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Movies

Submission + - Why HD-DVD / Blue-ray Combo Players Are A Bad Idea

Submitted by
GSJason
GSJason writes: "GorillaSushi.com reports on the perils of a hybrid player..
"Neither format would necessarily need to prevail if a hybrid player was readily available. The two could peacefully coexist on the shelves of your entertainment system. And if two formats could coexist while still being profitable, why not three? Why shouldn't Nintendo's next console use their own proprietary format disc? I would call it Wii-VD.
Why then couldn't the major movie studios develop their own formats too? Each could have unique copy protection systems and they could make a bundle licensing their format to the companies making the players and smaller studios. We could end up with ten to fifteen different formats for high-def discs." read the full story"
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - "Violent" Games banned In Turkey

Submitted by
unity100
unity100 writes: "Last in a series of moves in order to "protect children" against harmful content, government branches in cities around turkey have banned a list of 19 games including Counter Strike, GTA Vice City, Half Life, GTA San Andreas, Delta Force, Swat, Call Of Duty, Knightonline, The Punisher, Louncher, Hitman, Counter, Hell Forces, Halo, Line Of Sight Vietnam, Pariah, Serious Sam, Return To Castle Wolfenstein as unplayable through internet cafes around turkey. Cafes who are found to have these games are fined 12.000 Turkish Liras, which equal roughly $ 8500, as reported by the website of the foremost newspaper belonging to one of the two biggest media monopolies in turkey :

http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/teknonet/5653536.asp? m=1&gid=112&srid=3439&oid=1

The ban was initiated with the directive of governors, and is enforced by police force. Governors are not elected, but appointed in Turkey, by buraeucratic arm of the government. The 'council' that decides these games are 'violent' and therefore 'harmful are comprised of a hilarious compendium of instutitions, which include national lottery instutition, State monopoly instutition, fiscal police instutition, police force (national) and some branches of health ministry and child health branches of some universities — which with a whopping percentage consist of people who are not even able to turn a computer on by themselves.

The move follows on the wake of the turmoil resulting from a high profile child porn distribution crime case, which was also much hyped by the same major newspapers."
Patents

Report Says Patents Prevent New Drugs 381

Posted by samzenpus from the but-the-old-ones-were-good dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Current orthodoxy claims patents encourage innovation, by allowing developers to enjoy profitable monopolies on their inventions which in turn inspire them to create new inventions. A new report by the non-partisan General Accounting Office suggests that this orthodoxy is wrong — at least when drug companies are involved. According to the report, existing patent law allows drug companies to patent, and make substantial profits off of, "new" drugs which differ little from existing medicines. Given high profit margins on very minor innovations, the report argues that drug companies have little incentive to produce innovative new drugs. In other words, current patent law actually discourages drug companies from producing new medicines. Responding to the report, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) released a strongly worded statement suggesting that a legislative response will be forthcoming. "The findings in this new GAO report," said Senator Durbin, "raise serious questions about the pharmaceutical industry claims that there is a connection between new drug development and the soaring price of drugs already on the market. Most troubling is the notion that pharmaceutical industry profits are coming at the expense of consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer new drugs.""
Space

Submission + - 50Grand for idea to tag a asteroid

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A $50,000 (£25,000) competition has been launched to find the best way to tag a 400m-wide asteroid, and tracked it with the most precision. The Plantery Society is organising the competition in cooperation with the European Space Agency (Esa), the US space agency (Nasa), the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). The Apophis space rock is set to make a pass closer than the orbits of many communications satellites and scientists would like to confirm that it poses no danger to our world- but it will not hit the planet, that is clear. "The threat of a strike from asteroids is always a very low probability at any given time, and yet bad things will happen," said the Planetary Society's director of projects, Bruce Betts. "We need to know whether Earth's name is on it," he told BBC News. The concern centres on the small chance that its orbit could be perturbed enough in the flyby to put the rock on a collision path for its return in 2036. And the Planetary Society thinks an innovative tracking mission could make doubly sure. Hence, the prize for an individual or team that can put together the best concept for tagging a huge lump of rock. "You could use a beacon; you could put a reflector on it that you ping; you could put a spacecraft in orbit and track that. There are any number of possibilities and ones we haven't thought of, I'm sure," said Betts. The winning entry or entries will be submitted to space agencies to see if they want to carry the ideas through. The Planetary Society competition was launched here at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.
Education

Submission + - How to make a taser from a disposable camera.

