Remember CRTs? Those big boxy things we used to stare at all day, instead of the new screens we stare at all day now? Photographer Stephan Tillmans does—and he's captured the dazzling colors they blast when switched off.More »
Foldarn writes “Recently on Slashdot, Utah’s Governor was honored with the Blackhole Award. Governor Herbert has now released a statement and a meeting with a concrete date to repeal the opaque law from the books in an effort to stay in offi… err, restore confidence in the public. The law added time for lawmakers to respond to information requests, removed the number of items that can be requested, and increased the prices of those same items. It’s currently scheduled to become law this summer.”
In its 2010 annual report (PDF), recorded music’s global trade body said that the industry would “struggle to survive unless we address the fundamental problem of piracy.” Just how “fundamental” a problem is that piracy? Not very, as new research suggests that only 9 percent of US Internet users even use peer-to-peer networks at all, down substantially from 2007.
Market research firm NPD Group, which tracks music acquisition, said today that P2P use has dropped from 16 percent of all US Internet users to 9 percent over the last three years. The latest data comes from the fourth quarter of 2010, when a federal judge shut down LimeWire; that may have depressed the numbers a bit, though NPD notes that other P2P programs saw more usage as a result.
For many years, we heard security professionals lament the way they are perceived. Terms such as “the place where good ideas go to die” and “the department of no” weren’t uncommon just a few years ago when referring to the security function.