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Submission + - Self-publishing a contraversial e-book (amazon.com)

Submitted by Evildonald
Evildonald writes: My father is publishing a book that is too hot to publish in his home country. He will be exempt from prosecution as long as the book is not published or is directly for sale in the state that it is discussing.

We will be initially publishing on Amazon and Barnes and Noble e-book, but I am concerned that they might bow to legal pressure (whether it has jurisdiction or not) and stop sale of his book.

To protect ourselves, and to have a fallback, what other services are there out there for selling your own e-book? Are there e-publishers that are militantly resistant to legal takedowns? Is there an open-source project that has been made to self-publish reliably?

Please help my dad.
Medicine

Submission + - Portable Microscope Uses Holograms Instead of Lens (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: While financial contributions are certainly a great help to health care practitioners in developing nations, one of the things that they really need is rugged, portable, low-cost medical equipment that is compatible with an often-limited local infrastructure. Several such devices are currently under development, such as a battery-powered surgical lamp, a salad-spinner-based centrifuge, and a baby-warmer that utilizes wax. UCLA is now working on another appropriate technology in the form of a small, inexpensive microscope that uses holograms instead of lenses to image what can't be seen by the human eye.

Comment think zombies, not ideas (Score 3, Informative) 283

by OnionFighter (#36884016) Attached to: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas

The problem is that this article badly summarizes the results of computer modeling that is supposed to represent human interactions. Apparently the tipping point for their simulation is 10%. Without seeing the actual original research findings, it is difficult to see if this actually matters, but the available article seems to say that the 10% is irrespective of network structure.

The computer simulation seems more analogous to a disease outbreak than to an idea. Imagine a percentage of people are zombies. They can only attack their friends, who can fight them so long as they have more living than dead friends nearby (I am assuming here that it is 51% that is needed to change status, but who knows what the actual research used). If they don't, then they switch sides and spread the outbreak. So the simulation might be saying that if 10% of people are initially zombies, then mankind is generally doomed. If it is less, then the outbreak will be contained.

I also find it interesting that the study was funded by the military.

Submission + - Burglaries in the Fukushima exclusion zone (yomiuri.co.jp)

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "

Burglars are apparently targeting houses left vacant because they are within 30 kilometers of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. The National Police Agency said the number of burglaries in Fukushima Prefecture totaled 695 from March to May, an increase of about 40 percent from the same period last year. Fukushima prefectural police have set up a special security unit consisting of about 300 police officers to patrol these areas in cooperation with the Metropolitan Police Department.

It is strange that when a area has been evacuated to protect life, some must return to it to protect property."

Comment Re:Different kind of change (Score 1) 140

by OnionFighter (#34802046) Attached to: It's Surprisingly Hard To Notice When Moving Objects Change
I noticed that when I was looking at the unmoving dots, I saw them as individuals. As they started moving together, I reinterpreted them as a single mass made up of dots. It would be interesting to see if the effect is the same when the dots are moving in different directions and at different speeds.
Toys

Aerial Video Footage of New York Taken By RC Plane 208

Posted by timothy from the make-friends-in-law-enforcement dept.
kkleiner writes with this fun bit from Singularity Hub: "Expert remote control pilot Raphael 'Trappy' Pirker recently took his 54 inch Zephyr model plane on a harrowing tour of Manhattan and the surrounding area. The best part: his RC vehicle was fitted with a camera that wirelessly transmitted an amazing recording of everything it saw – Pirker was piloting his craft with this visual feed. As you can see in the video, the results were spectacular. The plane looks to be flying within a few feet of buildings and whizzing past bridges with ease. You have to check out around 2:01 when he starts to buzz right by the Statute of Liberty."
Censorship

DHS Seized Domains Based On Bad Evidence 235

Posted by Soulskill from the legal-systems-and-intertubes-don't-mesh dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Back over Thanksgiving, the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit (ICE) made a lot of news by seizing over 80 domain names. While many of these involved sites that sold counterfeit products, five of the domains involved copyright issues. Four of them involved hiphop-related blogs — including ones that hiphop stars like Kanye West and others used to promote their own works, and the last one was a meta search engine that simply aggregated other search engines. Weeks went by without the owners of those sites even being told why their domains were seized, but the affidavit for the seizure of those five sites has recently come out, and it's full of all sorts of problems. Not only was it put together by a recent college graduate, who claimed that merely linking to news and blog posts about file sharing constituted evidence of copyright infringement, it listed as evidence of infringement songs that labels specifically sent these blogs to promote. Also, what becomes clear is that the MPAA was instrumental in 'guiding' ICE's rookie agent in going after these sites, as that appeared to be the only outside expertise relied on in determining if these sites should be seized."
Toys

Fun With an Induction Cooktop? 147

Posted by Soulskill from the do-try-this-at-home dept.
fishfrys writes "Besides generating heat quickly and efficiently in ferromagnetic pans, what sorts of fun things can you do with an induction cooktop? This seems like a pretty serious piece of electromagnetic equipment — boiling water can't be the only thing it's good for. I went to YouTube, expecting to find all sorts of crazy videos of unsafe induction cooktop shenanigans, but found only cooking. What sort of exciting, if not stupid, physics experiments can be performed with one? Hard drive scrubber? DIY Tesla coil? There's got to be something."

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