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Subterfuge is a tactic of modern data security and privacy. --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2007/08/subterfuge-as-security-tactic.html

I'm a garage-kit maker -- 1/285 Macross and 1/2500 Star Trek, available at http://scifiskunkwerks.blogspot.com/. All of my models are done in CAD first, then rapid prototyped. I spent several months looking for an affordable way to get my parts printed out in the quality that I needed and I'm always on the lookout for being able to just buy my own machine. So when this PAID ADVERTISEMENT masquerading as an article came along I was pretty interested. RTFA and you'll see: "The 3-D printers that Shapeways is using are commercially available, made by Israeli firm Objet and Stratsys in Eden Prairie, MN." That means they're nothing more than a print bureau. Big farking whoop. Last night I saw a nice, big Objet add on the front page and now I know why. Incidentally, I'm already having my stuff printed on Objets. The quality is top-notch. I'm just irritated (no coffee this morning) because this is a non-article.

'"Lulz" is how trolls keep score. A corruption of "LOL" or "laugh out loud," "lulz" means the joy of disrupting another's emotional equilibrium'

How do you explain this paticular troll in terms of Lulzing. This is someone who has been trolling comp.os.linux.advocacy for over a *decade*, over eight thousand posts since January of this year alone, not to mention its various other aliases.

I have no idea what a beer bong game would involve, other than drinking excessive amounts of beer.

That's a helluva typo. Allow me to elucidate with the help of hot chicks:

This is a beer bong.
This is beer pong.

There really are blogs for everything.

I had an idea once. It was a "jump to conclusions" mat.

But also I had an idea about the Martian magnetosphere - or lack thereof: http://thelazysci-fiauthor.blogspot.com/2007/04/ding.html

what do you all think? :)

The store and forward broadcasting scheme has definite merits as a means of distributing information in a community. I think that the Twitter / Indenti.ca - laconica / RSS reader tools of the world will eventually re-collapse into a new version of Usenet, without anonymity, and a slightly different feature set.

Usenet is dead... long live Usenet.

Actually, if you read about how the French do it, the total amount of waste from 30+years of nuclear power fits in one room. In the US, there is no effective nuclear waste recycling plan, thank you Jimmy Carter. If there were, Yucca mountain would provide enough capacity for the entire planet! I read a great series of articles at http://www.economicefficiency.blogspot.com/ that spell a lot of this stuff out.

I couldn't agree more. There is too much money in cheap manufacturing. They get the power to run those plants through dirty coal plants as well as fuel oil plants. In the short term, they could start putting green roofs on their buildings. They have done a few, but nowhere near enough. I read an article on http://www.cleanerairforcities.blogspot.com/ about the ones they are building in Beijing.

Same- I write the blog http://hackingym.blogspot.com/ and I've been following this transition closely. Rhapsody's service is far superior, including a much larger library, and more "radio" stations (channels). It's worth every penny. (Especially with the Squeezebox Duet that /. convinced me to buy)

I had typed a response to this but I think slashdot ate it. I think it went something like this: You are an exceptional person and I greatly admire the continued commitment you have to the cause. I am not of the opinion that all lawyers are sleezeballs or anything like that and the phrase was meant to amuse as it typically does here though I suppose they'd be Maine country lawyers. Either way, you seem to be an exception in many ways. That you take the time to fight the case is not exceptional, there are a lot of great lawyers out there. That you ALSO take the time to update us, to keep us aware of the problems, and give us hope is above and beyond what I'd expect of anyone in any field. I did have a question: Does your client, if you can say, have a homepage or anything where they accept donations to assist them with their legal fund? As the first comment (hell both really) didn't suit properly I'll add that, in short (or really long actually), I truly appreciate the information you're sharing with us and thank you greatly for the time you take to keep us in the loop.

Thanks very much for your kind words.

In response to your question,

-you can contribute to Marie Lindor's legal defense fund by PayPal here, or by sending it to my firm and indicating that it's for Marie Lindor;

-you can contribute to the expert witness defense fund here;

-you can contribute to the legal defense funds of Tenise Barker, Joan Cassin, and/or Victor Torres, or to my blog, by making payment to my firm and indicating which defendant it's for;

if you want to contribute to a defendant being represented by another firm, I assume you can send payment to that firm and indicate which case it's earmarked for;

if you want to contribute to my blog you can send the payment to my firm, indicating it's a general contribution to the work of the law blog.

