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Comment Re:Recording devices are banned in McDonalds (Score 2) 1198

McDonalds in France (and in the UK and many other countries) do not allow still cameras, video cameras or other recording equipment to be operated inside their restaurants without explicit permission from the managers.

It is true that he brought a camera-type device in with him, but it was a Physician Sanctioned vision assistance system (and he even had appropriate documentation!). It is not like he brought a point-and-shoot in and started taking silly snapshots of people without their consent. This is a device that he needs to enable him to live a normal life.

I bet that very same McDonalds does not allow pets in their establishment, but they would allow a Seeing Eye dog. In my mind, this should be cast in the same light.
Canada

Submission + - Canadian Copyright board to charge for music at weddings, parades (www.cbc.ca) 1

Submitted by silentbrad
silentbrad writes: The CBC reports that the Copyright Board of Canada will begin charging for music played at live venues: 'Money can't buy love — but if you want some great tunes playing at your wedding, it's going to cost you. The Copyright Board of Canada has certified new tariffs that apply to recorded music used at live events including conventions, karaoke bars, ice shows, fairs and, yes, weddings. The fees will be collected by a not-for-profit called Re:Sound. While the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (otherwise known as SOCAN) already collects money from many of these events for the songwriters, Re:Sound will represent the record labels and performers who contributed to the music. ... For weddings, receptions, conventions, assemblies and fashion shows, the fee is $9.25 per day if fewer than 100 people are present and goes up to $39.33 for crowds of more than 500 people. If there's dancing, the fees double. Karaoke bars will pay between $86.06 and $124 annually depending on how many days per week they permit the amateur crooning. And parades, meanwhile, will be charged $4.39 for each float with recorded music participating in the parade, subject to a minimum fee of $32.55 per day.'

Also reported by Sun News, Metro News, and others.
Businesses

Motorola's Identity Crisis 135

Posted by Soulskill from the coulda-just-bought-a-ferrari dept.
An anonymous reader writes "An article at the NY Times discusses the awkwardness of Google's recent purchase of Motorola Mobility, an acquisition widely thought to be motivated by Android patent concerns rather than a more straightforward business plan. From the article: 'While industry analysts and insiders say the rationale makes sense, they also say it leaves Motorola in an unusual position. ... Heightening the uncertainty is that the companies involved, both of which declined to comment, are in some ways as different as two technology companies can be. Google makes Internet services and software, thrives on high profit margins and distributes its product using giant data centers. Motorola makes hardware, has modest margins on a good day and moves its products on trucks and airplanes and through brick-and-mortar stores. ... "It's like, thanks for everything you did in the 20th century, but you're being bought by a search engine," said Roger Entner, a telecommunications industry analyst and founder of Recon Analytics, a market research firm. He added, "Nobody ever buys a company and leaves it alone."'"

Comment Re:Ride quality (Score 1) 274

by wookaru (#35732080) Attached to: Electromagnetic Automobile Suspension Demonstrated
From TFA:

The 60 percent ride improvement figure was obtained when a single wheel equipped with the system was mounted on a laboratory testbed that simulates road conditions.

That's not exactly a complete answer, but I would guess the mounted an accelerometer or some other device to measure vibrations and compared that number to a passive system run over the same course. But I am making a bit of a leap there...

Submission + - FCC Moves to Convert Phone Fund to Broadband Fund (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by medv4380
medv4380 writes: The Federal Communications Commission is expected to change the Universal Service Fund and instead of having the funds go towards Rural Phone Infrastructure it would not go towards Broadband Infrastructure. You can see a transcript of what was presented to the FCC here.
Movies

The Time Travel Paradoxes of Back To the Future 454

Posted by CmdrTaco from the one-for-emmett dept.
brumgrunt sent in a fun little piece to get your brain going on a cloudy monday morning. Despite countless viewings of BTTF I still never thought of a few of these. "Throughout Back To The Future Part III, there has to be two Deloreans in 1885. Also, why don't George and Lorraine recognize their son? Why doesn't the time machine disappear in the alternative 1985? These and more Back To The Future paradoxes explored..."

