Slashdot Mirror

hama writes "There is a new Linux PDA from China from a Beijing Firm Golden Global View who has been in the PDA/Digital Dictionary Market in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan for some time. The model is WalkPad GP1288 with a SRP of RMB1288 in China. Use the fish if you cannot read Chinese." My favorite fishism in here is the "The whole world is in sole possession of the Chinese Linux operating system, steadily beats a drum to announce the start of a watch the freedom."

Jaws writes: "BSI (the German equivalent of NIST) has announced a project proposal for planning and implementation of partial migration of certain federal government offices to free/open source products. Three sites in two cities, servers and desktops, each site with a few dozen/several hundred seats. They are asking for a full-service, detailed plan including infrastructure, installation, documentation, support, and education. Looks like a reasonable pilot project. (The original in German; Fish-English version)"

Alicia (ad454) writes "A new sub-notebook was released in Japan today, the JVC InterLink Victor MP-XP7210, which is one of the smallest notebooks around in recent years that does not have a Transmeta emulation processor. It has a true Pentium-III 800MHz processor, weighs only 885 grams, and is only 225x152x28mm in size. It also comes with 256MB ram (384 max), 30 GB harddrive, 1024x600 TFT display, SoundBlaster Pro compatable audio, V90 56kbps fax/modem, 10/100 ethernet, USBx2, IEEE1394 (ilink/firewire), cardbus type 2 PCMCIA, and SD memory slot. You can get the specifications, which are in Japanese; you can use Alta Vista to translate it. A number of stores in Tokyo are selling it for (JPY)209,800. It would be interesting to hear what type of opensource Unix (NetBSD, Linux, etc.) and X-windows driver support exists for it. Although some may find the keyboard and screen too small, many of us find it quite useable, especially when compared to a PDA."

SysKoll writes: "Some obscure commission in France has decided to slap a 0.50 euro per GB tax on all hard drive used in appliances that can record video or audio broadcasts. The official announcement will be made on June 27. The tax is on bulk HDs so consumers will end up paying twice as much, or about $1 per GByte. All these taxes will go to a state agency supposed to redistribute it to copyright holders, i.e., disc labels and TV networks. This is quite frightening because if this test balloon is left unopposed, the rest of the tax-hungry European countries will follow, and the RIAA and MPAA will have a real-life example to show to Washington lawmakers. Here are the details: This tax applies not only to TiVo-like video 'time-shifting' recorders, but also to all the upcoming digital set-up boxes and HDTV sets that include a hard drive. As for audio appliances, MP3 players with an embedded hard drive will also be taxed. The 0.50 euro tax is imposed on hard drives sold to audio and video manufacturers, so by the time the manufacturers and distribution channels have added their mark up, the price increase will easily be doubled to a cool dollar per gigabyte (1 EUR = 0.93 USD or so these days). The news article (in French) is here. Use Babelfish if vous ne parlez pas French. Note that the French abbrev for Gb is Go. Here is an excerpt: 'According to our information, for a decoder of 80 GB, the [proposed tax] goes from 15 to 20 euros. And for a hi-fi system with 40 GB, they would be spread out from 20 to 25 euros. "But one has to expect that for the consumer, these prices will double," warns Bernard Heger, representative of Simavelec (Trade union of industries of electronic audio-visual equipment).'"

Slashback tonight with a quartet of updates. So, read on for more information on portable video viewing (and instant recording!), United Linux and one analysts view of What it All Means, Microsoft's answer to a Gopher hole, and why easily guessed passwords sometimes save the day.

Throwing the gopher out with the bathwater. An Anonymous Coward writes: "As reported on News.com and discussed on Slashdot, MSIE's gopher support had a serious security vulnerability that allowed your machine to get ROOT'ed.

Well, it seems that Microsoft is unwilling or unable to make the fix, so it is removing support for the gopher protocol from IE. Not that MSIE's gopher support isn't very poorly implemented anyways."

Kept out of the U.S. by the secret conspiracy, no doubt. Buggalo writes "When I saw the article about the Pogo Flipster I thought I'd mention this too. Of course, it's not available in the US (not yet at least), but it sounds cool anyway. It plays MP4 video as well as MP3 audio. One thing that differentiates it from the Flipster is that this one includes video inputs so you don't even need a computer to get anything onto it. It also seems to have a larger screen. From what I can tell it has 64 megs of flash memory built in, and has an SD memory card slot as well. Sorry the website is in Japanese, but you can use Babelfish to translate it."

Not betting on a United front. dgb2n writes "Smart Money Magazine published an excellent article covering the business implications of the United Linux consortium. It provides some good insight into Red Hat's business model, stock price, and future prospects and names a potential winner in the Linux market."

At least this one aspect is happy. Hellkitten writes "The password for the database has been found, it was as simple as 'ladepujd', the name of the database's creator spelt backwards This previous Slashdot article explains the problem they had.

Aasentunet posted this notice, telling the password and thanking everyone that helped"

ZDNet has the story here as well."

Slashback has updates tonight on the fate of Counterstrike in Germany, PanIP's lawsuit-happy past, and facial recognition software's spotty results so far. Go on, read more!

False negatives, false positives, anda false sense of assurance. coryboehne writes: "TechNews has a report on the face recognition system installed at the Palm Beach Internation Airport early results of face-recognition surveillance suggest the technology is proving once again to be unreliable.

The ACLU said the first four weeks of testing at the Palm Beach airport showed the technology was "less accurate than a coin toss." The system matched the faces of the volunteers just 455 out of 958 times, or about 47 percent of the time.

Seems to me that this is a controlled environment for the most part, and still they have problems this big? I wonder if this technology will ever be accurate enough to work properly. I suppose the biggest problem is the size of the database that would be necessary to hold the high quality pictures necessary for accurate identification.

However I must admit that I am rather glad that this is'nt working yet as I'm not too sure I even like the idea of being able to digitally locate and track anyone within range of a camera."

This is what's meant by "repeat offender." Audent writes: "Following on from this story on Slashdot about PanIP's nasty habits, InfoWorld is running a story about it all.

To quote from the story about PanIP's boss:

'These lawsuits aren't the first time that PanIP principal Lawrence Lockwood has initiated legal proceedings against companies he felt were infringing his patents. Lockwood filed a lawsuit against American Airlines in 1994, claiming that American's SABREvision airline reservation system infringed on other patents he holds. Lockwood lost the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California and then lost again on appeal in 1997.'

He's since had a bunch of patents disallowed. He's obviously learned from his earlier 'mistake' and is only going for the smaller companies.

Kick his ass I say. Disclaimer: I work for IDG Comms in New Zealand)."

Temporary sanity. CyberQ writes: "Some news from Germany on the censorship front: Despite demands from prominent politicians the responsible Federal Authority decided today not to ban the sale of Counterstrike to minors [Link in German, use the fish]. This came after weeks of public discussion following a school shooting by a student who apparently trained by playing CS."

the_danielsan writes: "I first thought this (this ain't yellow press) would be a joke, but apparently swiss ISPs are now enforced to monitor all outgoing mails up to a period of 6 month - at their own cost! sunrise, a larger ISP, speaks of 50,000 to 100,000 CHF (that's about 31,405 to 62,810 USD according to my currency calculator) to update their systems. heise Newsticker has the same story running (both German). I can't believe this." For non-German readers, babelfish does a decent job with these articles.

Get Behind the Mule writes "The Heise news ticker is reporting that the software used by the German government to handle the results of the Bundestag election (that's the national parliament) on September 22nd will be based on open source platforms. The system will be written in Java and deploy Tomcat, JBoss and MySQL, and is being developed by the Berlin software firm IVU (here's their press release), working with the Statisches Bundesamt (the federal statistics office). It's not clear from the announcements whether the source code of the application itself, and not just the servers it runs on, will be publically available. Nevertheless, one is reminded of the argument of Peruvian congressman Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez (seen recently in Slashdot) that open source software enables citizens of a democracy to see for themselves whether the work of government, such as elections, is conducted as it should be. All of the announcements are in German, so go fish. The software, as described in the announcements, will compute preliminary results (which are announced as soon as possible after the polls close), run plausibility checks, and determine the Bundestag membership as well as distribution of seats to the political parties. It will use web clients for entry of voting data, data import, presentation of results, and preparation of printed results. It will be based on a three-level architecture (apparently standard J2EE) and deploy Enterprise Java Beans."

hexdcml writes "Just found this whilst browsing, Sony has now brought out the My Little Vaio range, (probably for rich kids..tsk) All I can say is WOW, this thing is tiny. Makes me wanna ditch my lurvely little iBook and get this! The site's in japanese, so you'll need to translate (for those how are non-japansese literate) using Babelfish or something." Dynamism.com has specifications in English.

Slashback brings you updates and amplifications on the SSSCA, the future of RAMBUS and Intel, fragmentation of filesystems, a book reviewer who's been publishing online longer than some slashdot readers have walked erect, and more. Read on for the details.

A screenplay written by Jack Valenti? cc_pirate writes: "Apparently Sen. Fritz Hollings (D - Disney, er - SC) completed his hearings today on how the media needs to have content protection included in computers. Intel and other high tech companies resist and are chastized by Hollings."

Penguins are the new Turtles. Gerein writes "After many months of extreme lobbying, personal attacks, public petitions and surveys, the war over the future OS of the Bundestag (German parliament) is finally over (previous /. stories). As heise reports (in german, use the fish) Linux won't make it to the desktops (they're going with XP) but will take over the 150 servers. The last critical question over the directory service has finally been decided in favor to OpenLDAP instead of Active Directory. It's not the complete victory for Linux, many had hoped for, but it's a start for more Open Source in the German government."

