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+ - BitTorrent Bundle puts a music store inside torrents->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "BitTorrent has come up with a new way to sell music, and it’s sure to ruffle executive feathers at stodgy record labels. It’s called BitTorrent Bundle, and it puts the music store right inside the torrent. Yes, a legitimate music store embedded in a torrent. At last, someone has come up with a way to turn all us entitled, lawless downloaders into paying customers!

BitTorrent thinks of BitTorrent Bundle as a sort of 21st century band flyer. It’s a digital grassroots way to reach out to fans, but it also enables them to show their support and easily purchase additional content. Post a torrent with a handful of live tracks from your latest tour, Bundle it with a store that lets your groupies buy the full album. Simple."
Link to Original Source

+ - Stop Motion Effects Master Ray Harryhausen, Dead At 92->

Submitted by Dave Knott
Dave Knott writes "Ray Harryhausen, the stop-motion animation pioneer behind the special effects in such movies as “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958), “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), and “Clash of the Titans” (1981) has died in London. This note was posted on the Facebook page of The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation: “The Harryhausen family regret to announce the death of Ray Harryhausen, Visual Effects pioneer and stop-motion model animator. He was a multi-award winner which includes a special Oscar and BAFTA. Ray’s influence on today’s film makers was enormous, with luminaries; Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, John Landis and the UK’s own Nick Park have cited Harryhausen as being the man whose work inspired their own creations.”"
Link to Original Source

+ - Weird Geological Features Spied on Mars->

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes "The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera carried by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has spotted a strange geological feature that, for now, defies an obvious explanation. Found at the southern edge of Acidalia Planitia, small pits with raised edges appear to hug a long ridge. So far, mission scientists have ruled out impact craters and wind as formation processes, but have pegged the most likely cause to be glacial in nature."
Link to Original Source

+ - Defense Distributed's Entirely 3D-Printed Gun Works Alarmingly Well ->

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The Liberator is not perfect. Subsequent tests led to a misfire, and when the Texans tried to fire a rifle bullet, the whole thing exploded. However, Wilson later returned to the firing range with an improved model, one that he felt comfortable enough holding in his hand and firing. And that's exactly what he did. Behold: (VIDEO)

The most alarming thing about this mostly functional little plastic firearm is the fact that Wilson has now uploaded the CAD files for the gun parts so that everyone can 3D-print his own weapon. And yes, there is definitely an arm-the-people element to the project. There always has been, but Wilson seems to have taken an even more radical point of view as his 3D-printed project becomes more successful."
Link to Original Source

+ - CenturyLink's nationwide outage affects millions ->

Submitted by halfEvilTech
halfEvilTech writes "CenturyLink, the nation’s third largest telco network is experiencing an outage of its broadband service nationwide, leaving its support systems overwhelmed and even causing its website to hit a few snags this morning. The company, which at last count has 5.8 million broadband subscribers, has no estimates yet on how long it will take to restore service."
Link to Original Source

+ - Using YouTube for File Storage->

Submitted by ememisya
ememisya writes "Ever thought it might be a good idea to store encrypted data in a QRCode video? Using this technique one could easily store 10GB of data to be available anywhere in the world and completely free."
Link to Original Source

+ - Prenda hammered: Judge sends porn-trolling lawyers to criminal investigators->

Submitted by SternisheFan
SternisheFan writes "ArsTechnica Aurich Lawson reports:

Lawyers who lied and obfuscated for years face disbarment and a $82,000 fine.

US District Judge Otis Wright has no love for the lawyers who set up the copyright-trolling operation that came to be known as Prenda Law. But Wright at least acknowledges their smarts in his long-awaited order, released today. Wright's order is a scathing 11-page document, suggesting Prenda masterminds John Steele and Paul Hansmeier should be handed over for criminal investigation. In the first page though, there's almost some admiration expressed for the sheer dark intelligence of their scheme. The copyright-trolling scheme that has reached its apex with Prenda is so complete, so mathematical.

"Plaintiffs have outmaneuvered the legal system," Wright begins. He goes on:

"They've discovered the nexus of antiquated copyright laws, paralyzing paralyzing social stigma, and unaffordable defense costs. And they exploit this anomaly by accusing individuals of illegally downloading a single pornographic video. Then they offer to settle—for a sum calculated to be just below the cost of a bare-bones defense. For these individuals, resistance is futile; most reluctantly pay rather than have their names associated with illegally downloading porn. So now, copyright laws originally designed to compensate starving artists allow, starving attorneys in this electronic-media era to plunder the citizenry."

