submission + - Russian court aquits former owner of allofmp3.com (themoscowtimes.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Moscow's Cheremushkin District Court has acquitted Denis Kvasov, former owner of the music download website allofmp3.com, of violating intellectual property laws, reports Moscow Times.

The court has cited insufficient evidence of criminal activity — a question of fact — without touching the question of law of whether the site's activities (had they been proven by the prosecution) actually violated Russian copyright law. Yekaterina Sharapova, the trial's presiding judge, said: "I want to draw particular attention to the sloppy job done by prosecutors in collecting and analyzing the facts."

According to the Moscow Times, though, the allofmp3.com case is far from over. Two more criminal trials are scheduled to take place: one against Vladimir Mamotin, the media director of MediaServices, the parent company of allofmp3.com, and another against the company itself.

allofmp3.com has been a long subject of controversy. According to the licensing agreement, it pays a percentage of its revenue to the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, which in turns pays individual rights holders of the songs. However, western music labels claim that ROMS's licensing agreement violates their intellectual property rights.
Media

Submission + - Dan Rather uncovers flaws in touchscreen voting

Submitted by goombah99
goombah99 writes: Dan Rather Reports has posted a lengthy YouTube teaser of their upcoming touchscreen voting expose (to air tuesday at 8 or 11pm ET) This is sort of a "60-minutes" style investigation of touchscreen voting. It's apparently not a rehash either. Rather turns up some new evidence such as tracking down the dilapidated plant where the ES&S ivotronic touchscreens were assembled. There they were having a 30 to 40% rejection rate on the screen themselves. Apparently the issue here was a rush to market to meet the election schedule. They needed lots of machines, fast. So plant workers say the rejects got shipped too. The "rush to market" aspect demonstrates an often overlooked strength of the use of open source software with commodity hardware and a multiple vendor business model like open voting consortium. This should be much less subject to single source point failures and has a built-in adversarial oversight nature that might lend some quality control. I just hope their conclusion is not "we need perfect machines and perfectly trained operators" and instead is we need a different approach that is transparent, robust and self correcting in the face of errors.
Censorship

Submission + - AT&T censors anti-Bush lyrics (go.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "The rock band Pearl Jam is upset after lyrics critical of President Bush were censored out of a live webcast of Lollapalooza last weekend by AT&T. The telecom company has apologized and said that the editing of the lyrics was a mistake that should not have happened. (ABCNEWS)"
Wii

Submission + - Advanced Wii Opra functionality (kotaku.com)

Submitted by
mehemiah
mehemiah writes: "This from Kotaku who got it from neogaf but now its commming to you here, where web developers hang out. Opera now has a page on the Wii Remote API. Kotaku sums it up best, " It breaks down not only how exactly the Wii Remote is compatible with Opera on the Wii, but also shows how developers can get the Wii's browser to not just recognise four Wii Remotes at once, but have them all interact with the screen. Which should be good news for anyone big on playing, or crafting, Wii-specific web games.""
Biotech

Submission + - Cat Predicts Death with Alarming Accuracy

Submitted by bagsc
bagsc writes: Oscar the Cat is not your typical friendly feline. When people are really ill at his nursing home, he curls up next to them until they die. In fact, according to a recent article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, he has predicted the deaths of 25 patients, and is almost never wrong. Many news sites have reported this. Compassionate furry companion to the ill, or stealer of souls? You decide.
Movies

Submission + - The Science of Relighting the Sun (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by ntmokey
ntmokey writes: Popular Mechanics has 10 questions for Dr. Brian Cox,, a physicist at the largest particle physics lab and scientific advisor for the movie Sunshine, a sci-fi flick where the sun is dying and needs to be revived. Surprisingly, there is actually a lot of good science that went into the making it, despite the unavoidable Hollywood stretches here and there. Cox talks about the feasibility of the sun's lifecycle actually being interrupted, and whether we could really bring it back if it started to fizzle.
Enlightenment

Submission + - "Cat Scanning" death (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
BWJones
BWJones writes: "An article in the New England Journal of Medicine that describes a cat in Providence, Rhode Island that appears to be able to detect when a patient in a nursing home is about to die. BBC link here. CBS link here. The cat following cues or small molecular signals goes into the room of a dying patient, curls up next to them and begins to purr in the hours before the patient dies. Cats may be better detectors of metabolomic status than we give them credit for."
Education

Submission + - Largest Viking Treasure Unearthed on English Farm (msn.com)

