Peon's Place

The music industry has dealt a major blow to illegal music downloads in the United States, winning a copyright lawsuit against the operators of LimeWire.

Lime Group and founder Mark Groton faced claims of copyright infringement, unfair competition and inducing copyright infringement in a battle with the Recording Industry Association of America. CNet reports that U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood issued a summary judgment in favor of the RIAA, ruling thatt LimeWire’s operators optimized their software to ensure that users could download music, most of which was copyrighted. She also noted that LimeWire advertised in Google to people who searched for terms like “replacement napster” and “kazaa morpheus,” reports All Things D.

From here, the RIAA will likely seek a primary injunction against the LimeWire software, disabling its file-sharing features. The group could also seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each of the millions of copyrighted downloads facilitated through the software.

LimeWire rose from the rubble of Grokster, Kazaa and Napster to become the premiere vessel for illegal file-sharing in the United States. The NPD Group estimated last year that 58 percent of people who said they downloaded music from peer-to-peer services used LimeWire. CNet notes that the software’s been downloaded 200 million times from its Download.com site, and nearly 340,000 times in the last week alone. The music industry is understandably giddy.

“LimeWire is one of the largest remaining commercial peer-to-peer services,” RIAA chief executive Mitch Bainwol said in a statement. “Unlike other P2P services that negotiated licenses, imposed filters or otherwise chose to discontinue their illegal conduct following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Grokster case, LimeWire instead thumbed its nose at the law and creators. The court’s decision is an important milestone in the creative community’s fight to reclaim the Internet as a platform for legitimate commerce.”

Though there are no solid plans in place yet for a Hugh Hefner biopic, director Brett Ratner thought it would be a good idea to get Hef’s approval on someone to play him before anything else.

Hef’s choice? Robert Downey Jr.

After a meeting that included Robert, Hef and Brett, the original Playboy has been at Robert to consider to role, bringing it up wherever the two stumble into each other, like the Iron Man 2 premiere just a few weeks ago.

Brett agrees and explains that he believes that Robert would do it, if the script is strong enough.

And there is the snag as there is so much to tell of the life in Hugh Hefner that it has been difficult for the writers to lock down the story.

From the invasion of Afghanistan until last summer, the U.S. military had lost 761 soldiers in combat there. But a higher number in the service — 817 — had taken their own lives over the same period. The surge in suicides, which have risen five years in a row, has become a vexing problem for which the Army’s highest levels of command have yet to find a solution despite deploying hundreds of mental-health experts and investing millions of dollars. And the elephant in the room in much of the formal discussion of the problem is the burden of repeated tours of combat duty on a soldier’s battered psyche.

The problem is exacerbated by the manpower challenges faced by the service, because new research suggests that repeated combat deployments seem to be driving the suicide surge. The only way to apply the brakes will be to reduce the number of deployments per soldier and extend what the Army calls “dwell time” — the duration spent at home between trips to war zones. But the only way to make that possible would be to expand the Army’s troop strength, or reduce the number of soldiers sent off to war.

TIME did a video: “The Soldier’s Experience: Iraq vs. Afghanistan.“

I sort of wish Apple would stop leaving their trash around, but then we wouldn’t have all these cool updates provided by techy website companies giving Apple free advertisement for their new phone launch next month. Another iPhone 4G has been found, and this time in Vietnam.

If you don’t understand the language, it won’t hurt you to mute the video below. Basically he models the outside of the phone, giving display of the blocky/edgy feel of the phone as opposed to the smooth curved iPhone we have become used to. The volume buttons are obviously different, and ..is that a memory card in the side? I disbelieve that. Unless it’s the SIM card, so easily accessible.

We see the signs of the dual-camera, the first phone to ever sport two different cameras, but most everything else is the same. Supposedly the device is a little thicker, 3 grams heavier, but sports a battery lasting 16% longer than its predecessors.

This time, it is from the country of Vietnam and they have gone all out. Not only is the unit a little bit different physically from the one Gizmodo had (there are no screws at the botton of the device), but the gentleman who has the phone has torn it apart and revealed the custom Apple A4 processor. There is no working OS loaded (besides a test one called Bonfire) and the unit appears to be a 16GB mode, though it is pre-production obviously. Word on the street is that this unit was purchased for $4,000. Couple additional shots in the gallery and video after the break!

You know how Google Maps uses a van with cameras to photograph city streets? This is one large step ahead: using airplanes with lasers to create three-dimensional city maps.

New York City may be on the cutting edge of cuisine and fashion, but in nerdier pursuits like cartography, NYC has unfortunately fallen behind — like, 30 years behind. A twin-engine airplane fitted with LIDAR scanners has lately been gathering data that will close the city’s map gap, creating extremely detailed digital maps of the city that will lead to better land management, inform emergency protocols, and help identify the best places to install solar panels across the five boroughs.

The flyovers, conducted by a specially equipped Shrike Commander aircraft, will produce the most detailed maps the city has ever known, capturing 3-D images that detail surface terrain and structural elements in unprecedented detail. Current maps — like the one FEMA uses to determine the city’s flood plains — were composed in the 1980s from aerial photography and surveys.

The new maps will help city planners rezone neighborhoods, determine shifts in population density, identify remaining wetlands, and even figure out which neighborhoods simply need more trees. It will also help the city determine what to do if/when rising sea levels brought on by global warming begin to threaten waterfront areas.

An operator aboard the aircraft operated the LIDAR — light detection and ranging — sensor as the pilot made repeated low-flying sweeps over the city at around just 3,500 feet during the second half of April. The laser surveying tech fired laser pulses from the aircraft at the topography below, measuring the time it takes the pulses to bounce back, much as sonar does with sound.

While wetland identification and population density maps will surely excite urban planning types, the solar map is hands-down the most exciting aspect of NYC’s new cartographic pursuit. The aerial survey has determined the number of pitched and flat roofs across the city and will allow NYC residents and property owners to go online and see whether their buildings are good candidates for solar panels. That, in turn, could lead to increased adoption of solar tech, making the U.S.’s most densely populated burg even greener. The data is currently being crunched and should generate detailed solar and flood maps by year’s end.