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Comment Re:Nothing to see here (Score 1) 418

Yea. And your Blue Ray collection can burn in a house fire or get stolen. People don't want to screw with discs. You're living in the past. Talking about wills and inheritance. Just give them the account and password. We're talking aobut movies and tv shows, not family heirlooms. Chances are you won't even remember you owned the thing when Amazon just one day decides to stop making gazillions of dollars streaming entertainment or just goes bankrupt one day because VHS tapes and retail stores miraculously stage a comeback!

Comment Nothing to see here (Score 1) 418

Amazon wouldn't sell digital downloads where the company that owns the rights can just revoke access at any whim. Both Disney and Amazon know that doesn't make sense. People who bought it still have access to it. That's the whole point of a digital purchase. Denying access to it was an accident and apparently has been fixed. And for people saying they want to stick with discs, have fun living in the past.

Submission + - Q: How does hacking cost companies billions of dollars? (slashdot.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Frequently in news articles I hear about how "hackers" are costing single companies X million dollars or more. These claims are becoming more frequent with the government's building aggression against anyone with "dangerous" computer abilities. But my question is, how does it cost companies so much money? Specifically the government. (Okay, technically not a company, but how does having someone reveal their secret information cost them anything?) Every article I've read in my search for a answer either completely glosses over that information or simply says it goes to improving security. But the numbers seem way out of proportion.

Submission + - Can a Japanese AI Get Into University? (ieee.org)

the_newsbeagle writes: Japanese researchers are trying to develop an artificial intelligence program that can pass the standardized test required of all college-bound high school students. Interestingly, the AI is showing good progress in the history portion of the exam, because it's fairly adept at looking up answers in a vast textual database. But the so-called Todai Robot is having trouble with math, "because the questions are presented as word problems, which the Todai Robot must translate into equations that it can solve," as well as with physics, which "presumes that the robot understands the rules of the universe." If the AI does succeed in mastering the general university exam, researchers will next tackle the notoriously difficult University of Tokyo entrance exam, which will require the bot to write essays.

Submission + - Twitter-Based Study Figures Out Saddest Spots in New York City (slashdot.org)

Nerval's Lobster writes: A new research paper from the New England Complex Systems Institute, titled “Sentiment in New York City” (PDF), attempts to pull off something that would have been impossible—or at least mind-bogglingly difficult and time-consuming—before the invention of online social networks: figure out the block-by-block happiness level of the biggest metropolis in the United States. In order to generate their “sentiment map” of New York City, the researchers analyzed data from 603,954 Tweets (collected via Twitter’s API) organized by census block. “This method, combined with geotagging provided by users, enables us to gauge public sentiment on extremely fine-grained spatial and temporal scales,” read the paper’s abstract. The study took emoticons and word choice into account when deciding whether particular Tweets were positive or negative in sentiment. According to that flood of geotagged Tweets, people are happiest near New York City’s public parks, and unhappiest near transportation hubs. Happiness increased closer to Times Square, the declined around Penn Station, the Port Authority, and the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. People were in a better mood at night and on weekends, and more negative about the world between the hours of 9 A.M. and 12 P.M. None of this is surprising: who wouldn’t be happy amidst the greenery of a public park, or borderline-suicidal while stuck in traffic or waiting for a late train? The correlation between happiness and Times Square is almost certainly due to that neighborhood’s massive influx of tourists, all of them Tweeting about their vacation. But as with previous public-sentiment studies, using Twitter as a primary data source also introduces some methodology issues: for example, a flood of happy Tweets from tourists could disguise a more subdued and longstanding misery among a neighborhood’s residents, many of whom probably aren’t tweeting every thirty seconds about a Broadway show or the quality of Guy Fieri’s food.

Submission + - Rebuilding the internet (wired.com)

just_another_sean writes: Alex Polvi is living the great Silicon Valley archetype. Together with some old school friends, he’s piecing together a tech revolution from inside a two-car Palo Alto garage.
In a nutshell these guys are trying to use Linux to give the masses a cheap and reliable way to build server farms similar to Google or Amazon. It's an open source project called Core OS. Is "rebuilding the internet" on a single, standard server platform a good idea or is such an homogeneous environment an undesirable security problem waiting to be let loose?

Comment Re:Anti-Intellectual bullshit (Score 1) 338

He said stupid people think Shakespeare is boring... It's pretty cut and dry. And I don't see how your analogy fits. They are not creating anything. And it doesn't even have anything to do with Shakespeare. They are given a more elaborate explanation of what they are reading in textbooks. People are hung up on the past believing everyone should learn things the way they learned things. As technology advances, so should the way we learn as well as what we learn.
Space

Video Jon Oxer Talks About the ArduSats That are On the Way to ISS (Video) 17

Two ArduSats were launched last week from Japan, along with an ISS resupply package, and on August 9 this payload is due to arrive at the International Space Station. Jon Oxer is a co-founder of Freetronics, a company that sells Arduino-based products, so he has a vested interest in ArduSat's success. He's also a major Free Software booster, which may be part of the reason he was at OSCON -- where Timothy Lord and his camcorder caught up with him. BTW: This is the same JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) launch that is carrying the first talking humanoid robot to go into space from Earth. So this launch is not only "a giant leap for robots," as Japanese robot Mirata famously said, but is also a good-sized step for Arduinos. And for CubeSats, too.

Comment DRM doesn't have to always be evil (Score 2) 221

I don't see DRM as the issue here. If you purchase something and the terms of the purchase are that you can access it "as long as the company allows you to access it", this is different from a legal agreement that requires the company to provide access to it indefinitely. Something like Netflix has nothing to do with DRM because you are not purchasing content, you are buying access to it. The idea that companies can just on a whim take content away that you purchased, no they can't, unless you agreed to this when you purchased it, or if you never actually purchased it in the first place. And why would companies go away from "selling" content and move completely to a subscription model. Last time I checked, they make a lot of money off sales. Why would they want to stop doing it? A lot of people claim they want to own physical or digital copies of everything locally. That's fine. But I think more and more people are moving towards just wanting "access" to things, and not having to worry about managing files and discs themselves. And if a digital purchase is guaranteed to be permanent, it may be even more valuable to some than a local copy (which can be broken or lost).

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