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Comment Cord Cutting (Score 4, Interesting) 697

by EndingPop (#35901698) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Are You Streaming-Only For Home Entertainment?
I pulled the plug on Comcast over six months ago, and I love it. I bought a Dell Inspiron Zino HD 410 and hooked it up to my big ol' TV. It has HDMI out which actually sends the audio as well, since this computer is designed to be TV connected. It does a great job for streaming Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon VOD. I'm saving $60/mo., and enjoy a better experience. On demand streaming is wonderful, since there's so much out there to watch already. I do have to be patient, waiting for TV shows to hit Hulu or movies to hit Netflix, but it's been worth it to me. The only thing I really miss is the ability to just sit down and let the flashing box entertain me. Now I do have to make a choice. Before, I could sit down and let a Mythbusters marathon entertain me. I can still do that, but I have to think to do it before I can do it. I've also been spending more and more of my time watching podcasts from TWiT and others. I watch very little actual TV these days, only those shows I really want to see.
Software

Stallman Says Cloud Computing Is a Trap 621

Posted by kdawson from the head-out-of-the-clouds dept.
stevedcc writes in to tell us about an interview with RMS in The Guardian, in which he gives his views on cloud computing, with a particular focus on user access to data and the sacrifices made for convenience. "'It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign,' he told The Guardian. 'Somebody is saying this is inevitable — and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.'" Computerworld has a summary of some of the blogosphere's reaction to RMS's position.
Software

Two AI Pioneers, Two Bizarre Suicides 427

Posted by Soulskill from the unfortunate-losses dept.
BotnetZombie writes "Wired tells the quite sad but very interesting stories of Chris McKinstry and Pushpinder Singh. Initially self-educated, both had the idea to create huge fact databases from which AI agents could feed, hoping to eventually have something that could reason at a human level or better. McKinstry leveraged the dotcom era to grow his database. Singh had the backing of MIT, where he eventually got his PhD and had been offered a position as a professor alongside his mentor, Marvin Minsky. Sadly, personal life was more troublesome for them, and the story ends in a tragic way.
User Journal

Journal Journal: The Idea of Perpetual Copyright

Journal by katatak

A recent New York Times editorial piece expressed the idea that copyright should be perpetual. The idea that an author or composer has any right to keep a creation he has sold to a publisher is new to the 20th & 21st Centuries. Before modern copyright law, authors, unless they self-pu
PlayStation (Games)

Sony Rejects PS3 Price Cuts 187

Posted by Zonk from the i-cast-thee-out dept.
Despite hopeful comments by analysts, Sony has gone on the record (again) saying that it has no plans to cut the PS3's pricetag any time soon. Next Generation reports: "'PS3 prices and shipment plans for the future should be determined by market trends and competition. Sony currently doesn't have any specific plan to cut the PlayStation 3's price.' Analysts believe a price cut is inevitable, as the company struggles to catch Microsoft's early lead with Xbox 360, and the $250 Wii continues to sell as many as can be produced. However, Sony's plan has generally been to hold tight and hope that demand for Blu-ray drives will increase, by the end of this year." Relatedly, the company has outlined releases for the second quarter of this year on the PS2, PS3, and PSP systems.
The Courts

RIAA Balks At Complying With Document Order 166

Posted by kdawson from the show-me-the-money dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "When the RIAA was ordered to turn over its attorneys' billing records to the defendant's lawyer in Capitol v. Foster, there was speculation that they would never comply with the order. As it turns out they have indeed balked at compliance, saying that they are preparing a motion for a protective order seeking confidentiality (something they could have asked for, but didn't, in their opposition papers to the initial motion). Having none of that, Ms. Foster's lawyer has now made a motion to compel their compliance with the Court's March 15th order."
Censorship

