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Crime

Submission + - Cutting Prices is the Only Way to Stop Piracy (thinq.co.uk)

Submitted by Stoobalou
Stoobalou writes: The only way to stop piracy is to cut prices. That's the vedict of a major new academic study that reckons copyright theft won't be halted by 'three strikes' broadband disconnections, increasing censorship or draconian new laws brought in under the anti-counterfeiting treaty ACTA.

The Media Piracy Project, published last week by the Social Science Research Council, reports that illegal copying of movies, music, video games and software is "better described as a global pricing problem" — and the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares.
Government

Submission + - Blogger Fined $60K For Telling The Truth (startribune.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: ""Johnny Northside," a Minneapolis blogger with less than 500 readers a day revealed that a University of Minnesota researcher studying mortgage fraud had been involved in a fraudulent mortgage himself; the blog post was at least partially responsible for the researcher losing his job. The researcher then sued the blogger and won — despite the blogger having his facts straight. Johnny Northside plans to appeal the verdict."
Media

Submission + - Virgin Media UK Begins Throttling P2P Traffic (unitethecows.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "UK Internet Service Provider (ISP) Virgin Media has announced that it will begin throttling both P2P and Newsgroup traffic at "Peak" times it has emerged.

The ISP which advertises itself as "The fastest in the UK" and offers speeds of up to 100mb has said it needs to throttle file sharing traffic to prevent slowness in other areas such as online multiplayer gaming.

Trialing of the new traffic managment plans commenced on March 2 and will only apply to Upstream traffic, therefore download speeds will be unaffected. The clamp down will apply on top of the existing traffic shaping Virgin Media has in place and will affect all packages, including the previously unmanaged 100mb deal.

A message on the Virgin Media site read

"After the successful out of hours trial of our combined upstream and downstream file sharing traffic management policy we will be trialling this new policy between 17:00 and 00:00 for one week starting on Wednesday 2nd of March.

Between these times P2P and Newsgroup upstream traffic will be managed in a similar way to our current downstream traffic management. If the trial is successful we'll launch the new policy immediately.

We're interested if you could tell us how this affects your gaming experience over the next few days and if you see any general improvement in latency and ping at peak times."

The move comes as a surprise to many as Virgin already manage traffic between 4pm and 8pm. Virgin Medias website details their file sharing traffic management policy and says;

"We moderate the total volume of file sharing traffic on our network between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends. This policy, which applies to all broadband packages, is restricted to Peer to Peer ("P2P") applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data). This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer and Newsgroups, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected."

So there you have it, Virgin Media ARE the UK's fasstest Broadband Provider, but only because they decided what you can do and when you can do it.

Source: UniteTheCows"
Education

Submission + - Falling Demand for Brains?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times that information technology seems to be reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers (reg. may be required), because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing. One good recent example is how software is replacing the teams of lawyers who used to do document research. “From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” says Bill Herr, a lawyer at a major chemical company who used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.” If true this raises a number of interesting questions. "One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that the big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war," writes Krugman. "Another is how we [can] have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can’t command a middle-class income." Remember the Luddites weren’t the poorest of the poor, they were skilled artisans whose skills had suddenly been devalued by new technology."
Perl

Journal Journal: Now it gets interesting

Journal by countertrolling

<This> is what I've been waiting for.

"We are getting inside, and we are finding the secrets that have haunted us for so many years. This feeling is better than anything that has happened so far."

I hope it's not too late..
Apple

Submission + - Forget Google - it's Apple that is turning into t (guardian.co.uk) 2

Submitted by jira
jira writes: "You may think you own your iPad or iPhone but in reality an invisible string links it back to Apple HQ" writes John Naughton writes in "The Guardian". And ads: "Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven."

Submission + - SSDs cause crisis for digital forensics (techworld.com) 5

Submitted by rifles only
rifles only writes: Firmware built into many solid state drives (SSDs) to improve their storage efficiency could be making forensic analysis at a later date by police forces and intelligence agencies almost impossible to carry out to legally safe standards, Australian researchers have discovered.

They found that SSDs start wiping themselves within minutes after a quick format (or a file delete or full format) and can even do so when disconnected from a PC and rigged up to a hardware blocker.
The Internet

Submission + - How cyborg tech could link the minds of the world (silicon.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Science writer Michael Chorost has written a book that suggests that mankind may one day be able to link individual minds to share thoughts, feelings and perceptions by genetically modifying individuals brains and implanting computers based on neural networks in the body. Here he talks about the implications for human relationships, our sense of self and phenomenon like telempathy and dream brainstorming that this so-called World Wide Mind would make possible.

Submission + - First Probe To Orbit Mercury Will Answer Big Quest

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Next month, the first space probe in nearly 40 years will approach the planet Mercury, with an array of instruments that could help answer fundamental questions about how planets form. The mission is called MESSENGER, for Mercury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging. On March 17 it will pull into orbit around mercury, after more than six years of maneuvering between the Earth, Venus and Mercury itself.

Comment Re:To immediately Godwin the poll... (Score 1) 1270

by jayemcee (#33949016) Attached to: Given one free trip to the past in a time machine, I would..
Chuck Klosterman covered this poll topic quite well in Eating the Dinosaur http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Dinosaur-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/1416544208 Essentially, killing Hitler by using a time machine would eliminate the reason for you to do it to begin with, unless of course you chose to let him enact the Holocaust first and then killed him...

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