firehose

According to a survey commissioned by U.K. communications regulator Ofcom, the classic Pareto principle is in full effect for people who use pirated versions of copyrighted material. The top 20 percent of copyright infringers account for 88 percent of all infringements (with the top 10 percent being responsible for a whopping 79 percent).

What’s surprising, however, is that the top 20 spent £168 (about $253) on content during the six-month monitoring period. That’s not just more than the amount spent by the lower 80 percent (£105, or about $158), it’s significantly more than the £54 ($81) spent by the average person who never pirates anything. In other words, the worst pirates get the vast majority of their stuff for free, but they take in so much media that they end up spending 321 percent more than people who never pirate.

It’s a fascinating study, and not only because it turns expectations about pirate behavior upside down. The goal was to classify and predict pirate behavior, with an eye on figuring out how best to curtail it. What wasn’t a surprise were the top factors that would encourage copyright infringers to stop: better pricing and increased availability.

(via TorrentFreak)

Doctor Who's Dan Starkey never breaks character, and knows his Sontaran butler character inside and out. THAT is dedication to the craft, people!

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Seattle

Sony executives are considering splitting the company's entertainment and electronics divisions, following billionaire Daniel Loeb's proposed initial public offering of its entertainment business. The entertainment arm includes all PlayStation properties, alongside Sony's film and music businesses.

Loeb, with Third Point LLC, owns a 6 percent stake in Sony worth $1.1 billion, and is Sony's biggest investor. Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai confirmed that the top brass is considering Loeb's offer, but didn't say when it would come to a decision, Bloomberg reports.

"It's only a start," Hirai said. "It's important that the board will discuss this and come to a decision that represents Sony's stance." Following Loeb's offer yesterday, Sony stock surged 9 percent.

Sony considers splitting the company after proposed IPO originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 23 May 2013 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LEGO has taken custom model building to the next level with their incredible life-size model of a Star Wars X-Wing Fighter that is built out of 5,335,200 LEGO bricks. Gizmodo reports that “it reproduces the official $60 Lego 9493 X-Wing Fighter. But instead of being 560-pieces and a few inches long, this model uses more than five million pieces and it’s 11-feet tall and 43 feet long, with a 44-foot wingspan. Just like the real X-Wing—and 42 times the size of the commercial Lego set.” It took 32 Master LEGO builders approximately 4 months to build it to completion. LEGO unveiled this behemoth at Time Square in New York City. It will be on display there during the Memorial Day weekend then be moved to the West Coast.If the size alone wasn’t enough, the X-Wing also has a custom built R2-D2 and noisy engines that glow red just like in the films. You can learn more, view more photos and video footage at Gizmodo.

According to Gizmodo:

The model was created to promote the original Lego Star Wars animation TV series ‘The Yoda Chronicles,’ which will premiere on Cartoon Network on Wednesday, May 29 at 8:00PM.

Here is a video from the folks at Yoda’s News showing off the LEGO X-Wing. You can watch it being fired up at the 5 minute mark of the video.

photos by Nick Stango of Gizmodo

video via Yoda’s News

via Gizmodo

miller60 writes "Servers may soon fill the aisles where shoppers once roamed. Sears Holdings is seeking to convert former Sears and Kmart stores into Internet data hubs. Some stand-alone stores and distribution centers may be repurposed as data centers, while mall-based stores can be converted into disaster recovery sites, the company says, offering access to stores and eateries for displaced workers who may be on site for weeks. Then there's the wireless tower opportunity. Seventy percent of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Sears or Kmart store, and these rooftops can be leased to fill gaps in cell coverage. It's not the first effort to convert stores into IT infrastructure, as Rackspace is headquartered in an old mall, and companies have built data centers in malls in Indiana and Maryland. But Sears, which operates 25 million square feet of real estate, hopes to make this strategy work at scale." Also at Slash DataCenter.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comic Book Resources reports that—just weeks after a dust-up involving the banning and reinstatement of Image Comics’ Saga #12—digital comics distributor Comixology has once again pulled dozens of comics with explicit content from their iOS app, .

Six weeks after he was born, Kaiba Gionfriddo began to experience severe breathing difficulties, the result of a rare obstruction in his lungs called bronchial malacia. In desperation, doctors attempted a technique never tried before on a human: they 3D-printed a splint from biological material.

