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Media

Submission + - Why Internet Pirates Always Win (nytimes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Nick Bilton writes in the NY Times about how the fight against online piracy is 'like playing the world's largest game of Whac-A-Mole.' While this will come as no surprise to Slashdot readers, it's interesting to see how mainstream sources are starting to realize how pointless and ineffective the war on piracy actually is. Bilton writes, 'The copyright holders believe new laws will stop this type of piracy. But many others believe any laws will just push people to find creative new ways of getting the content they want. "There’s a clearly established relationship between the legal availability of material online and copyright infringement; it’s an inverse relationship," said Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit technology organization that is trying to stop new piracy laws from disrupting the Internet. "The most downloaded television shows on the Pirate Bay are the ones that are not legally available online." The hit HBO show "Game of Thrones is a quintessential example of this. The show is sometimes downloaded illegally more times each week than it is watched on cable television. But even if HBO put the shows online, the price it could charge would still pale in comparison to the money it makes through cable operators. Mr. Wilson believes that the big media companies don’t really want to solve the piracy problem.'
Science

Submission + - University Receives $5 million Grant to Study Immortality

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "For millennia, humans have pondered their mortality and whether death is the end of existence or a gateway to an afterlife and millions of Americans have reported near-death or out-of-body experiences while adherents of the world’s major religions believe in an afterlife, from reincarnation to resurrection and immortality. Now the University of California at Riversdie reports that it has received a $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation that will fund research on aspects of immortality, including near-death experiences and the impact of belief in an afterlife on human behavior. “People have been thinking about immortality throughout history. We have a deep human need to figure out what happens to us after death,” says John Martin Fischer, the principal investigator of The Immortality Project. “No one has taken a comprehensive and sustained look at immortality that brings together the science, theology and philosophy.” Fischer says he going to investigate two different kinds of immortality. One would be the possibility of living forever without ever dying. The main questions there are whether it’s technologically plausible or feasible for us, either by biological enhancement such as those described by Ray Kurzweil, or by some combination of biological enhancement and uploading our minds onto computers in the future. Second would be to investigate the full range of questions about Judeo, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and other Asian religions' conceptions of the afterlife to see if they’re theologically and philosophically consistent. "We’ll look at near death experiences both in western cultures and throughout the world and really look at what they’re all about and ask the question — do they indicate something about an afterlife or are they kind of just illusions that we’re hardwired into?""
AI

Submission + - AI gender detector (i-programmer.info) 2

mikejuk writes: A Spanish research team have patented a video camera and algorithm that can tell the difference between males and females based on just a 25x25 pixel image. This means that there is enough information in such low resolution images to do the job!
The also demonstrates that an old AI method, linear discriminant analysis, and demonstrates that it is as good and sometimes better than more trendy mehods such as Support Vector Machines...

Idle

Submission + - World's Smallest Wedding Rings Made of DNA (ecouterre.com)

fangmcgee writes: Nerd love alert: German researchers have just created the world’s smallest wedding rings, measuring less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair. Goethe University professor Alexander Heckel and his doctoral student Thorsten Schmidt made the artificial structures from two interlocking loops of DNA—known as “catenane,” from the Latin word for “chains”—in a single drop of water.
The Matrix

Journal Journal: Conspiracy theories 13

As most people know, the consumer divisions and store fronts are nothing more than fencing operations of the criminal activities of the world's heavy industries, all run by some guy named Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Submission + - A Fourth Domain of Life? (economist.com)

ecesar writes: The Economist is reporting on a recent paper published in the Public Library of Science, which suggests there might be at least one other, previously hidden, domain of life (besides eukaryotes, bacteria and archaea). Using DNA sequence data generated directly from environmental samples, the authors found sequences not yet seen in any cultured organism.
Space

Submission + - Student Built Spacecraft Separate and Communicate (spaceref.com)

BJ_Covert_Action writes: "Some students from the Cockrell School of Engineering in Austin, Texas have built, developed, launched, and operated two historical satellites. The FASTRAC satellites make up the first small-scale satellite system which is composed of two separate spacecraft that can communicate to each other. On March 22, the single FASTRAC satellite successfully separated into two smaller spacecraft that are currently operating and communicating with each other. While separation and communication has occurred between paired satellites before, this is the first time it has been done with such a small platform (the FASTRAC spacecraft weigh approximately 60 lbs.).

Furthermore, this is the first time a student designed and built space system has been comprised of two separate spacecraft that can interact with each other. One of the most impressive things about this mission is that it was done incredibly cheap at $250,000, which is far below the costs associated with traditional spacecraft."

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