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Media

Video Game Movies "Not Creative Expression" 134

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the and-the-lawyers-shall-inherit-the-earth dept.
GamePolitics is one of many that is reporting on the impending removal of video game movies from the video hosting site Vimeo. While they have agreed to leave machinima alone, all walk-throughs, strategy videos, pvp battles, raids, etc, will be deleted on September 1st. "The Vimeo staff does not feel that videos which are direct captures of video game play truly constitute 'creative expression.' Further, such videos may expose Vimeo to liability from the game creator(s), as we have already seen action from popular video game companies against videos such as these... Gaming videos are by nature significantly larger and longer than any other genre on Vimeo ..."

Comment Re:Cheap publicity. (Score 5, Insightful) 194

by endofcell (#23490338) Attached to: Was This the First CC Community-Edited Novel?
This is not a problem of crowdsourcing at all. Contributors to Mozilla and Firefox don't ask for a cut of the profits/donations it receives from Google or other partnerships, and users of the browser don't get paid for using it. The fact you get to use Wikipedia is enough, and no one forces you to contribute to the common good, or commons. If you want to participate that is a free choice. You should not be vilified for trying to get some revenue back for open sourcing your work -- you should be congratulated for releasing it as such rather than going for the default 'commercial' model.
Books

Was This the First CC Community-Edited Novel? 194

Posted by kdawson from the establishing-precedence dept.
Odinson writes "In late 2005 I released a draft of a science fiction novel under the by-nc-nd CC license. I started accepting edits in the hope of polishing a manuscript for submission to a publisher. A publisher never materialized, but after thousands of comments the draft started getting really solid. So a couple of months ago I decided to buy an ISBN and sell hard copies from Lulu. While doing research for a press release, I was unable to uncover the first community-edited, CC-licensed work of fiction. I strongly suspect that my novel is the first. Can anybody point to a prior example? How about under other licenses? If someone has traveled this road before, I'd like to ask them how it went. I would also like to vet this question here before staking a claim to be the first."
Censorship

UK Teen Cited For Calling Scientology a "Cult" 995

Posted by kdawson from the what-it-is dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A 15-year-old in the UK is facing prosecution for using the word 'cult' to describe the Church of Scientology at an anti-Scientology demonstration in London earlier this month. According to the City of London police at the scene, the teen was violating the Public Order Act, which 'prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.' There's a video of the teen receiving the summons from the City of London police at the demonstration (starting about 1 minute in), and now he's asking for advice on how to handle the court case."
Google

YouTube Refuses To Remove Terrorist Videos 676

Posted by kdawson from the how-the-interwebs-work dept.
hhavensteincw writes "YouTube has declined a request from Sen. Joe Lieberman remove videos from terrorist organizations. Lieberman said that the videos made by groups like Al-Qaeda show assassinations, attacks on US soldiers leading to injuries and death, and weapons training, 'incendiary' speeches, and other material intended to 'encourage violence against the West.' YouTube said that while it removed some of the videos highlighted by the Senator, most were allowed to stay because they did not violate YouTube's community guidelines. YouTube went on to note that they are strong supporters of free speech."
Technology

'Innovation In a Flash' Is a Myth 163

Posted by Zonk from the slouching-towards-greatness dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times article spells out what most of us probably already knew: real innovation takes lots of time and hard work to come to fruition. The article looks at the origins of new ideas, and attempts to dispel the myth that 'Eureka' moments create change. Comments author Scott Berkun, 'To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn't the magic moment: it's the end result of a useful innovation. Everything results from accretion. I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.'"
Communications

Fourth Undersea Cable Taken Offline In Less Than a Week 499

Posted by Zonk from the bad-week-to-be-a-backbone-cable dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Another undersea cable was taken offline on Friday, this one connecting Qatar and UAE. 'The [outage] caused major problems for internet users in Qatar over the weekend, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission. It is not yet clear how badly telecom and internet services have been affected in the UAE.' In related news it's been confirmed that the two cables near Egypt were not cut by ship anchors." Update: 02/04 07:13 GMT by Z : A commenter notes that despite the language in the article indicated a break or malfunction, the cable wasn't cut. It was taken offline due to power issues.
Space