Judge Strikes Down COPA, 1998 Online Porn Law 348

Posted by kdawson from the one-for-free-speech dept.
Begopa sends in word that a federal judge has struck down the Child Online Protection Act. The judge said that parents can protect their children through software filters and other less restrictive means that do not limit others' rights to free speech. This was the case for which the US Department of Justice subpoenaed several search companies for search records; only Google fought the order. The case has already been to the Supreme Court. Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. wrote in his decision: "Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection."
Music

RIAA Caught in Tough Legal Situation 267

Posted by samzenpus from the catch-22 dept.
JeffreysTube writes "The RIAA's legal fight against a divorced mother has run into trouble, with the judge now telling the RIAA that its only two options are to proceed with a jury trial against Patty Santangelo or dismiss the case with prejudice. If the latter happens, Santangelo officially "wins" and could collect attorneys' fees. The judge is less than pleased with the RIAA, which is now trying to drop the case without giving Santangelo a chance to be declared guilty. 'This case is two years old,' wrote Judge McMahon. 'There has been extensive fact discovery. After taking this discovery, either plaintiffs want to make their case that Mrs. Santangelo is guilty of contributory copyright infringement or they do not.'"
Music

How to Turn A Music Lover to Piracy 521

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the self-defeating-drm dept.
dugn writes to tell us The Consumerist is running a story about how a run of the mill (read non-tech-savvy) music lover was pushed to become a pirate. "I've devoted a not-inconsequential chunk of my life to collecting music; to tracking down obscure records, cassettes, 8-Tracks and CD's of all genres and styles. And now apparently that is all but over. Music has somehow evolved from tangible things into amorphous collections of 1's and 0's guarded over by interested parties as if they were gold bullion. How so very sad."
Education

Internet Curfew for College Students? 342

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the no-more-overnight-torrents dept.
140Mandak262Jamuna writes "IIT Bombay, one of the top Indian engineering schools, is restricting internet access to its students. The restriction is simply to cut off all internet access at night from the dorms. The school claims the 24/7/365 internet access is hampering academic performance, personality development and extra curricular activities. Though these are the 'official' reasons, it appears there are other reasons too. Mr Prakash Gopalan, the Dean of Student Affairs, says, 'one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good.'"
Censorship

Yes Virginia, ISPs Have Silently Blocked Web Sites 204

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-think-about dept.
Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A recurring theme in editorials about Net Neutrality -- broadly defined as the principle that ISPs may not block or degrade access to sites based on their content or ownership (with exceptions for clearly delineated services like parental controls) -- is that it is a "solution in search of a problem", that ISPs in the free world have never actually blocked legal content on purpose. True, the movement is mostly motivated by statements by some ISPs about what they might do in the future, such as slow down customers' access to sites if the sites haven't paid a fast-lane "toll". But there was also an oft-forgotten episode in 2000 when it was revealed that two backbone providers, AboveNet and TeleGlobe, had been blocking users' access to certain Web sites for over a year -- not due to a configuration error, but by the choice of management within those companies. Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being blocked was mine. But I think this incident is more relevant than ever now -- not just because it shows that prolonged violations of Net Neutrality can happen, but because some of the people who organized or supported AboveNet's Web filtering, are people in fairly influential positions today, including the head of the Internet Systems Consortium, the head of the IRTF's Anti-Spam Research Group, and the operator of Spamhaus. Which begs the question: If they really believe that backbone companies have the right to silently block Web sites, are some of them headed for a rift with Net Neutrality supporters?" Read on for the rest of his story.
Censorship

Copyright Law Used to Shut Down Site 206

Posted by Hemos from the bad-usage dept.
driptray writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that an Australian mining industry group has used copyright laws to close a website that parodied a coal industry ad campaign. A group known as Rising Tide created the website using the slogan "Rising sea levels: brought to you by mining" in response to the mining industry's slogan of "Life: brought to you by mining". The mining industry claimed that the "content and layout" of the parody site infringed copyright, but when Rising Tide removed the copyrighted photos and changed the layout, the mining industry still lodged a complaint. Is this a misuse of copyright law in order to stifle dissent?"

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