Computers-Plus

The U.S. Congress should scrap two controversial copyright enforcement bills and start over with attempts to target foreign websites accused of infringement and counterfeiting, more than 70 groups have said.

With widespread concerns about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), Congress needs to “take a breath, step back, and approach the issues from a fresh perspective,” the groups said in a letter to lawmakers, sent Monday.

Among the groups signing the letter were Amnesty International, the American Library Association, Consumers Union, Public Knowledge, Fight for the Future and Human Rights Watch. Many of the groups signing the letter have opposed SOPA and PIPA.

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Who doesn’t like free? Vonage, which is still around helping people who love home phones, is finally taking a serious leap into what’s next: mobile. The company just announced the new Vonage Mobile iPhone and Android app, which lets users make free high-definition calls and send free texts to all users of the app, worldwide. It works over Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G data networks. When calling those who have not yet downloaded the app, Vonage Mobile provides ultra low-cost international calling with per-minute rates that are on average 70 percent less than major mobile carriers and 30 percent less than Skype. Users can instantly add calling credit directly from the app through iTunes or Android Market in increments of $4.99 and $9.99.

But we mentioned free, right? Read more…

VSCO is a set of presets for Adobes Lightroom photo-processing application. So what, right? Anyone can make presets all by themselves. But the VSCO presets go a little deeper. Instead of just saving the settings for brightness, white balance ands so on, they manipulate the Camera Profiles themselves. That is, they tell Lightroom to interpret the RAW image data in different ways.

Thus, they can emulate film in a similar way to that in which film reacts to light, changing the softwares response to different colors and intensities of light. An added advantage is that you start from scratch and can apply all your usual presets on top of an unadjusted photograph.

The VSCO presets only work with Nikon and Canon cameras.

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VIA Technologies today announced the VIA EPIA-M910 Mini-ITX board, the latest dual core Mini-ITX board featuring one of the richest I/O sets available for a wide range of embedded applications including ATM, kiosks, POS, digital signage, healthcare and digital media applications. The VIA EPIA-M910 is available in both active and passive cooling configurations with the choice of either a performance oriented 1.6GHz VIA Nano X2 dual core processor or a fanless 1.0GHz VIA Eden X2 dual core processor and is paired with the VIA VX900 media system processor, which provides the ideal platform for today’s HD-intensive applications. <

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