Bcstevieb

Jennifer Jenkins from the Duke Center for the Public Domain writes, "January 1, 2020 is Public Domain Day! Works published in 1924 are entering the US public domain. They include George Gershwin’s 'Rhapsody in Blue' and 'Fascinating Rhythm,' silent films by Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and Thomas Mann’s 'The Magic Mountain,' E. M. Forster’s 'A Passage to India,' and A. A. Milne’s 'When We Were Very Young.' These works were supposed to go into the public domain in 2000, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years. See what will (finally) be open to all!"

Works from 1924 are finally entering the public domain, after a 95-year copyright term. However, under the laws that were in effect until 1978, thousands of works from 1963 would be entering the public domain this year. They range from the books The Fire Next Time and Where the Wild Things Are, to the film The Birds and the albums and The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and much more. Have a look at some of the others. In fact, since copyright used to come in renewable terms of 28 years, and 85% of authors did not renew, 85% of the works from 1991 might be entering the public domain! Imagine what the great libraries of the world—or just internet hobbyists—could do: digitizing those holdings, making them available for education and research, for pleasure and for creative reuse.

Public Domain Day 2020 [Center for the Study of the Public Domain/Duke University School of Law]

(Thanks, Jennifer!)

Two big sea lions kicked back aboard a small, empty anchored boat in Eld Inlet at the southern end of Washington's Puget Sound. Josh Phillips of Spawn Fly Fish captured this delightful moment two weeks ago. “It looked a little off and we got closer and closer and realized there were two massive animals on board,” Phillips told The Olympian.

Photographer Eric Brummel created this magnificent time-lapse video of the Milky Way in which the sky is stabilized so you can experience the Earth's rotation. He captured the footage at Font's Point, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California. From Universe Today:

Eric created this time-lapse by using a star-tracker with his camera. A star-tracker rotates the camera at the same speed as the Earth, but in the opposite direction. It has the visual effect of stabilizing the sky. Usually, star-trackers are used to stabilize the camera during a long exposure, to avoid blurry or streaked stars in the image.

(via Daily Grail)

Christmas is almost here, and with another year having passed us by, it's time to pore through the best Android games released on the Play Store in 2019. Just like the previous two years, I've ordered the roundup by price so that everyone can easily find the titles that best appeal to them, whether you prefer premium releases or free-to-play games that contain in-app purchases. After all, today's list isn't a popularity contest.

Best Android games of 2019 for your new phone, tablet, or Chromebook was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

GROOT. GINGERBREAD.

Says IMGURian @cdeniseeriksson, 'I made a gingerbread Groot!'

This years christmas gingerbread project! It took me 5 weeks, 1 for planning and 4 to build. It has a wire mesh structure underneath to fill out the shape, since it’s 1:1 scale.

Truly spectacular.

I don't wanna eat him. But I would.

Scroll down in her gallery for the excellent video!

I made a gingerbread Groot!

Welcome to the roundup of the new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have a fantastic adventure game that's perfect for Christmas, a relaxing puzzler that contains a winter theme, and a planet-orbiting arcade game that's perfect for a relaxing experience. So without further ado, here are the more notable Android games released during the week of December 16th, 2019.

20 new Android games from the week of December 16th, 2019: Snowman Story, My Winter Album, and Little White Rocket was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

One Georgia family's viral owl Christmas saga started began on December 12, with this Facebook post: “No joke, we just found a live owl roosting in our Christmas tree.”

In the photo, an owl tucked in to the tree branches among lights and ornaments.

The local paper identified the critter as an Eastern screech owl, and the family says the bird was discovered when Katie McBride Newman's daughter was trimming the tree with owl ornaments. The girl “was both terrified and delighted,” the newspaper wrote.

From the Associated Press:

Katie McBride Newman said Friday that she and her daughter spotted the bird on Dec. 12. They had bought the 10-foot (3-meter) tall tree from a Home Depot, brought it back to their Atlanta area home and decorated it with lights and, coincidentally, owl ornaments.

“It was surreal, but we weren’t really freaked out about it,” McBride Newman said. “We’re really outdoorsy people. We love the wilderness.”

The family opened windows and doors near the tree hoping the owl would fly away, but it didn’t.

“The owl seemed to be pretty comfortable, and I thought, ‘Hey buddy, it’s not going to go well if you just stay here. There’s no food, I’m sorry,’” said McBride Newman’s husband, Billy Newman. So the family called a nonprofit nature center for help. The Chattahoochee Nature Center caught the bird and helped the family release it.