Full disclosure seems like a nice idea. Merlynnus writes: "Yahoo! is running a story, Copy-protected CD makers lose battle, in which Music City Records, Fahrenheit Entertainment and digital rights management company Sunncomm have 'agreed' to stop collecting personal info, and to label copy-protected CDs as defective, er, play-challenged in certain devices. The agreement came as the result of court action by a Cali resident, Karen DeLise, over the Charlie Pride CD, 'Charley Pride: A Tribute to Jim Reeves.' Did that CD really need copy-protecting?"

This should have been transparent. Metrollica writes: "It turns out the transparent aluminium article at Spiegel was misunderstood. Sci-fighter published a correction. The transparent substance was not aluminium but alumina, shorthand for aluminium oxide. Slashdot reported on transparent aluminium here."

Odds are, somebody's written a thesis on it ... and here one is. Whether in response to this Ask Slashdot question or just a lucky guesser, Cine writes: "The standard filesystem benchmarking tools such as Bonnie++, Postmark , Mongo and others all test the optimum case for the block layouting algorithm. But in practice one also is interested to know how a filesystem performs when it is or was heavily used over a longer period (e.g. months and years).So Constantin Loizides has written a Master Thesis about the performance of filesystems under the influence of fragmentation."

Intel-Rambus break not as simple as portrayed. Controlio writes: "Tom's Hardware Guide has posted a clarification regarding the EBN story with the sensational headline, 'Intel to drop support of Rambus in new CPU products'. The article was also posted on Slashdot. Tom reports:

EBN had the sensational headline Intel to drop support of Rambus in new CPU products, but the story goes on to say, "Intel will continue using Direct Rambus memory with its network processors. Also, although not new products, the next iterations of its 850 and 860 chipsets, supporting a 533MHz front-side, will support RDRAM when they arrive, probably in the second half of this year." A little misleading, wouldn't you say? Hard to tell, but you read it for yourself, and make your own call.

Great. More sensational journalism. Maybe someone should submit Jack Robertson's resume to Fox News."

Finally, some congratulations are in order. danny writes (does he ever): "February 28th marks the 10th anniversary of my first book review; there are now over six hundred. I have written an account of ten years writing book reviews, which illustrates something of how online publication has changed over the years."

twms2h queries: "It is everybody's favorite task, the worst part of programming: writing the documentation. I have been charged with writing lots of documents, some smaller some larger, most of them documenting programs I wrote myself. In order to avoid the torture of fighting with Microsoft Word all the time (which crashes on me regularly) I am looking for an easy way to get printed and electronic (HTML/PDF) documents from as simple a source as possible. I have looked into several of the processing tools that are available on the net." Below is twms2h's take on a few of the documenting systems available. The preference is to keep things simple, editing ASCII files to produce high quality documentation. Are there other tools some of you know of that might prove to be better solutions?

"So far, I like aft, mostly because it is simple to use, and gives me nice result as HTML. Unfortunately HTML is not enough, since I also need a very good looking printable version.

There are alternatives like DocBook, which I could not get to work and udo (Page is German, get the translation from the fish) which I have not yet looked into very closely.

Then of course there is TeX and any number of WYSIWY-won't-G word processors. I haven't used TeX much, I only tried my luck in writing a few letters (and found out that it is not suitable for this). I went through hell when I wrote larger documents with various versions of MS Word and I am not really a fan of Star Office even though version 5.2 has not yet crashed on me (however 6.0 beta did). KWord, part of KOffice doesn't seem to be stable enough yet.

I would prefer a simple ASCII only format as the source for being converted to more complex formats anyway, especially since it could be easily put into CVS for version management (Anybody tried that with MS-Word documents? Don't!)

As all these projects show I am not the first one faced with this problem. I wonder what experiences Slashdot readers have had with these and other packages?"

Random Walk writes "The German news site Heise Online reports that on behalf of an anonymous client, a lawyer has won a preliminary injunction (German only) against the Linux distributor SuSE. The injunction forbids the delivery of SuSE CDs as long as they contain some program name that apparently violates a registered trademark. No more details available, but SuSE seems to be in negotiations with the other party." Head over to the fish for translation.

nappster writes: "According to this article (sorry, it's in German), Germany thinks it can control the Internet, so now it's considering requiring that porn sites restrict their hours to 11pm to 6am. Exactly how they will coerce sites operating outside Germany is not explained, hence the term 'imbecility' that some have used to describe this proposal." Swim through the German with the Fish.

