highers

Facebook post leads to murder retrial

I am not sure that all's well that ends well.

Sometimes, you just want things to end and then decide if all can ever be well.

This might be the case with the Highers brothers.

Twenty-five years ago, they were convicted of the murder of Robert Karey at his Detroit home. They say they're innocent.

In 2009, a friend called Mary Evans happened to think of the Highers brothers when she was posting something to the Northeast Detroit Alumni Facebook page.

She told My Fox Detroit: "(All) I said was it's too bad or it's … Read more

Might as well jump

Doodle Jump is a fun and addictive platform-jumping game with a cute, hand-scribbled aesthetic and a cleverly integrated leaderboard. Not surprising for such an addictive game, the interface couldn't be more simple: you keep jumping automatically, and you gently tilt the device to move left and right. As you move higher and higher up an infinitely scrolling, wraparound vertical screen, you jump onto an increasingly challenging arrangement of platforms--including moving blue platforms, crumbling brown platforms, white platforms that disappear after one jump, and platforms with jump-boosting springs and jet packs.

You have to tap the screen to shoot the … Read more

Might as well jump

You have to tap the screen to shoot the … Read more

Federal rules on campus file sharing kick in today

Frat parties and free music have been among the perks of attending college in the United States during the past decade. But now the days of using fat campus bandwidth to download movies and music via file-sharing networks appear to be coming to an end.

Thursday is the deadline for colleges and universities that receive Title IV federal aid to have implemented antipiracy procedures on their campuses as part of the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008.

HEOA, which was backed by the movie and music industries, addresses a lot of different facets of higher education, but tucked in … Read more

Blackboard gets a "C-" from open-source leaning education market

Ah, to be proprietary and free from those pesky open-source projects! This is almost certainly the feeling at Blackboard, the "Microsoft of Higher Education" which is coming under increased pressure from Moodle, Sakai, two open-source alternatives for course management, as The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests.

It used to be so easy to throw one's proprietary weight around. Blackboard has launched patent attacks on competitors and has been a tough competitor in a range of different ways. Still, open source is thriving.

Blackboard is heading for a showdown with the free-software movement, according to some observers. Although … Read more

RIAA reveals how it tracks college file sharing

A painstaking examination of how the RIAA goes about its business hunting down file sharers on college campuses is available online.

The Chronicle of Higher Education visited the offices of the Recording Industry Association of America and got a demonstration.

The RIAA employee, who declined to give his or her name for fear of receiving hate mail, said the organization has hired online copyright enforcer MediaSentry to do most of the heavy lifting. MediaSentry writes scripts to automatically hunt for the names of copyright songs and locate the IP addresses of computers sharing files, and forwards the information to the … Read more

Tweaking YouTube's resolution settings the easy way

Higher resolutions or not, YouTube still tweaks the quality of its videos for users depending on what kind of connection they've got. So how about a workaround to make sure you're getting the best of the best? Bayme of the VideoHelp.com forums seems to have found a way to tweak the URL of some videos to force YouTube to serve you the version with the highest resolution. The good news? It's easy as pie. The bad news? It's not going to work on all your videos, and it's not noticeably better

To give it … Read more