Meeting 2008-01-30
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Information
- Date: Wednesday, January 30, 2008
- Time: 8:30PM
- Place: Torgerson 3180
Attendance
Plan on attending:
Plan on skipping:
Goodies
Game
News
OpenStreetMap project completes import of United States TIGER data
MIT Student anonymously fights RIAA
Nineteen members of the MIT community have been asked by the recording industry to preemptively settle lawsuits for allegedly downloading music illegally on peer-to-peer networks, according to a Jan. 10 Recording Industry Association of America press release.
One MIT student who has received a letter from the RIAA said last week that he planned not to settle and that he would fight the RIAA’s attempts to learn his identity. To date, no MIT students are known to have gone to court — all have paid the pre-litigation settlement or have settled after the RIAA has sent a subpoena to MIT.
Hollywood's Congressman to leave Internet and IP issues behind
The chair of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, may be stepping down. The current chair, Howard Berman (D-CA) was very pro-MPAA/RIAA. The man who looks like he is next in line for the job, Rick Boucher (D-VA) looks to be much more reasonable.
Aim to be XMPP compatible
Aim will be compatible with Jabber and Gtalk. This news is a week late.
Smartphone patent
Court says you can copyright a cease-and-desist letter
Nokia will acquire Trolltech
Trolltech, the makers of the Qt toolkit, which itself is used in KDE, will be acquired by Nokia. The amount Nokia is offering to pay per Trolltech share suggests that the company is valued at US $150M. Apparently Nokia is buying the company because they are interested in deploying Trolltech software on their line of mobile phones for integration with PCs and the Internet. The announcement states that the acquisition will not adversely change the development of current products.
Trolltech announcement Slashdot summary
- Nokia tends to be pretty linux friendly...hopefully this is good news. --Conley 06:35, 29 January 2008 (JST)
Cape Town Open Education Declaration
RIAA Lawsuit names 36 VT students
AIDS drug patent revoked in US
Based on prior art.
Amazon patents customized 404 pages
College Affordability Act still going down
The EFF says that the language requiring a piracy detection system at universities still remains in the bill. See the article.
Googlization of Everything talk
Siva Vaidhyanathan of UVA is coming to VT to talk about The Googlization of Everything.
ABSTRACT
In less than 10 years since the search engine first appeared and spread through word of mouth, Google.com has utterly infiltrated our culture. It is a ubiquitous brand, used as a noun and a verb everywhere from adolescent conversations to scripts for Sex and the City. It puts previously unimaginable resources at our fingertips — huge libraries, vast archives, eras of government records, troves of goods, the comings and goings of whole swaths of humanity. It is more than the most interesting and successful Internet company of all time. As it catalogs our individual and collective judgments, opinions, and (most importantly) desires, it has grown to be one of the most important global institutions as well.
As we shift more of our Internet use to Google-branded services such as GMail and YouTube, Google is on the verge of being indistinguishable from the Internet itself. This talk argues that “The Googlization of Everything” is a truly revolutionary phenomenon that will determine the ways that both firms and governments act in coming years for – and at times against – their “users.” To understand this phenomenon, we have to realize that we are not Google’s customers. We are its product. We are what Google sells to advertisers. Because Google ranks give the illusion of precision, accuracy, and relevance, we have allowed ourselves to believe that Google ranks are a proxy for quality of information.
- I read Googlization and Siva even commented on my blog once. --Conley 04:48, 26 January 2008 (JST)
VTLUUG installfest
Sunday, February 10th, from 12 PM till 6 PM in Squires 145
Movie nights with the VTU
We have March 21st and April 4th to do movie nights
Show and tell
Open floor
Free Film
Check out a list of free films.
Suggestions:
