theorbtwo - Slashdot User

Groklaw's PJ Says SCO's Demise Greatly Exaggerated 152

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday December 01, 2008 @03:48PM from the still-looking-for-a-fat-lady dept.

blackbearnh writes "Last week, the net was all abuzz with speculation that SCO was finally gone and done for. With the final judgment in SCO v. Novell in, and SCO millions of dollars in the hole to Novell, it seemed like the fat lady had finally sung. But like most things in the legal system, it isn't nearly that simple. O'Reilly Media sought out Groklaw's Pamela Jones, and got a rundown of what's still alive, and why a final end to the madness may be many years away. 'Summing up, it looks bleak for SCO at the moment, but let's enter the alternate realm of SCO's best-case scenario in its dreams: in that realm, SCO wins on appeal, which one of SCO's lawyers indicated might take a year and a half or five years, and the case is sent back to Utah for trial by jury, which is what SCO wanted (as opposed to trial by judge, which is what it got), then everything listed above (except for the IPO class action) comes alive again, presumably, depending on what the appellate court decides. Then SCO is in position once again to go after Linux end users, as well as IBM, et al.'"

Wikipedia's New Definition of Truth 428

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @01:43PM from the beware-the-man-with-the-lantern dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Simson Garfinkel has an interesting essay on MIT Technology Review in which he examines the way that Wikipedia has redefined the commonly accepted use of the word 'truth.' While many academic experts have argued that Wikipedia's articles can't be trusted because they are written and edited by volunteers who have never been vetted, studies have found that the articles are remarkably accurate. 'But wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observability. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience,' says Garfinkel. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is verifiability — that it appeared in some other publication, but there is a problem with appealing to the authority of other people's written words: many publications don't do any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or right. Wikipedia's policy of 'No Original Research' also leads to situations like Jaron Lanier's frustrated attempts to correct his own Wikipedia entry based on firsthand knowledge of his own career. So what is Wikipedia's truth? 'Since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it's the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo. On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.'"

FireFox 3.1 Leaves IE in the Dust 435

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 20, 2008 @11:00AM from the i-just-want-fewer-beachballs dept.

Anonymous writes "Granted, FireFox 3.1 is just a beta and IE 8 is also in beta, but it looks like Microsoft has some ground to make up when it comes to browser performance. Given that Mozilla appears to be on a much faster cycle than Microsoft with this stuff, it's also possible that it could increase the gap even more before IE 8 is GA, no?"

Journal Journal: UK Traffic Cams Abused for Political Purposes.

Journal by Erris on Sunday March 23, 2008 @11:16PM

Two peace activists were stopped and harassed when traffic cameras claimed they were terrorists based on license plate ID.

Olympic Web Site Features Pirated Content 235

Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 09, 2008 @04:57AM from the do-as-I-say dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Despite all the emphasis on protecting Olympic copyrights in China this year, the official web site of the Beijing Olympics features a Flash game that is a blatant copy of one of the games developed at The Pencil Farm. Compare the game on the Olympic site with 'Snow Day' at The Pencil Farm."

EU Encouraging Standardized DRM, Licensing 153

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 04, 2008 @06:24AM from the reply-hazy-try-again dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The European Commission is trying to encourage a standard licensing and DRM scheme for all of Europe, as well as 'cooperation procedures' and 'codes of conduct' for ISPs, copyright holders, and customers. No legislation has been proposed yet, but the 'cooperation procedures' sound like a push for an EU version of the DMCA Takedown Notices, which are already routinely sent to people outside the US. While simplified licensing might be nice, it's interesting that they don't appear to understand the inherent tension between standardization, interoperability and DRM — break once, copy everywhere."

Comment Re:Learn how to summarise (Score 1) 668

by theorbtwo on Tuesday December 11, 2007 @04:33AM (#21652863) Attached to: RIAA Argues That MP3s From CDs Are Unauthorized

"moreover" implies that the statement preceding it is true on it's own merits, and that additionally, the statement following it is also true. Nobody here has asserted that the Defendant did nothing wrong, just that the Plaintiffs' assertion that converting to mp3 and sticking them in a particular folder is itself infringement.

I don't think anybody (sane) would claim that actually sharing them is not infringement. Offering to share them is not the same as actually sharing them, however. Quite possibly, offering to share is evidence enough that sharing has taken place, but that's quite another question.

Cannabis Compound Said To "Halt Cancer" 383

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 20, 2007 @08:58AM from the afraid-of-what-we-represent dept.

h.ross.perot informs us of research out of the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute suggesting that a compound found in cannabis may stop breast cancer from metastasizing. Cannabidiol, or CBD, could develop into a non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy some years down the road, if animal and human trials bear out its effectiveness. The article notes that smoking cannabis will not deliver significant quantities of CBD.