Also you can help support our work by patronizing the advertisers on Recording Industry vs. The People. We frequently have "affiliate ads" listed in the sidebar. If there are particular products or types of products you would be interested in, email me and I'll try to get advertisers of those products.

I wonder if the US could use lasers to shoot down Chinese missiles fired at Taiwan?

Actually from what I've read Chinese missiles are not a mortal threat to Taiwan now

http://meizhongtai.blogspot.com/2005/11/chinas-ballistic-missiles.html

Assuming the Chinese missiles are on the more reliable end of the estimates, 10% (or 47 missiles) are still lost to mechanical malfunctions. That leaves 420 missiles headed for Taiwan

I personally would guess that the [Taiwanese] Patriots [missile defense] would have a 50% kill rate, but to be honest I have no data to back that estimate up. Based on my estimates, Taiwan could kill 100 missiles before they reach their targets (with their current Patriot capabilities), bringing the number that would cause damage down to 320

CSS-6s have a circular error probability (CEP) of 280 meters. CSS-7s have a CEP of 200 meters. With this limited degree of accuracy, it would take 44 CSS-6s or 23 CSS-7s to destroy a target with 75% certainty.* Thus, if China's missile batteries are composed equally of CSS-6s and CSS-7s, China could expect to destroy ten buildings with 75% certainty using all of its missiles (except the 233 it has held in reserve). If no missiles were held in reserve and thus 530 missiles reach their targets, 15 buildings could be destroyed with the same degree of certainty.

Though it actually seems like Taiwan should develop its own missile defense system in parallel with trying to buy PAC3 batteries and missiles from the US.

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Yeah... So I went back over there, and tried to find the "technical acumen" and "valuable criticism" you speak of, but I just couldn't find it. Tell me with a straight face that this article demonstrates the author's "technical acumen".

And why should I care at all with Jeremy Alison says?

This isn't about foss advocacy for me. It's about an ignorant punk spamming my beloved slashdot for some adsense pennies. Fuck them.

The candidate's name is Greg Tannahill he maintains a gaming blog and a political blog.
Gaming blog: The Dust Forms Words
Campaign blog: Greg Tannahill for Canberra.

The candidate's name is Greg Tannahill he maintains a gaming blog and a political blog.

Gaming blog: The Dust Forms Words

Campaign blog: Greg Tannahill for Canberra.

Doesn't this just sound like one of those Navel-gazing projects that programmers get into that take up all their time? You know, like Yegge's 'teenager' project. If so, isn't it great that MicroSoft are betting on these teenage ideas? They're sure to fall flat on their face, and then they'll have no choice left but to switch to basing their products on something stable like BSD or Linux :-)

It is one-sided: if a Yank cracked British government computers the US government would not extradite them to the UK. See the synopsis from Statewatch:

"Under the new treaty, the allegations of the US government will be enough to secure the extradition of people from the UK. However, if the UK wants to extradite someone from the US, evidence to the standard of a "reasonable" demonstration of guilt will still be required.

No other EU countries would accept this US demand, either politically or constitutionally. Yet the UK government not only acquiesced, but did so taking advantage of arcane legislative powers to see the treaty signed and implemented without any parliamentary debate or scrutiny.

Guantanamo Bay, the failed extradition of Lofti Raissi and US contempt for the International Criminal Court make this decision to remove relevant UK safeguards all the more alarming"

My government is being a lap dog by signing up to this bullshit treaty in the first place. The Conservative ad campaign, back in the nineties, was right: New Labour, New Danger.

What's worse is those fucking weasels, David Blunkett, Tony Blair and the rest of the traitors in Her Majesty's Government got this through with no parliamentary discussion. They used an arcane part of the British Constitution to do, what you Americans would call, and 'end run' around the spirit of it (which is that any major change like this should be discussed in Parliament).

Sadly, I think the time to go Guy Fawkes on this bunch of pricks has passed. We should have done it in 2003, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next election when an even bigger arsehole will be voted in.

I'm not pissed off with Americans in general by the way. After all, I really enjoy posting on Slashdot (except for when it says: You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later. Arrrgh!), but frankly your government are dicks and my government are pussies. And dicks fuck pussies, right?

Seems much simpler / safer than this: http://damncoolpics.blogspot.com/2007/07/eye-tattoo.html

It's my personal opinion (and direct experience) that if you have to exercise to stay thin, there's crap in your diet that's making you gain weight. I used to be 230 pounds, now I'm 185 (which is about right for my height). The only exercise I get is 11 minutes of weight lifting (arms & legs only) twice a week. This I do for vanity only. But diet? That's where the magic is. Remove all man-made food from your diet, return to raw fruits & veggies & nuts & berries, cook 'em sometimes if you have to, cook your own meat, and avoid, to the greatest possible extent, anything that went through a manufacturing plant (you can tell because this stuff comes in boxes and cans). And keep this in mind: Almost anything you eat in a typical restaurant these days went through a manufacturing plant and arrived on a freezer truck.

With this incredibly restrictive diet (which consists of the stuff humanoids have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years, rather than the chemicals and such invented in the last 100 years), your body will return to the weight it naturally prefers. http://darwinshealth.blogspot.com/

By the way, the article was written largely in March of this year. In June I submitted a proposed epilogue mentioning a few bits of late breaking news on the 'equal access to justice' issue. The Judges' Journal didn't have room to add it in, but here it is.

They have to. If they didn't, they couldn't win a single case.

And they should be more concerned about justice and the proper use of the court system rather than just winning cases. The thing is, rather than pursuing the cases, they should be telling their clients (the RIAA members) that their cases are deficient and there's not enough real evidence to continue. That's what an ethical lawyer acting as an officer of the court would do. Instead, they prefer to cash those big checks and twist the system around in an attempt to actively hinder their chosen target's ability to receive justice in the courts. Worst of all, in some cases they are richly rewarded for having abused said system so skillfully.

Sorry, forgot slashdot doesn't convert urls:

Warbiking

Hey! It's "not" amusing to make "fun" of quotation marks. They even have their own "blog!"

Turns out "SYNC" isn't so hot either and has very MS-esque screwups. Check out that dude's review. I couldn't believe it:

1) Apprently, it claims podcast support, but doesn't actually, er, let you say, "play podcast X", like a reasonable person with a functioning brain would assume was possible -- manual supposedly doesn't even have much mention of podcasts, despite other literature I've seen claiming it supports podcasts, which implies some level of support beyond "can play whichever ones it feels like".
2) Can't quite tell without dimensions on the picture, but he reports the button you're supposed to hit to use the voice commands, requires your thumb to be in a contorted, irritating position to use.
3) You must -- as you probably guessed-- navigate through irritating menus every time you start, including a lecture about your (ahem) lacking metadata. Don't use pirated stuff on Microsoft products! Even if it's um, something you created yourself.
4) The special compartment, designed SPECIFICALLY to hold your iPod, leaves it in plain view for thieves.
5) If you hit the phone button when you don't have a phone with you or it's not been set up, that disables the car's audio system until you "reboot" the engine. WTF?

You're right--there's no doubt that they're hypocrites. What I wonder is whether they won that argument when the shoe was on the other foot? I don't have any way to see whether or not they won that particular point.

They won. The Court agreed that 10 times the actual damages was unconstitutional.

My position is that this is not distribution. You're still liable for copyright infringement, however, because you created the copies.

The copyright statute differentiates between distributing a work and offering to distribute it. In 17 U.S.C. 101, for example, "publication" is defined as either actual distribution or "offering to distribute." The two are not the same thing.

A copyright holder has several exclusive rights -- create copies, distribute a work, public performance, etc.... There is no exclusive right to "offer to distribute." There is only actual distribution.

That's my view -- the RIAA has a different view and courts have held both ways.

Bill Patry, copyright scholar, has a good post on the topic at his blog: http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2008/04/recent-making-available-cases.html

We deny the value of the lives of the animals we eat, we deny their feelings and their suffering,

It's not just animals. Plants have feelings and feel pain too! We need to learn how to make food artificially, without killing living things.

As the size of e-mail archives swells, corporations can take steps to manage and reduce the volume of what they retain. --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/04/reducing-volume-of-e-mail-archives.html

As the size of e-mail archives swells, corporations can take steps to manage and reduce the volume of what they retain. --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/04/reducing-volume-of-e-mail-archives.html

Ted, Thank your for your thoughtful reply. While I disagree about carbon credits and climate change, I do appreciate the consideration you put into your reply. You may enjoy my blog on green roofs, yes green roofs at http://www.cleanerairforcities.blogspot.com/ and also my management blog at http://www.managerqanda.blogspot.com/ Thank you for your time and reasoned reply.

