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Music

RIAA Wants Songwriter Royalty Lowered 343

Posted by kdawson from the more-for-meeeeee dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Lest there be anyone left who believes the RIAA's propaganda that its litigation campaign is intended to benefit the 'creators' of the music, Hollywood Reporter reports that the RIAA is asking the Copyright Royalty Board to lower songwriter royalties on song file downloads, from the present rate of 9 cents per song — about 13% of the wholesale price — down to 8% of wholesale. Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale. So any representations by any of these companies that they are concerned for the 'creators' of the music must henceforth be taken with a boxcar-load of salt."
Microsoft

How Microsoft-Yahoo Will Affect Open Source 287

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-think-about dept.
jammag writes "If the marriage of Microsoft and Yahoo were to be consummated, GNU/Linux would be hindered, argues Roy Schestowitz. Yahoo's funding of open source initiatives would dry up. Yahoo, which acquired Zimbra, would lose its love for the open source competitor of Microsoft Outlook. The list goes on..."
Microsoft

Torvalds Says Microsoft is Bluffing on Patents 157

Posted by CmdrTaco from the summon-the-patent-attorneys-from-their-crypts dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than "a marketing thing," according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel. "They have been sued for patents by other people, but I don't think they've — not that I've gone through any huge amount of law cases — but I don't think they've generally used patents as a weapon," Torvalds said. "But they're perfectly happy to use anything at all as fear, uncertainty and doubt in the marketplace, and patents is just one thing where they say, 'Hey, isn't this convenient? We can use this as a PR force.'""
The Courts

A Look at The RIAA's War Against College Students 159

Posted by Soulskill from the tomb-of-the-anonymous-peer dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "p2pnet.net has put together a fascinating retrospective on the RIAA's war against college students, commenced February 28, 2007. The campaign is described as one to 'force "consumers" to buy what they're told to buy — corporate "content," as the Big 4 call their formulaic outpourings.' In a scathing indictment not only of the major record labels, but of those schools, administrators, and educators who have yet to take a stand against it, Jon Newton reviews a number of landmark moments in the 11-month old 'reign of terror'. They include the announcement of the bizarre 'early settlement' sale, the sudden withdrawal of a case in which a 17 year old Texas high school student had been subpoenaed while in class during school hours to attend a deposition the very next day during his taking of a standardized test, the call by Harvard law professors for the university to fight back when and if attacked, and the differing reactions by other schools."
Medicine

Finnish Patient Gets New Jaw from His Own Stem Cells 141

Posted by Soulskill from the close-the-organ-banks dept.
An anonymous reader writes with news out of Finland, where a patient's upper jaw was replaced with bone cultivated from stem cells and grown inside the patient himself. We discussed other advances in stem cell research a few months ago. Quoting: "In this case they identified and pulled out cells called mesenchymal stem cells -- immature cells than can give rise to bone, muscle or blood vessels. When they had enough cells to work with, they attached them to a scaffold made out of a calcium phosphate biomaterial and then put it inside the patient's abdomen to grow for nine months. The cells turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels, the researchers said."
Biotech

Sperm Made From Female Bone Marrow, Men Obsolete? 459

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the what-some-women-have-been-saying-for-years dept.
Shaitan Apistos writes "British scientists have discovered a way to turn female bone marrow into sperm, allowing women to reproduce without the need of male companionship. All children born of this method would be female, due the lack Y chromosomes, and there is high chance of birth defects. Eggs also can be created from male bone marrow, but men looking to reproduce would still need to find a surrogate mother to handle the gestation period. I'd like to take a moment to welcome our new amazonian overlords and remind them that men are still very good at mowing lawns and fixing cars."
Windows

Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista 347

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the wine-keeps-getting-better-with-age dept.
Several readers have written to tell us about one users rant in which he tells the story of being so frustrated with gaming on Windows Vista that he tried comparing gaming on Vista to that on Linux using Wine, with surprising results. "This post is clearly a bit biased. What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox. I'm not a huge gamer, so I don't have a huge collection of games to try out, but even still with just a few hours of frustrating work, I have been able to show that not only is Linux a reasonable alternative to Vista for gaming (XP is still king though), but also that Linux handles application failures more gracefully than Vista. Every game but Blackthorne crashed my Vista box, this didn't happen a single time under Linux."
Microsoft

Time for a Vista Do-Over? 746

Posted by samzenpus from the better-luck-next-time dept.
DigitalDame2 writes "'There's nothing wrong with Vista,' PC Mag editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff tells a Microsoft rep at this year's CES. 'But you guys have a big problem on your hands. Perception is reality, and the perception is that Vista is a dud.' He goes on to confess that the operating system is too complex and burdened by things people don't need. Plus, Vista sometimes seems so slow. Ulanoff gives four suggestions for a complete Vista makeover, like starting with new code and creating a universal interface table. But will Microsoft really listen?"
Communications

Submission + - Bendable optical fiber replaces copper at home (corning.com)

Submitted by barwasp
barwasp writes: It appears that Corning Inc. has developed an optical fiber cable that is 100 times more bendable than standard fibers. Current optical fiber installations lose signal strength and effectiveness when bent around corners and routed through a building, making it often difficult and expensive to run fiber all the way to customers' homes. These Corning's new fibers are claimed to be bendable around very tight corners with virtually no signal loss.
Businesses

Submission + - IT industry competitiveness around the world (akamai.net)

Submitted by barwasp
barwasp writes: The Economist's intelligence subunit has been benchmarking IT industry competitiveness. The produced "IT industry competitiveness index", compares 64 countries around the world. This BSA sponsored study tries to measure to which extent the environment in each country provides competitiveness to information technology firms.
In overall scores the top five countries were found to be USA, Japan, South Korea, UK and Australia. US had high scores in measured business environment, human capital and legal environment. In R&D environment quality Japan, South Korea and Taiwan totally ruled. In average, the European countries did not bad in most measurement. The total annual dollar productivity per employee was found ten times higher in Taiwan ($386,413) than in Hong Kong ($39,629) or India ($39,033). Average US IT worker's annual dollar output being $154,173.

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