Free IMAP On Gmail 440

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:29PM from the bout-time dept.

A number of readers are writing in to tell us that Google is rolling out IMAP support for Gmail accounts. Several people say that some of their gmail accounts offer the IMAP option (in Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP) and others do not.

Crime Reduction Linked To Lead-Free Gasoline 616

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @02:55PM from the getting-the-lead-out dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Even low levels of lead can cause brain damage, increasing the likelihood of behavioral and cognitive traits such as impulsivity, aggressiveness, and low IQ that are strongly linked with criminal behavior. The NYTimes has a story on how the phasing out of leaded gasoline starting with the Clean Air Act in 1973 may have led to a 56% drop in violent crime in the US in the 1990s. An economics professor at Amherst College, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, discovered the connection and wrote a paper comparing the reduction of lead from gasoline between states (PDF) and the reduction of violent crime. She constructed a table linking crime rates in every state to childhood lead exposure in that state 20 or 30 years earlier. If lead poisoning is a factor in the development of criminal behavior, then countries that didn't switch to unleaded fuel until the 1980s, like Britain and Australia, should soon see a dip in crime as the last lead-damaged children outgrow their most violent years."

Internet Archive Challenges Google 115

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 22, 2007 @09:52AM from the pistols-at-dawn dept.

richards1052 writes "The Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history, has created a new project: the Open Content Alliance. It's purpose is to open the nation's library collections to universal web search. A number of major library systems, including the Boston Public Library and Smithsonian, have refused to sign up with competing ventures by Microsoft and Google because they do not provide for universal access to digitized books. These commercial ventures prohibit books being accessed by competing search engines. So far, 80 libraries and research institutions have signed on with Open Content Alliance. They must pay for the scanning of their books while Google and Microsoft offset that cost for their participating institutions."

New Plastic to Cut CO2 Emissions and Purify Water 120

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday October 15, 2007 @05:57PM from the green-plastic dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers have lots of imagination. After developing plastic as solid as steel, other scientists from in Australia, Korea and in the U.S. have created a plastic which could cut CO2 emissions and purify water. Their new material mimics pores found in plants and is exceptionally efficient. As said one of the lead researchers, 'it can separate carbon dioxide from natural gas a few hundred times faster than current plastic membranes and its performance is four times better in terms of purity of the separated gas.' Now it remains to be seen if commercial companies are interested, either for water desalination or for natural gas processing plants."

Rob Malda Answers Your Questions 221

Posted by Roblimo on Friday October 12, 2007 @01:22PM from the pants-are-still-optional-but-not-for-you dept.

Last week hundreds of you posted questions for Slashdot's CmdrTaco, AKA Rob Malda. Today we present his answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions. CT: You can continue to sign up for 10 year anniversary parties but we're already working on shipping shirts so you won't be able to get a care package... but you can still try to run for the big grand prize by just taking videos of pictures or just doing something cool at your parties to prove that we should have been there.

High-Quality HD Content Can't Easily Be Played by Vista 434

Posted by Zonk on Monday August 13, 2007 @02:19AM from the i-thought-that-was-part-of-the-point dept.

DaMan1970 writes "Content protection features in Windows Vista from Microsoft are preventing customers from playing high-quality HD audio/video & harming system performance. Vista requires premium content like HD movies to be degraded in quality when it is sent to high-quality outputs, like DVI. Users will see status codes that say 'graphics OPM resolution too high'. There are ways to bypass the Windows Vista protection by encoding the movies using alternative codecs like X264, or DiVX, which are in fact more effective sometimes then Windows own WMV codec. These codecs are quite common on HD video Bittorrent sites, or Newsgroups."

China Sets Sights on Comprehensive Lunar Survey 122

Posted by Zonk on Friday August 10, 2007 @01:07PM from the space-race-version-two dept.

eldavojohn writes "Perhaps unsatisfied with the closeups that Google Moon has to offer, China has decided to survey the moon down to the 'inch'. In the second half of 2007, they plan to launch an unmanned lunar satellite to first orbit the moon, land on the moon & then return samples to earth for them to analyze. '"The moon probe project is the third milestone in China's space technology after satellite and manned spacecraft projects, and a first step for us in exploring deep space," the China National Space Administration head said. The orbiter represented the first phase, with a moon rover to be used in the second phase scheduled for around 2012, reports said. The plan for the third phase, scheduled for around 2017, was for another rover to land on the lunar surface and collect samples before returning to Earth.'"

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