Selanit asks: "I'm a student of English literature at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, with a pronounced interest in all things tech as well. Next term I'll be taking an Independent Study course which combines the two -- the topic will be 'Influences of Science Fiction on Real-World Tech.' The professor and I are still trying to assemble a reading list. So here's my question: what science-fiction novels have had a particularly noticeable effect on the development of technology? I'm mainly interested in books that have been written since World War II. The line of inquiry is not limited to computers; any kind of link between sci-fi and hard tech will do (e.g. Cap'n Kirk's communicator == prototype mobile phone). Books that have lent a name to a technology are also interesting (like the 'Little-Endian, Big-Endian' terms which were lifted from Gulliver's Travels, or 'Babel Fish' from Douglas Adams)."

Rolo Tomasi writes: "Germany's first online service, BTX (Bildschirmtext) is shutting down. BTX had a history of major security flaws, which made the Chaos Computer Club famous." Non-speakers might want to try a translation.

jedrek writes "MSNBC is reporting that Altavista, the great search engine, isn't able to keep it's listings current. Altavista hasn't renewed it's index since July which, seeing how it's almost November, is a tad too long." AltaVista was my weapon of choice until Google came along and was so much better that most net users jumped ship.

osolemirnix writes: "Starting today, the Robot Challenge initiated by c't Magazine / Heise Publishing takes place at the Systems computer fair show in Munich, Germany. The robots have to collect trash while driving through a maze (2x3 meters) and and deliver the trash in a special color-coded area. They have about 40 entries of bots and the challenge goes on all week, so check it out if you're at the Systems. Unfortunately the robot challenge web pages are in german, but you can check the live webcams here." So either quickly learn German, or use the Fish. The current c't (print) magazine has great pictures of the competing robots, too.

ribbiting writes: "A father-son team have won the "Ultimate Builder Competition" (Lego Mindstorms) with their entry named "Jitter". The robot will fly to the ISS in November. It fits (whole) into a approx. 1'x1'x1' box and weighs less than 3 lbs. It's main mission is to collect small, flying debris. It can interact with the station walls and crew and supposedly has some light "mischief" programmed in as well (sneaking up on people, dancing). The story can be found here, de.news.yahoo.com, it's in German (sorry)." We mentioned the contest a few months ago. Altavista gives a semi-readable machine translation.

the_2nd_coming writes "Red Hat has announced a legislation alert for the SSSCA. They are collecting comments to hand to lawmakers. Get those comments in while you can, but make sure you give them some thought."

ms writes: "Yesterday golem.de reported that the Optical Communication and High-Frequency Engineering Group at the University of Paderborn (Germany) claims to have made a technology practical which doubles the transmission capacity of optical fibers to 80 GBit/s. In their so-called "polarization division multiplex data transmission system" they don't only send one but two mutually orthogonal light waves through the fiber. They say the only big problem was the dispersal of the light waves which limits the data rate. Additional they had to fight against the phenomena that the polarization direction of the light waves changes while it goes through the fiber. Now, after two years of research, they invented an "automatic optical compensator of polarization mode dispersion" which fights both the limitations. With this gadget they were able to send data at a rate of twice 40 GBit/s (that's 85,899,345,920 Bps) over a test-line of 212 km. And "only the available equipment limited distance and data rate". As we all know, optical fibers build the (cronically overloaded) backbone of our beloved Net. (BTW: That's Net., not .Net!)" Here's the babelfish translation, too.

jdfox writes: "According to this press release from SuSE, they have just received another 15 million Euros (about 14 million $US) venture capital, with some big names listed in the consortium's membership. They have also announced that a quarter of their 500 staff will be let go, following on from similar recent cuts. This excellent distro deserves to succeed: I hope this move will see them through the current slowdown." The upcoming release (needs babelfishing from German) of SuSE's version 7.3 promised for October 13th is loaded with a ton of goodies, too -- Kernel 2.4.10, KDE 2.2.1 and GNOME 1.4.1 beta2, among other things.

hysterion writes: "According to today's Libération, the Curie Institute is challenging a recent European patent which grants Utah's Myriad Genetics a de facto monopoly on genetic tests for breast cancer. The article (fish translation) quotes a Curie researcher: "Their patent is so vague that even using other techniques, one could be sued for infringement. (...) So European labs have to send all samples to Salt Lake City. This means that we risk losing our skills, our credits, and in the long term, any ability to do research. Meanwhile, Myriad overcharges 3.5 fold, and gets to build a nifty world wide database." The researchers complain about being prevented from improving the test so that it tracks a newly identified mutation."

gerddie writes "Heise has an interview with S. Kiesewetter-Köbinger, a patent examiner of the German PA, about the cultural break, software patents will impose to Europe if they become valid. He points out the danger to open source and science, and that with patents on software even mathematical methods would become patentable because there is no longer any difference. There is also a companion article competition in the court room, that gives some more insight in the history and current state of the patent system. All is in german, but as always the fish is your friend."

rsd writes: "Conectiva Linux 7.0 is out. Here is the original announcement. And here is the babelfish translation. They are already shipping Portuguese box and will start the english soon. However the CDs (iso for what matter) are available in english already. Their main ftp server is overcrowded. Hoever, Rik VanRiel provided us with a really fast server. I will not describe every feature on it but the main change is the Synaptic tool, which in my opinion is the best APT frontend ever written."

