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Feds Demand Prison For Guns N' Roses Uploader 590

Posted by Soulskill from the welcome-to-the-jungle dept.
Defeat Globalism writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are pursuing a 6-month prison term for a Los Angeles man who pleaded guilty in December to one misdemeanor count of uploading pre-release Guns N' Roses tracks, according to court documents. Kevin Cogill was arrested last summer at gunpoint and charged with uploading nine tracks of the Chinese Democracy album to his music site — antiquiet.com. The album, which cost millions and took 17 years to complete, was released November 23 and reached No. 3 in the charts. The sentence being sought — including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it — underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material."

Comment Re:lol whut? (Score 1) 239

by AWhistler (#27191617) Attached to: How Moore's Law Saved Us From the Gopher Web

My first PC-compatible was a Zenith 386sx. It had a 40MB drive that I upgraded to a 120MB drive...lots of space! Before that I was a TRS-80 die-hard since the late 70's.
 
In 1994 I bought a Gateway 2000 Pentium 90 with a 540MB drive. At the time, it was the largest hard drive you could get without having to install a special driver or get a BIOS update to cross he boundary in disk size.

Comment Defeats the purpose of teaching (Score 1) 931

by AWhistler (#26588505) Attached to: A Teacher Asking Students To Destroy Notes?

Is what she wants legal? I don't know.
Is her taking of your notes out of your bag legal? Probably not. I don't know.

However, that she asks the question in the first place means that she doesn't want her students to learn. She just wants them to pass tests and graduate. She is not a teacher.

The purpose of teaching is to pass information from one generation to the next, hoping the next generation turns the information into new knowledge. People don't have perfect recall. They need notes and books to retain information. If the teacher doesn't want you to keep your notes then she is paranoid about cheating, and doesn't care if you learn anything or not. If I were a student, I would refuse and force her to take it to the dean, then to the police if necessary.
Robotics

Denver Couple Unveils Homemade Service Robot 140

Posted by Soulskill from the take-me-to-your-liter dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Jim & Louise Gunderson, owners of a Denver-based computer software tool development company, have finally unveiled their autonomous robot, Basil. Basil is completely home built, runs Linux with some instructions in Java, uses a sonar-based 'reification' logic system, and can go get you a beer or a pot of tea. Quoting: 'The plan is this: The Gundersons will ask Basil to go to the bar, request a couple of stouts from the bartender, and then, once they're placed on the titanium tray perched on his head, bring them back to his creators. They haven't told him how to do this — there's no set script in his processors that tells him to roll a certain distance southwest, speak a certain command, then come back. He'll have to figure it all out on his own, using a basic knowledge of bars and beers and so on, reasoning skills and an ability to understand certain parts of the world. When his sonars capture the image of a person, for example, he knows it's a person, not just a nameless object to be avoided. And he knows that, in this case, that person wants a beer.'"

Comment Re:Giant LED light bulbs (Score 1) 303

by AWhistler (#26183605) Attached to: New York City Street Lights To Go LED

Except they don't. The LED's themselves might last forever, but the circuit boards they're attached to don't. I have seem many traffic lights in the middle of summer have missing sections of lights, and others where sections flicker on and off like there's a loose connection. They look like pies with a wedge missing. Soon the light is replaced and it looks whole again...until the cycle repeats all over again.
Medicine

Cold Sore Virus May Be Alzheimer's Smoking Gun 285

Posted by kdawson from the you-must-remember-this dept.
Science Daily is reporting that the virus behind cold sores has been found to be a major cause of the insoluble protein plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer's disease sufferers. Researchers believe the herpes simplex virus is a significant factor in developing the debilitating disease and could be treated by antiviral agents such as acyclovir, which is already used to treat cold sores and other diseases caused by the herpes virus. Another future possibility is vaccination against the virus to prevent the development of Alzheimer's in the first place. The research was just published in the Journal of Pathology (abstract).
Technology

Accident Could Lead To Better Digital Cameras 120

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the digital-chamagne dept.
Dave Bullock (eecue) writes "Scientists at UCLA have accidentally created a material that will some day give us better, faster, cheaper, more flexible digital cameras. I toured their lab and shot a photo essay for Wired. Personally I'm looking forward to a quantum-dot embedded camera sensor someday soon. 'Graduate student Hsiang-Yu Chen was working on a new formula for solar cells when something went wrong. Instead of creating electricity when hit with light, the conductivity of the material she was working with changed. "The original purpose [was] to make a solar cell more efficient," says Chen. "However, during the research we found the solar cell phenomenon [had] disappeared." Instead, the test material showed high gain photoconductivity, indicating potential use as a photo sensor.'"

Comment Re:godelstheorem? (Score 5, Insightful) 209

by AWhistler (#25667603) Attached to: Achieving Mathematical Proofs Via Computers
Not only that, but people should stop using this as a crutch in general. The journey is worth the effort, even knowing that you can never reach the end. This is why I agreed with Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter and disagreed with The Emporer's New Mind by Penrose.

One of Penrose's conclusions was that any attempt at artificial intelligence is necessarily incomplete, so it won't be possible, while Hofstadter said that it is possible to successively approximate something intelligent, and we can learn a LOT about ourselves in the attempts, and that in itself is worth it.

At least that is one of the many things I got from the two books.

Feed Engadget: Microsoft's WGA servers down, everyone's a pirate today (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Hope you weren't planning on installing "your" legally purchased copy of XP or Vista today, Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage servers are down at the moment, meaning your Vista install will go into "reduced functionality mode" when you fail to check in with Big Brother, and your XP install will just be generally cranky until you can give that license information to The Man. Microsoft's tech support seems to be vaguely aware of the issue, and recommends trying again on Tuesday the 28th, since the server "might be down for a few days." Oh, is that all?

[Via Boing Boing; thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Microsoft

Journal Journal: Windows Genuine Advantage Lost. 1

Journal by ozmanjusri
Microsoft's WGA servers are down. All computers running Vista or XP which try to validate are being marked as counterfiet.

A user at one of Microsoft's tech forums posted this response from the company.

Thank you for your response. I'm sorry to inform you that the Windows Genuine server might be down for few days. I have escalate the issue to our Genuine team, kindly try to validate again on Tuesday 28 Aug 2007.

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