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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."
Here's something similar, but not at all safe to look at if you are at work. This is great for you really really lazy folks.
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
A neighbooring school, to where I shall be attending, had a like threat. What did people do? The college store suddenly had USB 2.0 and Firewire hard drives in stock. People copied everything to hard drives and stored them in a safe place in case the threat was real. It wasn't, but they were prepared.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Hello,
I'm trying to learn Blender, is there a resource (like a nice pdf file), which I can use to quickly learn Blender. I've learned povray via the included help documentation, is there such a beast for Blender, please post below.
And on Australia, down with them I say! Change your government people.
It's been a while since I took civics, but I remember one thing for sure: Constutional Ammendments are, for all intents and purposes, on equal footing to the rest of the Constution. Ammendments are not "less authoritative" than the rest of the Constution; they are, legally, exactly the same thing.
I agree, in principle, with your statement that the First Ammendment is not relevant to this discussion. However, fair use is. In my opinion, fair use applies to this issue, and AOL/Time Warner has no case.
There have been a number of memos from the Dean lately about copyrighted material, including music. The University's stance is that any copies of music, whether you own an original or not, are illegal unless you have written permission from the copyright holder. I believe that this is consistent with Australian copyright law, which (correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't seem to have a Fair Use clause. If that's true, it makes me wonder why you can buy solid-state MP3 players in this country at all.
find / -name "*.mp3" -print returned nothing on my laptop, so it's not a big deal to me, and since it's the University's equipment, they're entitled to set their own rules. But searching our hard disks doesn't exactly foster a trusting relationship between staff and university. More to the point, it's also going to have a nasty effect on research on audio compression.
My old school (UPenn) has really fantastic terms of service for this sort of thing. I think most colleges probably do. This is about some external entity forcing the school to violate its own terms of service. Of course, my school did have clauses that allowed it to comply with court orders and not be liable to the students. I can't blame them for that.
One of the coolest things in the ToS was that computer lab workers were expressly not allowed to prevent people from viewing pornography in computer labs. This is because, of course, it's not up to the lab worker to decide if something is porn/art/science.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
How do you tell "unlawful sound recordings" from legal ones?
I have a whole lot of MP3's on my hard drive -- all of it personally ripped from legally purchased CD's. (Except that which I downloaded, legally, from MP3.com as explicitly permitted by the copyright holder, and much of which I ended up buying on CD anyway.) So, supposing the RIAA, et al. were to scan my computer (as if I'd allow them), how could they tell whether or not the files I have are there legally?
I ask because I am concerned that the answer is "you can't tell, so we'll just have to make *all* copyrighted sound files illegal."
I don't condone copyright violation, and don't want my rights curtailed because of it.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Just pick a few of the folks sharing gigabytes of stuff [...] and "make examples" out of them. Then everyone else will delete^H^H^H^H^Hencrypt their files with a quickness!
Reminds me of the late '60s / early '70s, when "the computing center" was a centralized empire at each university where everybody (except the administration) did their computing, and a 50 MB hard disk looked like a washing machine (and disk farms actually WERE sometimes referred to as "laundromats").
The big U where I was an inmate had a policy against "frivolous use of the computer" (which had been paid for by research grants on the condition that nobody got a cheaper rate on processor seconds, kilobyte months, or what-have-you than the grant that bought the box). So games were verbotten. Also: Obscenity was frowned upon (due in part to an unfortunate incident with typewriter pictures on a line printer just as the sponsors' tour party went by it).
Well, the typewriter-interface Star Trek game hit the timesharing machine - and quickly became a major consumer of CPU time. The center's personnel deleted a publicly-known copy. And another. And several more. And it turned into an arms race.
Encrypted copies all over the disk farm. HUNDREDS of 'em. Software to search the disks for more. People doing things like inserting the comment "Kirk Spock Klingon phaser Enterprise NCC-1801" in otherwise-unused lines of configuration files (for the joy of watching the use counts go up as the tools kept finding it and the staff kept looking at it only to discover that it was not part of a game). Conservative guesstimates were that AT LEAST one whole washingmachine's worth of storage was given over to encrpyted copies of the game.
