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Comment Re:Music 60 years from now... (Score 1) 1115

To that end, what do you think a Lady Gaga CD will go for in (roughly) 2070, do you think? More importantly, how widely do you think her songs would be played by then? Would anyone still alive then even know or care who she was? That my friend is the big metric of success or failure concerning creative works.

You're assuming that a CD will go for anything in 2070. Current trends seem to suggest that the future price of music is 0$.

Biotech

Vitamin D Deficiency Behind Many Western Cancers? 478

twilight30 wrote us with a link to an article in the Globe and Mail. If further study bears out the findings, new research into the causative agents behind disease and cancer may have a drastic impact on the health of citizens in Canada and the US. According to a four-year clinical trial, there's a direct link between cancer and Vitamin D deficiency. "[The] trial involving 1,200 women, and found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error. And in an era of pricey medical advances, the reduction seems even more remarkable because it was achieved with an over-the-counter supplement costing pennies a day. One of the researchers who made the discovery, professor of medicine Robert Heaney of Creighton University in Nebraska, says vitamin D deficiency is showing up in so many illnesses besides cancer that nearly all disease figures in Canada and the U.S. will need to be re-evaluated. 'We don't really know what the status of chronic disease is in the North American population,' he said, 'until we normalize vitamin D status.'"
Music

RIAA Claims Ownership of All Artist Royalties For Internet Radio 458

ISurfTooMuch writes "With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn't a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels' music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA's affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not. 'SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free ... So how it works is that SoundExchange collects money through compulsory royalties from Webcasters and holds onto the money. If a label or artist wants their share of the money, they must become a member of SoundExchange and pay a fee to collect their royalties.'"
Music

Jobs Says People Don't Want to 'Rent' Music 203

eldavojohn writes "PhysOrg is running a piece on a recent speech by Apple CEO Steve Jobs about DRM free music. While we know that Jobs is a self proclaimed proponent of DRM free music who's not all talk, he's now said that 'by the end of this year, over half of the songs we offer on iTunes we believe will be in DRM-free versions. I think we're going to achieve that.' Jobs pointed out what's obvious to us, the consumers, but isn't obvious to the music industry — 'People want to own their music.' He also dismissed subscription based music as a failure, and claimed a lot of other music labels are intrigued by the EMI deal."
The Internet

EU Moving to Ban Online Hate Speech 452

WED Fan writes "Several members of the EU Parliament are moving to ban online hate speech. 'The draft of the declaration, which heise online has seen, calls on providers in somewhat vague language to make provisions against "hate pages" part of their standard terms and conditions.'"
Programming

Virtues of Monoculture, Or Why Microsoft Wins 703

blackbearnh writes to ask, "Why does Microsoft win the development environment war so often, when we all know it's a lifetime lock-in to Windows? Perhaps it's because the open source community offers too much choice." From the post: "Microsoft offers the certainty of no choices. Choice isn't always good, and the open source community sometimes offers far too many ways to skin the same cat, choices that are born more out of pride, ego, or stubbornness than a genuine need for two different paths. I won't point fingers, everyone knows examples... The reality is that there are good, practical reasons that drive people into the arms of the Redmond tool set, and we need to accept that as a fact and learn from it, rather than shake our fists and curse the darkness."
Security

Spy Act of 2007 = "Vendors Can Spy Act" 309

strick1226 writes "Ed Foster over at InfoWorld describes the Spy Act bill (H.R. 964) as having the same relation to the prevention of spyware that the CAN SPAM Act had to the prevention of spam. It allows exceptions for companies to utilize spyware for any number of reasons; if this bill had been law when Sony distributed their rootkit, they would have had perfect cover. Most troubling is that the bill would preempt all state laws, including those more focused on the privacy of people's data, and disallow individuals from bringing suit. It is expected to pass soon with 'strong bipartisan support.'"
Power

Nanotubes May Improve Solar Energy Harvesting 93

eldavojohn writes "Scientists are hoping that the 'coaxial cable' style nanotube they developed will resolve energy issues that come with converting sunlight to energy. The plants currently have us beat in this department but research is discovering new ways to eliminate inefficiencies in transferring photons to energy. Traditional methods involve exciting electrons to the point of jumping to a higher state which leaves 'holes.' Unfortunately, these electrons and holes remain in the same regions and therefore tend to recombine. The new nanotubes hope to route these excited electrons off in the same way a coaxial cable allows a return route for electrons. End result is fewer electrons settling back into their holes once they are elevated out of them yielding a higher return in energy."
Movies

'Kryptonite' Discovered in Serbian Mine 272

Rubinstien writes "A mineralogist at London's Natural History Museum was contracted to help identify an unknown mineral found in a Serbian mine. While he initially thought the miners had discovered a unique compound, after its crystal structure was analyzed and identified the researcher was shocked to find the material already referenced in literature. Fictional literature. Dr. Chris Stanley, from the BBC article: 'Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral's chemical formula — sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide — and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luthor from a museum in the film Superman Returns ... I'm afraid it's not green and it doesn't glow either — although it will react to ultraviolet light by fluorescing a pinkish-orange.'"
Republicans

Submission + - Netcraft shows RNC running Ohio election servers

goombah99 writes: Netcraft is showing a very hard to explain event happened in the Ohio 2006 election. The Secretary Of states website IP address, which normally is directed to an Ohio based IP address and handles all the election reporting, was transferred on election night to the Smarttech Corp owned servers out of state. According to the American Registry on Internet Numbers Smartech's block of IP address 64.203.96.0 — 64.203.111.255 encompasses the entire range of addresses owned by the Republican National Committee. This includes hosting the recently notorious gbw43.com used in the Whitehouse. Can Slashdotters suggest any good explanations for this seemingly dubious transfer?
The Almighty Buck

FDA Considers Redefining Chocolate 939

shewfig writes "The US Food and Drug Administration is considering redefining 'chocolate' to allow substitution of vegetable oil ($0.70/lb.) for cocoa butter ($2.30/lb.), and whey protein for dry whole milk. There are already standard terms to differentiate these products from chocolate, such as 'chocolatey' and 'chocolate-flavored.' The change was requested by the industry group Chocolate Manufacturers of America. Leading the resistance to this change is high-end chocolate maker Guittard, with significant grass-roots support from the Candyblog. The FDA is taking consumer comments until April 25. Here is the FDA page on the proposed change, which oddly enough does not say what the proposed change is."
Science

Quantum Physics Parts Ways With Reality 568

aeoneal sends us to PhysicsWeb for news guaranteed to induce headache in those wedded to the reality of, well, reality. Researchers from the University of Vienna have shown the violation of a stronger form of Bell's inequality known as Leggett's inequality. The result means that we must not only give up Einstein's hope of "no spooky action at a distance," we must also give up (some of) the idea that the world exists when we are not looking. From the article: "[Studies] have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism, meaning that reality exists when we are not observing it; and locality, meaning that separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously. But a violation of Bell's inequality does not tell specifically which assumption — realism, locality, or both — is discordant with quantum mechanics." From the Nature abstract: "Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned." Only subscribers to Nature, alas, can know what features those are, as PhysicsWeb doesn't tell us.
Space

Submission + - India's successful commercial satellite launch

An anonymous reader writes: India successfully launched an Italian satellite yesterday. The Indian Space Research Organization's announcement here. A BBC article on the launch here with a video clip here. India's launch vehicle has less overall capacity than the competition; but plans to sweep the low end of the market by offering the lowest cost per launched kilogram for smaller payloads.

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