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Slashback: Nerves, Unis, Subtitles
Yes, does that come with insurance? An anonymous reader writes "Channel 4 news has a small report on the way that financial institutions are moving their computer systems and data backup out of central London to establishments such as The Bunker and Sealand."
Suddenly, those places seem a bit like less of a novelty and more good plain sense.
Copyright vs. Presumptive Scanning, part VXIIIXIX AnElder writes "The SMH (Sydney Morning Herald) now reports that 'Recording companies have asked the Federal Court to allow their computer experts to scan all computers at the University of Melbourne for sound files and email accounts, so they can gather evidence of claimed widespread breaches of copyright.' Are libraries next? "Counsel for the companies, Mr Tony Bannon SC, said industry studies of piracy had found public institutions such as universities and libraries were the biggest repositories of unlawful sound recordings."
Speaking of brand integrity. increment writes "The Engrish TTT Captions Site that was mentioned earlier here has apparently received a cease and desist order from AOL/Warner Bros and taken down their hilarious bootleg screenshots of The Two Towers. You did know that AOL is the parent company of New Line Cinema, right? AOL probably contends that humorous captions 'degrade their brand integrity,' though they should be grateful for such a vivid illustration of the poor quality of bootlegs. A few mirrors of the site can still be found around the net."
What about robotic juicers for the home? CallNElvis writes "Here's another interesting (translate that to "Cool! I want one") site lazydrinker.com showing a tabletop automatic drink pouring machine. It seems to be a little more polished than the last one posted here. The site includes a pretty cool mpeg of it in action."
Blend it into Knoppix, please :) 3-D modeling program Blender was converted from a proprietary license to the GPL last October. What's been going on since then? An anonymous reader writes "A couple of days ago, Blender 2.26 was released. This is the first open source version, and has all the features of the previous proprietary version, except physics support in the gamekit, which was not owned by NaN, and could thus not be opened.
Blender is 'the vi of 3d-modeling,' and was Freed by the community, when NaN (the company creating blender) went broke. It is platform independent (with roots in Unix), scriptable, has a steep but rewarding learning curve, ingenious but nonstandard user interface, and can be used to make games, 3d-web-thingies (there exists a browser plugin) and of course images, animations and models (which among others, can be exported to POV-ray)."
Mandrake keeps moving -- give it a whirl.
An anonymous reader writes "The Mandrake 9.1 testing cycle is coming to an end. I haven't noticed any big fan-fare for testing this version, but I noticed that RC-1 is now on many of the ftp mirrors found here.
If you like the distro, don't forget to join MandrakeClub where you can help the company and have a say in what packages they include in their user-friendly distro."
They want to scan their email too?
We all have seen the clauses in the Terms of Service that say that email is not private, that this is univerisity owned equipment and such. I can understand if they were going to scan incoming email for attachments, but it would appear that they want to scan the student's personal computer too!
My bet is that if they scan the student's computers that they are going to find more porn than music...
No Not Again! Its whats for dinner.
Erm... no.
How do I know? I got a copy when I went to China. Hey don't bitch - The movie won't be in Japan for another two monthes (maybe one and half), and if you don't make it available when I am WILLING to pay and see it - you'd bet your ass I'm gonna buy the 1USD copy off a street-stall when it's available.
So anyway - the bootleg was actually for submission to the academy awards - so the quality was definitely not bad. You can imagine academy awards copies are better than the "sit in the theatre w/ a camera" copies, by a far margin. If I ever decide to choke up the cash for a real copy (probably after all three are out), I'll let y'all know. but by that time I wonder if anyone still cares =)
But, this really means that the academy awards ppl is leaking films. so... why arn't you guys (MPAA) looking harder at your OWN PEOPLE? like, the academy, for one?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
They are legal for one reason: journalistic interest in illustrating what the bootlegs look like. The First Amendment trumps copyright.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I think that that whole incident with AOL Time Warner losing $98,000,000,000 just last year does a bit more to "degrade their brand integrity", not to mention that at least once a week they are in the news because a board member is fired or leaves the company because the whole entity hit the fan a while back.