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Submission + - US Senator Describes Being Target Of Political Surveillance By Done- (politico.com) 3

cold fjord writes: Politico reports, "Sen. Dianne Feinstein says she once found a drone peeking into the window of her home — the kind of cautionary tale she wants lawmakers to consider as they look at allowing commercial drone use. ... she used the episode to implore lawmakers to “proceed with caution.” Feinstein said she encountered the flying robot while a demonstration was taking place outside her house. She said she went to the window to peek out — and “there was a drone right there at the window looking out at me.” ... “Obviously the pilot of the drone had some surprise because the drone wheeled around and crashed ...” she said. ... Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday that she has seen firsthand the surveillance capabilities of drones and called civilian privacy concerns “significant.” She ... recommended a search warrant requirement. Feinstein said she is working on legislation with the Commerce Committee and urged senators to move swiftly to create “strong, binding enforceable privacy policies that govern drone operations before the technology is upon us.”"

Submission + - Why the Major Labels Love (and Artists Hate) Music Streaming

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Jay Frank writes that that the big four major music distributors and their sister publishers (Sony, Warner, UNI and EMI) make 15% more per year, on average, from paying customers of streaming services like Spotify or Rdio than it does from the average customer who buys downloads, CDs or both. Each label makes “blanket license” deals with Streaming services with advances in the undisclosed millions, which is virtually the same as selling music in bulk; they receive these healthy licensing fees to cover all activity in a given period rather than allowing Streaming services to “pay as they go.” "Artists are up in arms, many are opting out of streaming services," writes Frank. "Lost in that noise is a voice that is seldom heard: that of the record companies. There’s good reason for that: they’re making more money from streaming and the future looks extremely bright for them." The average “premium” subscription customer in the US was worth about $16 a year to a major record company, while the average buyer of digital downloads or physical music was worth about $14 so year over year, the premium subscriber was worth nearly 15% more than the person who bought music either digitally or physically. Meanwhile it will take an “indie pop/rock group” 34 months to make more money from streaming than they did from sales so the artist has to take the long view but "with many artists being financially irresponsible, is it so bad for them to get their money slowly over a prolonged period?" Moses Avalon writes that the rise of streaming services is helping to resurrect the model that made major labels powerful in the first place. "Streaming is anything but democratic. It has strict DRM and most importantly, it’s a royalty salad that puts control in the hands of the party with the confidential data-to-dollars formulas," writes Avalon. "It will bring back the power they had over distribution, promotion and the edge they had over their free-wheelin’ indie competitors."

Submission + - Citizen Science: Who makes the rules?

UnderCoverPenguin writes: At MakeZine, David Lang talks about the some of the legal issues around a planned, amature science "expedition", as well as some other amature science projects.

In the not too distant past, most science was amature. Over the past 20 or so years, society has been making it harder for amatures to do real science despite the technical costs falling. With the recent upswing of the "maker movement", amature science has seen an increase as well, but is running into an assortment of legal issues.(An exception is astronomy, where amatures continue to play important roles. Of course, astronomy doesn't involve chemicals or other (currently) "scary stuff".)

Can amature science make a come-back? Or are the legal obsicles too entrenched?

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Command line interfaces, what is out there? 3

Mars729 writes: GUIs are walled gardens in that features available in one piece of software is not available to other pieces of software. However, there is software out there with command-line options that can make software features accessible to power users and programmers.

Some important ones I have uncovered are:
Exiftool: A command-line application that can read/write almost any kind of metadata contained in almost any filetype
Imagemagick: This and similar software like GraphicsMagick is a full-feature toolkit for displaying, converting and editing image files.
Irfanview: Like Imagemagick but faster, although it has much fewer features.
FFMpeg: For video files
VLC: For audio and video files
Aspell: A command line spell checker
Google Static Maps API: A URL with coordinates, markers, zoom levels and other options to show a custom map from Google Maps. (I just uncovered this: no need to learn KML!)

Less useful but still useful are command shells. These provide file management mostly. I believe some of them may allow for sending and retrieving email messages.
Also useful but less accessible and with a steeper learning curve are software with APIs and scripting. Examples would be Visual Basic for Applications in office software and groovy scripting for Freeplane.

What else is out there?

I am currently creating a GUI that provides menuing tools, grids for database-like stuff, a non-hierarchical data structure, a set of commands and a media organizer. I am currently trying to get the media organizer working. Slow work, I don't have much free time to work on it. If I ever finish this thing it will to a limited extent allow a power user to create their own customized GUI with a minimum of programming. For myself, I want it to manage my nature observations ... checklists, photos etc. The media organizer (photos plus voice files mostly) is what I am most keen on — the photo organizers out there generally suck.
Businesses

Submission + - Indian Software Firm Outsourcing Jobs to US

phobos13013 writes: "NPR is reporting Indian software maker Wipro is outsourcing positions to a development office opening in Atlanta, Georgia. Although, it sounds good for US job growth, although the implication is that firms outside the US appear to be dominating more and more in the global economy, even from developing and underdeveloped regions of the world. Similarly, salaries of IT professionals world-wide are projected to stagnant or possibly fall due to the large pool of qualified applicants in the market today. Likely another reason companies like Wipro and Cognizant see it possible to outsource to the US and still remain competitive."

Feed Science Daily: First Ever 'Zero Emission' Antarctic Station (sciencedaily.com)

The first ever "zero emission" Antarctic research station, the Princess Elisabeth Station, was recently unveiled in Brussels, Belgium. Using specialized building design and materials, a passive heating system, an energy control system, energy efficient appliances, and sound insulation techniques, engineers from the International Polar Foundation and its technical partners have managed to take a pioneering step forward in the domain of sustainable development.

Comment Re:Copy cat? (Score 1) 471

Agreed. I'd like to meet this two-year-old who is swift enough to find my car keys, choose the right key, open the drivers side door, put the key into the ignition, turn the engine over, apply the brake with 12-inch legs, take the car out of gear, press the accelerator with 12-inch legs, and motor on down the highway. I'd adopt her, becuase she's a genius and would be able to support a comfortable retirement for me.

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