Comment Re:Impossible (Score 3, Informative) 292
No, firearms are not illegal in the UK - that's a common misconception.. Some specific types of firearms are illegal (e.g. handguns), the rest require the owner to hold a firearms licence.
Submission + - Amazon bundles ebooks with print copies for the first time (pcpro.co.uk)
nk497 writes: Amazon is bundling ebooks with print copies for the first time, via its Kindle MatchBook programme, admitting that "bundling print and digital has been one of the most requested features from customers".
The digital copies won't all be free — as with AutoRip, which offers free MP3s for selected CDs and records — but Amazon promises to charge no more than $3 per digital copy. The programme will apply to books bought as far back as Amazon's 1995 launch. So far, only 10,000 books are listed as being part of Kindle MatchBook, but Amazon hopes to add more, telling publishers it "adds a new revenue stream".
The digital copies won't all be free — as with AutoRip, which offers free MP3s for selected CDs and records — but Amazon promises to charge no more than $3 per digital copy. The programme will apply to books bought as far back as Amazon's 1995 launch. So far, only 10,000 books are listed as being part of Kindle MatchBook, but Amazon hopes to add more, telling publishers it "adds a new revenue stream".
Submission + - Better Factories Through Crazy Role Playing (businessweek.com)
pacopico writes: A former Ford executive has taken his unique brand of factory training to the public. According to Businessweek, Hossein Nivi has set up a new company called Pendaran that forces people to endure a week-long, manic training simulation that's meant to produce safer, better workers. The participants — lots of people from the tech and military fields — get yelled at by actors while they try to assemble things like golf carts and airplanes in a simulation that mixes virtual tasks on computers with real world tasks. After their spirits get broken, the workers actually start functioning as a well-oiled team. It sounds both awesome and bizarre.
Submission + - If A Network Is Broken, Break It More (insidescience.org)
Aras Esor writes: When a network is broken — an electrical grid, the World Wide Web, your neurological system — one math model created by a PhD student at Northwestern University suggests that the best way to fix it may be to break it a little more.
Comment Re:sweet !! (Score 5, Informative) 314
From the first sentence of the summary at the top of the page:
arshadk writes with this excerpt from the BBC about researchers at Oxford University who found that...
As an Englishman I may be biased, but I think the BBC counts as a major news company.
Comment Re:Stock price is falling too (Score 2, Interesting) 479
Considering PR and marketing is one of Apple's strongest areas and which pushes everything they do forward, they did some incredibly stupid decisions
Marketing is Apple's strongest area, but PR has never been been their forté.
Comment Re:Uh-uh (Score 1) 6
Here's the summary from the Slashdot RSS feed:
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a series of hacked emails and documents that were recently posted on Wikileaks are causing quite a stir in the scientific community. All told, more than 1,000 emails and 2,000 documents were stolen from the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia University in the U.K. "The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with. [] Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We 'will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!' Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday."
Comment take a different approach (Score 1) 173
"in academia, the issue of attribution and citation is very important" - true, but strictly speaking it's the attribution and citation of other research, not the research tools. After all, you don't find many research papers citing that they were typed on Microsoft Word with tables created in Microsoft Excel.
However, you've tried to convince them of this and they still want to go ahead, and it's your job to sort it out to their specifications. So...
The ideal solution would be to make the software so damn good that citing the use of your software in their publications is a good way for the external researchers to prove the integrity of their data analysis.
I might even suggest a reverse-psychology strategy with something along the lines of:
"You may only cite the use of {SOFTWARE} to guarantee the integrity of your data analysis if all data analysis has been done with {SOFTWARE}."
...and then provide a few suitable icons like this one:
CES 2008 Hall of Shame 179
Romana Reynolds writes "The CES 2008 Innovations Design and Engineering Awards Showcase honored the Atom Chip Corporation, which was exhibiting the same 100GB, 500GB, and 1TB 'quantum optical' memory chips back in 2006. We actually wandered by, but long gone are the 'SolarMemory' chips, and he didn't know anything about Duke Nuk'em Forever. A little easy digging shows that they'd been making the same extraordinary claims and exhibiting prototypes at CES during the past three years, long enough to make 'atom chip hoax' the fourth suggestion on typing 'atom chip' into Google. I'm amused that the 'preeminent' panel of judges failed their vetting and gatekeeping functions. But I fear that Atom Chip will gather investors based on their recognition at CES, and continue in the game for many years to come, while honors at CES become a Hall of Shame."
Sony's Idea of DRM-Free Music 370
edmicman writes "Leave it to Sony to mess up DRM-free music downloads. What is the point of DRM-free tracks if you still have to go to a retail store to buy them? From the Infoworld article: 'The tracks will be offered in MP3 format, without DRM, from Jan. 15 in the U.S. and from late January in Canada... The move is far from the all-digital service offered by its rivals, though. To obtain the Sony-BMG tracks, would-be listeners will first have to go to a retail store to buy a Platinum MusicPass, a card containing a secret code, for a suggested retail price of $12.99. Once they have scratched off the card's covering to expose the code, they will be able to download one of just 37 albums available through the service, including Britney Spears' "Blackout" and Barry Manilow's "The Greatest Songs of the Seventies."'"
Vista Pirates To Get "Black Screen of Darkness" 873
jcatcw writes "Microsoft has just turned on Reduced Functionality mode, worldwide, and sent a letter to OEMs explaining the consequences of Vista piracy. These include a black screen after 1 hour of browsing, no start menu or task bar, and no desktop. Using fear as a motivator, the email warns resellers to 'make sure your customers always get genuine Windows Vista preinstalled.'"
Feed New Scientist: Mesopotamian city grew regardless of kingly rule (pheedo.com)
Six-thousand-year-old pottery from the site of Tell Brak challenges the notion that such cities expanded outwards as a result of dictates from a central authority
Google and Microsoft Help To Defend Fair Use 122
An anonymous reader writes "The Computer & Communications Industry Association filed a complaint this month with the FTC 'alleging that professional sports leagues, Hollywood studios, and book publishers were all using copyright notices that misrepresented the law'. That is, they were aggressively pursuing 'right' that they were not entitled to. Now a group, backed by companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Sun, and Red Hat, has launched a web site called Defend Fair Use that shows they are serious about making the complaint stick. From the article: 'In contrast to copyright notices that take no account of fair use and claim control over "all accounts and descriptions" of a game, the CCIA offers a different copyright notice of its own. "We recognize that copyright law guarantees that you, as a member of the public, have certain legal rights," it says, "You may copy, distribute, prepare derivative works, reproduce, introduce into an electronic retrieval system, perform, and transmit portions of this publication provided that such use constitutes 'fair use' under copyright law, or is otherwise permitted by applicable law."'"
German Prosecutors Won't Help RIAA Counterpart 199
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A German court decision ruled that the European counterpart to the RIAA cannot invoke criminal proceedings over petty file sharing incidents. The goal was to to find out from ISPs the identity of alleged file-sharing subscribers; the requests have been refused as the judge saw the the proceedings as not in the 'public interest', and little or no economic damage was shown to have been caused to the record companies. Offering a few copyright-protected music tracks via a P2P network client was 'a petty offense,' the court declared. Within days, German prosecutors have now indicated that they will no longer permit the use of 'criminal proceedings' to procure subscriber information."
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When it is incorrect, it is, at least *authoritatively* incorrect. -- Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy
