314381
submission
Eskimo Joe writes:
A federal judge surprised observers in the Captiol v Thomas file-sharing trial today by barring RIAA president Cary Sherman from testifying. 'After a brief recess this afternoon, plaintiffs' counsel Richard Gabriel and defendant's counsel David Toder made their cases before the judge as to the relevance of Sherman's testimony. Toder argued that Sherman's testimony was not relevant to the question at hand, the fact of whether Thomas was liable for copyright infringement. Gabriel said that Sherman would be able to tell the jury why this case was significant, and more importantly, describe the harm the RIAA believes piracy has caused to the music industry. "I don't want to turn this case into a soap box for the recording industry," Toder argued in response.' Testimony wrapped up today with closing arguments expected Thursday morning.
148731
submission
hidingintheclosetwithaplatypus writes:
Damien & Trisha Buchwald (previously) from Novablade.com have loosed the dogs of war after their registrar, Network Solutions, refused to allow them to renew or transfer their domain name and who have now sold it to another company to be auctioned off. Apparently the name's worth around US$16,000, and the Buchwalds are looking for help from anywhere they can get it.
We are infuriated, upset, and feel like we have had our very souls stolen from us and sold. This is a very disgusting, underhanded act that deserves justification.
148697
submission
dgym writes:
Having applications that can be deployed on the net and run either in a browser or from a standalone player is an old idea, but still not one that has been done really well.
Java is one solution, but for various reasons hasn't attained ubiquity. Now that it is being open sourced it might find itself on more platforms, but it still may be too big for some devices, and too slow to start up to not be annoying.
Flash is geared towards video and animation, but can also lend itself to RIAs and it is certainly a very popular plugin. However, like any closed standard, it is only available on the platforms Adobe decide to support.
Silverlight might be a better platform for RIAs from a technical perspective, but is otherwise in the same position as Flash (only with even fewer platforms).
So why are there so many poor choices for such a simple problem? After all the requirements for developing applications are rather low:
- A sand boxed virtual machine for running client side code.
- A means to display information, i.e. graphics drawing primitives.
- Event handling for user input.
- Networking back to the originating server.
Can we not have an open standard for these, and open source plugins implementing it? The "virtual machine" could either be defined in terms of a language (e.g. ECMAScript), or be a true byte code engine such as Parrot or Mono. The graphics are straight forward, and using a cross platform library such as Cairo would help make these plugins extremely portable. Networking is almost trivial, although being able to make HTTP requests using the browser's proxy settings would be an important consideration.
The need is there, where is the open standard?
148693
submission
espamo writes:
Chinese tourism authorities are seeking investment to build a novel concept attraction — the world's first "women's town," where men get punished for disobedience, an official said Thursday.
The motto of the new town would be "women never make mistakes, and men can never refuse women's requests," Chinese media have reported....
link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070426/od_nm/china_wo mentown_odd_dc