Comment 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 (Score 1) 1260

by wookaru (#33892660) Attached to: Proving 0.999... Is Equal To 1
Though im sure its far from mathematically sound, Ive used this method to convince myself and others of the general "truthiness" of the .99999 = 1 debate in the past:

1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1
In decimal form:
.3333 + .3333 + .3333 = .9999

So, .9999 = 1
Input Devices

Razer, Valve, and Sixense Working On Motion Control For PC Games 126

Posted by Soulskill from the trendy-name-guaranteed dept.
An anonymous reader sends along this excerpt from Shacknews: "Gaming hardware developer Razer has announced a new multi-year partnership with Sixense Entertainment and Valve Software to deliver a '...revolutionary true-to-life, next-generation motion sensing and gesture recognition controller for PC gaming.' Razer, Valve, and Sixense, along with a selection of PC OEM partners, are aiming to produce '...ultra-precise one-to-one motion sensing controllers that use electromagnetic fields to track precise movements along all six axes.' Each controller will reportedly track its orientation within a single degree, and detect positioning within one millimeter. Thankfully, the device will be compatible with both current and future generation PC games."
Games

Imagination In Games 94

Posted by Soulskill from the oh-no-aliens-are-attacking-earth-again dept.
In a recent article for Offworld, Jim Rossignol writes about how the experiences offered by games are broadening as they become more familiar and more popular among researchers and educators. He mentions Korsakovia, a Half-Life 2 mod which is an interpretation of Korsakoff's syndrome, a brain disorder characterized by confusion and severe memory problems, and makes the point that games (and game engines) can provide interesting and evocative experiences without the constraint of being "fun," much as books and movies can be appreciated without "fun" being an appropriate description. Quoting: "Is this collective imagining of games one of the reasons why they tend to focus on a narrow band of imagination? Do critics decry games because games need, more than any other media, to be something a group of people can all agree on? Isn't that why diversions from the standard templates are always met with such excitement or surprise? Getting a large number of creative people to head out into the same imaginative realm is a monumental task, and it's a reason why game directors like to riff off familiar films or activities you can see on TV to define their projects. A familiar movie gets everyone on the same page with great immediacy. 'Want to know what this game is going to be like? Go watch Aliens, you'll soon catch up.' We are pushed into familiar, well-explored areas of imagination. However, there are also teams who are both exploring strange annexes and also creating games that are very much about imaginative exploration. These idiosyncratic few do seem like Alan Moore's 'exporters,' giving us something genuinely new to investigate and explore. Once the team has figured out how to drag the thing back from their imaginations, so we get to examine its exotic experiences — like the kind we can't get at home."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Playing a First-Person Shooter Using Real Guns 225

Posted by Soulskill from the and-shovels dept.
Blake writes "A group called Waterloo Labs rigged up a few accelerometers to a large wall and projected a first-person shooter onto it. Using some math, they can triangulate the position of impacts on the wall, so naturally they found someone with a gun and bought a large case of ammunition. Even cooler, this group usually posts a 'how we did it' video a few weeks after a project's debut, including source code."
Graphics

HTML 5 Canvas Experiment Hints At Things To Come 321

Posted by timothy from the faux-phlash dept.
An anonymous reader writes with an interesting and impressive demonstration of modern browsers' HTML 5 capabilities. "From the 9elements blog: 'HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and the new 3.0 beta of Google Chrome, browsers support some great new features including canvas and the new audio/video tags. [...] We've created a little experiment which loads 100 tweets related to HTML 5 and displays them using a javascript-based particle engine.' The site warns "(beware: sophisticated browser needed)"; Firefox 3.5 seems to work fine.
Displays

Mind-Blowing Interfaces On Display At SIGGRAPH 2009 173

Posted by Soulskill from the closing-in-on-that-holodeck dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Tech Review has a roundup of some cool, experimental new interfaces being shown at SIGGRAPH 2009, underway in New Orleans this week. They include an amazing 'touchable holograph' display, developed by a team in Japan, which uses an ultrasound device to simulate the sense of touch as the user grasps objects shown in 3D. The other ideas on display are Augmented Reality for Ordinary Toys, Hyper-Realistic Virtual Reality, 3D Teleconferencing and Scratchable Input Devices. If this is the future of computers, sign me up." The conference has also seen the release of OpenGL 3.2 by the Khronos Group.

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