Ted, Thank your for your thoughtful reply. While I disagree about carbon credits and climate change, I do appreciate the consideration you put into your reply. You may enjoy my blog on green roofs, yes green roofs at http://www.cleanerairforcities.blogspot.com/ and also my management blog at http://www.managerqanda.blogspot.com/ Thank you for your time and reasoned reply.

In other words, the only reason they've been getting away with this for so long is uninformed judiciary.

Not really. The only reason they've gotten this far is that there haven't been more defendants fighting back. Once properly briefed, the judges are getting wise to what is going on. E.g., compare this decision, against a litigant who had no representation, to the subsequent decision in the same case, rendered after the litigant and the Electronic Frontier Foundation brought some of the applicable authorities to the judge's attention, or take a look at Judge Davis's painful realization in Minnesota that he had been misled by the RIAA's lawyers into committing a "manifest error of law".

Probably, neither of the initial judicial errors would have occurred had the issue been properly briefed in the first place.

Ours is an adversary system of justice; only if defendants fight back will the truth come out.

In other words, the only reason they've been getting away with this for so long is uninformed judiciary.

Not really. The only reason they've gotten this far is that there haven't been more defendants fighting back. Once properly briefed, the judges are getting wise to what is going on. E.g., compare this decision, against a litigant who had no representation, to the subsequent decision in the same case, rendered after the litigant and the Electronic Frontier Foundation brought some of the applicable authorities to the judge's attention, or take a look at Judge Davis's painful realization in Minnesota that he had been misled by the RIAA's lawyers into committing a "manifest error of law".

Probably, neither of the initial judicial errors would have occurred had the issue been properly briefed in the first place.

Ours is an adversary system of justice; only if defendants fight back will the truth come out.

In other words, the only reason they've been getting away with this for so long is uninformed judiciary.

Not really. The only reason they've gotten this far is that there haven't been more defendants fighting back. Once properly briefed, the judges are getting wise to what is going on. E.g., compare this decision, against a litigant who had no representation, to the subsequent decision in the same case, rendered after the litigant and the Electronic Frontier Foundation brought some of the applicable authorities to the judge's attention, or take a look at Judge Davis's painful realization in Minnesota that he had been misled by the RIAA's lawyers into committing a "manifest error of law".

Probably, neither of the initial judicial errors would have occurred had the issue been properly briefed in the first place.

Ours is an adversary system of justice; only if defendants fight back will the truth come out.

I don't remember ever saying that I rejected quantum physics. Why the strawman?

Read your own blog, Mr. Troll. You *do* say that quantum physics is crackpottery. Please keep your ravings straight.

Do you people work for D-Waves? Or are you all ass kissers by nature?

I don't have any opinion on D-Waves. They are probably selling snake-oil. As for the personal attacks, you sure have an interesting blog and post history. Most trolls forget create a blog that advertises the fact (maybe they troll for kicks, but you seem to be after the page hits). From the blog's "about me", first item:

I am a crackpot and a crank. Those are my credentials.

The article states " Costello also claims that Cuil's Web crawler is three times faster than Google's" and not "three times as many". Google may be crawling as many as 1 trillion pages http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html while the cuil front page says something more like 121 billion.

The speed claim may or may not be true but crawling a trillion times three isn't as plausible unless you get a crawler that likes to crawl a lot of junk. :)

No. It is in no one's economic best interest to purchase anything that doesn't return benefits that can be achieved for a lower cost. This statement obviously doesn't account for taste or other irrational desires. Regarding Al Gore, his credibility comes into question whenever his lifestyle is viewed. As far as renewable energy is concerned, when the market makes it affordable "to the masses," it will be adopted. Until that time, fossil fuels offer the less expensive alternative. I discuss these general topics at http://www.economicefficiency.blogspot.com/

I hold you in the deepest regard, but it seems to me that you didn't answer the point in question, which is only whether agents of the copyright owner can be legally considered "the public". My understanding, from reading a lot of the material on your blog, is that they aren't.

(Your answer was equivalent to "for distribution to occur, A, B, C, and D must be all true, and they all aren't", whereas the question was whether C would be considered true for a download from Media Sentry. My apologies if you meant that none of A, B, C, and D were true.)

The damages owed by Exxon for the Valdez oil spill were recently limited and substantially reduced because the court found the original damages excessively punitive. So if it makes sense for Exxon perhaps it also makes sense to apply a similar theory of limitation of damages elsewhere.

