Baumi - Slashdot User

Submission + - Robert Anton Wilson gravely ill.

Submitted by Obvius on Sunday January 07, 2007 @03:42PM

Obvius writes: The author of the Illuminatus! triology writes on his blog that doctors are giving him between two days and two months to live. Anyone wanting to send final messages to the great old man can do so at via his blog at http://www.robertantonwilson.blogspot.com/

ABC/Disney Shuts Down Blog Exercising Fair Use 525

Posted by Zonk on Sunday January 07, 2007 @03:32PM from the mouse-trap dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A blogger named Spocko had his blog shut down by ABC/Disney lawyers because he had posted clips from an ABC Radio-affiliated program and commented on their content, as well as informed show advertisers of what exactly they were paying for. Spocko merely pointed out the content that station KSFO was broadcasting, and as a result Visa pulled their advertising from the station. More companies were reportedly considering pulling their ads. A YouTube video summary is available. From the Daily Kos article: 'How'd he do it? He did it the way it's always done - by working within the law, identifying points of weakness, exploiting them and being absolutely tenacious ... It appears to me as if Disney is attempting to bully a little guy in an unethical manner. Any media lawyer worth the air she breathes knows that Spocko's use was well protected.'"

Submission + - Portable Laser Projector - Size of Compact Flash

Submitted by

mrbill

on Sunday January 07, 2007 @02:25PM

mrbill writes: "Need that always at the ready portable projector? New portable laser projector the size of a compact flash card. Projects image on wall or piece of paper. Called a PicoP http://www.getpicop.com/pdf/PicoP_standalone_appli cation.pdf (pdf) or at http://www.getpicop.com/oem.html"

Wikipedia Used for Artificial Intelligence 177

Posted by Zonk on Sunday January 07, 2007 @02:25PM from the great-it-has-finally-become-self-aware dept.

eldavojohn writes "It may be no surprise but Wikipedia is now being used in the field of artificial intelligence. The applications for this may be endless. For instance, the front of spam fighting is a tough one and it looks as though researchers are now turning towards an ontology or taxonomy based solution to fight spammers. The concept is also on the forefront of artificial intelligence and progress towards an application passing the Turing Test and creating semantically aware applications. The article comments on uses of Wikipedia in this manner: '"... spam filters block all messages containing the word 'vitamin,' but fail to block messages containing the word B12. If the program never saw B12 before, it's just a word without any meaning. But you would know it's a vitamin," Markovitch said. "With our methodology, however, the computer will use its Wikipedia-based knowledge base to infer that 'B12' is strongly associated with the concept of vitamins, and will correctly identify the message as spam," he added.'"

Submission + - Reading a DVD with VLC is illegal in France

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07, 2007 @02:17PM

An anonymous reader writes: Starting December 31st 2006, reading a DVD protected with CSS (as most DVD are) is illegal in France when it is done with software allowing to circumvent the protection, such as VLC or mplayer which can both use the libdvdcss library. This Journal Officiel (where laws and executive orders are published) says that you may be fined 135 (around $180) for doing so. This includes watching any DVD that you have legally purchased.

Submission + - Acer bugging computers

Submitted by tomjen on Sunday January 07, 2007 @08:50AM

tomjen writes: What if a well known laptop company had silently placed an ActiveX Control on their computers that allowed any webpage to execute any program?

Well Acer did and they have (based on the last modified-by date of the file) been doing this since 1998.

"Checking the interface of the control reveals it has a method named "Run()" as shown below. The method supports parameters "Drive", "FileName", and "CmdLine". Isn't it strange for a control that's marked "safe for scripting" to allow a method that is suggestive of possible abuse?"

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