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The Courts

Submission + - RIAA attacks Fair use (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by cyberfunk2
cyberfunk2 writes: It seems the RIAA has finally decided to drink their own koolaid. It seems the aforementioned entity is attacking the what most people believe to be holy ground in a case against Jeffrey Howell. The Washington Post reports In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer. For his part, RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said in a statement that the industry "will continue to bring lawsuits" against those who "ignore years of warnings,". "It's not our first choice, but it's a necessary part of the equation. There are consequences for breaking the law." Fair use anyone ?
The Courts

Judge — "Making Available" Is Stealing Music 489

Posted by kdawson from the if-i-can-hack-into-your-computer-are-you-liable dept.
JonathanF writes "If you were hoping judges would see reason and realize that just using a program that could violate copyright law is about as illegal as leaving your back door unlocked, think again. An Arizona district judge has ruled that a couple who hosted files in KaZaA is liable for over $40K in damages just because they 'made available' songs that could have been pirated by someone, somewhere. There's legal precedent, but how long do we have before the BitTorrent crew is sued?" The New York case testing the same theory is still pending.
Education

Free Tuition for Math, Science, and Engineering? 766

Posted by Zonk from the sign-me-up dept.
Gibbs-Duhem writes "Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus wants free college tuition for US math, science, and engineering majors conditional upon working or teaching in the field for at least four years. From the article: 'The goal, he said in an interview last week, is to better prepare children for school and get more of them into college to make the United States more globally competitive, particularly with countries like China and India. "I think the challenge is fierce, and I think we have a real obligation to go the extra mile and redo things a bit differently, so we leave this place in better shape than we found it," Baucus said.' Do you think this would help with the US's lackluster performance in these fields?"

Comment Re:Ask yourself this... (Score 1) 1583

by Merle Darling (#16928464) Attached to: Students Put UCLA Taser Video On YouTube
You mean the one gesturing wildly and acting in a threatening manner? He was being an idiot, I'm surprised they didn't tell him to back off sooner.

Not that what these zap-happy fools did was right, but after seeing what they're willing to do it's really stupid to get up in their faces. Take their names and badge numbers, report them. Don't pace back and forth trying to talk shit to people who are obviously unreasonable and armed. The guy's lucky he was only threatened with the tazer.

Spam That Delivers a Pink Slip 160

Posted by CowboyNeal from the insult-to-injury dept.
alphadogg wrote in with a Network World story that begins: "Last week, a handful of employees at Dekalb Medical Center in Decatur, Ga., received e-mails saying they were being laid off. The subject line read 'Urgent — employment issue,' and the sender listed on the message was at dekalb.org, which is the domain the medical center uses. The e-mail contained a link to a Web site that claimed to offer career-counseling information. And so a few employees, concerned about their employment status and no doubt miffed about being laid off via e-mail, clicked on the link to learn more and unwittingly downloaded a keylogger program that was lurking at the site. Score another one for spammers."

What a Vista Upgrade Will Really Cost You 482

Posted by kdawson from the big-bucks dept.
narramissic writes, "James Gaskin wrote an interesting article this week about what he recons it will really cost organizations to upgrade to Vista. Gaskin estimates that each Vista user will 'cost your company between $3,250 and $5,000. That's each and every Vista user. Money will go to Microsoft for Vista and Office 2007, to hardware vendors for new PCs and components, and possibly a few bucks to Apple for those users jumping to a Mac.'" Any sense of how realistic those figures are?
Slashdot.org

Journal Journal: Slashdot moderation is a joke.

Journal by Merle Darling

I've gotten mod points every few days for the last two weeks or so, and I wound up with mod points about once a week for several months before that. It seems to be a much more frequent occurrence than it used to be. I try to resist the /. groupthink while modding and many of the things that I mod up as insightful get modded back down by silly fanboys on all sides of all fences. What's the point in moderating at all if the vast majority aren't willing to mod objectively?

The Sharpest Object Ever Made 304

Posted by CmdrTaco from the not-as-sharp-as-my-wit dept.
ultracool writes "Forget the phrase 'sharp as a tack.' Now, thanks to new University of Alberta research, the popular expression might become, 'sharp as a single atom tip formed by chemically assisted spatially controlled field evaporation.' Maybe it doesn't roll off the tongue as easily, but considering the researchers have created the sharpest object ever made, it would be accurate."

