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The Internet

Submission + - Pandora Wants Radio Stations to Pay for Music, too (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: US radio stations don't pay performers and producers for the music they play, but the recording industry hopes to change that with a new performance rights bill in Congress. Webcaster Pandora has jumped into the fray on the side of the artists and labels, asking why radio gets a free ride when Pandora does not.

The campaign to get radio stations to pay up for the music they play marches on. With revenues from recorded music sales declining, rightsholders have turned their eyes in recent years to commercial US radio, which currently pays songwriters (but not performers or record labels) for the tunes that power their business.

The record labels now have Pandora on their side. The influential webcaster just wrapped up its own music licensing negotiations with rightsholders last week as both sides at last agreed to a deal that each could live with. With its own future secure for the next few years, Pandora is now turning its attention to the public performance debate here in the US, saying that the issue is a simple matter of fairness: why should webcasters have to pay more for music than traditional radio does?

ARS Technica : http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/pandora-now-pushing-radio-to-pay-for-music-too.ars
Robotics

Submission + - Robot invented to crawl through veins (pcauthority.com.au) 1

Submitted by Slatterz
Slatterz writes: Scientists from Israel's Technion University have unveiled a tiny robot, made using Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, purportedly able to crawl through a person's veins in order to diagnose and potentially treat artery blockage and cancer. The little robot — with a diameter of just one millimeter — has neither engine nor onboard controls, instead being propelled forward by a magnetic field wielded on it from outside the patient's body. Controlling the tiny bot externally means boffins have been able to shrink it to a previously impossibly tiny scale, allowing it to crawl its way through the typical human body's veins and arteries using miniscule outstretched arms which grip the vessel walls.
Education

Submission + - Dawkins Backs camp for atheists (timesonline.co.uk) 5

Submitted by
RockoTDF
RockoTDF writes: "The Times reports that Richard Dawkins is backing a summer camp to "groom" atheists. Knowing Dawkins, can we expect something just as loaded with indoctrination and polarization as a church camp, or a place that really teaches reason and skepticism? Singing "Imagine" may point to indoctrination, but the £10 prize for the child who can disprove the existence of the mythical unicorn indicates that independent thought is put on a pedestal.

So I ask the atheists and agnostics out there, is this the kind of place you would send your child, or does it appear to be church camp sans church?"
Caldera

Submission + - SCO Head sued for trade secret theft and fraud 1

Submitted by akahige
akahige writes: In what can only be described as a massive turning of the karmic wheel, Darl McBride (SCO), Robert Brazell (founder of Overstock.com), Stephen Norris (an investment capital guy), and Bryan Cave (former Pelican Equity attorney) are all listed as defendants in a lawsuit filed that alleges they conspired to steal trade secrets from Pelican Equity which they used to establish Talos Partners, a stock lending business. Among the charges are fraud, conspiracy, and violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Groklaw posted about this last night and has since pulled the story, though the PDF of the complaint is still available, and there's a summary on Courthouse News Service.
Space

Submission + - Spirit Rover Begins Making Night Sky Observations (universetoday.com)

Submitted by
Nancy Atkinson
Nancy Atkinson writes: "Even though the Spirit rover is stuck in loose soil on Mars, she has an overabundance of electrical power due to a wind event that cleaned off her solar panels. While MER scientists and engineers are having the rover take pictures of her surroundings in an effort to figure a way to get her dislodged, there also is enough power (since the rover isn't moving anywhere) to do something extra: keep the rover "awake" at night and run her heaters so she can take images of the night sky on Mars. "Certainly, a month or more ago, no one was considering astronomy with the rovers," said Mark Lemmon, planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover team. "We thought that was done. With the dust cleanings, though, everyone thinks it is better to use the new found energy on night time science than to just burn it with heaters.""
Media

Submission + - Pirate Bay Retrial Denied, Judge Declared Unbiased 2

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: A Swedish court has ruled that the judge in the PirateBay trial is unbiased and there will be no retrial. Stockholm District Court defended the judge's membership in copyright organizations as a necessity to "keep up with developments in the field" and that merely endorsing the idea of copyright law was not grounds for a mistrial. The defendants must now rely on the appeal process, while one defendant has written on their Twitter account that the PirateBay will also be suing Sweden for human rights violations.
Security

AV-Test Deems Windows Security Essentials "Very Good" 318

Posted by timothy from the if-you're-in-the-right-demographic dept.
CWmike writes "Microsoft's new free security software, Windows Security Essentials, passed a preliminary antivirus exam with flying colors, said independent and trusted firm AV-Test, which tested Essentials, launched yesterday in beta, on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. It put it up against nearly 3,200 common viruses, bot Trojans and worms, said Andreas Marx, one of the firm's managers. The malware was culled from the most recent WildList, a list of threats actually actively attacking computers. 'All files were properly detected and treated by the product,' Marx said in an e-mail. 'That's good, as several other [antivirus] scanners are still not able to detect and kill all of these critters yet.' It also tested well on false positives."
Privacy

