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Big Media and Big Telcos getting nasty in landmark Australian law Case->

Submitted by
Fluffeh
Fluffeh writes "In Australia, we have the right to record TV and play it back at a later date, we also have the right to transcode from one format to another, so anyone with a media server can legally back up their entire DVD collection and watch it without all those annoying warning and unskippable content — as long as we don't break encryption (please stop laughing!). Optus, Australia's second largest Telco has been raising ire though with the new TV Now service they are offering and Big Media is having a hissy fit. They recently offered the service that does the recording on behalf of the customer. Seems a no brainer right? Let the customer do what they are allowed to legally do at home, but charge them for it. Everybody wins! Not according to Sports Broadcasters who made this statement when Optus said they would appeal their recent loss in an Australian Court to the highest court in the land: "They are a disgusting organisation who is acting reprehensibly again and now putting more uncertainty into sports and broadcast rights going forward I’m really disappointed and disgusted in the comments of their CEO overnight." Is this yet another case of Big Media clutching at an outdated business model, or should consumers be content with just doing their own work?"
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Hardware

DDR4 May Replace Mobile Memory For Less->

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes "The upcoming shift from Double Data Rate 3 (DDR3) RAM to its successor, DDR4, will herald in a significant boost in both memory performance and capacity for data center hardware and consumer products alike. Because of greater density, 2X performance and lower cost, with the upcoming specification and products will for the first time mean DDR may be used in mobile devices instead of LPDDR. Today, mobile devices use low-power DDR (LPDDR) memory, the current iteration of which uses 1.2v of power. While the next generation of mobile memory, LPDDR3, will further reduce that power consumption (probably by 35% to 40%), it will also likely cost 40% more than DDR4 memory."
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Science

Gene Therapy Extends Mouse Lifespan->

Submitted by
Grond
Grond writes "'Researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre have demonstrated that the mouse lifespan can be extended by the application in adult life of a single treatment acting directly on the animal's genes. Mice treated at the age of one lived longer by 24% on average, and those treated at the age of two, by 13%. The therapy, furthermore, produced an appreciable improvement in the animals' health, delaying the onset of age-related diseases — like osteoporosis and insulin resistance — and achieving improved readings on aging indicators like neuromuscular coordination.' Notably, the therapy did not cause an increase in the incidence of cancer."
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Canadian Internet Surveillance dies a quiet, lonely death.->

Submitted by
Dr Caleb
Dr Caleb writes "The Internet surveillance legislation sponsored by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has disappeared down a dark legislative hole. For all intents and purposes, the bill is dead. If the Harper government still wants to pass a law that would make it easier for police to track people who use the web to commit crimes, it will have to start from scratch.

A follow up from the Minister of "Against Online Surveillance? You Must Be 'For' Child Porn""

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Math

The Mathematics of Obesity

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The NY Times reports that Carson C. Chow, an MIT trained mathematician and physicist, has taken a new look at America's obesity epidemic and found that a food glut is behind America’s weight problem with the national obesity rate jumping from 20 percent to over 30 percent since 1970. "Beginning in the 1970s, there was a change in national agricultural policy. Instead of the government paying farmers not to engage in full production, as was the practice, they were encouraged to grow as much food as they could," says Chow. "With such a huge food supply, food marketing got better and restaurants got cheaper. The low cost of food fueled the growth of the fast-food industry. If food were expensive, you couldn’t have fast food." Chow and mathematical physiologist, Kevin Hall created a math model of a human with hundreds of equations, boiled it down to one simple equation, and then plugged in all the variables — height, weight, food intake, exercise. The slimmed-down equation proved to be a useful platform for answering a host of questions. For example, the conventional wisdom of 3,500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong because the body changes as you lose. The fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight so an extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one. Another finding: Huge variations in your daily food intake will not cause variations in weight, as long as your average food intake over a year is about the same. Unfortunately another finding is that weight change, up or down, takes a very, very long time. All diets work but the reaction time is really slow: on the order of a year. Chow has posted an interactive version of the model on the web where people can plug in their information and learn how much they’ll need to reduce their intake and increase their activity to lose. "There’s no magic bullet on this. You simply have to cut calories and be vigilant for the rest of your life.""
Network

The elusive capacity of networks->

Submitted by slashbill
slashbill writes "MIT's working on a way to measure network capacity. Seems no one really knows how much data their network can handle. Makes you wonder about how then do you calculate expense when building out capacity?

From the article: Recently, one of the most intriguing developments in information theory has been a different kind of coding, called network coding, in which the question is how to encode information in order to maximize the capacity of a network as a whole. For information theorists, it was natural to ask how these two types of coding might be combined: If you want to both minimize error and maximize capacity, which kind of coding do you apply where, and when do you do the decoding?"

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Science

Iranian physics student from UT gets 10 years in jail for spying->

Submitted by scibri
scibri writes "Omid Kokabee, a laser physics graduate student from the University of Texas who has been imprisoned in Tehran for the past 15 months, was sentenced to 10 years in jail on Sunday for allegedly conspiring with foreign countries against Iran.

Kokabee was arrested in February 2011 while on a trip home, and charged with “communicating with a hostile government” (ie Israel) and “illegal earnings”. He has consistently denied the charges, and refused to speak at his trial, where no evidence against him was presented.

Several international science groups, including the American Physical Society, have spoken up in his defence, and an online petition has been set up in support."

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Canada

Byron Sonne Cleared of Explosives Charges->

Submitted by davegravy
davegravy writes "Byron Sonne, the Toronto-based security consultant / chemistry hobbyist / geek who was arrested leading up to the Toronto G-20 for alleged plans to bomb the event, has been found not guilty of all charges.

Sonne was held in prison for 11 months without receiving bail and the ruling comes 2 years after his arrest. Sonne is considered by many in the Toronto security community as a champion of civil rights and a sharp critic of security theatre."

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Publishers SAGE & OUP win copyright case against Georgia State University->

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes "The Atlanta Journal Constitution (http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/judge-rules-largely-for-1437124.html) is reporting that a federal judge has ruled in favor of Georgia State University on 69 of 74 copyright claims filed by Cambridge University Press (http://www.cambridge.org/), Oxford University Press(http://www.oup.com/) and SAGE Publications (http://www.sagepub.com/) .

In a 350-page ruling, Senior US District Judge Orinda Evans found that "fair use protected a Georgia State University professor's decision to allow students to access an excerpt online through the university's Electronic Reserves System."

While the 69 of the 74 claims were rejected, the judge also found that five violations did occur "when the publisher lost money because a professor had provided free electronic access to selected chapters in textbooks." SAGE Publications (http://www.sagepub.com/) prevailed on four of these five claims, while Oxford University Press (http://www.oup.com/) won the fifth claim. Cambridge University Press (http://www.cambridge.org/) lost all its claims."

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The Military

UK In Danger From Electromagnetic Bomb, Says Defence Secretary->

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes "Britain must build defences against an EMP bomb, the UK Secretary of Defence Phillip Hammond told a conference today. Electromagnetic Pulse devices mimic the result of a solar flare or a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere, creating a storm of electromagnetic radiation, which can break mobile networks and satellite systems. Any preparation for olar storms must also consider the possibility of deliberate electromagnetic events, warns Hammond."
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