More: Family finds live owl while decorating indoor Christmas tree with owl ornaments in GA [star-telegram.com]

Doctors who accept pharma industry gifts (which can range from free coffees to lavish dinners to six-figure speaking fees) claim that they're not influenced by these bribes/gifts, which is possibly why doctors are taking more pharma bribes than ever.

Now, an empirical study by Propublica draws on mandatory disclosure data on pharma gifts as well as prescribing data to show that "Doctors who receive money from drugmakers related to a specific drug prescribe that drug more heavily than doctors without such financial ties."

The sample size is large. The effect size is large. The effects are consistent across multiple drugs. The size of the gift needed to change prescribing behavior is bewilderingly small.

It's not the first such study, but it's an important, empirical addition to our understanding of the problems with this practice. Obviously, the pharma industry wouldn't spend all that money if they didn't think it made a good return on their investment, but industries often spend lavishly on useless things for long periods (for example, think of all the firms that entrust hedge funds with large sums of money, despite the fact that hedge funds generally underperform relative to a simple index-tracker). It's nice to have some outside validation.

For some drugs that are household names, it was more common for prescribers to receive a payment than not to. More than half of doctors who prescribed Breo, an expensive asthma drug, to Medicare patients received payments involving the drug in 2016. This was also true for Invokana and Victoza, both of which are diabetes medications. For Linzess, nearly half of doctors who prescribed the drug had interactions with its maker.

More than one in five doctors who prescribed OxyContin under Medicare in 2016 had a promotional interaction with the drug’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

“If there are physicians out there that deny that there is a relationship, they are starting to look more and more like climate deniers in the face of the growing evidence,” said Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an expert in pharmaceutical costs and regulation. “The association is consistent across the different types of payments. It’s also consistent across numerous drug specialties and drug types, across multiple different fields of medicine. And for small and large payments. It’s a remarkably durable effect. No specialty is immune from this phenomenon.”

Doctors Prescribe More of a Drug If They Receive Money from a Pharma Company Tied to It [Hannah Fresques/Propublica]

We received the Charmin Forever Roll with Stand [Amazon] as a joke gift but it has improved the quality of our lives immeasurably due to the sheer enormity of the roll, its portability, and the general improvement in bathroom logistics thereby facilitated. It is the best toilet roll holder.

Essentially, it's a nice metal stand designed to hold the commercial-size toilet rolls that usually go in the boxes mounted in public lavatory stalls. The up-front cost of the stand pays for itself over time because you can buy commercial rolls by the dozen, and in the meantime you won't have to worry about running out of toilet paper, yelling for replacing rolls, shuffling around looking for toilet paper with your pants around your ankles, etc.

Charmin's own Forever Rolls do fit it best, as they have a small-sized tube. But larger-tubed commercial rolls work just fine; they're just not quite as well-balanced or elegant on the tug.

It can also hold normal rolls, of course, or anything else you might want to drape over it, such as newspapers.

Every year, the nonprofit Neural Correlate Society, an organization "that promotes scientific research into the neural correlates of perception and cognition," holds a competition for the Best Illusion of the Year. This year's winner is the above "Dual Axis Illusion" created by Frank Force (USA).

"This spinning shape appears to defy logic by rotating around both the horizontal and vertical axis at the same time!" reads the description. "To make things even more confusing, the direction of rotation is also ambiguous. Some visual cues in the video will help viewers change their perception."

Below, second prize winner "Change the Color" by Haruaki Fukuda (Japan) and third prize winner "The Rotating Circles Illusion" by Ryan E.B. Mruczek and Gideon Paul Caplovitz (USA).

This video shows a labrador puppy receiving his D&D alignment examination prior to being put up for adoption. King is adorable. King is a tabula rasa. He'll be two years old now —I wonder how he's doing?

King is a 6 week old male AKC yellow lab from Sadie's 2017 litter who will be ready to go home as early as 10/28/17. Read more about our pups and approach to temperament testing at highdesertlabradors.com/new-owner-infomration.html

If this wasn't enough, here's a video of a stray kitten getting its first bath.

When it comes to bathroom breaks, do you struggle to stay..."regular"? You're not alone. Most people don't use the toilet correctly, for the simple reason that toilets in the western hemisphere aren't actually designed to make eliminations as easy as they could be.

For that, you need a stool. And unlike your toilet, the TURBO Bathroom Toilet Stool is ideally crafted for its job.

Studies show that a squatting position on the toilet as vastly better and healthier than a simple sitting posture. But differing body types and leg lengths mean it's difficult to find a stool that suits everyone.