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New submitter c0d3g33k writes "Google Project Hosting announced changes to the Download service on Wednesday, offering only 'increasing misuse of the service and a desire to keep our community safe and secure' by way of explanation. Effective immediately, existing projects that offer no downloads and all new projects will no longer be able to create downloads. Existing projects which currently have downloads will lose the ability to create new downloads by January 2014, though existing downloads will remain available 'for the foreseeable future.' Google Drive is recommended as an alternative, but this will likely have to be done manually by project maintainers since the ability to create and manage downloads won't be part of the Project Hosting tools. This is a rather baffling move, since distributing project files via download is integral to FOSS culture."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Years ago we covered using thermite to destroy a hard drive. The idea is that if you melt through the platters, the data is completely unrecoverable.  There are tons of videos of people doing this, but they all have a similar format. There’s a hard drive, with a flower pot or soda can sitting on top full of thermite. They then light this with a strip of magnesium and a torch.

I wanted to do something a little different. I wanted to implement thermite as a self destruct mechanism inside the device. To do this, I had to come up with a way to ignite the thermite. This stuff is very difficult to light. You have to get it really really hot. The easiest way is to use magnesium, which itself isn’t the easiest thing to light.

What I finally landed on was an ignition system that uses model rocket igniters, gun powder, and magnesium to light the thermite.  The model rocket igniter can be set off from the 12v line inside your computer. However, it isn’t hot enough to light magnesium shavings, much less thermite. To get it to work, I needed to add some gunpowder. A small amount of gun powder would get hot enough to light the magnesium shavings, which in turn were hot enough to light the thermite. I had to be careful though, because too much gunpowder would cause a rapid expansion, blowing the thermite everywhere instead of lighting it. You can actually see some red thermite being blown out of the external hard drive and the laptop as the gunpowder ignites.

Effectiveness of external hard drive self destruction:

I wasn’t sure about this one. There isn’t a whole lot of space for thermite and the ignition system inside the box. On top of that, the only space was at the side of the hard drive, where the walls are the thickest. I had no idea if the small amount of thermite I used would penetrate the drive. It did, just barely as you can see in these pictures. It looks as if it pooled in the screw holes  and made it inside. The platters are damaged.

Effectiveness of laptop destruction:

I decided to completely replace the cd rom with thermite. This gave me a ton of space to put things. I was pretty positive this would work. The hard drive is in the center of this laptop, which meant I had to place it on its side for this to be effective. You can see the thermite work its way down toward the drive in the video. As you can see in the pictures below, the drive cover is completely gone and the platters are destroyed. Success!

Since this system can be powered by batteries or the internal power of your computer, it can be put inside a working device only to be used when needed. Obviously it is a ridiculous fire hazard that no one should bother with. It was a fun experiment though and I really feel like it is something that would fit in well in the world of [James Bond]

Filed under: chemistry hacks, computer hacks, Featured

Vancouver Sun

Mass. Teen Birth Rates Fall to Record Low Levels abc40 The latest numbers from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health from 2010 show teen birth rates at their lowest level on record. That's good news for those who work with teens to prevent unwanted pregnancies. “Tapestry feels really, really good about ... The New Geography of Teen MothersThe Atlantic Cities Almost all states seeing big drop in teen birth ratesCBS News CDC Reports Steep Decline in Black and Hispanic Teen Birthsatlantadailyworld KWTX -Washington Times -Huffington Post all 50 news articles »

Park Slope Family Circus

An anonymous reader writes "Ron Paul lost his two cybersquatting complaints against RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org. In the case of RonPaul.org, Paul was been found guilty of 'reverse domain name hijacking'. A reverse domain name hijacking finding means that the arbitration panel believes the case was filed in bad faith, resulting in the abuse of the administrative process. The panel ruled this way since Paul filed the case after the owner of RonPaul.org had already offered to give him the domain for free. The panel also ruled against Paul for the RonPaul.com domain name."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From Gabe Wyner come photos of a menu in Arcos de la Frontera, whose English version is full of the delightful consequences of someone's earnest reliance on a bilingual dictionary. For example:

In the Spanish version of the menu, that one of course is Calamares en su tinta.

Lexicographical parentheses come up again in the various dishes characterized as Revuelto de X, where revuelto here means "scrambled", and (I think) refers to scrambled eggs with various other ingredients, but has been translated as "In a mess (Untidy)":

Another poetic fragment involves several dishes characterized as "Attacked" of this and that, resulting from the fact that saltear can mean "rob, assault" as well as "sauté":

A more subtle misconnection is the translation of guarnición as "garrison" rather than "garnish":

The full English and Spanish versions of this menu page are here and here.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what you'd get if you ordered "Iberian Secret" or "Iberian Pen (Feather)" from the "Meets" section:

sluttyoliveoil: onlylolgifs: Macaroni being made

Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it fast and easy to build iOS apps that scale. Use Mobile Services to store data in the cloud, authenticate users, and send push notifications.

