knobbie - Slashdot User

Sound As the New Illegal Narcotic? 561

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 15, 2010 @12:46PM from the you-ever-see-the-back-of-a-$20-bill-on-sound? dept.

ehrichweiss writes "The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics is warning parents and teachers of a new threat to our children: sounds. Apparently kids are now discovering binaural beats and using them to get 'physiological effects.' The report goes on with everyone suggesting that such aural experiences will act as a gateway to drug usage and even has one student claiming there are 'demons' involved. Anyone who has used one of those light/sound machines knows all about the effects that these sounds will give and to state that they will lead kids to do drugs is nonsense at best. It seems the trend in scaring the citizens with a made-up problem has gone to the next level."

The Long-Term Impact of Jacobsen v. Katzer 77

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 16, 2009 @06:00PM from the stabs-in-the-dark dept.

snydeq writes "Lawyer Jonathan Moskin has called into question the long-term impact last year's Java Model Railroad Interface court ruling will have on open source adoption among corporate entities. For many, the case in question, Jacobsen v. Katzer, has represented a boon for open source, laying down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. But as Moskin sees it, the ruling 'enables a set of potentially onerous monetary remedies for failures to comply with even modest license terms, and it subjects a potentially larger community of intellectual property users to liability.' In other words, in Moskin's eyes, Jacobsen v. Katzer could make firms wary of using open source software because they fear that someone in the food chain has violated a copyright, thus exposing them to lawsuit. It should be noted that Moskin's firm has represented Microsoft in anti-trust litigation before the European Union."

Comment Re:Would this ever happen without the licence fee? (Score 1) 249

by knobbie on Thursday May 12, 2005 @07:52PM (#12514741) Attached to: BBC Launches APIs

The problem lies with the TV executives who would rather go for easy sensationalist content with low risk, rather than provide useful and smart content like BBC. If the network executives would realize that more people would watch if the shows had real content, the private stations would be much more successful.

i respectfully disagree. i think that the idea that TV executives care about the actual content at all is crap. TV executives care about one thing, like all other corporate executives: profit. and the source of that profit for them is advertising. thus, it is not the TV executives who determine the content, it is advertisers. Pepsi wants its product shown during some crazy "Xtreme" reality show, in order to imply a co-relation between the two.

it is only indirectly related to the number of people watching. a free codec does not generate sales revenue for Pepsi, and thus means wasted resource for a media corporation that produces it.

the BBC can do this because it doesn't rely on advertising as a main revenue source, and thus is not subject to the whims of advertisers.

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