And things started going wrong.
The last straw was twofold - two big mistakes within about a week of each other:
A student named "James Kirk" found his thesis work (in a file of the same name) deleted, with no backup. Oops.
And the medical school was just finishing a several-year, multi-million dollar project on the critical path to approval for a new drug. The drug was related to the endocrine system, so one of the tests was to dose rats with it when they were in the womb or young, then measure their penises to see if their size at maturity was affected. The project accumulated the data, as it was collected, in a file on the heavily-backed-up Computing Center disk farm. The file was named "Rat Penis Data".
One day the grad student went to enter the latest set of measurements - and found the file had been replaced with a self-righteous flame about misuse of the computer.
Of course the center staff hadn't done a backup of the "obscene" file just before the replacement. So even if the file were restored, the data since the last backup was lost, and atempting to re-enter it from paper records risked missing or double entries, even if all the paper could be sorted out. Project's results are now invalidated. Med school lost megabux. Drug company's product was set back by years.
Needless to say there was quite a bit of interdepartmental pressure to take the culprits out behind the woodshed for a sound thrashing. And rabid enforcement of such policies got a major setback.
But it was also the beginning of the end for the Center as an all-controlling computer empire.
Up to that point it, like such centers at most universities and corporations, had been in a position to veto other departments' computer purchases. The Regents (or the administration acting as their agents) would take such requests to the Comp Center for evaluation - and the evaluation would always be "they should use the timesharing system at the Center". And the other departments wouldn't push (or would sneak a PDP-n in as automation in some test instrument). Now the integrity of their data was at issue, and the Center had proven itself incompetent on this issue. So first the Medical Center and then other departments pushed for, and won, their own machines.
And the Center went on to salvage its position by specializing in networking. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Not sure about the Cartoon Network but that sort of censorship in cartoons has been going on for quite some time in the U.S.A. There are quite a few modified Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, and many early cartoons that were censored due to post explosion Blackface scenes, black maid shots, statements, etc... Most of them enforced because the black community thought it offensive. NAACP and other groups lobbied to have them censored. Actually I remember many of these cartoons and when they re-run them today, much is missing.
To be honest much of it was offensive! Most of the ones that were censored were the old classics that originally aired as movie theater shorts at about the time of WWII. My father grew up on Saturday Matinee's when one actually had to go to the theater on Saturday to see cartoons. This was before T.V.'s were in everyone's homes and radio was still the big new media. T.V. was out there but there was little programming and they were so expensive most people could not afford them.
I suppose the Cartoon Network would catch Holy Hell if they didn't censor their toons. Then again, they could just be overly cautious and wishing to avoid a lawsuit.
Lot's of parents plot their kids in front of the household baby sitter the good ole' T.V. Imagine walking in to the room and seeing some cartoon say "Sweet Zombie Jesus!". Now many of us would think absolutely nothing about that; but take someone from the USA south where religion is taken seriously. One phone call to Jerry Falwell and a team of lawyers decends on Cartoon Network!
Being politically correct saves them from offending anyone and potentially getting sued. I know it sucks, but before this will ever change, folks need to get a hell of a lot more tolerent over a great deal of things.
Unless there is a clause in the school's ToS in which they claim any computer that connects to, access files on or is accessed from the school's network or any computer on the school's network is now property of the school. The University I graduated from had this. By my brief estimation, they were responsible for half of the pr0n on the internet. (predominantly male population on the campus network sitting around in their dorm rooms with no better use for their time than to surf the web -- thereby assimilating each and every server which hosted the sites they visited into the school's network)
I'd never heard of the aforementioned clause being enforced, but it did create some interesting speculations on the part of the few of us who bothered to read the ToS.
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!" -Rush