There's a change in the virtual winds...Mininova limits service

Looking around the internets earlier today I stumbled on some massive news. Mininova has been forced to restrict access to illegal torrents by a Dutch Court. There's a big shift online at the moment and it's hard to tell who's winning.

Mininova Blog Post
November 26, 2009

Today is an important day in the history of Mininova. From now on, we are limiting Mininova.org to our Content Distribution service. By doing so, we comply with the ruling of the Court of Utrecht of last August.

Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service. According to the verdict (Dutch link) we have to prevent uploads of torrents to Mininova that refer to certain titles or to similar-looking titles. We’ve been testing some filtering systems the last couple of months, but we found that it’s neither technically nor operationally possible to implement a 100% working filter system. Therefore, we decided that the only option is to limit Mininova to Content Distribution torrents from now on. We are still considering an appeal at this moment.


We launched our Content Distribution service in 2007. This service allows producers and artists to easily publish and distribute their content for free through Mininova. The launch of Content Distribution has proven to be a success. Countless content owners have used Content Distribution to distribute their content (e.g. albums and documentaries) for free to millions of users. For example, the Dutch band Silence is Sexy released their complete album on Mininova and received the Interactive Award 2009 for doing so. The Dutch television broadcaster VPRO decided to start using Content Distribution in 2009 in order to distribute documentaries.

Full posting from Mininovas blog

Zero Punctuation: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

We live in a universe that is optimised for building starships!

Here's a cool article from New Scientist about future prospects for interstellar spaceflight, ....  ooohh...

SPACE is big," wrote Douglas Adams in his book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."

He wasn't exaggerating. Even our nearest star Proxima Centauri is a staggering 4.2 light years away - more than 200,000 times the distance from the Earth to the sun. Or, if you like, the equivalent of 50 million trips to the moon and back.

Such vast distances would seem to put the stars far beyond the reach of human explorers. Suppose we had been able to hitch a ride on NASA's Voyager 1 the fastest interstellar space probe built to date. Voyager 1 is now heading out of the solar system at about 17 kilometres per second. At this rate it would take 74,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri - safe to say we wouldn't be around to enjoy the view.

So what would it take for humans to reach the stars within a lifetime? For a start, we would need a spacecraft that can rush through the cosmos at close to the speed of light. There has been no shortage of proposals: vehicles propelled by repeated blasts from hydrogen bombs, or from the annihilation of matter and antimatter. Others resemble vast sailing ships with giant reflective sails, pushed along by laser beams.

All these ambitious schemes have their shortcomings and it is doubtful they could really go the distance. Now there are two radical new possibilities on the table that might just enable us - or rather our distant descendants - to reach the stars. read the rest of the article...

Co-op - Assassin's Creed 2 Review Special

Could they gush any more about this new title?? hummm, maybe I'll have to go and have a look.

Tech News - Computational cameras perfect your photos for you

17 November 2009 by Jim Giles

The signs of the digital photography revolution are hard to miss, from cameras embedded in our cellphones to gigabytes of images stored on hard drives. But if you thought the revolution finished with the death of chemical film, think again. Computational photography promises equally dramatic changes, turning even the most ham-fisted of snappers into veritable Cartier-Bressons.

We are on the cusp of a new era in which every camera comes with a sophisticated built-in computer, says Ramesh Raskar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who delivered a presentation on advances in computational photography at an imaging technology conference in Monterey, California, this week. Low-cost processing and memory combined with new digital sensors will deliver richer images created by fusing elements from multiple shots and even video.

Hints of the changes to come can be found in cameras such as Casio's EX-F1, which launched last year and has been dubbed the first computational camera. In poor light, photographers face a difficult choice: use a flash, which can produce a harsh illumination, or go for a long exposure, where the risk of image blur increases. The EX-F1 offers a third option. It shoots a burst of images at long exposures and its computer merges the shots into a single image, reducing the blur as it does so. The process may not yet outperform established anti-blur techniques, such as using a tripod, but its existence is a significant advance in itself.

In labs around the world, researchers are developing a slew of other computational tricks for cameras. "We're creating images that people have never been able to produce," says Marc Levoy at Stanford University in California. more...

Tech News - LHC smashes protons together for first time

More news from the LHC.... - Monkey

22:39 23 November 2009 by David Shiga

The Large Hadron Collider bashed protons together for the first time on Monday, inaugurating a new era in the quest to uncover nature's deepest secrets.

Housed in a 27-kilometre circular tunnel beneath Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC is the world's most powerful particle accelerator, designed to collide protons together at unprecedented energies.