AP Looks at Piracy, Misses the Point 406

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the toeing-the-line dept.
TechDirt is reporting that the Associated Press has covered several stories recently about what a "huge threat" piracy is in other countries. This article, however, argues that they have perhaps missed out on the whole story by ignoring the other side of the coin. From the article: "the AP doesn't bother to mention how all that piracy helped created new and different business models for musicians in China that let them thrive despite the piracy (actually, in some cases, because of it). Nor does the AP bother to mention how software piracy helped boost certain aspects of the industry in China by decreasing the cost of inputs."

Athens Breeding "Super Mosquitoes" 458

Posted by Hemos from the all-the-better-to-suck-your-blood-with dept.
Chemisor writes "Air pollution and cramped housing conditions in Athens, Greece, are creating a new breed of mosquitoes which are bigger, faster, and can smell humans from farther away. The super insects have color vision and detect humans from 25-30 meters, which is about 50% farther than the ordinary mosquitoe. Beating their wing 500 times a second provides them with extra speed, and the larger bodies (by 0.3ug) presumably allow larger bloodsucking capacity." And in a similar vein (har har) New Scientist had a piece about what mosquitoes like or hate about people.

French Lawmakers Approve 'iTunes Law' 423

Posted by Zonk from the play-together-and-enjoy-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Lawmakers in the French government have passed a controversial iTunes law, which has the stated intention of forcing Apple to allow purchased music to be universally useable." From the article: "In a statement issued after lawmakers hashed out the final compromise text last week, Apple said it hoped the market would be left to decide 'which music players and online music stores are offered to consumers.' The final compromise asserts that companies should share the required technical data with any rival that wants to offer compatible music players and online stores, but it toned down many of the tougher measures backed by lower-house lawmakers early on."

Australia's Technological World Cup Advantage 343

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the time-to-build-an-expert-system-bot dept.
hotsauce writes "The BBC has a piece about how Australia is using software to gain an advantage in the World Cup. The Socceroos are running software that looks for patterns in attacks of the opposing team. It also shows the effectiveness of different response strategies by recording where attacks fail when countered. This is the first time Australia has reached the World Cup in 30 years, but a real test of the technology will come today when Australia must take on five-time and current world champions Brasil. The Socceroos talk about specific strategies for that game, also."

Viral Marketing to Become the Norm? 213

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the advertisers-working-for-their-bread-and-butter dept.
An anonymous reader writes "One of the oldest advertising companies in the U.S., JWT, has just bought up all the Huffington Post's front-page ad space for a whole week. They are taking the unique approach of trying to create ad content interesting enough to make people want to watch, instead of the traditional ad agency approach of bludgeoning the user base over the head through interstitials and other forced ad techniques. Will the ad companies be able to put forth enough continued effort to make good ads that become viral, or is this just a short phase to gain publicity?"

DIY 4 GHz Dual Core Gaming Rig For $720 201

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the not-for-long dept.
Tom's Hardware has posted the detailed results of their recent quest to build a beefy gaming rig without a visit to the poorhouse. The trick it seems is to find a processor with 'cores designed for a much faster clock than their nominal rating at a speed of up to 4 GHz without problems.' They provide shopping lists for both a 'budget version' and a 'top flight version'.

China Frustrated In Encryption Talks 252

Posted by Zonk from the can't-always-get-what-we-want dept.
mikesd81 writes "According to an AP article, the Chinese are pushing for the encryption standard called WAPI. It's not going so well, as the majority of countries are taking the IEEE standard 802.11i. From the article: 'An international dispute over a wireless computing standard took a bitter turn this past week with the Chinese delegation walking out of a global meeting to discuss the technology. The delegation's walkout from Wednesday's opening of a two-day meeting in the Czech Republic escalated an already rancorous struggle by China to gain international acceptance for its homegrown encryption technology known as WAPI. It follows Chinese accusations that a U.S.-based standards body used underhanded tactics to prevent global approval of WAPI.'"

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