Cpyder writes "LinuxFrench reports that Mandrakesoft (home of Mandrake Linux) are going public. Good luck to them!" The article is in French - use the fish for an...interesting...translation. Or try out GPLTrans.

nils23 writes "There's a story on heise.de that says that M$ won't include their SmartTags (tm - probably...) in the European release of Windows eXPerimental.. The reason is not, they claim, any privacy or Anti-Trust issues, but the problem of maintaining the content/links to Microsoft. It's in german. Use the fish, Luke." I'd be fine with this if they only did it on pages that included a tag that said the author of the page approved the feature. I for one don't want Microsoft choosing where links on a Slashdot story go. Imagine what links they could choose for words like Linux or the GPL. Think I'm kidding?

XMLGuy writes "The first German crypto mobile phone is to be built by Rohde and Schwarz - a company that took over the hardware-crypto segment of Siemens at the beginning of May this year. At the push of a button the mobile phone (they are called "handies" here in Germany) will set up an encrypted communications link with your communications partner. According to heise online, the mobiles then use a 128 bit key to encrypt the channel. One of the technicians is quoted as saying that "A thousand pentium computers would need over 10 years to decrypt a 10 minute phone-call". The mobiles will cost around 6000 German Marks. " You know where the the fish is for translation.

Last Saturday a comment was posted here by an anonymous reader that contained text that was copyrighted by the Church of Scientology. They have since followed the DMCA and demanded that we remove the comment. While Slashdot is an open forum and we encourage free discussion and sharing of ideas, our lawyers have advised us that, considering all the details of this case, the comment should come down. Read on to understand what this means.

This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken hearted about it than me. It's a bad precedent, and a blow for the freedom of speech that we all share in this forum. But this simply doesn't look like a case we can win. Our lawyers tell us that it appears to be a violation of Copyright law, and under the terms of the DMCA, we must remove it. Else we risk legal action that would at best be expensive, and potentially cause Slashdot to go down temporarily or even permanently. At the worst, court orders could jeporadize your privacy, and we would be helpless to stop it.

We need to choose our battles and this isn't one we want to have. We want Slashdot to be a forum where you can say what's in your heart, but we simply can't defend an anonymous poster who violates copyright law. Keep that in mind when you post in both this discussion, and in others in the future. Post your ideas. Post your thoughts. And most of all, post your links. We need to play by the rules or it's game over.

Now there is the matter of this specific comment. It contained a text called "OT III", part of what is known as the Fishman Affidavit. This text is Copyrighted by the Church of Scientology. In compliance with the DMCA, we are removing it from Slashdot. In its place we are putting non-copyrighted text: Links to websites about the church of Scientology, as well as links to how you can contact your congressman about the DMCA. Thanks a lot to Jamie for putting this together.

First of all, we would like to point out that the text of OT III is available at many other places on the web. To many to list here in fact. Instead, try a Google search on "OT III" and "Fishman", which as of this writing (March 2001) returns over 250 pages. A broader search on AltaVista returns over 2,000 webpages.

Operating in the jurisdiction of the Dutch courts, Karin Spaink's Fishman Affidavit webpage has fended off two lawsuits from Scientology, one in 1996 and one in 1999. The latter suit, according to the page, is still being appealed. >From the link listed just above, you can click through to the Fishman Affidavit, which contains links to not only to an annotated copy of OT III, but to the documents on the other OT levels as well, number one through the disputed number eight.

If you would like a plain English explanation of OT III, see OT III Rewritten For Beginners, by Jon Atack. Its author is a former Scientologist who himself completed level OT III. The webpage contains nothing copyrighted by a Scientology organization. It is an explanation of what OT III says and what that means, along with commentary by the author. Jon Atack is also the author of A Piece of Blue Sky, which is a history of Scientology from before its founding to after L. Ron Hubbard's death. At the above link, you can either purchase it, or read it in its entirety online.

If you are interested in Scientology, you will want to visit Operation Clambake, at xenu.net. It seems to be the most important central resource for information on the organization.

You may also want to visit the Lisa McPherson Memorial Page, which claims that "Lisa died needlessly at the hands of Scientology." Her case is truly a tragic one and she deserves to be remembered. The site has a great deal of information on her death. Related is The Lisa McPherson Trust, which has not only information about Lisa, but a very large archive of interviews, court transcripts, news reports, testimonials, and videos about Scientology.

Here's a Slashdot story last year on eBay removing auctions for e-meters based on the Church of Scientology DMCA copyright allegations, which is odd because Copyright law doesn't cover a physical device.

If there's anything else about Scientology you want to know, you will want to see AltReligionScientology.org, which contains a huge list of links to all the sites I don't have room to list here.