You don't even need to go that far afield; one of the plaintiffs in Ms. Barker's case, UMG Recordings, Inc., made the very same argument when it was a defendant, saying that a jury verdict for 10 times the amount of the actual damages was excessive.

I.e., when it's a defendant a multiple of 10 is too much. But when it's a plaintiff, a multiple of 428,571 is okay.

Does the word "hypocrite" come to mind?

Here here! I can't say enough about nuclear, except that its expensive to get started. While there are some tax incentives and the regulations have been streamlined, getting the facility online is expensive. Here are two good article about that: http://economicefficiency.blogspot.com/2008/07/nuclear-american-style.html http://economicefficiency.blogspot.com/2008/07/nuclear-silver-bullet-or-money-pit.html

Here here! I can't say enough about nuclear, except that its expensive to get started. While there are some tax incentives and the regulations have been streamlined, getting the facility online is expensive. Here are two good article about that: http://economicefficiency.blogspot.com/2008/07/nuclear-american-style.html http://economicefficiency.blogspot.com/2008/07/nuclear-silver-bullet-or-money-pit.html

Every employer wants as much of your life as he can get - for as cheap as possible. My personal willingness to obey that wish relates proportionally to the perception of my compensation. I don't know about you but my perception is indeed influenced not only by my salary but also by the number of pool tables, arcade games, swimming pools and sexy female co-workers in the office. Furthermore I don't mind taking on responsible tasks like doing a massage interview every now and then, or so...

Also consider that pretty much all employers try to make you work long hours. Just normally instead of pool tables they use rigged "bonus programs", 360 peer reviews and other intimidation tactics. Maybe google has those, too? I don't know. But I guess having a pool table in the office (and being allowed to use it!) makes everything more bearable...

Yeah, um... because Linux provides things like the phone call I got today from a friend trying to load CentOS on a bog-standard machine with an ATI video card -- that it didn't fucking work. As always.

And of course, that's ATI and NVIDIA's fault for not releasing open-source drivers, because they want their products to actually WORK on real OS's that they fully support.

It's soooooo much better to have a machine that has 10 different applications for IM'ing people when your video card, webcam, and all your other hardware don't work right on a regular basis.

Dumb-ass... listen. Linux has obtained less than 2% of the desktop space after ten years of telling everyone that it's better. If your neighbor bragged this much about so little success, you'd call him an asshole. And you'd be right.

Mac fans are often DISGRUNTLED LINUX USERS who found a Unix-based OS that ... WORKS! Wow. Amazing.

Go read this guy LinuxHaters Blog and get a clue.

Linux is not better at anything WORTHWHILE. The applications that are GREAT on Linux run just fine on other platforms too, and your argument being based on how "great" Linux is just sounds like so much hot air.

People send money to Cupertino because their shit works. Take Linux, rip out the shit that doesn't work, make it work properly and keep the source for the changes to yourself, and you too can make millions. I swear. Try it.

People aren't clamoring for a real working Linux because they know only the geek down the street ever got it running, and had to listen to him bitch for six months that he "almost has the buttons on the mouse working the way they should" and "finally got the graphics card to do 3d acceleration" and whatever other lovely anecdotes the loser had for them that week.

And they realized? Fuck.. that guy's stupid. I bought a computer that works over at the Apple store last week, and certainly never had to fuck with any of THAT shit!

Same with long-time Linux users who got tired of the same old shit... they walked into Apple, plunked down some money, and walked out with something that they could both use, and also had a shell and Unix under the hood. Then they started porting the useful bits off of Linux onto their WORKING computer.

Go figure.

A friend of mine was studying using solar to heat salts, as the salts were very poor thermal conductors. I am reminded of the principle that when changing energy from one form to another, there is always loss. It is in this loss where we find costs. There is a blog http://www.economicefficiency.blogspot.com/ that talks about the cost of "green" technologies. I would like to see more discussion on those topics.

This is very typical of Al Gore and many of his ilk. While he is busy flying around in private jets and having his Lincoln idle for 20 minutes, he doesn't seem to have a clue about economics. I read a great series of pieces on how much many of these "green" technologies really cost. The site was http://www.economicefficiency.blogspot.com/ This was the same site that had "Hybrid Hummer Hums."

D-Wave's Quantum Computing Crackpottery

The whole field of quantum computing is crackpottery at best and an elaborate scam/hoax at worst. One man's opinion.