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Submission + - Pirate movie bootlegger gets 24 months probation

Submitted by Solandri
Solandri writes: Ricardo Taylor, a former supervisor at the U.S. Department of Labor ran a bootleg DVD operation for 7 years, copying DVDs and selling them to other employees via the Department's internal email system. You know — exactly the sort of thing our draconian Copyright fines were meant to prevent. He made more than $19,000 from these pirated movie sales in 2013 alone. His punishment? 24 months probation. So apparently, using the Internet to share Copyrighted materials at no personal profit is a more serious crime than selling Copyrighted works for profit on physical media. More details on this site with auto-playing video.
Media

Player Piano Roll Production Ceases 117

Posted by kdawson from the day-the-music-died dept.
boustrophedon writes "The Buffalo News reports that QRS Music Technologies halted production of player piano rolls 108 years after the company was founded in Chicago. QRS continues to make digitized and computerized player-piano technology that runs on CDs. 'We're still doing what we always did, which is to provide software for pianos that play themselves. It's just the technology that has changed. But I would be lying to say [the halting of production] doesn't sadden me,' said Bob Berkman, the company's music director. Piano rolls can last for decades, but not forever. Volunteers at the International Association of Mechanical Music Preservationists build piano-roll scanners to scan rolls optically and convert them to MIDI files. The IAMMP archive and others contain thousands of scanned rolls."
Google

Development, Privacy, and Standards for Chrome 114

Posted by Soulskill from the chrome-chrome-chrome-chrome-chrome dept.
Continuing our coverage of Google Chrome, snydeq points out an Infoworld story about looking at the new browser from a developer's perspective, and another about how WebKit should be the focus of development efforts, rather than the browsers that use it. TGdaily notes that Chrome's search box will fetch all types of data, and can be made to display banking information with little effort. ABC and coderrr have slightly more paranoid articles questioning Google's commitment to privacy. NetworkWorld suggests that Chrome's unique process model (explained here) will require the development of new measurement standards.
GNU is Not Unix

RMS Steps Down As Emacs Maintainer 321

Posted by CmdrTaco from the evangelism-is-time-consuming dept.
sigzero writes "Short but sweet: RMS is stepping down as Emacs Maintainer: 'From: Richard Stallman, Subject: Re: Looking for a new Emacs maintainer or team, Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:57:22 -0500 Stefan and Yidong offered to take over, so I am willing to hand over Emacs development to them."
Media

NPD Group Says "Wait! HD-DVD Isn't Dead Yet" 279

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the get-on-the-cart dept.
The NPD group, owners of the not-quite-as-popular-as-they-had-hoped HD-DVD format, attempted to battle back against the tide of "naysayers" who claim that the format war is over and have declared Blu-Ray Disc the winner. "While select articles have implied that HD-DVD as a format is doomed and the sky is falling for the format's supporters, the NPD Group this afternoon reinforced that sales results from a single week do not necessarily indicate a trend, and that the week in question had several intriguing variables that have gone unreported."
Databases

MapReduce — a Major Step Backwards? 157

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the angry-dbas-are-never-a-good-thing dept.
The Database Column has an interesting, if negative, look at MapReduce and what it means for the database community. MapReduce is a software framework developed by Google to handle parallel computations over large data sets on cheap or unreliable clusters of computers. "As both educators and researchers, we are amazed at the hype that the MapReduce proponents have spread about how it represents a paradigm shift in the development of scalable, data-intensive applications. MapReduce may be a good idea for writing certain types of general-purpose computations, but to the database community, it is: a giant step backward in the programming paradigm for large-scale data intensive applications; a sub-optimal implementation, in that it uses brute force instead of indexing; not novel at all -- it represents a specific implementation of well known techniques developed nearly 25 years ago; missing most of the features that are routinely included in current DBMS; incompatible with all of the tools DBMS users have come to depend on."
Transportation

Submission + - General Motors: Driverless cars ready by 2018

Submitted by
Gregor Stipicic
Gregor Stipicic writes: " Cars that drive themselves — even parking at their destination — could be ready for sale within a decade, General Motors Corp. executives say. "This is not science fiction," Larry Burns, GM's vice president for research and development, said in a recent interview. GM plans to use an inexpensive computer chip and an antenna to link vehicles equipped with driverless technologies. The first use likely would be on highways; people would have the option to choose a driverless mode while they still would control the vehicle on local streets, Burns said. He said the company plans to test driverless car technology by 2015 and have cars on the road around 2018. "
Cellphones

Research Finds Effects of GSM Signals on Sleep 319

Posted by CmdrTaco from the get-out-of-my-brain dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The effects of mobile phone radiation on sleep were studied in Sweden in a laboratory experiment where subjects were exposed either to 884 MHz GSM radiation or placebo. The study finds that compared to placebo, in the radiation-exposed subjects there was a prolonged latency to reach the first cycle of deep sleep (stage 3). The amount of stage 4 sleep was also decreased. Moreover, participants that otherwise have no self-reported symptoms related to mobile phone use, appear to have more headaches during actual radiofrequency exposure as compared to sham exposure."

Feed Techdirt: Student Films Principal Fighting Another Student... School Board Bans Mobile Pho (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
A few years ago, we wrote a story about some students filming a teacher's angry outburst in a classroom and putting that film up on the web. Rather than disciplining the teacher for the outburst, the school disciplined the students and banned mobile phones. The lesson? It's okay for teachers to act inappropriately. It's not okay for students to reveal that behavior. It seems other schools want to teach that same lesson. The Agitator points us to another school that has banned mobile phones in school after a student filmed the principal in a physical fight with another student. At least in this case, the principal was put on leave. No matter what you think concerning mobile phones in schools, it seems pretty clear that this change in policy was brought about because of the principal getting filmed. If anything, that should be a reason to encourage more students to have mobile phones -- so that they can expose inappropriate behavior. Apparently, the school board believes its better to just pretend inappropriate behavior doesn't exist rather than to document it.

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Security

Exploit Found to Brick Most HP and Compaq Laptops 294

Posted by Soulskill from the cool-looking-paperweight dept.
Ian Lamont writes "A security researcher calling himself porkythepig has published attack code that can supposedly brick most HP and Compaq laptops. The exploit uses an ActiveX control in HP's Software Update. It would 'let an attacker corrupt Windows' kernel files, making the laptop unbootable, or with a little more effort, allow hacks that would result in a PC hijack or malware infection.' The same researcher last week outlined a batch of additional vulnerabilities in HP and Compaq laptops, for which HP later issued patches."
Space

Submission + - Active glacier found on Mars (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by
FireFury03
FireFury03 writes: "The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has spotted an icy feature which appears to be a young active glacier. Dr Gerhard Neukum (what a cool name :), chief scientist on the spacecraft's High Resolution Stereo Camera said "We have not yet been able to see the spectral signature of water. But we will fly over it in the coming months and take measurements. On the glacial ridges we can see white tips, which can only be freshly exposed ice". Estimates place the glacier at 10,000 — 100,000 years old."
User Journal

Journal Journal: 6th Circuit strikes down 2257 age verification for pornsites 359

Journal by arbitraryaardvark

How Appealing reports that a court has struck down age verification requirements for porn sites, as a First Amendment violation.
While the average slashdot user has never been to such a site, porn has been a driving force in the economics and technology of the net.
The age verification requirements of U.S.C. Title 18, Section 2257 were yet another attempt to regulate to death what the government can't outright prohibit. The re

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