The DMCA is actually five separate modifications to copyright law. Its Title I is known for providing legal protection for "technological measures" (typically encryption) which prevent copying; this is the part that empowered the MPAA to sue over DeCSS, to name the best-known example.

That's not the part that concerns us here; Title II is its other major modification of copyright law and that's what we're dealing with. Title II created 17 U.S.C. Section 512, and we're specifically looking at our liability under paragraphs (c)(1)(A), which says we have to act "expeditiously to remove or disable access to the [infringing] material." Here's the U.S. Copyright Office's 18-page summary of the DMCA as a whole. If 18 pages is too long for you, here's the American Library Association's much quicker summary

Here's a list of resources on the DMCA, including the DMCA itself in PDF format. The EFF page on the DCMA seems to relate mostly to Title I, the anti-encryption-circumvention portion, but it's too good not to mention anyway.

Don't know who your Congressperson or Senators are? That's OK, now's as good a time as any to learn. Finding your Senators is easy, just go to Senate.gov. To find your Representative, you just need your zip code. You can use the form on the website to write them if you're lazy, but if you want your message to have more impact, print it out and send it in a real envelope. Anything's better than nothing, though.

When you write, you'll want to write something they'll read. Here are the ACLU's tips for writing to your Congressperson or Senators.

asterisk5 writes: "The New Republic has an article from Seattle about the unions moving into new economy companies. Good stuff about the rise and fall of the Bezos cult of personality." When the illusions are stripped away, it's not pretty...

ovidus naso writes " Minister Tasca decided not to go forward with her computer tax project. My impression is that this was just political play (her strongest enemies are fellow socialists, naturally!). The Liberation is carrying the story with the retracation. " As always with non-fluent speakers, the fish is your friend. Remember: You get a twofold benefit with Babelfish: The translation to the story to get the main gist of the story, and the actual translation has so many laughable areas, you have an entry to a bad poetry competition.

Scott_Marks writes: "In the fine tradition of the previously-reported finger-phone, DoCoMo has brought out their Eggy! The Babelfish translation is, as usual, a total hoot." I'm a little confused about what this thing will do to your poor "knitting machine," but imagine a baby-blue Nintendo controller with a built in camera, a small LCD and a nice chunk of RAM, equipped with a Web browser. And for anyone who laughs at the fingerphone, I had a chance to use one of these in October courtesy of a DoCoMo representative in Atlanta, and called home with surprizing clarity. So maybe this little thing isn't so crazy ...

kampi writes: "As I found on heise newsticker the volcano Popocatepetl's eruption is being broadcast live to the Internet. You can get more info from the National Centre For Protection of Catastrophes, if you understand Spanish. " You can also use the fish, of course, for translation.

hysterion writes: "A recent bill from the French government makes the headlines of the major daily paper Libération. (Translation here.) Currently, French law prohibits DVD sales of any movie during its first 9 months in theatres. While reducing this to 6 months, the bill aims to kill a thriving import market by now including foreign issues -- even if they are not dubbed or subtitled in French. In effect, starting January 1, "any importation of zone 1 DVD or VHS of movies which have obtained a visa of exploitation in French theatres is prohibited." Can they really hope to enforce this? Or will movies eventually have to come out simultaneously in all parts of the world? (Irony: the Secretary of Culture who wrote this bill is also on record speaking against software patents.)" Apparently the law will ban any Zone 1 DVD permanently if the French distributors have, or plan to, show the same movie in French theaters (and presumably release it on Zone 2 DVD some time after that).

Eris writes: "An interesting tidbit from a UPI story running on Environmental News Network: A Welsh/Indian team of scientists thinks that their high flying research balloon may have picked up actual alien bacteria dropped into the atmosphere by cometary debris. It remains to be seen whether this is any better than our old friend ALH 84001, the Martian Meteorite, and the researcher involved does have a history of pushing the life-from-outer-space theory. But this is just neat enough to merit at least a quick glance." So far, no Andromeda Strain reactions -- a good sign.

BrightIce writes "It seems like things are getting better in Europe regarding software patents." The text of that article is in German, but thanks to Sebastian Bunka of Austria for providing me this translation: "On the CONVENTION ON THE GRANT OF EUROPEAN PATENTS all 20 memberstates have decided to not change the regulations to the patentability of software and to allow by this basically no patents on software." Else, you can check the fish, but the above is a better translation.

wieselwerkstatte sent us a link to a Nature article that talks about the possibilty for self-soldering molecular wires. In related news, demon-cw sent us a C't story about .2 buckyballs that they are using to create nanotubes. Use the fish for those who don't speak German.