Submission + - Nokia Siemens Sold Monitoring Technology to Iran (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
opec
opec writes: "The BBC is reporting that the Nokia Siemens Network sold technology to Iran that would enable the regime to monitor telephone calls, text messages, instant messages and web traffic. From the article: "A spokesman described the system as 'a standard architecture that the world's governments use for lawful intercept. Western governments, including the UK, don't allow you to build networks without having this functionality.'" Experts have speculated that the sudden drop-off and slow return of Internet traffic at the beginning of the election fiasco was from authorities beginning to use their data filtering and interception technology against the opposition."
Education

Submission + - Wikipedia to add video (technologyreview.com) 1

Submitted by
viyh
viyh writes: "Wikipedia will soon be adding a video option, within two or three months, according to the MIT Technology Review.

"Within two to three months, a person editing a Wikipedia article will find a new button labeled "Add Media." Clicking it will bring up an interface allowing her to search for video--initially from three repositories containing copyright-free material--and drag chosen portions into the article, without having to install any video-editing software or do any conversions herself. The results will appear as a clickable video clip embedded within the article."

They will be requiring all video to use open-source formats. This is in hopes of getting content providers to open up their material to gain wider exposure on the Wikipedia website. There is also an in-browser editor that removes a lot of the headache often associated with any kind of video editing.

"Presently, the work flow is pretty atrocious" for people trying to download, convert, and edit video, says Dale, citing the notoriously confusing array of incompatible video formats now in use. With the new Wikipedia system, "people will be able to easily inject media into pages, in a way that wasn't possible before," says Michael Dale, a software engineer from Kaltura, the company assisting with development of the tools."
Internet Explorer

Submission + - Microsoft Launches new 'Get the facts' campaign (microsoft.com) 5

Submitted by ko9
ko9 writes: Microsoft has launched their "Get the facts" campaign, in an attempt to promote Internet Explorer 8. It contains a chart that compares IE8 to Firefox and Chrome. Needless to say, IE8 comes out as the clear winner, with MS suggesting it is the only browser to provide features like 'privacy', 'security', 'reliability'. It even claims to have Firefox beat in 'customizability'. Almost all of these are at the very least stretching the truth, and more likely blatant lies. To people like me, this page would destroy a lot of the credibility MS might have had with me. I'm wondering if the average joe will question these facts though, or will he just blindly accept them as facts, because a big company like Microsoft would not lie this openly?
Transportation

Submission + - Ground breaks on world's first spaceport (examiner.com) 1

Submitted by
johnathan Martinez
johnathan Martinez writes: "Two years after it was announced, construction will finally begin Friday on 'Spaceport America' in New Mexico. The spaceport will be used for commercial space flight from such start ups as Richard branson's Virgin Galactic. Construction on the 18,000 acre, $198 million venture will be kicked off with a big bash, which is open to the public."
Enlightenment

Submission + - ARM powered Linux laptops unveiled at Computex (friendfeed.com)

Submitted by
Charbax
Charbax writes: "At Computex in Taipei on 2-6th June, several companies unveiled ARM powered laptops that are cheaper ($99 to $199), last much longer on a regular 3 cell battery (8-15 hours) and that still can add new cool features such as a built-in HDMI 720p or 1080p output, 3D acceleration, connected standby and more. The ARM Linux laptops shown as working prototypes at Computex will run Ubuntu 9.10 (optimized for ARM), Google Android, Xandros OS for ARM or some Red Flag Linux type of OS. Here in this video, the Director of Mobile Computing at ARM is giving us all the latest details on the status for the support of full Flash (with all actionscripts), the optimizations of the web browser (accelerating rendering/scrolling using the GPU/DSP), the stuff that Google is working on to adapt Android 2.0 Donut release for Laptop screens and interfaces and more. At Computex I also filmed an Interview with the Nvidia team working on Tegra laptops, the Qualcomm people working on Snapdragon devices and the Freescale people doing their awesomely thin ARM laptops in cooperation with manufacturers such as Pegatron as well."
Earth

Submission + - NASA believes sun heats earth (dailytech.com) 2

Submitted by windowshater13
windowshater13 writes: Report indicates solar cycle has been impacting Earth since the Industrial Revolution Some researchers believe that the solar cycle influences global climate changes. They attribute recent warming trends to cyclic variation. Skeptics, though, argue that there's little hard evidence of a solar hand in recent climate changes.Via Daily Tech Al Gore in search of new income.

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