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Blackberry

New RIM Streaming Music: $5 For 50 Songs? 149

Posted by Soulskill from the opinions-are-like-music-services dept.
jfruhlinger writes with news that Research In Motion will soon jump into the music service market. The service will be available through BlackBerry Messenger, and will offer users 50 songs for $5/month, which they can then share with other people who own BlackBerries. "So why would anyone pay $5 a month to get 50 songs on their phone, when they can pay $10 a month and get an unlimited number of songs, that work on lots of different devices, from services like Rdio and Rhapsody? Reasonable question! But RIM seems to be assuming that its subscribers won’t ask. Instead it is playing up the notion that BBM Music will be about 'personalizing' your phone, in the same way that ringtones supposedly did a decade ago. Ringtones, as you’ll recall, let buyers play a few seconds of a song, and sold for a couple bucks, while full songs from Apple’s iTunes went for 99 cents. And for a few years, the music companies and the wireless carriers sold lots and lots of ringtones."
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus from the less-math-more-social-science dept.
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
Mozilla

Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 3.6 RC, Nears Final 145

Posted by Soulskill from the onwards-and-upwards dept.
CWmike writes "Mozilla has shipped a release candidate build of Firefox 3.6 that, barring problems, will become the final, finished version of the upgrade. Firefox 3.6 RC1, which followed a run of betas that started in early November, features nearly 100 bug fixes from the fifth beta that Mozilla issued Dec. 17. The fixes resolved numerous crash bugs, including one that brought down the browser when it was steered to Yahoo's front page. Another fix removed a small amount of code owned by Microsoft from Firefox. The code was pointed out by a Mozilla contributor, and after digging, another developer found the original Microsoft license agreement. 'Amusingly enough, it's actually really permissive. Really the only part that's problematic is the agreement to "include the copyright notice ... on your product label and as a part of the sign-on message for your software product,"' wrote Kyle Huey on Mozilla's Bugzilla. Even so, others working on the bug said the code needed to be replaced with Mozilla's own."

Comment Re:What the fuck (Score 1) 170

by kprsa (#28715657) Attached to: Indian Tiger Park Now Tiger-Free

There is a multimillion dollar demand in Asian countries for, among other pieces of the tigers, the male tiger penis. It is seen in many Asian cultures as a sacred aphrodisiac.

As opposed to the female tiger penis, seen in many other cultures as the elixir of life? ;)

Comment A waste of money (Score 1) 55

by kprsa (#27278841) Attached to: Robot Fish To Hunt Down Pollution
If you can make the robot that will cost twice less and look like a robot (not a fish), but hunt for pollution equally well, why not do it? The only answer in the text is "not to alarm their fellow marine inhabitants"... That is, IMHO, just a waste of money.
Image

DIY Space Photography 106

Posted by samzenpus from the exploring-on-a-budget dept.
Four Spanish teenagers sent a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere. The boys built the electronic sensor components from scratch. Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort attached a £56 camera to a heavy duty £43 latex balloon, and sent their science project 20-miles above the Earth. Team leader Gerard Marull, 18, said, "We were overwhelmed at our results, especially the photographs, to send our handmade craft to the edge of space is incredible."
Image

Outliers, The Story Of Success 357

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
TechForensics writes "Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is subtitled "the story of success." It is a book that purports to explain why some people succeed far more than others. It suggests that a success like Bill Gates is more attributable to external factors than anything within the man. Even his birth date turns out to play a role of profound importance in the success of Bill Gates and Microsoft Corporation." Look below for the rest of Leon's review.

Comment Re:Carl LundstrÃm (Score 1) 685

by kprsa (#26915095) Attached to: Pirate Bay Day 3 — Defense Requests Dismissal
Who cares? He was young and stupid and got convicted. Weren't we all young and stupid to some degree? I don't know about you, but I most certainly have been. I've never commited a crime, but there are plenty of things I've done and am ashamed of. If I would have to choose to meet a person between him and you, Sir, I would most certainly choose him (even though I am not Swede). He, with his criminal youth is for me a far more interesting person than you, Sir, who sound like my grandmother, accusing people for bad things they've done 20 years ago.
GNU is Not Unix

How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need? 276

Posted by CmdrTaco from the he-should-start-an-organization-or-six dept.
jammag writes "Bruce Perens, who wrote the original licensing rules for Open Source software in 1997, notes that there are a sprawling 73 open source licenses currently in existence. But he identifies an essential four — well, actually just two — that developers, companies, and individuals need. In essence, he cuts through the morass and shows developers, in particular, how to protect their work. (And yes, he favors GPL3 over GPL2.) For his own coding work, he's fond of the 'sharing with rules' license, which stays true to the Open Source ethos of shared code yet also enables him to get paid by companies who use it in their commercial products."
Privacy

Cambridge, Mass. Moves To Nix Security Cameras 366

Posted by timothy from the buncha-lefties dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Citing privacy concerns, the Cambridge, Mass. City Council has voted 9-0 to remove security cameras scattered throughout the city. 'Because of the slow erosion of our civil liberties since 9/11, it is important to raise questions regarding these cameras,' said Marjorie Decker, a Cambridge city councilor. Rather than citing privacy, WCBVTV is running the story under the headline 'City's Move To Nix Security Cams May Cost Thousands.'"

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