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Media

Submission + - Pirate Party Coming to Canada (google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After scoring a surprise electoral win in Sweden and getting high-profile support in Germany, The Pirate Party is coming to Canada. The party's goals are fairly simple. People should have the right to share and copy music, movies and virtually any material, as long as it is for personal use, not for profit. It opposes government and corporate monitoring of Internet activities, unless as part of a criminal investigation. It also wants to phase out patents.

Linux Patch Clears the Air For Use of Microsoft's FAT Filesystem 272

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the anything-you-can-do-i-can-do-better dept.
Ars Technica is reporting that a new kernel patch may provide a workaround to allow use of Microsoft's FAT file system on Linux without paying licensing fees. "Andrew Tridgell, one of the lead developers behind the Samba project, published a patch last week that will alter the behavior of the Linux FAT implementation so that it will not generate both short and long filenames. In situations where the total filename fits within the 11-character limit, the filesystem will generate only a short name. When the filename exceeds that length, it will only generate a long name and will populate the short name value with 11 invalid characters so that it is ignored by the operating system."
Space

Submission + - NASA Researchers Worried About Huge Sun Flares (wired.com) 1

Submitted by resistant
resistant writes: Wired reported recently that a group of researchers assembled by NASA issued a "chilling" report expressing great concern about the potential for solar flares in 2012 to coincide with "the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth's geomagnetic shield", potentially virtually collapsing national power grids. Complicating the matter is the lack of current plans to replace the sole early warning satellite on which power grid operators rely, and the poor state of readiness in general. Full recovery from such a catastrophe might take four to ten years, and cost trillions of dollars.

The report was largely ignored at first because of the unfortunate overlap with an ancient Mayan prediction of a major "turning point" in the year 2012 (by the Western calendar).
The Courts

Submission + - The Pirate Bay Aftermath Circus in Swedish Press

Submitted by MaulerOfEmotards
MaulerOfEmotards writes: Reading the Swedish news reports, the turmoil surrounding the aftermath of The Pirate Bay trial continues.

Part of the news are occupied with Tomas Norström, the presiding judge of The Pirate Bay trial. Mr. Nordström is suspected of bias after reports of affiliation with copyright protection organisations, for which he has been charged reported to the appeals court, is rapidly gaining a certain notoriety. The circus around him is currently focused on three points. First, his personal affiliation with at least four copyright protection organisations, a state the potential bias of which he himself fails to see and refuse to admit. Secondly, Swedish trials use a system of several lay assessors to supervise the presiding judge, one of which, a member of an artists' interest organisation, which is far fewer than Mr. Norström himself, was by Mr. Norström made to resign from the trial for potential bias, and his failing to see the obvious contradiction in this casts doubts on his suitability and competence. Thirdly, according to professor of judicial sociology Håkan Hydén the judge has inappropriately "duped and influenced the lay assessors" during the trial: "a judge that has decided that 'this is something we can't allow' has little problem finding legal arguments that are difficult for assisting lay assessors to counter".

The apparent grave legal problems if the trial itself is also of medial interest. Professor Hydén continues with enumerating "at least three strange things" with "a strange trial": Firstly that someone can be sentenced for being accessory to a crime for which there is no main culprit: "this assumes someone else having committed the crime, and no such individual exists here ... the system cannot charge the real culprits or it would collapse in its entirety". It is unprecedented in Swedish judicial history to sentence only an accessory. Secondly, that the accessories should pay the fine for a crime committed by the main culprits "which causes the law to contradict itself". And thirdly that accessories cannot be sentenced to harsher than the main culprit, which means that every downloader must be sentenced to a year's confinement. In closing Me. Hydén sums up by saying that to allow this kind of judgement the Swedish Parliament must first pass a bill making this kind of services illegal, which hasn't been done.
Privacy

Submission + - Judge in Pirate Bay trial biased 1

Submitted by
maglo
maglo writes: "The judge who handed down the harsh sentence to the four accused in the The Pirate Bay trial was biased, writes Sveriges Radio (Sweden Public Radio): sr.se (swedish). Google translation. The judge is member of two copyright lobby organizations, something he shares with several of the prosecutor attorneys (Monique Wadsted, Henrik Pontén and Peter Danowsky). The organizations in question are Svenska Föreningen för Upphovsrätt (SFU) and Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (SFIR)."