It was on the verge of its first proton collisions in September 2008 when a faulty electrical connection triggered an explosion of helium used to cool the machine. This caused a 14-month delay while CERN repaired the damage and installed safety features to prevent a repeat of the accident.

But physicists started whipping protons around the machine again on Friday.

Now, at long last, CERN is heralding the first collisions inside the machine. Two beams of protons travelling at nearly the speed of light crashed together on Monday at 1322 GMT inside the ATLAS detector, one of the giant measuring devices the LHC will use to probe shrapnel from the collisions, according to CERN's announcement. Further collisions occurred inside the LHC's CMS and LHCb detectors.

"This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics – and hopefully discoveries – after 20 years' work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance," said Fabiola Gianotti, a spokesperson for the ATLAS detector project. more...

Tech News - Britain's new Internet law -- as bad as everyone's been saying

Yikes! Now here's some scary shit....damn you QUEEN!    -  monkey

Cory Doctorow

POSTED AT 4:28 AM November 20, 2009

The British government has brought down its long-awaited Digital Economy Bill, and it's perfectly useless and terrible. It consists almost entirely of penalties for people who do things that upset the entertainment industry (including the "three-strikes" rule that allows your entire family to be cut off from the net if anyone who lives in your house is accused of copyright infringement, without proof or evidence or trial), as well as a plan to beat the hell out of the video-game industry with a new, even dumber rating system (why is it acceptable for the government to declare that some forms of artwork have to be mandatorily labelled as to their suitability for kids? And why is it only some media? Why not paintings? Why not novels? Why not modern dance or ballet or opera?).

So it's bad. £50,000 fines if someone in your house is accused of filesharing. A duty on ISPs to spy on all their customers in case they find something that would help the record or film industry sue them (ISPs who refuse to cooperate can be fined £250,000).

But that's just for starters. The real meat is in the story we broke yesterday: Peter Mandelson, the unelected Business Secretary, would have to power to make up as many new penalties and enforcement systems as he likes. And he says he's planning to appoint private militias financed by rightsholder groups who will have the power to kick you off the internet, spy on your use of the network, demand the removal of files or the blocking of websites, and Mandelson will have the power to invent any penalty, including jail time, for any transgression he deems you are guilty of. And of course, Mandelson's successor in the next government would also have this power.

more from the article...

BBC News story.

Main points from the bill thanks to politics.co.uk

Tech News - Lady Gaga Earns Slightly More From Spotify Than Piracy

Written by enigmax on November 21, 2009

Piracy is without a doubt, truly evil. It doesn’t help the artists, it robs them of their rightful revenue and is such a poor basis for a business model, it’s unworthy of consideration. Of course, new streaming sites are miles better, offering a legal way to listen to free music. Hmm – Lady Gaga got a million plays on Spotify and earned $167.

gagaIn August, Swedish artist and composer Magnus Uggla launched a scathing attack on the owners of Spotify. After discovering that Sony BMG is a shareholder and receiving virtually no cash from his music being played there, he withdrew his tracks from the service and stormed away, declaring controversially: “I’d rather be raped by The Pirate Bay.”

Nevertheless, Uggla insisted that Spotify is a fantastic service with a great range of music to sample. However, he felt that the fact he wasn’t getting paid was the fault of the major labels involved in the project (Sony BMG bought 5.8% of Spotify for 2,935 Euros, Universal Music got 4.8% for 2,446 euros, Warner Music paid 1,957 Euros for 3.8% and EMI pocketed 1.9% for an investment of 980 Euros), claiming that he “earned as much in six months as a BUSKER could earn in a day.”

More...

Hadron Collider is back online!

Alright! Finally! Now got ready for the moment that we all pass out and see six months into the future! or just cease to exist, one of the two...










From Pop Sci Fi

Frickin Laser Beams!

Boeing's Matrix Laser destroying an unmaned drone aircraft

from Gizmodo;

Boeing has successfully tested their new Matrix laser over airborne targets, which is a world's first. In total, they shot down five drones at various ranges. That's a lot of pew pew in a day.

The Air Force and Boeing achieved a directed-energy breakthrough with these tests. MATRIX—Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments—performance is especially noteworthy because it demonstrated unprecedented, ultra-precise and lethal acquisition, pointing and tracking at long ranges using relatively low laser power.

I'm sure that description would get Governor Tarkin wet, but if that weren't enough, Boeing—along with the Air Force and the Army—also tested the Laser Avenger, a kinetic-laser hybrid weapon that fires a high power ray coupled with a 25mm machine gun.

Obviously, the kids in the funny uniforms are happy with their new toys, but I would like to see if they can do the same with a small thermal exhaust port only two meters wide.

More from Pop Sci Fi