Comment Blood of Christ? (Score 3, Interesting) 132
Aldrin took communion on the moon? I had never heard that.
New Aliens Vs. Predator Game Doesn't Make It Past AU Ratings Board 277
An anonymous reader writes "Australia refused to give Rebellion's new Aliens Vs. Predator game a rating, effectively banning it in the country. Rebellion says it won't be submitting an edited version for another round of classifications, however. (As Valve did with Left 4 Dead 2.) They said, 'We will not be releasing a sanitized or cut down version for territories where adults are not considered by their governments to be able to make their own entertainment choices.'"
Modded Xbox Bans Prompt EFF Warning About Terms of Service 254
Last month we discussed news that Microsoft had banned hundreds of thousands of Xbox users for using modified consoles. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now pointed to this round of bans as a prime example of the power given to providers of online services through 'Terms of Service' and other usage agreements.
"No matter how much we rely on them to get on with our everyday lives, access to online services — like email, social networking sites, and (wait for it) online gaming — can never be guaranteed. ... he who writes the TOS makes the rules, and when it comes to enforcing them, the service provider often behaves as though it is also the judge, jury and executioner. ... While the mass ban provides a useful illustration of their danger, these terms can be found in nearly all TOS agreements for all kinds of services. There have been virtually no legal challenges to these kinds of arbitrary termination clauses, but we imagine this will be a growth area for lawyers."
Comment Re:I think you've already decided... (Score 1) 600
I don't want schadenfreuede, I just want to read that PowerPoint where my boss told me that we were secure, this year.
Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331
Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."
Proton Beams Sent Around the LHC 115
feldhaus writes "The BBC reports that the first beams for over one year have been successfully sent around the complete circumference of the Large Hadron Collider. Engineers do not yet have a stable circulating beam but they hope to by 0600 GMT on Saturday."
Comment Re:Who is Brian Eno? (Score 1) 196
Who is Brian Eno?
He's a pervert. From an interview with Chrissie Hynde (lead singer/guitarist of The Pretenders): ' "He just didn't come on like someone with an extensive collection of breast bondage literature in the bathroom," she noted.'
Submission + - Google Voice rejected for its dialer functionality
whoop writes: "From TechCrunch, "In a letter to the FCC today, Google disclosed previously unpublished information about Appleâ(TM)s rejection of their Google Voice application... 'Apple representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone'""
Submission + - Recession hits porn industry (economist.com) 2
AliasMarlowe writes: "The unthinkable has actually happened. The porn industry, which was been untouched by several previous recessions, has been severely hit by the current recession. The Economist, ever watchful of important trends, includes the porn industry among the sectors its reporters monitor and analyze. They consider the 50-80% cuts in porn production to be a critical difference between the present recession and other, lesser recessions, with work for "actors" being greatly reduced, pay per performance being cut back. The industry spokespersons, of course, also blame the internet for supplying cheap plentiful porn which had already caused hardship; the economic slowdown was merely an additional hit. "The industry will shrink and stay shrunken" said one performer. Hard times or flaccid times?"
Submission + - SPAM: Facebook will shut down Beacon to settle lawsuit
alphadogg writes: "Facebook has agreed to shut down its much maligned Beacon advertising system in order to settle a class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed in August of last year, alleged that Facebook and its Beacon affiliates like Blockbuster and Overstock.com violated a series of laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Video Privacy Protection Act, the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act and the California Computer Crime Law."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Submission + - Crew for Final Scheduled Space Shuttle Mission Ass (spacefellowship.com)
Toren Altair writes: "NASA has assigned the crew for the last scheduled space shuttle mission, targeted to launch in September 2010. The flight to the International Space Station will carry a pressurized logistics module to the station.
