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The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending November 5th 2016 are in. Star Trek: Beyond was the big release for the week.
Read the rest of the stats and analysis to find out how DVD, Blu-ray, …
The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending November 5th 2016 are in. Star Trek: Beyond was the big release for the week.
Read the rest of the stats and analysis to find out how DVD, Blu-ray, Ultra HD Blu-ray did.
Is it fair use? “We may spend time… proving it to people in black robes.”
Enlarge / Theodor Seuss Geisel in 1959. He's holding a plant-sprouting corncob pipe as he stands in front of his 1940 sculpture of the Blue-Green Abelard hanging on the wall at his home. (credit: John Bryson/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)
Connecticut-based ComicMix has been sued for trying to sell a book called Oh, The Places You'll Boldly Go!, which was proposed on Kickstarter as a "mash-up" of Dr. Seuss and Star Trek. The lawsuit raises the question of what kind of "fan fiction" may be legally allowed in a world that's embracing "remix" culture.
The plaintiff in the case is Dr. Seuss Enterprises, or DSE, which owns the copyrights and trademarks related to Theodor Geisel, the author and illustrator who wrote children's books under the Dr. Seuss pseudonym, including one called Oh, The Places You'll Go!
ComicMix and the project's creators, Glenn Hauman, David Friedman, and Ty Templeton, raised tens of thousands of dollars on Kickstarter before they were hit with an intellectual property complaint from DSE. At that point, the Kickstarter page was taken down. The lawsuit was filed on Friday and reported yesterday by The Hollywood Reporter.
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Court documents reveal relationship soured fast amid blood testing scandal.
Enlarge / Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos CEO (credit: Getty | CNBC)
Theranos, the disgraced blood testing startup once valued at $9 billion, broke all of its promises and “failed to meet the most basic quality standards and legal requirements” in its contract with Walgreen Co. That’s according to a scathing lawsuit (PDF) from drugstore giant, which owns neighborhood Walgreens.
The two companies had teamed up in 2012 to offer Theranos’ low-cost, finger prick-based blood tests to Walgreens’ customers in “Wellness Centers” that would be set up within Walgreens’ drugstores. According to the court documents, Theranos had spent two years wooing Walgreens into the deal, promising “disruptive” proprietary technology that would be of the highest quality and receive regulatory approval.
But the deal imploded and the relationship soured after media reports in late 2015 revealed problems with Theranos’ technology, testing standards and accuracy, and its dealings with regulators. In July of 2016, federal regulators levied hefty and unprecedented sanctions on Theranos after inspections found deficiencies that posed “immediate jeopardy” to patient health and safety. Regulators revoked the certification of one of Theranos’ labs and banned the company’s founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, from the laboratory business for at least two years.
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Airlines are slowly experimenting with alternative fuel mixtures to reduce greenhouse gases.
Yesterday a commercial Alaska Airlines plane pumped with a blend of traditional jet fuel and wood biofuel flew from Seattle to Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C.
The flight was the first to use a 20 percent blend of biofuel made of leftover wood from timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not the first to use a biofuel mixture in general though—in June, Alaska Airlines flew two test flights on jet fuel mixed with biofuel made from non-edible parts of corn, and in March of this year, United Airlines pledged to use a 30 percent biofuel mixture on its flights from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The United Airlines fuel is produced by a company called AltAir Fuels that depends on a variety of biological source materials “from used cooking oil to algae.”
Alaska Airlines’ wood-based fuel was developed by a Colorado-based company called Gevo, which partnered with the Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance (NARA) to develop the wood waste into isobutanol, which it then converted to jet fuel. Gevo also created the corn waste biofuel mixture that Alaska Airlines flew with in June.
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In the new episode of our TV podcast, we talk to one of the show’s writers.
Enlarge / I have something to show you, and you're not going to like it. At all. (credit: HBO)
Everything I believed was a lie on Westworld—at least, that's what I got out of this week's episode "Trompe L'Oeil." I guess that's just par for the course in this mind-breaking story about storytelling. This week on Decrypted, my guest is one of Westworld's writers, Charles Yu, who is also the award-winning author of the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. He can't give us spoilers, but he does tell us a lot about writing for this incredible show.
