Manga Streaming

In the wake of Internet censorship bills SOPA and PIPA, it is beginning to seem like the bills were never needed.  Popular file- and video-hosting website, MegaUpload, was taken down and the owner and CEOs of the website/company were arrested by American forces despite the fact that the owner did not live in the United States.  This came about without the assistance of either SOPA or PIPA, throwing into question the necessity of these bills.  However, other media besides movies and music are feeling the pressure of censorship.  While not nearly as popular in America as it is in Japan, the industry of manga and anime has a very large cult following.  Controversy abounds due to websites that illegally host copies of Japanese manga translated by fans.

VIZ Media, the Japanese company responsible from bringing many popular Japanese manga and anime series to the United States, demanded four days ago that popular fan website Mangastream.com cease illegal translation of manga.  The problem with what MangaStream has been doing is that they are involved with many series that have been licensed and officially distributed within the U.S.  However, MangaStream takes the manga and translates it into English as soon as it is released in Japan.  Normally, VIZ Media would translate these series and redistribute them in America within several months, but MangaStream and similar sites allow for rapid releases of the same series for free.

While many cite the loss of profits as the reason for halting MangaStream, that argument loses some merit when one thinks about those who would not spend money on official manga releases, series that are not even available in English, and fans living in other countries that cannot read manga in their own language.  Evidence has also been coming in for many years that a great percentage of profits in the manga and anime industry come solely from merchandise like toys, “plushies,” and video games.  Some margin of profit is still lost, but many who claim to read illegal translations online still buy official releases and merchandise.  For others, online translations serve as a preview of the series, an opportunity to see what a series is like before decided to spend money on it.

A cry of anguish sounded from fans of popular series after they were taken down.  For some that live in foreign countries, online translators are the only way to read their favorite series since VIZ Media rarely distributes series in countries like Indonesia or the Philippines.  MangaStream is still active, but only for a portion of the series which they used to translate.  In the wake of what many fans are calling a catastrophe, other sites continue to obtain and translate manga directly from Japan.  Some wonder if it is only a matter of time before these sites are taken down as well, but many remain optimistic that other websites will appear and the illegal manga distribution will continue.

Safety First

Having just received my first car, the wonders of software in vehicles excites me. One of the main software components in cars today is the ability for the car to park without assistance from the driver. This software must obviously be rigorously tested before being used in commercial cars. The question comes, however, of how safety authorities handle this software. Could an officer site the driver of a car for hitting another car while it was being controlled solely by the parking software? If so, would the driver be able to sue the company that designed the software for inadvertently causing the accident?

According to an article on PCWorld by Leo King, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is charged with investigating such incidents. After Toyota discovered acceleration problems in its cars in 2009, an investigation was opened to discover the cause. No conclusive proof was found that cited computer systems as a plausible cause for the malfunctions, but questions remained about the dependability of the increasing amount of software control in motor vehicles. In the same article, King quotes Louis Lanzerotti, a distinguished research professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Lanzerotti claims that it will “be difficult for NHTSA to keep pace with the technology.” He calls for the NHTSA to “develop much better knowledge by engaging with the industry.”

In another article written by Evan Ackerman on IEEE Spectrum, research is presented by a group at Carnegie Mellon that proves mathematically that autonomous cars (cars controlled entirely by software) cannot cause an accident. The tests began with two cars traveling in opposite lanes of a road and then expanded, including more cars and more difficult maneuvers such as lane changes or exiting a highway. The software is still limited in what it can do; the article provides the humorous example of a moose jumping off of an overpass onto the hood of the car, which would an unexpected event for either a human or computer driver.

The “car of the future” used to be a joke that would appear in some cartoons and television shows around the 1970s. As technology moves forward, however, it seems like society is moving ever closer to a real car of the future. After all, if graduate students can design a program to accurately control cars with one hundred percent accuracy, how far away can we be from flying around with the Jetsons?