Veteran shuttle commander and retired Air Force Col. Steven W. Lindsey will command the eight-day mission, designated STS-133. Air Force Col. Eric A. Boe will serve as the pilot; it will be his second flight as a shuttle pilot. Mission Specialists are shuttle mission veteran Air Force Col. Benjamin Alvin Drew, Jr., and long-duration spaceflight veterans Michael R. Barratt, Army Col. Timothy L. Kopra and Nicole P. Stott."
Veteran shuttle commander and retired Air Force Col. Steven W. Lindsey will command the eight-day mission, designated STS-133. Air Force Col. Eric A. Boe will serve as the pilot; it will be his second flight as a shuttle pilot. Mission Specialists are shuttle mission veteran Air Force Col. Benjamin Alvin Drew, Jr., and long-duration spaceflight veterans Michael R. Barratt, Army Col. Timothy L. Kopra and Nicole P. Stott."
Submission + - Possible Rollback of Telcom Immunity? (arstechnica.com)
Asmodae writes: "Ars Technica has an article about a proposed Act in congress to roll back telecom retroactive immunity among other privacy safeguards."
Submission + - FreeScore.com sues Yahoo to out anonymous blogger (wordpress.com) 1
zokuga writes: "Back in July, a small blog named "flaneur de fraude" posted a slew of articles and documents purportedly showing that FreeScore.com, a FreeCreditReport.com-like service, had a history of allegations of abusive sales practices, including collecting customer info – including credit card numbers – from financial companies, offering "free trials" for a credit-check service to the customers, and then charging the surreptitiously collected card numbers without notice (they settled a lawsuit by the New York attorney general without admitting wrongdoing). flaneur also pointed out that FreeScore.com had received an F by the Better Business Bureau.
A month later, Adaptive Marketing (owners of freescore.com), who hadn't complained about the content in the blog entry, filed a lawsuit in Connecticut. Not against the blogger, but against Yahoo, in order to get the blogger's identity (the blogger posts with a Yahoo email address). Yahoo failed to show up at the hearing (which was in Connecticut) and so the court ordered Yahoo to reveal the blogger's identity on Sept. 21. flÃneur de fraude, who claims her blog "has had about as much readership as a small-town high school newspaper on the last week of school before summer", has now responded back with the help of the Public Citizen Litigation Group. And she posted more history about freescore.com's owner (which has changed its name 3 times), including its lawsuit against Wikipedia.
flaneur concludes "seems to me they should have let my post and my blog die the quiet death it had settled into.""
A month later, Adaptive Marketing (owners of freescore.com), who hadn't complained about the content in the blog entry, filed a lawsuit in Connecticut. Not against the blogger, but against Yahoo, in order to get the blogger's identity (the blogger posts with a Yahoo email address). Yahoo failed to show up at the hearing (which was in Connecticut) and so the court ordered Yahoo to reveal the blogger's identity on Sept. 21. flÃneur de fraude, who claims her blog "has had about as much readership as a small-town high school newspaper on the last week of school before summer", has now responded back with the help of the Public Citizen Litigation Group. And she posted more history about freescore.com's owner (which has changed its name 3 times), including its lawsuit against Wikipedia.
flaneur concludes "seems to me they should have let my post and my blog die the quiet death it had settled into.""
Submission + - Amazon bans public domain from Kindle (sacred-texts.com) 6
John B. Hare writes: "John B. Hare writes "Many publishers of public domain content on the Kindle are being turned away for reasons which Amazon declines to clarify. In the past two weeks any publisher posting a public domain book (or a book which appears to be a public domain book) have received the message "Your book is currently under review by the Kindle Operations team as we are trying to improve the Kindle customer experience. Please check back in 5 business days to see if your book was published to the store."
Amazon claims that this is a quality control issue, that readers can't figure out on their own that a five page Kindle book for $9.99 is a rip-off or yet another Kindle edition of 'Pride and Prejudice' is pointless. This was supposed to be the point of user feedback and the Kindle return policy: the user can quickly decide what the best choice is, and if they don't like it, back out without any harm done.