The TURBO Bathroom Toilet Stool, however, is slanted ergonomically, with grooves that allow you to anchor your feet lower or higher depending on your needs.

It's made of sturdy plastic that can accommodate pressure up to 350 pounds, and stores discreetly under the toilet after each use. It's even equipped with a rolling foot massager in the middle to help you de-stress and "let go," as it were.

The TURBO Bathroom Toilet Stool is already on sale for a full 40% off the MSRP, but you can take an additional 15% off the final price by using the holiday discount code MERRYSAVE15.

In what should come as a surprise to no one, it turns out just making your smartphone's screen kind of yellow won't magically stop it from keeping you awake. In fact, according to a study out of the University of Manchester, that yellow-shifted "night light" is even worse for helping you get to sleep than just leaving your phone in the standard untinted mode.

The reasoning behind using a yellow tint on your screen was, at least, based on scientifically plausible principles.

Science now says your phone's yellow tinted 'night mode' is worse for your sleep was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

I'm like, eighty percent certain that this kitty's going to kill whoever it is holding the camera, just as soon as it figures out that it can survive crossing a hallway filled with aluminum foil.

A customer who chose the no-payment option for a store item was pursued out the door by a relentless employee who apparently holds the quaint notion that transactions involving the exchange of goods should be beneficial to both parties. The ideologically rigid employee got his way this time, but I'm sure the gentleman with the big pickup will be back again before Christmas.

UPDATE: It looks like the employee was fired for not letting the  thief get away with it. (Thanks WCityMike in comments)

A terrible attempt at stealing from r/funny

The historical excuse for pharma monopolists who conspired to rig prices on insulin was that hardly anyone paid full price -- everyone got their life-saving, non-optional medicine through health plans that negotiated a knock-down price.

That was the line between 2012 and 2016, as median per-patient insulin costs rose 99%, to $5,705/year.

But now prices are even higher -- and more and more people are paying full cost, as the monopolized health insurance sector has reduced benefits to insured people. The average insured person with diabetes is paying 60% more than they were in 2012 (and the rest of the increase is being borne by Medicare and employers).

People with diabetes are increasingly rationing their insulin, a practice that can be lethal.

Today, there are three insulin manufacturers: Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. The manufacturers make the drug, set the price and negotiate with pharmacy benefit managers, the companies hired by health insurers to manage prescription-drug benefits for beneficiaries.

“It comes down to pure greed,” Patterson said. “They are lining their pockets. They are making a profit.”

When questioned about their costs, the insulin manufacturers told The Dispatch that the majority of patients don’t pay the list price for the drug.

'It comes down to pure greed': Insulin prices double, causing many people with diabetes to turn to extremes [Megan Henry/The Columbus Dispatch]

(via Naked Capitalism)

(Image: Melissa Johnson , CC BY, modified)

Over the years, the keyboard layout used on phones hasn’t seen a ton of change. While we’ve been introduced to plenty of new features such as swipe-typing, auto-correction, and word prediction, it's not often we see a reinvented keyboard layout. Now Typewise is looking to shake things up by doing something about that.

Released internationally after a successful soft launch in Switzerland, Typewise brings users a completely redesigned keyboard. Composed of hexagon-shaped tiles, gone is the long-standing QWERTY layout.

Typewise wants to get rid of the only keyboard layout you know how to use was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

In Halifax, West Yorkshire, England, a gentleman's car exploded after he reportedly sprayed "excessive" amount of air freshener and then lit a cigarette. From the BBC News:

Gas from the spray ignited, blew out the windscreen and windows and buckled the doors but the man escaped with only minor injuries.

Police said the incident in Halifax on Saturday "could've been worse" and warned people to follow safety advice.

Writing for the Washington Post, Danielle Paquette tells the story of Monkey Island in Liberia. Beginning in 1974, American scientists hoping to develop vaccines experimented on chimpanzees in Liberia, infecting them with hepatitis and river blindness. Eventually, due to the dangers posed by the ongoing civil war and ebola outbreak, scientists fled the country, abandoning the chimpanzees.

The chimpanzees could not be released into the wild because they were infectious, and in any event, were presumed unable to care for themselves in the wild due to their captivity. So, they were deposited on a group of small islands collectively known as Monkey Island. As the article recounts, one man was brave and caring enough to take on the responsibility to make sure the chimpanzees continue to be fed.

You can read all about it here, and donate here. Although the infected chimpanzees receive vasectomies and birth control hidden in their food, they continue to breed.

