Slashdot

hackingbear writes "After text, pictures, and videos, China starts regulating Internet map publishing (here is the google translation.) The government believes that Internet maps can represent the state's sovereignty and its political and diplomatic positions in the international community — and consequently, inaccurate maps could harm national interests and dignity, produce bad political influences, reveal national secrets and harm national security, in addition to harming consumer interests. So from now on, publishing maps would require approval and (yet another) license from the state survey bureau. That means Google, Yahoo, etc., need to remove China from the map; or maybe they just pay up some officials and their agents to acquire yet another license. And our newest 80Gbps DPI monsters need to be upgraded to identify maps together with porn."

desmondhaynes writes "Is Linux ready for the masses? Is Linux really being targeted towards the 'casual computer user'? Computerworld thinks we're getting there, talking of Linux 'going mainstream 'with Ubuntu. 'If there is a single complaint that is laid at the feet of Linux time and time again, it's that the operating system is too complicated and arcane for casual computer users to tolerate. You can't ask newbies to install device drivers or recompile the kernel, naysayers argue. Of course, many of those criticisms date back to the bad old days, but Ubuntu, the user-friendly distribution sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth's Canonical Ltd., has made a mission out of dispelling such complaints entirely.'"

NMerriam writes "In a stunning legal ruling this week, the family of Jerome Siegel, one of the creators of Superman, has regained some rights to the character from DC Comics and Time-Warner.

We often hear on Slashdot about the impact of Mickey Mouse on the development of modern copyright law, but less well-known outside of the creative community is the almost equally significant impact, often in the opposite direction, that the character Superman has had. Soon after Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster sold their Superman character to Detective Comics for $130 it became one of the most popular and profitable characters in America, and they were recognized as having made one of the most spectacularly bad deals since the sale of Manhattan island.

Outcry in the creative community over the issue finally shamed DC Comics into providing a token annuity to both creators in the 1970s, but it also directly influenced changes to copyright law in 1976 to allow creators to regain ownership of works that had been previously sold. Equally important, the era produced a strong and lasting creators' rights movement in which certain moral rights, such as the right to be recognized as the creator of a character regardless of ownership, were more firmly established.

The financial impact of the ruling is very unclear, since it only applies to work created after the Siegels moved to have their rights restored under that same 1976 law, and will only apply to properties directly related to the Superman character. One significant question that will be keeping DC Comics/Time-Warner and Marvel executives up at night is whether a flood of artists and writers will suddenly move to regain their copyrights, and what impact that would have on the numerous big-budget comic book movies currently in production. Given that tremendous financial uncertainty, it's almost a foregone conclusion that this will be appealed and closely watched by everyone in the entertainment industry."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/business/media/29comics.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

holy_calamity writes "Intel has been awarded a patent for building cosmic ray detectors into chips, to guard against soft errors where a high energy particle from space changes a value in a circuit. It's a problem that largely only affects RAM. As component sizes shrink futher, "this problem is projected to become a major limiter of computer reliability in the next decade", says the patent. Intel's solution is to build in a detector that responds to cosmic errors by repeating the latest operation, reloading previous instructions, or rolling back to a previous state. You can also read the full patent."

Kinescope writes "The motion picture industry has said that its profits are at risk due to piracy, but a record-setting 2007 box office has some wondering if the industry is crying 'wolf.' Last year, the US box office totaled $9.63 billion, a 5.4% increase over 2006. 'Piracy is so bad, according to the MPAA, that we need special legislation to target the dastardly college pirates who are destroying the business. It's so bad that Weekly Reader subscribers will learn about the $7 billion a year "lost" to Internet piracy. It's so bad that the MPAA wants ISPs to ignore years of common carrier law and the promises of "safe harbor" and start filtering their traffic, looking for copyright violations. The real world isn't quite this simple, of course. It turns out that the MPAA's college numbers were off by a factor of three, a revelation that came after years of hiding the study's methodology but continuing to lobby Congress with its numbers.'"

Gerard Boyers writes "Some members of the US National Academy of Engineering have predicted that Artificial Intelligence will reach the level of humans in around 20 years. Ray Kurzweil leads the charge: 'We will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029. We're already a human machine civilization, we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that. We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons.' Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers, and a gentleman we've discussed previously. He was chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering. The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter."

Shoemaker brings us a follow-up to Comcast's recent defense of its traffic management procedures. The companies involved in the original FCC investigation are not satisfied with Comcast's response. From Ars Technica: "Comcast made an aggressive defense of its policies, claiming that it only resets P2P uploads made during peak times and when no download is also in progress. Free Press, BitTorrent, and Vuze all say that's not good enough. In a conference call, Vuze's general counsel Jay Monahan drew the starkest analogy. What Comcast is really doing, he said, wasn't at all comparable to limiting the number of cars that enter a highway. Instead, it was more like a horse race where the cable company owns one of the horses and the racetrack itself. By slowing down the horse of a competitor like Vuze, even for a few seconds, Comcast makes it harder for that horse to compete. 'Which horse would you bet on in a race like that?' asked Monahan."

JoeHep writes "I'm staying in London for a couple of months and thought I would go see the 'Orbo' exhibit at the Kinetica museum. As it turns out, the hardest aspect of a perpetual motion device isn't keeping it running, it's starting it running. The exhibit has been postponed. From the Kinetica website — "KINETICA OPENING DELAYED: Due to technical difficulties the planned demonstration of Steorn's 'Orbo' free energy technology has been postponed until further notice. As a consequence, Kinetica Museum will not be open to the public during this period. A technical assessment is currently underway and information regarding the rescheduling of this demonstration will be posted on the websites of Steorn and Kinetica as soon as it becomes available. We apologise for this delay and appreciate your patience.""
http://www.kinetica-museum.org/new_site/index.php?ptitle=home%20page&mfile=home.php