Submitted by
Invisible Pink Unicorn
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "One of the largest known hoards of Viking treasures has been uncovered by a father and son on a farm in northern England. The collection of coins and jewelry was buried over 1,000 years ago, and includes items from Ireland, France, Russia and Scandinavia. It's the largest such find in over 160 years. In all, more than 600 coins and dozens of other objects, including a gold arm band, silver ingots and fragments of silver were found in and around the container. According to an expert from the British Museum, at least some of the treasure was taken by force, possibly in raids on northern Europe or Scandinavia. The article includes an impressive photograph of the entire collection."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Multi-Gigabit Wireless To Make Wires Obsolete (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by
Invisible Pink Unicorn
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "Researchers at Georgia Tech are investigating the use of extremely high radio frequencies to achieve broad-bandwidth and high data transmission rates over short distances, eliminating the need for wired connections in offices and data centers. Within as little as three years, multi-gigabit wireless approach could result in next generation home multimedia and wireless data connections able to transfer an entire DVD in seconds. From ScienceDaily: 'The research focuses on RF frequencies around 60 gigahertz (GHz), which are currently unlicensed — free for anyone to use — in the United States. GEDC researchers have already achieved wireless data-transfer rates of 15 gigabits per second (Gbps) at a distance of 1 meter, 10 Gbps at 2 meters and 5 Gbps at 5 meters. At 10 Gbps, you could download a DVD from a kiosk to your cell phone in five seconds, or you could quickly synchronize two laptops or two iPods.'"
Power

Submission + - Ice Block Air Conditioning (yahoo.com)

Submitted by JumperCable
JumperCable writes: The AP has an interesting article on the use of ice blocks as air conditioning in New York high rises. The concept is pretty basic. Overnight during off peak energy pricing hours & during the coolest part of the 24 hour day, the system freezes water in storage tanks into giant blocks of ice. These storage tanks are located in the basement (coolest location). They are frozen with ethylene glycol.

Given that most of the brown outs occur during the summer months due to high electric demand for air conditioning, I wonder how much of an effect this system would have in reducing brownouts if it's use was more wide spread. The article mentions it is only cost efficient for large companies. But how much of this is profit padding? Couldn't a smaller system be worked out for home use? CALMAC is one of the producers of these systems.
Biotech

Submission + - Self-Centered Cultures Narrow Your Viewpoint (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by
InvisblePinkUnicorn
InvisblePinkUnicorn writes: "NewScientist reports on research indicating that people from Western cultures such as the US are particularly challenged in their ability to understand someone else's point of view because they are part of a culture that encourages individualism. In the experiment, Chinese students outperformed their US counterparts when ask to infer another person's perspective. Volunteers had to follow the instructions of a director and move named objects from one compartment to another. But sometimes the researchers placed two objects of the same kind (eg, "wooden block") in the grid. 95% of Chinese students would immediately understand which object to move — the one visible to both them and the director. Their US counterparts, however, did not always catch on — only 35% understood what to do."
United States

Submission + - The New Science of Parking

Submitted by
Articles Directory
Articles Directory writes: " The New Science of Parking If you live in a city and drive a car, chances are you know the hassles of looking for a place to park. Studies of traffic congestion in New York and Los Angeles have found that cruising for parking is, in fact, a major source of gridlock. In a 2006 study undertaken in a Brooklyn neighborhood by Transportation Alternatives, a New York-based advocacy group, 45% of drivers interviewed admitted they were simply looking for a parking spot. A more rigorous analysis was conducted in Los Angeles by Dr. Douglas Shoup, an urban planning professor at UCLA and one of the nation's top parking gurus. Over the course of a year, he and his students found, the search for curb parking in a 15-block business district "created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel — equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon," which consumes "47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.""
Power

Submission + - NRC getting wolloped (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's mission is to regulate the nation's civilian use of byproduct, source, and special nuclear materials to ensure adequate protection of public health and safety, to promote the common defense and security, and to protect the environment. The Government Accountability Office is finding some problems with it's performance. They set up a shell company to procure sufficient materials to build a dirty bomb, got a license from the NRC in thirty days which they easily modified to allow larger purchases of materials as reported here.

Nearly at the same time they are taking heat from Congress for holding a secret public meeting that nobody attended (because it was secret) to hear about concerns about the licence for a Tennesee plant that spilt 35 liters of highly enriched uranium solution on the floor near a narrow shaft. Concentration of the solution in the shaft would have caused a fatal criticality accident. Federal Register notice here.

What reforms of the Commission might help it do its job better?"
Enlightenment

Submission + - Sun did'nt cause recent climate change: U.K. study (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Mikkeles
Mikkeles writes: The Royal Society has recently published an article (abstract full article(PDF)) written in response to Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle .

There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth's pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth's climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.
Space

Submission + - Site Chosen for Underground Lab

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to Nature , the US Government has chosen the Homestake Mine in South Dakota site for a half-a-billion underground laboratory. The mine was used in the 1960s by Nobel Prize winner Raymond Davis Jr. to study neutrinos, tiny, ghostlike particles that rarely interact with matter. Now, physicists say they want to do still more neutrino experiments there, and microbiologists want to look for primitive "dark life," that can live without sunlight.

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