227281
submission
Archaelicos writes:
I'm a second year law student working on my law review note (it's a "short" article, basically) and my subject is probably going to be copyright law regarding entertainment media in a digital environment where old solutions have failed. The industry grudgingly gave up the fight over VCRs and cassettes after they were able to require royalty payments on blank tapes to compensate them for future piracy, and a combination of energy barriers and limited social access prevented most people from mass-producing thousands of copies and trading them. That's all changed. You can't reasonably charge royalties on the sale of all storage media, our social access is now the entire planet, and the energy barrier is literally the push of a button. Piracy is a real legitimate problem for the industry, but their answer has been, shall we say, unenlightened, and the pirates are committed to the fight. Ignorance runs wild on all sides. The industry drops millions on copy protection schemes that are cracked within days. Internet users complain that the DMCA criminalizes fair use (it is evil legislation, but this belief isn't accurate; see, e.g., Lexmark v. SCC, 387 F.3d 522, 561 (6th Cir. 2004) ("[T]he DMCA explicitly leaves the defenses to copyright infringement, including the fair use doctrine, unaltered.")). iTunes is obviously a smashing hit, yet piracy continues unabated. Are there any solutions? REAL solutions, not "fsck the RIAA" solutions? Do the laws cast too wide a net? I'm hoping to see some insightful, thoughtful comments (on Slashdot, even, yes!) that I could quote in my note. I haven't decided what "side" of this I'm on, I'm going to let my research decide. I am especially interested in any legitimate studies done of the industry, its profit model, piracy, its impact on the bottom line, and so forth, so if anybody knows of that data, or even news articles that are critical, post them! You might have the dubious distinction of being immortalized in a legal journal. If this little experiment is success I'll try to post another story when the note is published letting you know where to find it.
226325
submission
Davin writes:
Study finds that top scientists are not very religious, but that is not because they studied science.
http://www.buffalo.edu/news/8732
"The first systematic analysis in decades to examine the religious beliefs and practices of elite academics in the sciences supports the notion that science professors at top universities are less religious than the general population, but attributes this to a number of variables that have little to do with their study of science."
217203
submission
Mike writes:
New users of the GIMP often become frustrated at the application's unwieldy user interface. For this reason Prof. Michael Terry and a group of researchers at the University of Waterloo have created ingimp, an modified version of the GIMP that collects real-time usability data. Terry recently gave a lecture about ingimp and the data it collects.
During each session, ingimp records events such as document creation, window manipulation, and tool use. A log of these events is sent to the ingimp server for analysis. The project hopes to answer questions such as "What is the typical monitor resolution of a GIMP user?" and "Is GIMP used primarily for photo editing or drawing?" Answers to these questions will help the GIMP developers find and fix GIMP's usability problems. For more information about ingimp, visit the project's web site.
216987
story
Baldrson writes
"Alexander Ratushnyak compressed the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to a record-small 16,481,655 bytes (including decompression program), thereby not only winning the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge, but also bringing text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence. Achieving 1.319 bits per character, this makes the next winner of the Hutter Prize likely to reach the threshold of human performance (between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character) estimated by the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon and confirmed by Cover and King in 1978 using text prediction gambling. When the Hutter Prize started, less than a year ago, the best performance was 1.466 bits per character. Alexander Ratushnyak's open-sourced GPL program is called paq8hp12 [rar file]."
217077
submission
GIMPFan writes:
Most people who have ever tried the GIMP know that its UI leaves much to be desired. Thankfully, at least one person is doing something about it. Usability expert Michael Terry has created an instrumented version of the GIMP called ingimp. The key feature of ingimp is that it collects usability data in order to determine how people are using (or struggling to use) the GIMP. This data is made available on the ingimp site so that researchers can study usability in the GIMP, which can hopefully lead to improved usability of the GIMP.
Terry also recently gave a talk on his project. In his talk, he emphasizes that the user's privacy is a key consideration of the project. He notes that contrary to most usage-collecting applications, ingimp is open-source and that the collected data is available to anyone. He also notes that Inkscape is also very interested in creating an instrumented version.
217015
submission
kpw10 writes:
"Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered that two drugs used to treat bone loss in old folks can both kill and short-circuit the 'sex life' of antibiotic-resistant bacteria blamed for nearly 100,000 hospital deaths across the country each year."