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TorrentSpy has lost the first round of its case against the MPAA, but the details suggest that it's for all the wrong reasons. TorrentSpy, of course, is like many other torrent trackers: it's a search engine. While the MPAA went after TorrentSpy claiming that it was violating copyright laws like Grokster/Morpheus, TorrentSpy pointed out (correctly) that the Supreme Court only said that service providers who actively encourage copyright infringement can be held liable. Instead, TorrentSpy noted, it was a search engine, just like Google -- which is quite accurate. However, the court seemed to have difficulty understanding this -- and when the court ordered TorrentSpy to spy on its users (against TorrentSpy's own terms of service), the company instead chose to cut off US users. This seemed quite admirable and reasonable. It was, in fact, a lot more admirable than the MPAA, who hired someone to hack into TorrentSpy's servers and pass on internal emails. However, it appears that TorrentSpy's decision to not spy on its users and to block access to US users is part of what caused it to lose the case. The ruling isn't on the merits of the actual copyright claim, but on the claim that TorrentSpy destroyed evidence -- such as the IP addresses of its users. There does appear to be some additional egregious destruction of evidence from TorrentSpy beyond just the IP addresses of users -- which was incredibly stupid for the company. That certainly hurt the company's position. However, that does not address the merits of the original lawsuit. The MPAA, of course, is claiming this is a huge win, but that's just its usual press release quote and has little to connect it to reality: which is that the MPAA won this case on a technicality rather than the merits. TorrentSpy plans to appeal, so this is hardly over -- but the destruction of evidence will hurt the rest of TorrentSpy's position, no matter how reasonable it may have been.

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http://techdirt.com/articles/20071218/161947.shtml

Filed under: Laptops, Peripherals

We're sure Apple had a fix in the works long before we got around to posting a poll about it, but if the response to Saturday's informal questionnaire was any indication, this update is long overdue. Apple just posted a new software update for MacBooks and MacBook Pros running Leopard, which solves the problem with the keyboard freezing up sporadically for a minute or so, which had at least two Engadget editors' keyboards in fits. Apple still hasn't addressed the issue with dropping the first character when typing into a text box on certain MacBook Pros, but this is certainly a good move -- though would it have really killed Apple to be a bit more talkative about the whole process?

[Thanks, Turgemanster]

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http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/202492260/

acid06 writes "Perl 5.10.0 is now out, the first in the 5.10.x major version series, after a five year long development process. It's currently being mirrored on CPAN.

From the posting: "Perl 5.10 isn't just a bug fix version: it's full of new features that I'm eager to use: named captures in regular expressions, state variables for subroutines, the defined-or operator, a switch statement (called given-when, though), a faster regex engine, and more. You can read more about the changes in perldelta."

This is great news for all of us Perl hackers around."
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/12/perl_510_for_perls_20th_birthd.html

calebt3 writes "The Article:
A postcard featuring a color drawing of Santa Claus and a young girl was mailed in 1914, but its journey was slower than Christmas. It just arrived in northwest Kansas.

The Christmas card was dated Dec. 23, 1914, and mailed to Ethel Martin of Oberlin, apparently from her cousins in Alma, Neb.

It's a mystery where it spent most of the last century, Oberlin Postmaster Steve Schultz said. "It's surprising that it never got thrown away," he said. "How someone found it, I don't know."

Ethel Martin is deceased, but Schultz said the post office wanted to get the card to a relative.

That's how the 93-year-old relic ended up with Bernice Martin, Ethel's sister-in-law. She said she believed the card had been found somewhere in Illinois.

"That's all we know," she said. "But it is kind of curious. We'd like to know how it got down there."

The card was placed inside another envelope with modern postage for the trip to Oberlin — the one-cent postage of the early 20th century wouldn't have covered it, Martin said.

"We don't know much about it," she said. "But wherever they kept it, it was in perfect shape.""
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071214/ap_on_fe_st/odd_long_lost_card

What are the defining discoveries and great developments that are shaping the way we use materials and technologies today? Top of the list of the top ten most significant advances in materials science over the last 50 years is actually not a research finding but rather a way of organizing research priorities and planning R&D.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071218101208.htm

Weather broadcasts have long been a staple for people planning their day. Now with the help of NASA satellites, researchers are working to broaden daily forecasts to include predictions of air quality, a feat that is becoming reality in some parts of the world.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071213101348.htm

A U.S. Representative has proposed that NASA keep the shuttle fleet flying past its 2010 retirement date. The move would help prevent NASA from relying on Russian rockets during the gap between the Space Shuttle retirement and the start of the Orion program. One proposal would keep the shuttle fleet flying from 2010 to 2013 while another would keep the fleet alive until the Orion program is ready in about 2015. In 2011, the exemption that has allowed NASA to purchase Soyuz rockets for trips to the Space Station ends, and they would need an extension to keep using Russian rockets until the Orion program is ready. NASA's other option lies in the private sector, but so far, the private sector's progress does not look like it will meet the 2011 deadline. Keeping the shuttle fleet flying for a couple more years seems like it would help keep American presence in space without having to rely on the Russian space program.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071218/sc_nm/space_shuttle_dc

An anonymous reader writes to mention that sources inside Sun Microsystems claim that OpenSolaris may see the GPLv3 added to its list of licenses soon. From the article: "While Sun officials would not confirm the plan to dual-license OpenSolaris under the CDDL and GPLv3, Tom Goguen, vice president of Solaris software at Sun, told eWEEK that other open-source technologies will play a big role in Solaris going forward. 'Take the GNU Userland, which is an interesting piece of technology that Sun is looking at closely, and we may do something similar with, say, a container flavor,' he said. 'You can also expect to see a renewed focus on the needs of developers and system administrators with Solaris going forward, while individual pieces of the next version will also likely be increasingly delivered first as components or technologies targeted at vertical markets,' he said."

theraindog writes "Seagate has announced a 2.5" SCSI hard drive that spins at an astounding 15,000RPM. The Savvio 15K is the first 2.5" hard drive with a 15K-RPM spindle speed, but what's more interesting is that Seagate claims it's the fastest hard drive on the market. Indeed, the drive boasts an impressive 2.9ms seek time, which is more than half a millisecond quicker than that of comparable 3.5" SCSI drives. The Savvio 15K also features perpendicular recording technology and a claimed Mean Time Between Failures of 1.6 million hours."