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Twitter

Judge Rules Twitter Images Cannot Be Used Commercially 103

Posted by Soulskill from the sharing-is-not-legally-caring dept.
New submitter 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 might have interesting implications in file-sharing cases — can it set a precedent against massive judgments against peer-to-peer file-sharers?"
China

Submission + - NASA releases orbital photos of Beijing's air polution (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by skade88
skade88 writes: This story should remind all of us that air pollution controls are not just about addressing global warming. They also help us have cleaner air and fewer health problems resulting from smog and haze. Starting earlier this month, Beijing, China started having worse than normal air pollution issues. On Jan 14, 2013 the US Embassy's air pollution sensors in Beijing found the density of the most dangerous small air particles, PM 2.5, at 291 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The world Health Organization's guidelines for air pollution state that PM 2.5 above 25 micrograms per cubic meter of air is dangerous to a person's health.

To put the problem into perspective for anyone not living in Cloud City..... I mean Beijing, NASA has released two orbital photos of Beijing showing a before and during photo of the air pollution. The photo from Jan 4 shows parts of the Beijing still visible from space. The photo from Jan 14 shows nothing but a huge, thick cloud of haze with no buildings visible.
Twitter

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

Submitted by trekkie314
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."
GNOME

Fedora 18 Released 118

Posted by timothy from the barely-legal dept.
ultranerdz writes "Fedora 18 has been released. Featuring a new installer UI, GNOME 3.6, Clojure, DragonEgg, KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9, MATE Desktop, Samba 4, Secure Boot, and updated major packages versions, this is one of the most anticipated Fedora versions yet. After more than two months of slips and delays, Fedora 18 is finally here." I'm glad to see MATE becoming more widely available; it suits me, as a GNOME 2 fan but not a complete troglodyte.

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

Submitted by FreaKBeaNie
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. "
AI

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

Submitted by
redletterdave
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."
Windows

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

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
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."
Medicine

NIH Neuroscientists: Junior Seau Had Brain Disease Caused By Hits To the Head 240

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the that's-an-osha-violation-there dept.
McGruber writes "ABC News/ESPN broke the story that a team of scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) analyzed the brain tissue of renowned NFL linebacker Junior Seau and have concluded that the football player suffered a debilitating brain disease likely caused by two decades worth of hits to the head. From the article: 'In May 2012, Seau, 43 — football's monster in the middle, a perennial all-star and defensive icon in the 1990s whose passionate hits made him a dominant figure in the NFL — shot himself in the chest at his home in Oceanside, Calif., leaving behind four children and many unanswered questions.' As Slashdot earlier reported, more than 30 NFL players have in recent years been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition once known as 'punch drunk' because it affected boxers who had taken multiple blows to the head."
Medicine

Drug Allows Deafened Mice to Regrow Inner Ear Hair 80

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the turn-it-up-to-11 dept.
sciencehabit writes "All you graying, half-deaf Def Leppard fans, listen up. A drug applied to the ears of mice deafened by noise can restore some hearing in the animals. By blocking a key protein, the drug allows sound-sensing cells that are damaged by noise to regrow. The treatment isn't anywhere near ready for use in humans, but the advance at least raises the prospect of restoring hearing to some deafened people."
Science

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

Submitted by
MTorrice
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."
Science

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

Submitted by Zothecula
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.
Science

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

Submitted by 2muchcoffeeman
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.

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

Submitted by razor88x
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
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."

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