At Victoria Richards' Etsy store she sells stunning embroideries evoking the timeless pastoral landscapes of southern England. May favorites are the "aerial photographs" such as the one depicted here. Sadly, she's all sold out for Christmas and you'll have to wait until the new year to order. Her Instagram is a greatest hits catalog.

"The first steam train test on October 7, 2019," writes Pavel Chilin, posting his own steam engine to YouTube. Choo choo! His channel has several other videos of his rusty railroad adventure.

"Vandalism must be mild!" declares the pinned post at r/MildlyVandalised, my new favorite subreddit. It's dedicated to amusing examples of relatively insignificant destruction and decay, such as missing letters in signs, wikipedia "vandalism" and fake instructional stickers added to public appliances and the like.

For some folks, writing notes by hand is just plain easier, but having to re-type them later can be a huge bore, not to mention time-sink.

The guys from Rocketbook successfully merged the best parts of analog and digital note-taking with their Everlast notebook awhile back. And now, that tech just got a lot more portable with their Rocketbook Everlast Mini.

If you haven't used an Everlast notebook before, here's the gist. The book is composed of specially-treated synthetic paper that you can write on with a special Pilot FriXion pen (included). It writes smoothly and without smudging but is completely erasable with a bit of water and a wipe. The Mini, true to its name, is pocket-sized, and the pen fits snugly in a holder flap.

Want to save that work? Just scan your page with the accompanying app. You can set up a variety of destination folders in all the major cloud locations like Dropbox or Google Drive, or just drop it into an email folder - all with the touch of a single icon.

A 2-pack of Rocketbook Everlast Minis is already on sale for 25% off the MSRP, but you can take an extra 15% off the final price by using the coupon code MERRYSAVE15.

Welcome to the roundup of the new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have the release of Black Desert Mobile in the West, a new action game from PewDiePie, and a remastered RPG from Square Enix. So without further ado, here are the more notable Android games released during the week of December 9th, 2019.

17 new Android games from the week of December 9th, 2019: Black Desert Mobile, Poopdie, and The Last Remnant Remastered was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous two weeks or so. Today I have a new release from Microsoft that can solve mathematical expressions, an official Craigslist app, and a reliable WYSIWYG writer for crafting notes. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last two weeks.

13 new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers from the last two weeks including Microsoft Math Solver, Craigslist, and Press (11/30/19 - 12/14/19) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

This adorable puma is willing to play a game with its human, as long as it receives the prize, win or lose.

Puma reasoning skills on display, 3 cup shuffle from r/Magic

Abbott Labs makes a continuous glucose monitor -- used by people with diabetes to monitor their blood-sugar levels -- called (ironically, as you'll see below) the Freestyle Libre.

Diabettech is a hub for helping people with diabetes manage their health, including by building "artificial pancreases," through which a glucose monitor is connected to an insulin pump, with software in between that measures out small insulin doses that respond in real time (or even predictively) to changes in blood sugar. These can be significantly better than manual interventions for managing blood-sugar for people with diabetes, and can avert life-endangering, life-shortening, and/or quality-of-life reducing blood-sugar spikes and troughs.

The admin of Diabettech posted technical instructions and code for extracting your blood-sugar data from the Librelink so that you could use a different "listener" app with your data, or even connect it to an insulin pump to create an artificial pancreas loop. In particular, it allowed the free/open Xdrip diabetes-management tool to access Freestyle Libre data.

In response, Abbott Labs used US copyright law to have the project deleted from Github, censoring Diabettech's code and instructions. In its takedown notice, Abbot's lawfirm Kirkland & Ellis LLP (a huge corporate firm) advances several alarming arguments about projects like this.

First, they say that creating a tool that interoperates with the Freestyle Libre's data is a copyright infringement, because the new code is a derivative work of Abbott's existing product. But code that can operate on another program's data is not a derivative work of the first program -- just because Apple's Pages can read Word docs, it doesn't mean that Pages is a derivative of MS Office. In addition, as Diabettech points out, EU copyright law explicitly contains an exemption for reverse engineering in order to create interoperability between medical devices (EU Software Directive, Article 6).

More disturbing is Kirkland/Abbott's claim that the project violates Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits bypassing "access controls" for copyrighted works. Factual data (like your blood sugar levels) are not copyrightable -- and if they were, you would hold that copyright. It's your blood. What's more, DMCA 1201 also contains an interoperability exemption.

Finally the whole thing is obviously fair use: it's a highly transformative work for an obviously socially beneficial purpose.

