The Motion Picture Association of America filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Fred Lawrence of Racine, seeking as much as $600,000 in damages for downloading four movies over the Internet file-sharing service iMesh.
Hollywood has unveiled a powerful new technology which it hopes will help kill the pirating of movies. The system relies on sound – not vision
All HD-DVD players will have a sensor that looks for inaudible watermarks in the soundtrack of movies. The watermarks will be included in the soundtracks of all major movies released to cinemas.
If a DVD player detects the telltale code, the disc must be an illegal copy made by copying a film print to video, or pointing a camcorder and microphone at a cinema screen. So the player refuses to play the disc.
Drawings sketched on the screen of a Tablet PC can be animated in seconds thanks to new software - all it takes is the flourish of a stylus
DRAWINGS sketched on the screen of a Tablet PC can be animated in seconds thanks to new software. All it takes is the flourish of a stylus.
The software, called K-Sketch, allows a relatively unskilled user to sketch out a scene on the PC's screen, select the parts they want to animate, and then simply drag these objects over the display to make them sweep, loop or spin in whatever way they want. The computer records these movements so that it can play them back as an animation.
When it comes to money, it turns out we're no more rational than our primate cousins. But knowing this could pay dividends, as New Scientist discovers
THE capuchin monkeys working with economist Keith Chen and psychologist Laurie Santos know a good bargain when they see one. They use metal chips as money, buying bits of apple or cucumber from humans, and they seem to know what they're doing. When the researchers make apple cheaper than cucumber - offering more food for the same number of chips - the capuchins opt for the better-value food, as any savvy shopper would. Yet it is not the monkeys' good economic sense that Chen and Santos find most interesting. Rather, it is their tendency, on occasion, to make an irrational deal - and to do so in a distinctively human way.
Over the past three decades, economists have come to accept that people aren't the purely "rational" and "selfish" individuals that classical theorists once imagined. Numerous experiments have shown that we often let apparently irrelevant factors influence our economic decisions