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Submission + - Harry Potter and a Goblin's Take on Copyright (scienceaddiction.com)

Submitted by

DevanJedi

on Wednesday July 25, 2007 @10:13PM

DevanJedi writes: "Here's a passage from page 517 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows : (Ron's brother Bill is warning Harry against trusting a goblin Griphook.) "You don't understand, Harry, nobody could understand unless they have lived with goblins. To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is the maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs. [...] They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. [...] They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft." These goblins sound like our friendly neighborhood MPAA/RIAA lawyers!"

Submission + - Are Mobile Phone Masts Responsible For Illness?

Submitted by drewmoney on Wednesday July 25, 2007 @08:55PM

drewmoney writes: According to a major UK study, symptoms of illness caused by mobile phone masts is "all in the mind".

Excerpts from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6914492.stm

Dozens of people who believed the masts triggered symptoms such as anxiety, nausea and tiredness could not detect if signals were on or off in trials.

However, the Environmental Health Perspectives study stressed people were nonetheless suffering "real symptoms".

Campaign group Mast Sanity "http://www.mastsanity.org/" said the results were skewed as 12 people in the trials dropped out because of illness.

Submission + - Gamer creates auto-"play" robot for the 36

Submitted by root_42 on Monday February 26, 2007 @08:10AM

root_42 writes: As the BBC reports US gamer David Harr created a small device to restart games of Perfect Dark Zero for him. As a devote gamer he collected all achievement points, except for the final 60. Those could only be achieved by playing 2,000 offline games of Perfect Dark Zero. So he just built a "robot" that pushed the buttons so as to start and re-start the games, instead of him, which would have taken 40 hours in front of the Xbox.

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