And yes, if reading "resistance is futile" rattles something in your brain—Wright's order is thoroughly peppered with Star Trek references.

The plaintiffs have a right to assert their intellectual property rights, "so long as they do it right," Wright acknowledges. That's not what happened here, though. Prenda lawyers used "the same boilerplate complaints against dozens of defendants," without telling the judge. Instead, defense lawyers like Morgan Pietz flagged the dozens of related cases. "It was when the Court realized Plaintiffs engaged their cloak of shell companies and fraud that the court went to battlestations," stated Wright."
Link to Original Source

+ - Porn-Trolling lawyers facing disbarment, fines, and criminal prosecution.

Submitted by JayRott
JayRott writes "Prenda Law (the porn copyright trolls previously mentioned here) have finally been handed Judge Otis D. Wright II's order. The order is every bit as entertaining as one would expect. It even has a liberal sprinkling of Star Trek references.
Brett Gibbs, John Steele and Paul Hansmeier are facing an $82,000 fine (noted by Judge Wright to be just below the cost of a proper appeal, a reference to Prenda's settlement offers which fell just below the cost of a proper defense.) Judge Wright will also "refer this matter to the United States Attorney for the Central District of California. The will also refer this matter to the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service and will notify all judges before whom these attorneys have pending cases."
Prenda law appears to be floating belly-up in the fishbowl.

Ars Technica coverage: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/prenda-hammered-judge-sends-porn-trolling-lawyers-to-criminal-investigators/

Pope Hat coverage: http://www.popehat.com/2013/05/06/does-prenda-believe-in-no-win-scenarios-because-judge-wright-just-gave-them-one/#more-18627

Link to full order: http://www.popehat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/PendaSanctionsOrder.pdf"

Comment: Skewed by Federal Accounting Rules? (Score 1) 202

If your company does business with the federal government, then FAR might be skewing the numbers.

Direct expenses, including non-recurring material costs, can be billed direct (i.e., to the contract) whereas marketing costs are by definition indirect (cannot be billed to contracts but do count towards overhead, G&A, etc.).

This means that a lot of "non-labor engineering expenses" could be hidden from that ratio due to the fact that they're billed to the customers.

Comment: Re:Move 'em to Macs (Score 1) 255

by bughunter (#43610977) Attached to: How often do friends/family call you for tech support?

My wife refuses to switch to Mac/iPhone, even though she keeps complaining about all the the things that Apple does better than Windows/Android:

"I hate how everything on my phone changes everytime they send a system update!"

"I connected to my client's wifi and now it won't connect to our wifi at home!"

"I can't print... AGAIN!"

"Outlook is re-downloading EVERYTHING in my Yahoo inbox... AGAIN!"

and the worst:

Her: "Windows won't boot!"
Me, after examining her laptop: "Looks like the drive got corrupted. When was the last time you backed up? I showed you how to do it and gave you an external drive..."
Her: "Um... I think it was the last time my hard drive crashed. Why won't it back up automatically?"

Comment: Not a new concept... (Score 5, Interesting) 221

by bughunter (#43570373) Attached to: The Coming War Against Personal Photography and Video

David Brin's settings in his novels Earth and Kiln People included ubiquitous surveillance, and it was a primary topic in his nonfiction work, The Transparent Society.

This "coming war" is just the birthing pains of the kind of society he predicts, wherein everyone wears cameras akin to Google Glass, the government records and monitors video everywhere, and privacy is a luxury available only to the wealthy and/or the criminal classes. (Not much of a distinction between the two anymore...)

+ - Smithsonian Releases 128-Year-Old Recording Of Alexander Graham Bell->

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes "Thanks to a newly developed audio extraction technology called optical scanning, the Smithsonian was able to recover the voice of Alexander Graham Bell from one of his hundreds of discs he donated to the museum, which were once considered "mute artifacts." Since many of the collected recordings are very fragile due to their âoeage and experimental nature,â optical scanning is a non-invasive procedure that creates a high-resolution digital map of the disc or cylinder, which is then reconstructed and used to simulate the motion of a stylus moving through its grooves to reproduce the original audio content. Bell, who created this recording on a wax and cardboard disc on April 15, 1885, can be heard clearly saying, 'In witness whereof — hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.'"
Link to Original Source

Force has no place where there is need of skill. -- Herodotus

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