Comment Sony/BMG EULA - the choral music setting (Score 1) 227
The Sony/BMG EULA - set as haunting choral plainchant.
One of my favourite examples of "transformative" fair use ever.
Submission + - Wikipedia wins defamation case
Raul654 writes: Yesterday, a french judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation for defamation. The judge found that "Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature". According to the inquirer: "Three plaintiffs were each seeking 69,000 euros ($100,000) in damages for invasion of their privacy after their homosexuality was revealed on the website."
Journal Journal: The Best Obsolete Technologies
Given the nature of the world today, where it seems a technology, application, or piece of equipment is rendered obsolete 15 minutes after it becomes available, Wired has gone back and looked at some of the best obsolete technologies. What's interesting about the list is that despite many of the items having been superseded by more modern technologies, several of them (like the Sundial or the Slide Rule) could sti
Submission + - FTC asked to investigate copyright warnings
JPMH writes: A formal Federal Trade Commission complaint has been filed by the Computer & Communications Industry Association — a group which includes Google, Microsoft, and Red Hat, among others. According to Ars Technica's report, "the CCIA's complaint fingers the NFL, Major League Baseball, NBC Universal, Morgan Creek, DreamWorks, Harcourt Inc., and Penguin Group (USA) for deceptive trade practices, accusing them of systematically misrepresenting the rights of consumers to use copyrighted material. 'These warnings that we have been seeing for decades are false,' CCIA spokesperson Jake Ward told Ars Technica in a Monday interview. 'They are a misrepresentation of the law and a violation of consumers' rights.'"
Comment Grain of Salt (Score 1) 311
Let me first say that I've read TFA but not the original paper. The following criticism is based on a presentation I attended long ago on another proposed mechanism to explain periodic extinctions.
When you look for a periodicity in a bunch of data, you might do a fourier transform and look for peaks. (The other work did that.) Essentially you're doing a large number of correlations. If you try 100 corelations, you should not be surprised to see one that's significant at the 99% level, just by chance!
On the other hand, if the periodicity they found matched known astronomical phenomena (as opposed to the other work I looked at), the probability of a chance result is much reduced.