Topics discussed: Metafiction (i.e. fiction about fiction), what the hell with the Bernard reveal (really, what the hell), the challenge of telling a story that feels familiar yet surprising (and how Westworld does it), whether the robots are just like humans or radically different (yes and no), Ford's real motivations (it's complicated), how intellectual property might be the enemy of storytelling (or maybe not), whether stories can be dangerous (sometimes), what characters and ideas got Yu excited about writing for Westworld (hint: Bernard and metafiction), and why Felix is so important (he shows us a side of Westworld that no one else can).
I'll be analyzing, debating, and dissecting Westworld every week with a different guest, and we'll post the podcast on Tuesdays. The episodes air on Sunday, so you have plenty of time to watch before we get into major spoilers. Yes, there are spoilers. Listen when you're ready!
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Once upon a time you could buy a laptop and be fairly certain that if you needed more RAM or storage in the future, you could just buy some new memory or a bigger (or faster) hard drive or solid state drive. It’s also often cheaper to buy your own than to pay for the higher-specced models.
These days, a lot of PC makers have opted to solder the memory and/or storage to the motherboard, ostensibly to save space in laptops that are getting thinner and thinner.
Continue reading Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops aren’t easy to upgrade at Liliputing.
Once upon a time you could buy a laptop and be fairly certain that if you needed more RAM or storage in the future, you could just buy some new memory or a bigger (or faster) hard drive or solid state drive. It’s also often cheaper to buy your own than to pay for the higher-specced models.
These days, a lot of PC makers have opted to solder the memory and/or storage to the motherboard, ostensibly to save space in laptops that are getting thinner and thinner.
Continue reading Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops aren’t easy to upgrade at Liliputing.
Slashing the number of spindles improves overall reliability, as long as you take care.
(credit: Alpha six)
Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has published its latest batch of drive reliability data. The release covers failure information for the 67,642 disks that the company uses to store nearly 300PB of data.
This is actually fewer disks than the company had last quarter, even though the total capacity has gone up. That's because Backblaze has been upgrading, replacing 2TB disks from HGST and Western Digital with new Seagate 8TB ones. While this upgrade offers size and energy savings, it's only worthwhile if the failure rate is contained; any more than 2-3 times the failure rate and Backblaze says the migration won't be worth it.
Annualized drive failure rates. (credit: Backblaze)
Fortunately, the findings from last quarter appear to be holding true. The widely expected bathtub curve—high failure rates at the start and end of the drives' lives, with a period of low failure rates in the middle—isn't in evidence. The 8TB Seagate drives so far are showing an annualized failure rate of 1.6 percent; that's identical to the (consistently reliable) 2TB disks from HGST and substantially better than the 8.2 percent seen from the WDC disks. With only a quarter of the number of drives required, this is a clear savings. Presuming things don't take a turn for the worse, the move will mean greatly reduced failures even as the total storage capacity goes up.
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Results of two-month study revealed on same day as new Twitter “muting” updates.
An NYU PhD student used these avatars for his Twitter accounts, which he used to study the effects of rebukes on the site. (credit: Kevin Munger)
Twitter users—and Twitter as a company—have grappled with ways to deal with hateful, bigoted, and harassing speech throughout the platform's lifetime. The service has added a few tools to try to keep things in check, but one PhD student at NYU's school of politics set out to see whether social checks and balances could reduce the platform's most abhorrent speech.
The results, published in the November edition of Political Behavior, concluded that direct, negative responses to racist tweets could have an impact—but, at least in this test's case, they were far more effective when they appeared to come from white users.
NYU student Kevin Munger began his experiment by identifying 231 Twitter accounts with a propensity for using the n-word in a targeted manner (meaning, the message included the "@" symbol and used second-person language). All of these accounts were at least six months old and had used the n-word in at least three percent of their posts during the period Munger monitored them (late summer last year). Munger explains that he chose white men as the study's subjects "because they are the largest and most politically salient demographic engaging in racist online harassment of blacks," and also to control "the in-groups of interest (gender and race)."
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A broad range of industry associations, academic institutions, libraries and digital rights groups have submitted their opinions on the landmark piracy case between Cox Communications and BMG. They all warn the court that the district court’s decision to hold the ISP available for pirating subscribers can have disastrous implications.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Last December a Virginia federal jury ruled that Internet provider Cox Communications was responsible for the copyright infringements of its subscribers.
The ISP was found guilty of willful contributory copyright infringement and ordered to pay music publisher BMG Rights Management $25 million in damages.
Last week Cox filed its appeal arguing that the district court made several errors that may ultimately restrict the public’s access to Internet services.
