[Quote]:

From Melbourne’s Astor Theatre, a harrowing tale of the way that the DRM on digital projectors — intended to stop exhibitors from leaking high-quality videos onto the Internet — can interfere with legitimate exhibition. Punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is never a good answer, morally or commercially. The most secure way to manage theatrical exhibition is to ban it altogether; the DRM scheme used by digital projectors comes pretty close to that “solution.”

[Quote]:

On June 12, 2012, the North Carolina Senate approved HB 819 by a 34-11 vote, requiring North Carolina’s Coastal Resources Commission to base predictions of future sea level rise along the state’s coast on a steady, linear rate of increase – thereby prohibiting state agencies from using projections of accelerated sea-level rise due to global warming in drafting coastal development rules. This follows Texas’ deletion of references to climate change and sea level rise in a 2011 report on Galveston Bay and pressure in the Virginia General Assembly to replace references to sea level rise with “recurrent flooding” in a recently-commissioned study.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation has responded with a contest to identify other problems the state faces that the Senate might outlaw next.

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From bait-and-switch marriage proposals to wig-pulling, cocktail-tossing catfights, it’s safe to say we’ve grown accustomed to absurd contrivance and scripting in “reality” television. But who would expect such dramatic puppet-mastering on HGTV?

Apparently we all should have. Earlier this week on the website Hooked on Houses, former House Hunters participant Bobi Jensen called the show a sham. Jensen writes that the HGTV producers found her family’s plan to turn their current home into a rental property “boring and overdone,” and therefore crafted a narrative about their desperation for more square footage. What’s more, producers only agreed to feature Jensen’s family after they had bought their new house, forcing them to “tour” friends’ houses that weren’t even for sale to accommodate the trope of “Which one will they choose?”

Wait, what? Reality TV is fake? Next you’re going to tell me WWE isn’t real either!

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The fact that my daughter’s ability to speak is becoming a casualty of a patent battle between two businesses is beyond my comprehension. This is a patent issue, a monetary issue, a legal issue, a business issue. This should be handled in a business vs. business way, within the court system. PRC’s decision to fight for the removal of this app from the iTunes store isn’t just an aggressive move against Speak for Yourself, it’s an attack on my child, the other children using this app, and the children who are ready to begin using this app but now cannot.

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Newt Gingrich said Tuesday that elections are “rigged, frankly, in favor of the wealthy.”

“It is very difficult in America today,” he told MSNBC’s Al Sharpton. “If you look at New York where Mayor Bloomberg spent an extraordinary amount of personal money to buy the mayor’s office for the third time. It is fairly hard to compete with a billionaire if — if they get to spend all the money they want and the middle-class candidate’s raising money in $2,500 units. So I think the current system is rigged, frankly, in favor of the wealthy.”

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By taking away the 1 percent’s excessive wealth, we take away their ability to buy elections. When we get corporate money out of politics, we weed out the politicians who were put in place by corporate money. By removing those politicians and putting in those who will work for us, we simultaneously scare those remaining in office to adhere to our agenda or lose their jobs, and then we begin to fundamentally change the system for the better.

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The Institute for Works of Religion, commonly known as the Vatican Bank, has so far refused to disclose details of an account held by a priest in connection with a money laundering and fraud investigation.Father Ninni Treppiedi was sacked from serving as a priest after a series of church funds transactions made by his parish came to anti-mafia prosecutors’ attention this spring. The dealings, involving millions of euro, date back to 2007-2009.Prosecutors suspect Treppiedi was involved in money-laundering operations linked to Matteo Messina Denaro, a Mafia Godfather on the run. The cleric’s former post in Aclamo, near Trapani, is said to be the richest parish in the Mafia stronghold of Sicily.

If you’ve installed iOS 6 on your phone, try this – start the music app, and tilt your phone by a small amount.

See the difference? No?

Here, try these two screen shots:

See it?

Let me zoom in a bit and point out the difference:

[Quote]:

Microsoft has filed for a technology patent which will allow advertisers to push their advertising to consumers based on their emotional states and recent behaviours and activities.

The platform works across devices, tracking and monitoring the online activity data of consumers stored in logs including browsing history, web page content, search queries, emails, instant messages, videos from webcams, gestures from a computing device, e.g., Microsoft Kinect and results from online games.

The technology created by a group of resident Microserfers goes on to process the online activity identifying a tone associated with content that the user interacted with, receiving an indication of the user’s reaction to the content and assigning an emotional state to the user based on the tone of the content and the indication of the user’s reaction to the content.

The user’s reaction is identified from facial expressions of the user captured by an image capture device during the time period of usage. Advertisers then provide targeting data that includes the desired emotional states of users it intends to target and the ads are duly served to unsuspecting emo targets.