Comment College Course Software? (Score 1) 189

by EvilGrin666 (#27182233) Attached to: Windows Security and On-line Training Courses?
I know it doesn't help much with the current problem your having, but you might want to drop a line to the college in question and let them know about the existence of Moodle. An open source virtual learning environment. The school where I work use it both in school and at home after hours. By all accounts the teachers and kids love it (and works in Firefox too!).

Comment Re:Meh (Score 4, Informative) 272

by EvilGrin666 (#26468227) Attached to: Collateral Damage as UK Censors Internet Archive
I know for a fact (because my work ISP feed gets their feed of them) that JANET does not use the IWF blacklists.

This leads to the amusing situation where schools (who are clearly in a position to most 'benefit' from the IWF list) who use JANET or a JANET subsidiary for their Internet feed are not subject to the IWFs will.

Bureaucracy gone mad. :)
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - iD and Valve violating GPL

Submitted by frooge
frooge writes: With the recent release of iD's catalog on Steam, it appears DOSBox is being used to run the old DOS games for greater compatibility. According to a post on the Halflife2.net forums, however, this distribution does not contain a copy of the GPL license that DOSBox is distributed under, which violates the license. According to the DOSBox developers, they were not notified that it was being used for this release.
Businesses

Submission + - An Ebay Sale is a Sale

Submitted by syousef
syousef writes: An Ebay Sale is a Sale says an Australian New South Wales State Judge in a case where a man tried to reneg on the Ebay sale of a 1946 World War II Wirraway aircraft. The seller tried to reneg because he'd received an offer $100,000 greater than the Ebay sale price elsewhere. The buyer who had bid the reserve price of $150,000 at the last minute took him to court. "It follows that, in my view, a binding contract was formed between the plaintiff and the defendent and that it should be specifically enforced," Justice Rein said in his decision. All dollar figures are in AUD.
Movies

Submission + - Girl faces year in prison for 20 second film clip

Submitted by PizzaFace
PizzaFace writes: It's Jhannet's 19th birthday, so her boyfriend borrows a camcorder to memorialize the occasion, and they head to the mall. They goof around, recording each other and the Chick-fil-A cows in the food court, then decide to catch the Transformers matinee, which started a few minutes earlier. During a big action scene, Jhannet takes the camcorder and records a 20-second clip to show her little brother. A few minutes later, cops who were called by the manager come in with flashlights, arrest Jhannet, confiscate the camcorder, and, at the behest of Regal Cinemas, charge her with film piracy. "I was terrified," said Jhannet. "I was crying. I've never been in trouble before." If convicted, she could be sentenced to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine. The police say they lack discretion because Regal Cinemas chose to prosecute: "They were the victim in this case, and they felt strongly enough about it." The National Association of Theatre Owners supports Regal's "zero-tolerance" prosecution standard: "We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable. Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing."
Math

Submission + - Winnie Wrote a Math Book

Submitted by SoyChemist
SoyChemist writes: Hollywood is not known for providing a wealth of positive female role models. Danica McKellar, the actress that played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years and Elsie Snuffin on The West Wing, has written a math book for teenage girls. Math Doesn't Suck is in the style of a teen magazine. It even includes a horoscope, cute doodles of shoes and jewelry, and testimonials from attractive young career women that use math at work. It focuses on fractions and pre-algebra and uses mnemonics like calling a reciprocal a "refliprocal", because you just take the fraction and flip it upside down. Wired interviewed McKellar about the new book and her crusade to eliminate the achievement gap between boys and girls in math courses. McKellar graduated Summa Cum Laude from UCLA. While studying there, she co-authored a proof and presented it at a conference. After she and Mayim Bialik — star of Blossom and a PhD in neuroscience — appeared in a 20/20 episode about intellectual actresses, several literary agents came knocking on her door.

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