NocturnHimtatagon - Slashdot User

Canadian Fined For Videoing Movie In Theatre 382

Posted by kdawson on Saturday November 15, 2008 @10:54PM from the duct-tape-it dept.

canadian_right writes "A Calgary man was fined $1,495 and banned from theaters for a year in the first conviction under a new Canadian law making recording a movie in a theater a crime. Until the new law took effect in 2007, prosecutors had to show evidence of distribution to get a conviction; now, recording without permission is sufficient. The Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association was disappointed that jail time was not given." The man was also banned for a year from possessing any video recording equipment, even a video-capable cellphone, outside of his home.

Comment Re:Voter registration (Score 1) 517

by NocturnHimtatagon on Monday November 03, 2008 @09:18AM (#25610847) Attached to: How We Used To Vote

I'm from belgium too and the fine is _not_ 500 euros. it's 25 euro or a verbal reprimand from the judge. (kieswetboek art. 210). And that's only if they bother to prosecute you in the first place. The last couple of elections I didn't bother to vote and never got prosecuted.

The 500 euro fine is when you are required to count votes.

Submission + - French plan to cut off pirates and DRM

Submitted by on Friday November 23, 2007 @07:22AM

An anonymous reader writes: In a plan to cut down on the number of French pirates President Niclas Sarkozy is endorsing a new law that will give a 3 strike rule and will open up individual downloads to all players.
Under the proposed law an enforcement body would collect information from ISP about high volume users. You would initially get a warning but after that your account would be suspended and if additional warning terminated. On the other side all music downloaded from various stores would have thier DRM protection removed and movies would be released to DVD 6 months after thier initial cinema screening instead of the current 7 1/2 months.
Needless to say there is some opposition, such as deputies of the presidents party who said that giving the enforcement agency judicial powers "creates a truly exceptional jurisdiction for downloaders contravening the principle of equality before the law".

Submission + - Is Garbage Collection killing computer performance

Submitted by fluor2 on Friday November 23, 2007 @05:11AM

fluor2 writes: "I've become increasingly frustrated with the speed of computers lately, or rather, lack thereof. After thinking about it, I came up with three reasons why I think computers have gotten slow." — VirtualDub programmer, Avery Lee.

"Let's be honest: garbage collection is here to stay. It's quite powerful for certain data structures, most notably string heaps, and it has undeniable benefits in other areas such as sandboxed execution environments and concurrent programming. What I think aggrevates the problems, though, are languages and programming environments that you insist on putting everything in the GC heap."

Read his interesting blog post, which I think really missed a focus from both slashdot and other computer sites.

Submission + - How To: Arm a nuclear bomb with a Bic pen (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by rubydooby on Friday November 16, 2007 @06:03AM

rubydooby writes: Well, until 1998. According to the BBC, Britain's WE 177 nuclear bomb's final layer of protection was a familiar-looking cylindrical key. That's right, it's the same type as the key to the recently-replaced Kryptonite bicycle lock- brought to fame by demonstrations of it's compatibility with Bic pen barrels. Other security features? How about "a series of dials which you can turn with an Allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or groundburst and other parameters". Everyone knows how hard it is to find the right size allen wrench... All this is in contradistinction to the U.S.'s "PAL protection", or "Permissive Action Links", which required the Chiefs of Staff to phone in the correct combination. Of course, the U.K. government responds that "officers of the Royal Navy as the Senior Service could be trusted", (BBC) and that The Bombs are "designed such that the warhead must have experienced missile launch and ballistic deployment before it can detonate". Now I feel safe.

Submission + - Hurricane-research UAV to be tested on Noel (libpipe.com)

Submitted by

mi

on Friday November 02, 2007 @07:16PM

mi writes: "USA Today is reporting on an unmanned aircraft developed to research hurricanes being sent into Noel. It should reach the eye of the storm at around 10pm tonight, November 2nd. The whole flight is expected to take about 20 hours:

"Unmanned flights at very low altitude are important since they give us unique insights and continuous observations in a region of the storm where the ocean's energy is directly transferred to the atmosphere just above. Attempting this type of research flight with our hurricane hunter aircraft would risk the lives of our crew and scientists," said Joe Cione, hurricane researcher at NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami, and project manager for the Aerosonde field study.
"

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