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The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Australian ISPs to disconnect file sharers?

shadrach_au writes: The Australian music industry has approached Internet service providers (ISP) to penalize people who illegally download music. Under the plan, record labels would identify Internet customers who are illegally downloading and service providers would give them three warnings before cutting off their phone and Internet connections. Recent research shows that 18 per cent of Australians regularly use filesharing programs like Limewire to illegally download songs from the Internet.
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - How Not To Comply With a Takedown Notice?

blazerw11 writes: "A friend of mine once wanted to be in advertising. He made some really funny ads for a greasy fast food joint, Gene & Jude's of River Grove, IL, that he loves. The ads are quite funny, so I offered to host them on my webserver. That was 7 years ago. They were basically forgotten about except when I occasionally looked at my web statistics and saw that they were the most popular pages on my webserver. As many as 10 people a month would actually view them. Well, today I got a certified letter from a lawyer representing Gene & Jude's claiming I've damaged their company and demanding that I take them down. Now, I can understand their point and if Gene or Jude would have called me and said, "Hey, I don't like those so much, could you take them down?" I would have in a heartbeat. Now that they've called their lawyer, my question is, what can I do at the very least to postpone taking them down or, better yet, keep them up?"
Windows

Submission + - Is Wine or Vista more Windows compatible?

ZMXJ writes: We've been hearing quite a few anecdotes & reviews that complain about poor compatibility of old hardware and pre-vista-windows software with Vista; and quite a few articles about improved compatibility of Wine.

My suspicion is that Linux has much better hardware compatibility with Win2K era PCs than Vista does; and my suspicion is that the software compatibility of Wine vs Vista for Win2K apps is about the same. But before I make a recommendation that upgrading to Wine would be better than upgrading to Vista in our company, I wanted to Ask Slashdot to see what other people's experiences with either transition have been like. So far our company has no experience with Vista nor Wine/Linux (quite a bit of Win2K & Linux experience, though). Any experience you guys had moving ot to Vista or to Wine would be of interest.

Would an upgrade from Win2K to Vista or an upgrade from Win2K to Wine/Linux be less painful?
Businesses

Submission + - How to avoid javacertified.com extortion ?

An anonymous reader writes: I am developing and selling a Java ME Go Game application for mobile phones and I run into something that I can't qualify otherwise than an extortion scheme.

Basically they lock out developers from API features or make them barely possible to use for almost every single mobile phone on the planet if you don't pay a premium to their "initiative" where LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony-Ericsson are participating. It looks like there is no technical way around it. It is (or will be) the only one certificate accepted by those phones.

You need to pay around 200-250 euros per device, per version to get certified where a monkey checks if you have an exit button on your application and an help screen.

Imagine you want to make your product compatible for every device and release 5 minor versions per year, it amounts to hundreds of thousands of euros per year !

Is anybody escaped this racket ? If yes how ?
Is it even remotely legal ?
Media

Web Scanning Technology for Copyright Violations 54

eldavojohn writes "I've heard a lot of talk about software being used to detect pirated media anywhere on the web, but haven't seen a lot of details. PhysOrg has a good article on one of the tools out there. Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection (ACID) boasts a patented technology dubbed 'meaning-based computing' that is reportedly capable of finding relationships among 1,000 different types of files. The important thing is that this is not tagging-based searching. 'Autonomy's search technology uses automatic hyperlinking and link clustering that the company claims isn't built into keyword search engines. According to the company, this technology allows computers to perform searches with greater context, so it finds a wider range of related documents or research citations than is possible from keyword searches.' For more details on how this magic works, check out Autonomy's patent and the many patents by its subdivision, Virage."
Data Storage

Submission + - Can CDs Be Recycled?

An anonymous reader writes: I was recently doing a closet-cleaning and came across literally hundreds of old software CDs that are no longer usable — both manufactured CDs and CD-Rs. Note that by "not usable", I mean that many of them simply couldn't be read anymore, possibly due to the fact that they'd been stored rather ineptly (no, I wasn't responsible for how they were stored). My question is: Is it possible to reclaim CDs for raw materials? It seems wrong to just throw them out, but are there other things that can be done with them that will allow their raw materials to be reused in some way?

Feed Tumors Stopped From Spreading In Mice (sciencedaily.com)

A research team reports that radiation and chemotherapy increase circulating levels of the growth factor TGF-beta, circulating cancer cells, and tumor metastases in a mouse model of metastatic breast cancer.
Windows

Submission + - Walt Mossberg of WSJ denounces craplets on new PCs

twasserman writes: "Walt Mossberg's Personal Technology column in the Wall Street Journal describes his irritation at the "craplets" that were preinstalled on his new laptop. He characterizes the manufacturers as not having respect for the consumer, and acting as if the computer does not belong to you. He also noted the serious performance hit and wasted space resulting from all of this stuff, noting that it took 3 minutes to start up the Vista laptop compared to 30 seconds for a MacBook. He expressed his wish that computer manufacturers would stop loading all of these trial programs and offers on computers. Thank you, Mr. Mossberg, for saying to your business readers what many of us have been saying to the manufacturers for a long time."

Feed Culture Is Key To Interpreting Facial Emotions (sciencedaily.com)

Culture is a determining factor when interpreting facial emotions. The study reveals that in cultures where emotional control is the standard, such as Japan, focus is placed on the eyes to interpret emotions. Whereas in cultures where emotion is openly expressed, such as the United States, the focus is on the mouth to interpret emotion.
Censorship

Submission + - Thailand bans YouTube for making fun of king

samerpav writes: Mr. Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom, the minister of information and communication technology, told the Reuters news agency he personally ordered a block of the entire site from Thailand after the ministry's attempts to block the offending page last week failed. Bangkok Post link: http://bangkokpost.com/topstories/topstories.php?i d=117871

YouTube video of the king: http://youtube.com/watch?v=4SRyffEbJ50

(Mr. Sitthichai was the minister who canceled Thailand's OLPC project a few months back)
IBM

Submission + - SCO Takes On PJ Herself, Files Motion to Depose

Vexler writes: In their latest attempt at a "scorch-earth" strategy to smear just about anyone related to this trial, SCO has filed a motion to depose Pamela Jones of Groklaw. According to this story, SCO accuses PJ once again of working with Novell and IBM while receiving assistance from them. Be sure to read the accompanying PDFs, but I suspect that PJ will have no trouble finding someone in the open-source community who has the legal training and resolve to defend her with vigor.
Security

Submission + - Securing your laptop while backpacking abroad?

Anonymous Coward writes: "I am planning to travel abroad and backpack through Europe and North America, however my laptop is one necessity I cannot live without. I will be staying in budget accommodation, mostly backpackers hostels, and the security of the laptop is a major concern. What have other travelers done to help secure their prize possession? Any general advice to someone hoping to stay online while enjoying their travels?"
Movies

Submission + - MPAA targets Singapore schools and libraries

Jared writes: The new anti-piracy booklets titled "Illegal File-Sharing: The Risks Aren't Worth It" will be distributed to students attending all of Singapore's 164 secondary schools and 16 junior colleges, and copies will be available at all of the country's 23 National Library branches as well. http://www.zeropaid.com/news/8590/MPAA+targets+lib raries+and+schools+in+Singapore+to+spread+anti-pir acy+message

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