RIAA Claims Ownership of All Artist Royalties For Internet Radio 458

Posted by Zonk on Sunday April 29, 2007 @01:22AM from the isn't-that-called-stealing dept.

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.'"

Microwave Experiments Cause Sponge Disasters 517

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 25, 2007 @05:38AM from the can-it-dry-a-wet-cat dept.

gollum123 writes "Reports about a study that found microwave ovens can be used to sterilize kitchen sponges sent people hurrying to test the idea this week — with sometimes disastrous results. A team at the University of Florida found that two minutes in the microwave at full power could kill a range of bacteria, viruses and parasites on kitchen sponges. They described how they soaked the sponges in wastewater and then zapped them. But several experimenters evidently left out the crucial step of wetting the sponge. "Just wanted you to know that your article on microwaving sponges and scrubbers aroused my interest. However, when I put my sponge/scrubber into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off," one correspondent wrote in an e-mail to Reuters."

NASA to Launch Magnetic Storm Probes 51

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 25, 2007 @02:58AM from the marlon-brando-pocahontas-and-me dept.

eldavojohn writes "The aurora borealis (also known as the Northern Lights) has long been known to be an effect resulting from the Sun's solar wind pushing particles into the earth's magnetic field and atmosphere. In light of the possible danger that these substorms could pose to astronauts & equipment, NASA is now planning a mission to track down these magnetic storms and disturbances. The program's not so catchy name of Time History of Events and Macroscale Interaction during Substorms has a slightly catchier acronym of THEMIS. From the article, "In order to scan the Earth's magnetic field and pinpoint the origin of substorms, THEMIS researchers plan to stagger their spacecraft in different orbits that range in altitude from 10 to 30 times the radius of the Earth (the planet's radius is about 3,962 miles, or 6,378 kilometers).""

Pay By Touch Goes Online 85

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sunday August 20, 2006 @07:19AM from the sort-of dept.

Max Fomitchev writes to tell us that Pay By Touch, the biometric identification service, has announced an online version of their service. While currently the only implementation of this service is in the brick-and-mortar storefront of Star Markets grocery stores, the company hopes that online vendors will start signing up soon.

Japan's Petaflop Supercomputer 161

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday July 30, 2006 @09:38AM from the renders-a-million-tentacles-a-minute dept.

slashthedot writes "Japan has built the fastest supercomputer in the world. While the BlueGene/L contains 130,000 processors, Japan has managed to create the first Petaflop supercomputer, called MDGrape-3, with just 4808 chips, and it cost just $9 million to develop."

On World of Warcraft's Network Issues 407

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @11:21AM from the in-queue-please-go-make-yourself-a-sandwich dept.

alphaneutrino writes to mention a C|Net article discussing some of the recent problems the World of Warcraft playerbase has experienced. From the article: "'Being a system administrator myself, I have some understanding of what goes on in a corporate data center,' said Evgeny Krevets, a sometimes-frustrated WoW player. 'I don't know Blizzard's system setup. What I do know is that if I kept performing 'urgent maintenance' and taking the service down without warning for eight-hour periods, I would be out of a job.' Blizzard blames some of the problems--such as the disconnection, for several hours on Friday, of players linked to several servers--on AT&T, its network provider. (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.) "

Comment Re:Running out of cat names... (Score 1) 981

by cody21XX on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @02:04PM (#12214376) Attached to: Apple Announces Tiger Release Date

Actually, Cheetah and Puma have already been used for versions 10.0 and 10.1 respectively, they were just never "official". They were the internal names Apple used, not what we got. http://www.thinksecret.com/news/panther.html This lists the cat names for the various versions of OS X.