mikejuk writes "After striking out on their own the former Mono team, now reconstituted as Xamarin, has just issued its first release of Mono. This is essentially a minor release with lots of bug fixes but it's proof of life for the Mono project after being dropped by Attachmate."

Andy Baio of Waxy.org recently organized a chiptune tribute project for Miles Davis' acclaimed Kind of Blue album. What was intended as a creative labor of love turned into a nightmare for Baio when a copyright claim demanded exorbitant sums while glossing over fair use. He writes, "I went out of my way to make sure the entire project was above board, licensing all the cover songs from Miles Davis's publisher and giving the total profits from the Kickstarter fundraiser to the five musicians that participated. But there was one thing I never thought would be an issue: the cover art." Despite strongly believing that his pixelated version of the original cover art fell under fair use, Baio eventually decided his cheapest option was to settle out of court, paying the original photographer $32,500. "Anyone can file a lawsuit and the costs of defending yourself against a claim are high, regardless of how strong your case is. Combined with vague standards, the result is a chilling effect for every independent artist hoping to build upon or reference copyrighted works."

aabelro writes "Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have decided to propose a common markup vocabulary, Schema.org, based on the Microdata format, simplifying the job of webmasters who want to give meaning to their web pages' content." Manu Sporny, chair of the W3C group that created RDFa, added his (personal) dissenting opinion about Schema, calling it a 'false choice,' and saying, "The entire Web community should decide which features should be supported – not just Microsoft or Google or Yahoo."

Phoghat sends this quote from Universe Today: "With her most recent drive of 482 feet on June 1, 2011 (Sol 2614), NASA's Opportunity Mars Rover has zoomed past the unimaginable 30 kilometer mark in total odometry since safely landing on Mars nearly seven and one half years ago on Jan 24, 2004. That's 50 times beyond the roughly quarter-mile of roving distance initially foreseen. And Opportunity is still going strong, in good health and has abundant solar power as she continues driving on her ambitious overland trek across the martian plains of Meridiani Planum. She is heading to the giant Endeavour crater, some 22 km in diameter."

mdsolar writes "Japan's atomic energy specialists are discussing a plan to make the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant a storage site for radioactive waste from the crippled station run by Tokyo Electric Power Co."