Submitted by
ungus
ungus writes: "A simple, well explained video tutorial on how to easily make a simple shocking device from a disposable camera! Check it out here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=-ErFr66Y0LQ

It's great way to burn the hole in the side of a soda can, etc... and if you're a really big jerk you can shock your friends. It's pretty painful, though. A cheap, easy, fun little project that can be done by pretty much anyone. Explained with hardware and electronics n00bs in mind!"
Movies

Submission + - The Head IMAX Sound Engineer's Home Theater

Submitted by
junger
junger writes: "As the chief sound engineer for IMAX, the company that makes wraparound theaters for you-are-there experiences, Lynn McCroskey knows a thing or two about massive audio and video. When it came time to build his own home theater, he took what he knew from his job at IMAX — and a few studio-grade custom speakers — to develop a room completely isolated acoustically from the rest of his house. It has walls built within walls, and the ceiling is isolated from the floor above. Even the doors have solid cores, and there are drop thresholds that rise up and seal the door when it closes, just as in an IMAX theater."
Red Hat Software

Submission + - Overhaul of the RPM

Submitted by
hdparm
hdparm writes: "Earlier today, Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack has made an announcement on fedora-announce mailing list about the big cleanup of the codebase and reorganisation of the maintenance for Red Hat Package Manager, better known as RPM.

Whatever people think about RPM, or Red Hat for that matter, turns out Red Hat is again doing the right thing. They have again acted in the best interest of the FLOSS community and released to it software critical to Linux development and wider addoption. Kudos and another round of respect go to Red Hat. They deserve it for true leadership and the fact that they care.

More information can be found on the new project's site. Project is hosted by Duke University."
It's funny. Laugh.

Servers, Hackers, and Code In the Movies 445

Posted by Zonk from the what-no-angela-bennett dept.
Billosaur writes "As with anything, Hollywood has a weird way of viewing computer technology and the people who use it. To help quantify things, take a look at The Top 20 Movie Hackers, the Top Ten Movie Servers, and the things code doesn't do in real life." From the servers article: "3. UNIX environment - Jurassic Park (1993). The UNIX environment here is a classic geek joke. Everything we saw was real - created by Silicon Graphics and called IRIX. InGen was the corporation funding the island, and from an IT perspective they let the worst possible thing happen: they allowed one programmer to design the infrastructure with no supervision. What's worse, they obviously required no documentation of what was done. The result was a kid had to hack in and gain ROOT privileges. The likelihood of a young kid knowing a way to get ROOT (and not a more experienced programmer) is pretty hard to swallow. The hardware for this server was probably minimal, running door locks and starting Quicktime movies. 'We spared no expense!' You would think that with the millions of dollars they spent on the park, they could have hired a couple newbie programmers and added a server on the backend."
Businesses

Submission + - Mandrake founder discusses new distro

Submitted by nanday
nanday writes: Gael Duval, the founder of the Mandrake distribution is looking to make his mark on GNU/Linux a second time. This time, it's with Ulteo, a distribution released in alpha earlier this week that's designed to simplify computing by doing the administration work for you. Duval discusses the inspiration for the new distro, and his future plans for it in an interview with Linux.com.
Music

Submission + - Dead Musicians signing petitions

Submitted by
epeus
epeus writes: "Following from the Gowers coverage and the Musicians' ad in the FT, Larry Lessig admits he was wrong about term extension:


If you read the list, you'll see that at least some of these artists are apparently dead (e.g. Lonnie Donegan, died 4th November 2002; Freddie Garrity, died 20th May 2006). I take it the ability of these dead authors to sign a petition asking for their copyright terms to be extended can only mean that even after death, term extension continues to inspire.

I'm not yet sure how. But I guess I should be a good sport about it, and just confess I was wrong. For if artists can sign petitions after they've died, then why can't they produce new recordings fifty year ago?
Meanwhile, the Open Rights Group is running a Release The Music campaign, with a petition you can sign. There's also one asking for the right to privately copy CDs to iPods. Are Slashdot readers as good at signing petitions as dead musicians?"
User Journal

Journal Journal: How patents should work

Journal by Harmonious Botch
The following is an attempt to improve the patent process by adding competition to it. It is essentially a public test of non-obviousness.

A patent application should be composed of two documents. The first document should say what the invention does. The second document should say how it does it ( or in some cases how the manufacturer made it ). Both documents would be submitted privately to the patent office at the same time.
Input Devices

Submission + - Poll

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "How many mouse buttons do you need? 1 2 3, wheel 3, no wheel 4 5 6"
Businesses

Submission + - Acer, Lenovo, Motorola now more green, Apple not.

Submitted by
RowboatRobot
RowboatRobot writes: "Greenpeace has re-ranked the large hardware companies on their environmental friendliness (You may remember their previous rankings in August). As can be seen from their new chart, Acer, Lenovo, and Motorola have made progressive strides in reducing e-waste and toxic chemical usage, while Apple has become dead-last, showing consistent indifference to environmental issues. Apple's continued apathy towards the planet in this respect has lead Greenpeace to launch the "Green My Apple" campaign to petition Apple to reform its policies. What will it take for apple to clean up its act?"

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