Could We Find a Door To A Parallel Universe? 327

Posted by Zonk from the alternate-me-is-posting-this-in-esperanto dept.
p1234 writes "Though no direct evidence for wormholes has been observed, this could be because they are disguised as black holes. Now Alexander Shatskiy of the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, Russia, is suggesting a possible way to tell the two kinds of object apart. His idea assumes the existence of a bizarre substance called "phantom matter", which has been proposed to explain how wormholes might stay open. Phantom matter has negative energy and negative mass, so it creates a repulsive effect that prevents the wormhole closing. 'US expert Dr Lawrence Krauss, from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, points out that the idea rests on untested assumptions. He told New Scientist magazine: "It is an interesting attempt to actually think of what a real signature for a wormhole would be, but it is more hypothetical than observational. Without any idea of what phantom matter is and its possible interactions with light, it is not clear one can provide a general argument."'"
Transportation

The Age of the Airship Returns? 315

Posted by Zonk from the let's-head-to-bespoke-and-compile-runcible dept.
Popular in Victorian and Steampunk fantasies, airships and zeppelins evoke a certain elegance that most modern travelers don't associate with the airplane. Some companies are capitalizing on that idea, and a need to move cargo by air in an era of ever-increasing fuel costs, to re-re-introduce commercial zeppelins. Popular Mechanics notes four notable airship designs, all with specific design purposes. One craft in particular, the Aeroscraft ML866, is being funded by the US government's DARPA group. It looks to combine the best elements of the helicopter and the zeppelin. "The Aeroscraft ML866's potentially revolutionary Control of Static Heaviness system compresses and decompresses helium in the 210-ft.-long envelope, changing this proposed sky yacht's buoyancy during takeoff and landings, Aeros says. It hopes to end the program with a test flight demonstrating the system. "
Programming

Rails Bigwig Rails on Rails Community 616

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the less-than-elegant-exit-strategies dept.
Zed Shaw, creator of the popular Mongrel HTTP daemon / library, has decided it was high time to tear into the Ruby/Rails community for many different complaints that he has been collecting over the last few years. "Rails is a Ghetto" is Shaw's self-proclaimed exit strategy from the Rails community. "This is that rant. It is part of my grand exit strategy from the Ruby and Rails community. I don't want to be a 'Ruby guy' anymore, and will probably start getting into more Python, Factor, and Lua in the coming months. I've got about three or four more projects in the works that will use all of those and not much Ruby planned. This rant is full of stories about companies and people who've either pissed in my cheerios somehow or screwed over friends. I can back all of them up from emails, IRC chat logs, or with witnesses. Nothing in here is a lie unless it's really obviously a lie through exaggeration, and there's a lot of my opinion as well."

Feed Science Daily: White Dwarf Pulses Like A Pulsar (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
New observations have challenged scientists' conventional understanding of white dwarfs. Observers had believed white dwarfs were inert stellar corpses that slowly cool and fade away, but the new data tell a completely different story.

Gates May Announce Xbox 360 DVR At CES 117

Posted by Zonk from the red-ring-of-content dept.
Via Kotaku, an article at the Seattle Times offers an interesting theory on what might be an important part of Bill Gates' keynote at CES next week. According to Times writer Brier Dudley, upgrades and licensing for the Xbox 360 could be a big new feather in Microsoft's cap: "I've speculated on my blog that Microsoft may be preparing to license the Xbox gaming platform to consumer-electronics companies. In particular, Microsoft could work with Toshiba to develop a digital video recorder with a hard-drive, high-definition HD-DVD drive and Xbox gaming capabilities. They're already allied against Sony and other backers of the Blu-ray DVD format, and Toshiba could help Xbox finally penetrate the Japanese market." Toshiba has repeatedly denied the possibility of a 360 unit with a built-in HD-DVD drive, it should be noted.

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