Iain M. Banks' latest Culture novel, Look to Windward, isn't available in the U.S. yet. But this being the age of the supermation infohighway, I ordered it from a .co.uk. It's another beautiful work from Banks -- Culture fans will not be disappointed. Look to Windward author Iain M. Banks pages 357 publisher Orbit rating superb reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 1-85723-969-5 summary beautiful, moving, and thoroughly thought-provoking

I can't go into any great detail about Iain M. Banks' latest novel of the highly-advanced Culture civilization without giving away too much of the plot. The book opens as the light of two suns which were induced to explode in a war 800 years past -- the Idiran wars, the gigadeathcrimes mentioned in previous Culture books -- is about to fall upon the scene. The stage is set.

Unlike some of his other Culture books, this is not an action novel. While there is some action, that isn't the focus of the novel. Rather than rushing ahead, this book takes a leisurely pace through an exploration of war. Where Use of Weapons didn't give you time to think, Look to Windward gives you nearly infinite time - the rest of your life, in fact - to consider the consequences of war.

Ponder, if you will, a shell of light 1600 light-years in diameter. Outside of that shell, a war is still going on -- two planetary systems are still full of life. Inside that shell, the war is over and nothing remains of those systems but two stars gone nova. If this image moves you, so will the book.

Banks is intent upon sculpting a symphony, a tribute to war veterans of all times and places. Threads wax and wane, appear and disappear. Lifelines are cut short. Heroes aren't. Soldiers do their duty. As with most of his science fiction works, things are not as they seem, and you won't figure out just how things are put together until the final bars are being played. It is easy to imagine this book played aloud.

I still might start new Banks readers on Use of Weapons or Player of Games. But this would be an excellent second novel for them. Well, I take that back. Consider Phlebas should be read before Look to Windward.

(As an aside, does anyone else remember "All The Way Back", a short story by Michael Shaara?)

An AC (appropriate) sends news of Austrian Big Brother awards: "Now for the second time around, the BigBrother Awards in .at. Nominees include amazon.at, American Express and some favourites of (ultra-) conservative politicians, all for violating privacy in a rather explicit manner. (Sorry, German only, try fishing it.) The list of nominees is here, my personal favourite is amazon, where you can read the privacy statement only _after_ youve agreed to it. Other countries with similar events can be found here."

BradeRunna writes: "Space.com has a very interesting article describing earth-like weather (even rain) on Saturn's moon, Titan. Especially of note as the surface temperatures hover around minus 288 degrees Fahrenheit. Guess we'll have to wait until the Cassini spacecraft makes it out there in Summer 2004 to get the full skinny ..." A sidebar to the article is a cute comparison between Earth's weather and Titan's.

Daniel Burckhardt writes: "There is a nice interview from the german c't magazine with Linus Torvalds. It's no longer about getting hit by a bus but instead about dropping into the atlantic ocean. He talks about his dislike for keynotes, the importance of "good taste" in os-design and why nobody wants 2.4 (they are all happy with 2.2). And for some real news: Expect ReiserFS going into 2.4.1." It's a longer interview than online translators like: babelfish choked on the translation for me, and only got about halfway through it; the systransoft engine, on the other hand, worked like a champ and yielded a smoother translation to boot.

^ZuLu^ writes "The inventor of MP3 Karlheinz Brandenburg just received the German Futurereward and 500k DM (approx. $250000). He received that price at the Expo in Hannover by the German President Johannes Rau. Isn't that just the statement we we're all waiting for? A state which completely honours the invention of MP3 regardless of what the music industry is trying to make us believe? The story's available in german at Yahoo here." And the fish can aid in translation.

martin-k writes: "German newsticker www.heise.de reports that SAP will announce tomorrow the GPL release of SAP DB, a database based on Software AG's Adabas. Have a look at www.heise.de but be sure to have Babelfish handy - it's in German." Babelfish is at Altavista - but the translation is bad. As far as I can tell, it sounds like they are expecting the announcement tomorrow, at LinuxWorld Germany, with the license being either the GPL or the LGPL. If you are fluent in German, please post a little more in the comments. From what I can tell it's not their flagship, but one of the parts of one, or another database?

Today's Slashback calls out to you with puppy-dog eyes, pleading with you to read on for addenda, errata, et cetera regarding previous Slashdot stories and other updates from the world. Read below for ... the all-singing, all-dancing, topless, hatless and reckless Cue Cat review (one night only) ... one reaction to Stephen Hawking's idea of the world's (human) life expectancy ... some Official Words from the Quakemakers ... and as usual, a few bits and pieces.

Just stick around and collect on this bet. mindriot writes "The German climatic researcher Manfred Stock has rejected Stephen Hawking's theory which states that man would not exist on earth for another 1,000 years. To him this seems rather unlikely. Stock expects that, in 50 years, mankind will have switched to alternative power resources. Read the german article here." Oder, wenn Sie nicht Deutsch kann, bitte Babelfish benutzen. It's a much more optimistic view of things, but hardly the words of a Pollyanna.