Glucose monitors and insulin pumps are, effectively, prostheses: artificial organs that are basically parts of your body. Abbott's position is that they own part of your body and you can only use it in ways that don't upset their shareholders. This is an outrageous position. I mean, forget all the bullshit about whether your blood is copyrighted and if so, by whom -- they're saying that your organs are copyrighted works whose usage is subject to the whims of a white-shoe law firm that is prepared to delete your code and send you a bowel-looseningly terrifying legal threat any time you dare to assert your bodily autonomy.

Speaking in my capacity as a professional dystopian cyberpunk writer, I'm here to tell you that that shit is a warning, not a suggestion.

The Infringing Software violates Abbott’s exclusive right to prepare derivative works of the LibreLink program under United States federal law. 17 U.S.C. § 106(2); Dun & Bradstreet Software Servs. v. Grace Consulting, Inc., 307 F.3d 197, 208 (3rd Cir. 2002) (holding that alteration of a copy of the plaintiff’s software constituted copyright infringement); Micro Star v. Formgen Inc., 154 F.3d 1107, 1112 (9th Cir. 1998) (same); Midway Manufacturing Co. v. Artic International, Inc., 704 F.2d 1009, 1013 (7th Cir. 1983) (affirming the enjoinment of a defendant that created a modified version of a program); Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. v. Zipperer, No. 18 Civ. 2608, 2018 WL 4347796, at *14, 19 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 16, 2018) (enjoining distribution of modification). Moreover, the Infringing Software is provided with instructions on how to circumvent the technological protection measures that control access to Abbott’s LibreLink program in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A). Thus, the Infringing Program’s creator is secondarily liable for these further acts of circumvention. See In re Dealer Mgmt. Sys. Antitrust Litig., No. 18 Civ. 864, 2019 WL 4166864, at *14 (N.D. Ill. Sept. 3, 2019) (recognizing secondary liability for violations of 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A)). The Infringing Software also violates GitHub’s Terms of Service, which state that users “must not violate any applicable laws, including copyright” and that users must “not under any circumstances upload, post, host, or transmit any content that . . . infringes on any proprietary right of any party, including patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, right of publicity, or other rights.”

Patching LibreLink for Libre2 – clearing the FUD [Diabettech]

Libre2-patched-App [user987654321resu/Github]

2019-11-08-abbott.md [Kirkland & Ellis LLP/Github]

(Thumbnail: Abbott Labs)

“What is this sorcery?”

Some cute video of a kitty playing in the fresh snow from IMGURian @Herkidar.

You need this.

Enjoy.

Silly cat play with snow

[via IMGUR]

Chris Knight recorded a video of the bees in his backyard and wanted to accompany it with a rendition of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's 1899 composition "The Flight of the Bumblebee."

Mindful of the copyright problems that plague Youtube creators who use professionally performed renditions of classical music, Knight made his own version, by feeding the sheet music to a MIDI synthesizer, noting that he'd done so on the page description: "The musical accompaniment is a computer generated audio track created from a MIDI file transcribed from the original score. As the score itself is long out of copyright, and this is not a human performance, you would be blatantly abusing the Youtube copyright system if you attempt to file a claim against this video."

You will never absolutely guess what happened next.

A company called "Adrev" filed an automated claim against Knight's video, through which they were able to force the video to have ads whose revenues were diverted to Adrev's coffers.

There are plenty of weird things about Adrev's act of copyfraud. First, they only claimed copyright on a three-minute chunk of the music (the entire composition is repeated 60 times in the video). Knight hypothesizes that this is a tactic that lets them file a new claim against him if he disputes this one.

Knight's well-versed on the obscure subject of Youtube copyright claims, so he was willing to dispute this one, despite Youtube's dire warning that if he did so and was found to have infringed copyright, he would face a strike against his account, which could lead to its permanent deletion.

However, no such penalties have accrued to Adrev, who have been claiming copyright over public domain renditions of Flight of the Bumblebee since at least 2017, with no penalties from Youtube.

In another display of bias against the creators that made Youtube what it is, when a claim is filed it goes into effect immediately; but they then have thirty days to respond to your dispute. That’s thirty days where a creator is in limbo stressing about the fate of their monetization. I wonder how many claims are filed by automated systems and then left hanging for thirty days after they are disputed?

This is what YouTube has become: A platform where content creators upload videos and copyright trolls can file an illegitimate automated claim and steal any potential revenue, and where the threat of a lost account will deter people from disputing those claims.

The absurdity of YouTube’s Copyright Claim System [Chris Knight/Ghostwheel]

(Thanks, Chris!)