This week it became apparent that the Internet provider is not alone in this assessment. Today, several industry associations, academic institutions, libraries and digital rights groups submitted amicus briefs to the court of appeals, voicing their concerns.
The submissions total roughly 200 pages, and the overall theme is that if the current verdict stands, many Internet providers and services will unjustly face similar liability claims based on an incorrect interpretation of the law.
The CCIA, which represents global tech firms including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, submitted a brief together with the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). According to both groups, the district court ignored Supreme Court rulings which limit contributory infringement for service providers.
“An Internet service provider does not infringe copyrights merely by providing households access to the Internet,” the CCIA and CTA write (pdf).
“Yet the district court allowed such a case to go to the jury, and asked the jury only whether Cox ‘materially contributed’ to infringement in any of the millions of households to which Cox offered Internet access,” they add.
As expected, several stakeholders from the telco industries have also chimed in to support Cox’s appeal.
The U.S. Telecom Association, for example, urges the appeals court to reverse the verdict as it would require other ISPs to disconnect subscribers based on one-sided piracy accusations.
“The decision […] forces ISPs like Cox and USTelecom’s member companies to restrict consumers’ access to the internet based on nothing more than unproven allegations of copyright infringement in the form of invalid DMCA notices.
“It upsets the careful balance of the interests of copyright holders, internet users, and ISPs that Congress struck in the DMCA,” the Telco association adds (pdf).
Similar arguments were submitted in separate briefs by the American Cable Association and the Internet Commerce Coalition, with the latter highlighting the dubious nature of the millions of standardized copyright infringement claims some copyright holders send.
“If the decision […] is not reversed, conduit ISPs, when they receive unverified, machine-generated infringement claims from profit-seeking agents of copyright holders, will be strongly incentivized to cut off vital Internet service to users, rather than face costly damages suits.
“This is not the system Congress intended when it enacted the DMCA, and it should not be one imposed through a misinterpretation of Congress’s plain words,” the Internet Commerce Coalition adds (pdf).
In their submissions, digital rights groups the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge highlight the risk the verdict poses for Internet users at large.
“Just as a tenant’s water should not ordinarily be cut off when a landlord alleges nonpayment of rent, a subscriber’s connection to the Internet should not be terminated in response to alleged copyright infringement except in the most extenuating circumstances,” the groups note (pdf).
The district court’s interpretation of ISP obligations under the DMCA was too strict, they argue, and should be reversed. Not doing so could ultimately violate the fundamental right of people to have Internet access.
“Termination impedes the subscriber’s ability to exercise one of our most cherished liberties, the right of free expression. And termination potentially imposes those far-reaching effects on an entire household sharing the subscriber’s Internet connection.”
Finally, there is a detailed brief from several academic groups and institutions, including several library organizations. The American Council on Education and the American Library Association, among others, fear that educational access to the Internet may become restricted if the verdict stands.
“It could force educational institutions to restrict student access to the Internet unreasonably. Similarly, it could require libraries to limit broadband availability to people who have no other way of accessing information they need,” they write (pdf).
“The DMCA does not mandate a uniform repeat infringer policy, and such uniformity would conflict with the flexibility afforded under the Higher Education Opportunity Act,” the groups add.
The barrage of submissions clearly shows the importance of this case, and it’s likely that many more will follow. It is now up to the appeals court to decide if and how these opinions should be factored in.
With the stakes being this high, it would be no surprise if this case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, to clearly define ISPs’ obligations when it comes to processing DMCA notices and dealing with repeat infringers.
Interestingly, no amicus briefs have been submitted in support of copyright holder BMG thus far.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Odds are that most photos you snap these days are shot on your phone or a digital camera. But if you took a lot of pictures a few decades ago… they’re probably in a shoebox or photo album.
Google’s new PhotoScan app is designed to make it easy to digitize those pictures and save them to your Google Photos account so they’re backed up, organized, and searchable.
What’s particularly interesting about the app is how it uses the camera on your iPhone or Android phone to do the work that normally would be done by a flatbed scanner.
Odds are that most photos you snap these days are shot on your phone or a digital camera. But if you took a lot of pictures a few decades ago… they’re probably in a shoebox or photo album.
Google’s new PhotoScan app is designed to make it easy to digitize those pictures and save them to your Google Photos account so they’re backed up, organized, and searchable.
What’s particularly interesting about the app is how it uses the camera on your iPhone or Android phone to do the work that normally would be done by a flatbed scanner.
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