CD-Rs are cheap, cheap, cheap. David Hume writes: "Fox News is reporting that '[a] three-judge panel decided to allow the popular service to continue allowing users to share music files over the Internet, pending further deliberations.' ... "The judges seemed to need more information from the recording industry and were more antagonistic to the RIAA," said copyright expert Leonard Rubin, who observed the proceedings."'

Overall, it sounds like Napster is taking neither the "shoo-in" or "dropped anchor" tacks that many people predicted. The article points out (and presumably the judge knows) that peer-to-peer file transfers have long since left the gate.

Well, they are the guys who make it, after all! You might remember the stink raised by the release of the Q3 1.25 patch. Now Bob Mintern writes: "iD Software, in hue of their current Point Release for Quake 3 1.25, has released a FAQ highlighting sevral issues of the 1.25 patch and what it breaks. The FAQ can be located here. I wonder when the "offical" patch will work and everything will be normal again..."

After this I'll try to shut up for a while about it, OK? There's been so much about the CueCat that perhaps you (and / or digital convergence) are sick of hearing about it. I pledge not to mention it for at least a week, on penalty of an early bedtime or perhaps more vacation days. But today, you must deal a few I thought were neat ;) First, bk1e asks the musical question: "Why :de:claw your :Cue:Cat when you can get it :spayed in about two minutes with a soldering iron? Simply solder on one jumper and it acts like any other barcode scanner." Heh.

Or, even without doing that, hangel points to this "A CueCat decoder for Zope by stevea," which includes source. Specifically, this one will let you scan in a book's bar code and look it up on Amazon.

Finally, photon317 writes: "There's a make-fun-of-DC site at www.digitaldivergence.org." This I leave to your own judgement, but as R. Crumb might say, not everything is for everybody. Think iBrator.

zottl writes: "German tech site computerchannel.de has an article about various problems concerning Intel's Pentium IV. It says that the new processors will draw lots of power (66 watts for the 1,4 GHz version), need special copper-core coolers, might need radiation shields for the socket pins for ECC compliance and will remain expensive for quite some time. It also says that the P4 will only get mass-market appeal with the introduction of the slimmed-down 0.13 micron version. Oh, and best of all, it seems to be slower for certain apps than a P3 of the Mhz. Seems like a repetition of the problems the P6 architecture had when the Pentium Pro was first introduced" Isn't this pretty much what they say about every generation of Intel chips when first released? Anyway, the article is in German, so you'll need to feed it to the fishy until translations crop up.

scamp was one of the folks who wrote from Europe with the news that an administrative board for the European Patents Office has voted 10-9 to allow patents for software in Europe. There's still a final conference to be held in Novemeber to ratify the decision - so there's still time to sign the petition against it. The conference in November should be close - the multinationals, US and Japan are applying heavy pressure. BTW, if you can't read German, use the fish.

Alkaiser writes "Hey, get this. According to Altavista, who got it from Variety, Neal Stephenson is negotiations to work on Fox's Batman Beyond movie. " This is a whole lotta rumor and speculation, but its still worth a thought. I mean batman and stephenson? Yum.

A reader writes " According to the German Heise Newsticker Linux is the top server for .de-domains both in terms of IP addresses and domain names hosted. The survey carried out by the company iKu Netzwerklösungen surveyed all of almost 2.5 million connected .de-domains distributed over 205.540 IP addresses with the port scanner nmap. 44 percent of IP addresses surveyed were hosted by Linux, 30 percent by Windows. In terms of domain names hosted Linux has an even greater lead, with over 1.1 million domaines. Solaris follows with about 850,000 names, of which 180,000 are hosted on just two Solaris boxes belonging to Germany's biggest webspace provider Strato. Windows follows in 3rd place with just 10%. " Check out the fish if you don't jive deutsch.

JSC writes: "IBM has developed a quantum computer consisting of five atoms that work as the processor and memory. It's a nice advance of the state of the art...unfortunately, we won't see them on the shelves for about 20 years." Update: 08/15 06:49 PM by H :Check out the official IBM release - thanks to netMonkey for the update.

roadrunner2000 writes: "Some German company claims to have the right on the brandname "samba", so they try to sue everyone in Germany which uses the open source project "Samba". Get more information from Heise Online" From the Fish Translation, it seems that the acronym SAMBA stands for something else in German. If you can add more information, post it below.

snuf23 asks: "Altavista has a report on the future of Windows as presented by Bill Gates at Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. Curiously, one of the touted features is called "type in-line." Essentially, it's a text based interface to the computer which uses a natural language interface. Having worked at a translation software company for three years, I am familiar with the complications of parsing meaning between human languages. It seems that in computer to human you would have somewhat less complexity, at least in terms of general use. Have any natural language interface CLIs been built? Voice recognition software comes to mind ("Open the file, HAL") but what attempts have there been to replace shell interfaces with natural language interpreters?" While I'm all for making computers easier to use, would typing "move all files beginning with the letter a to the directory called 'foo'" be any improvement over "mv a* foo" (or "move a* foo" for that matter)?