Mobile Services lets you choose from a variety of relational, NoSQL, and blob data storage options. You can authenticate users via Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Microsoft accounts. It’s as simple as copying over your App ID and Secret. And all it takes to send a push notification is push.apns.send(). It’s really that simple.

Leave the infrastructure to Windows Azure so you can focus on delivering the features and experiences your users want. Sign up for the Windows Azure free trial and claim your 10 Free Mobile Services today.

Thanks to Windows Azure Mobile Services for sponsoring Marco.org this week.

∞ Permalink

photo via Arbore Historic Floors

Spanish flooring company Arbore Historic Floors created this fantastic wooden floor inspired by the famous lithograph “Reptiles” by M. C. Escher. The custom floor was created at the request of a client in Madrid back in 2011.

photo via Arbore Historic Floors

image via Official M.C. Escher website

via Technabob, Archie McPhee’s Endless Geyser of Awesome

Every few weeks, some tech writer holds up a media analyst report allegedly showing, once and for all, that the cable guys have finally lost, and the cord-cutters have finally won. One week, that report might come. It will really be something.

This is not that week.

Let’s start with news that might appear to be the death throes of cable. Cable companies’ TV subscribers collapsed by more than 1.5 million in the last year, according to Leichtman Research Group. (The Big Two, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, have declined by more than 900,000, alone.)

In fact, the trend has been underway for a while. Cable TV customers peaked in the late 1990s and have since fallen to early Clinton-era levels (SNL Kagan data)

But the cable companies aren’t exclusively in the business of selling TV. They’re really in the business of communications infrastructure, which is TV, phone, and Internet. The Internet business in particular has done very well for them. Since cable video subs peaked in the late 1990s, the industry has added 45 million high-speed Internet customers (SNL Kagan data, again).

The two most important reasons why cable is still making more and more money every year, despite a structural decline in cable TV subs, is that they’ve successfully gleaned more money per customer: both by charging more for television and by getting households to buy more than just TV. For example, 40 percent of Comcast customers take three products (e.g.: video, phone, and Internet) and 70 percent take two products (e.g.: video and Internet).

Cable ≠ video, and nothing says it more clearly than the latest earnings reports from the Big Two: Comcast, the largest provider of pay-TV in the country; andTime Warner Cable, the second largest cable provider (but behind DirecTV and Dish in total video subs). Comcast’s total revenue is almost twice TWC’s, but their businesses are remarkably similar.

Upshot: If you equate “cable” with TV, you are literally getting only half the story. Cable providers are in the business of communications transport. They’re still in business because selling communications access is still a pretty good business, with high barriers to entry and voracious demand.

Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for TheAtlantic.com.

This originally appeared at The Atlantic. More from our sister site:

Black unemployment in the US is still shamefully high

China: From center of trade to center of investment

Can Obama end the ‘forever war’?

For the German desperate, it’s a daily dose of high-resolution soft porn.

Link

Nyder writes "Kim Dotcom posted via Twitter, with a link to Torrentfreak, that he owns a security patent US6078908, titled 'Method for authorizing in data transmission systems.'" Techdirt points out that Dotcom isn't just asking for financial help: Instead, he's asking companies which use two-factor authentication "to help fund his defense, in exchange for not getting sued for the patent. He points out that his actual funds are still frozen by the DOJ and (more importantly) that his case actually matters a great deal to Google, Facebook and Twitter, because the eventual ruling will likely set a precedent that may impact them -- especially around the DMCA." Update: 05/23 14:23 GMT by T : Why is this relevant to Twitter? If you're not an active Twitter user, you might not realize that (after some well publicized twitter-account hijackings), the company is trying to regain some ground on security. Nerval's Lobster writes "Twitter is now offering two-factor authentication, a feature that could help prevent embarrassing security breaches. Twitter users interested in activating two-factor authentication will need to head over to their account settings page and click the checkbox beside 'Require a verification code when I sign in.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Desolation and dampness reigned supreme. The fortress was lost and largely forgotten, becoming a pharaonic adventure playground for local youths despite parental admonishments about the dangers and risks which lurked within.

The Sleeping Giant Awakens

But perhaps unlike their parents, some of these very youths, and some of their friends came to realize that this immense construction was part of their heritage, part of their history, something which merited much more than just being known as “the ruins of the Fort”. And so an idea was born – an idea which was scorned and denigrated by many of those who saw it as an interruption of their “right to pillage” – why not attempt to “recover” the fortress? To be honest, this kind of idea only comes to those without the faintest idea of what such a task involves…

Safety was one of the primary objectives! 

Link

In 2002 the first Hellfire missile was shot from a U.S.-operated drone at suspected terrorists in Yemen. Since then an estimated 480 more unmanned airstrikes have been carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense.