Slashback: Indy, Kaneko, Swindling

Slashback brings you another round of updates and clarifications to previous Slashdot stories. Tonight, more on L.L. Bean vs. Nordstrom-via-Claria, Raiders of the Lost Ark re-shot for a fan film, good news for publically available laws on the Internet, the SBC strike, and more -- read on for the details.

Can good money drive out bad at least sometimes? News for nerds writes "Following the earlier news about the arrest of the Winny P2P app creator, KANEKO Isamu, researcher at the U-Tokyo and well-known hacker in the 3-D physics simulation scene in Japan (His first public Winny demo by his anonymous alias '47' was the graphic simulation of the network topology), the group of software technicians separate from Kaneko's lawyers has raised over 10 million yen ($88,347) in 10 days for the lawyers. It claims "The situation of the activities that technicians usually carry out being deemed a crime all of a sudden and arrests being made is seriously shrinking software research and development.""

A minor setback to the oligarchy of lawyers. Ellis D. Tripp writes "The SCOTUS has refused to hear an appeal of a 5th circuit court decision declaring that building codes such as the National Electrical Code lose all copyright protection once they are adopted into municipal law. Under this ruling, such codes can be freely posted on the internet or otherwise distributed for free, rather than requiring contractors or other interested parties to purchase them at often exorbitant prices each time they are revised. The original defendant, Peter Veeck, was sued by Southern Building Code Congress International for making their "Intellectual Property" available on his website."

Why does it have to be snakes? ChrisHanel writes "A follow-up to a story ran on Slashdot last year: The legendary shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark is screening next month at the first ever large scale Fan Film convention in Worcester, Mass. Tons of fanfilms and filmmaking workshops, and to get past the legal snafus, the fanfilms themselves are free to the public. A rare chance to check out this gem of a film."

Speaking of unconventional media origins, koa writes "This may be an Internet first: a mainstream television show spawned from a genuine internet phenomenon. Odd Todd will be piloting his own animated series on Comedy Central sometime early 2005 based off of his hit website. Press release here. Are we noticing an emergence of a new trend of media to look for original plot ideas from wilds the 'net?"

There is power in a union, evidently. XopherMV writes with the upshot (via Yahoo! News) of last weekend's strike at SBC: "The union wanted access to positions in SBC's emerging sectors, including Internet support and wireless data service. That work is now handled largely by lesser-paid contract workers, many of them in India and the Philippines. The tentative contract calls for SBC and the union to work together to bring the technical support jobs back to the United States when the current contract expires in two years.""

Trust me, ma'am, I was hired to fool you. Cold Drink writes "Part two of a previously Slashdotted story tells the tale of how social engineer Isreal was thwarted. When employees follow proper procedures, social engineers can be stopped dead in their tracks. Read on to find out how one person protected tens of thousands of dollars."

IWILL try to get one of these. We mentioned a few days ago a small dual-Opteron system promised from IWILL; many readers expressed skepticism about its internal configuration, memory slot allocation, power requirements, etc. An anonymous reader writes "it appears a lot of the questions have been answered in regards to the board and cooling configuration over at Hexus. They appear to have snapped some pics of this little beast."

That's awfully enterprising of Claria. gbulmash writes "Nordstrom Corporate Communications has composed an official response to complaints about L.L. Bean's allegations and is e-mailing it to customers.

I received the following letter:

'Thank you for taking the time to email Nordstrom with your concerns. We were disappointed that L.L. Bean did not contact us and allow us the opportunity to investigate this matter before they filed a lawsuit against us.

I would like to address your inquiry about Claria specifically. Nordstrom currently has no relationship with Claria and hasn't had a relationship with them since late 2001 when we tested their services for a 4-month period and concluded we and Claria were not an acceptable fit. To our knowledge, Nordstrom does not engage in the form of advertising described by L.L. Bean in the press. We have worked very hard to earn our customers' trust. We understand how important privacy is to our customers and we do not look to partner with advertisers that violate their privacy in any way.

Marketing on the Internet is a complex process and if our ads are in fact appearing on L.L. Bean's website, it is without our knowledge or consent. Please know that we are looking into this and will take appropriate action if we find the practice is in fact occurring.

Please know that we appreciate you as a customer and hope we will have the opportunity to serve you and your wife in the future.

Thank you again for your feedback.

Sincerely,

Deniz Anders
Corporate Communications
Nordstrom, Inc.'"

"Winny"

[dancingmad]

It's WinNY (based off WinMX), not Winny.

South Park and "The Spirit of Christmas"

[Valdrax]

This may be an Internet first: a mainstream television show spawned from a genuine internet phenomenon.

Nope. The popularity of the short film "The Spirit of Christmas" once it spread across the Internet was what led to Comedy Central asking the creators to make South Park. Without the Internet, they'd be languishing in obscurity.

Raiders remake

[jaysones]

If you get a chance to see the Raiders of the Lost Ark remake, you must do it. I saw it earlier this year at a film festival in Mississippi. Everyone in it is between around 12 and 16. Not just everyone in it, but everyone involved with it! These kids were resourceful in a way only kids can be and dangerously so. They literally set their parents' basement on fire and dragged each other behind a truck, all for love of a movie. The movie itself came out great, but there's this excellent metatheater aspect to it, where you set away and think "how the hell did 13 year olds DO that?!" They also (slightly) visibly age through the movie, which is funny when you notice it. This was one of the most fun movies I've ever seen, don't miss it!
Also, they revealed that Paramount bought their story and plans to make a movie about the kids making this movie!

Warning, it's really horrible

[XanC]

Princess [trioplus.tv]

But the Citations are...

[jayrtfm]

http://www.legalbits.com/thornton-CITATION-comment s.htm

Dual Opteron Memory Arangement?

[MBCook]

I saw those pictures the other day. The system looks very cool, but I'm a bit worried because it looks like the second processor has NO memory, and that's it's all on processor 0. While the second processor can use that memory (of course because it's an NUMA system), I'm worried about how much of an impact that would have on performance. I would think that having each processor have one channel of memory (if possible) would have much better performance than give one processor two channels and the other none.

Can anyone shed any light as to how this might perform?

Either way it's a cool achievement, and the little "fin" on top is a wifi antenna, which is cool.

Re:South Park and "The Spirit of Christmas"

[Phexro]

And don't forget Tripping the Rift [trippingtherift.com].

Uncle Sam's choice

[lothar97]

Depends. Uncle Sam can keep the rights (doesn't happen that often), or give it to who makes it- but Uncle Sam gets a free license to use it. Verbage needs to be included in the patent application: "This invention was made with government support under (grant/contract number) awarded by (institute, agency). The Government has certain rights in the invention." Uncle Sam would be able to retain worldwide patent rights as well. Could this perhaps be a nice way to generate some revenue to cover our deficit? (source: NIH [nih.gov])

Re:"Winny"

[Mandoric]

As someone who -uses- it, I'll note that it refers to itself as "Winny" and not "WinNY".

Re:"Winny"

[mistered]

Actually, no, it's Winny. Have a look at the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] or winny.info [winny.info]. The name is derived from WinMX, but the application itself isn't really.

Re:Dual Opteron Memory Arangement?

[complete loony]

not the OS exactly, though 64 bit processing should be an improvement. It's more to do with XP not knowing how much it costs to read from the memory attached to the other processor.
heres the link [techreport.com]
Quote:

"I committed further crimes when I chose the MSI K8T Master2 motherboard for testing the Opteron processors. The Master2 only has DIMM slots hanging off of one of the two CPU sockets on the board, cutting off the second processor's ability to talk to a pair of DDR400 DIMMs via its built-in memory controller. Tyan's Thunder K8W has the magic combination of an AGP slot and a "full" dual Opteron memory configuration.

In my defense, there are some good reasons why I committed such heinous acts. The Thunder K8W showed us its eye-popping memory bandwidth potential in our recent Opteron workstation motherboard round-up, but it was only able to realize that potential with the 64-bit beta of Windows XP. Right now, there is no workstation-class version of Windows available, outside of early beta versions, that understands the non-uniform memory access (NUMA) configuration of Opteron systems, so much of the K8W's memory bandwidth goes to waste. This reality, combined with the fact that the K8W doesn't tolerate aggressive memory timings well, caused the Thunder K8W to lose out to the K8T Master2 in many of our performance tests. So I decided to go with the K8T Master2 for our purposes. Of course, future versions of Windows with NUMA awareness and 64-bitness should give dually Opteron systems a big boost over their present incarnations. Had we more time with the Opteron 250 prior to its launch, we might have been able to test with a 64-bit version of Linux on the Thunder K8W. No doubt that could be scary fast."

Re:No, godammit

[WoodstockJeff]

For those interested, I did pull up the information on Adtranz ABB Daimler-Benz Transportation, N.A., Inc. v. National Labor Relations Board [georgetown.edu], and the employer won.

Re:"Winny"

[B4RSK]

Oops, better remember to put brain in gear in the future... ;)

I haven't seen any of the movies, but I do know of the series. There were a lot of sad fans in Japan when Tora-san died a few years ago.

I'd actually translate the title as "It's tough to be a man." but I am not sure how (or even if) it has been translated "officially".

Are you currently in Japan?