I own and run one of the primary contributors of new public domain etexts on the web: sacred-texts.com. When the ban went into effect, I was just back from an intense round of chemo. I was disappointed to get this message. I am (was?) in the process of converting all of the 2000+ ebooks at sacred-texts into Kindle editions. I use a homebrew preflight Kindle filter to construct the Kindle binary from my master files, which we have invested nearly a million dollars into creating. We spend thousands a month in-house doing legal clearance, scanning, OCRing, and proofing, often by domain experts. So we are hardly a fly-by-night operation. In fact, many of the PD texts floating around on the Internet and on the Kindle were originally done at sacred-texts at great investment of labor and time. Our Kindle return rate is close to zero.
This morning I received an email stating:
Amazon claims that this is a quality control issue, that readers can't figure out on their own that a five page Kindle book for $9.99 is a rip-off or yet another Kindle edition of 'Pride and Prejudice' is pointless. This was supposed to be the point of user feedback and the Kindle return policy: the user can quickly decide what the best choice is, and if they don't like it, back out without any harm done.
I own and run one of the primary contributors of new public domain etexts on the web: sacred-texts.com. When the ban went into effect, I was just back from an intense round of chemo. I was disappointed to get this message. I am (was?) in the process of converting all of the 2000+ ebooks at sacred-texts into Kindle editions. I use a homebrew preflight Kindle filter to construct the Kindle binary from my master files, which we have invested nearly a million dollars into creating. We spend thousands a month in-house doing legal clearance, scanning, OCRing, and proofing, often by domain experts. So we are hardly a fly-by-night operation. In fact, many of the PD texts floating around on the Internet and on the Kindle were originally done at sacred-texts at great investment of labor and time. Our Kindle return rate is close to zero.
This morning I received an email stating:
"Dear Publisher,
We're working on a policy and procedure change to fix a customer experience problem caused by multiple copies of public domain titles being uploaded by a multitude of publishers. For an example of this problem, do a search on "Pride and Prejudice" in the Kindle Store. The current situation is very confusing for customers as it makes it difficult to decide which 'Pride and Prejudice' to choose. As a result, at this time we are not accepting additional public domain titles through DTP, including the following: The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ
The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ
Traces of a Hidden Tradition in Masonry and Medieval Mysticism
The History of the Knights Templar by Nicolas Notovitch...
If you believe that we have wrongly identified this title as a public domain title, and you are the copyright holder or are authorized to sell it by the copyright holder, then please reply to title-submission@amazon.com with appropriate documentation of your e-book rights.
Thank you, Amazon.com
As can be seen, this brings an entirely new issue into play: apparently, if I owned the rights to a public domain book and can prove it, they will reconsider. However, nobody can own a public domain book. Amazon is telling us that in order to post our books we need to prove a contradiction!
One key point is that Amazon has applied this ban completely non-selectively. Established publishers such as myself and others who have never had any quality control issues whatsoever, and give good value for the price, have all been tarred with the broad brush of 'Public Domain Publisher--do not post'.
By banning new public domain books from the Kindle, they are making an implicit decision as to which books people should read. You can argue that 'you can get these texts anywhere' but by excluding high quality Kindle books of them from the nascent Kindle marketplace, Amazon is implicitly trying to decide what is a valid part of our culture and what isn't. This trend does not bode well for the future of ebooks.
Submission + - Should we be able to bitch about our boss online? (computerworld.com.au) 3
boss man writes: In Australia, the fate of a group of six prison wardens lies in the hands of an industrial relations committee, after they landed themselves in trouble for writing awful things about their boss and other co-workers on a Facebook group page. Some comments even went so far as to call their boss Judas! Their boss, who says he was offended by the comments, is seeking to sack the group of employees, but the employees believe they should have the right to vent frustrations about their boss on Facebook. So, whose side are you on? One expert argues that we will see more of these cases appear as society struggles to come to grips with issues arising from social networking.
