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http://techrunch.blogspot.com/2008/04/first-look-gimp-250.html Resulted in the jre kicking in on my machine and a bunch of virus mumbo-jumbo from my (crappy) avast software.

first time avast has ever found anything.

One is if the future of an organization is uncertain and it looks likely that it will fold.

The best term I have heard to describe that is the The Death Spiral

I have seen this happen to one company. They get money from investors, do an international job search to get good experienced programmers. But instead of putting together one good team, they try and get each experienced programmer to train up a whole load of entry-level programmers. A year later, the expected profits don't come in, so staff are fired and equipment is sold off. The experienced programmers have left out of principle because they were misled. By the time the company is left with two projects, there is nothing left of value for anyone to invest in and the company folds.

Under the law of privacy, there is a big difference between a human memory and a "record". Under privacy law, the formation of a human memory (about personally identifiable info such as a person's name or medical condition) is subject to much less regulation than is the creation and storage of a "record". Humans store memories; machines and robots store "records". Privacy law will regulate robots (and red light cameras) very differently from people. Generally, robots will be regulated much more strictly (if present trends in privacy law continue).--Ben

No HB1 students have murdered, maimed, decapitated, or blown themselves up yet, so let's give them more time! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

Forget that this is precious high technology that can, and has had spin-offs in the past.
Forget that Canada produced the world's first digital telecommunications satellite. Forget all the jobs and knowledge that will gradually melt south of the border. forget it.

It's much more basic than that. There is a long-time border dispute with the americans, we think the waters between arctic islands are Canadian waters, the US claims they aren't. The Americans have nuclear submarines, we don't. Now with the ice melting, http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=8df15e06-e40d-42da-b42e-61c0d0713260

there is a navigable channel shaping up that could take weeks off the time to ship from asia to europe. and there's oil up there, http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2006/01/arctic-circle-canadas-not-kidding.html
too.

One of the main uses of RADARSAT for Canada is to replace aerial reconnaissance for Ice forecasting. they can, I imagine, spot submarines as well, since the Americans, supposedly our closest ally, refused to launch them. So they were launched on Russian vehicles.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071025164751AAOF6Ur

http://www.studentsonice.com/blog/?p=79

We like our arctic, it is ours. We'd like the tax revenue from any oil that is pumped out of there. we'd like the revenue from a major shipping lane, so declaring it international waters is a problem for us. We can't afford to build nuclear submarines...

So it would be pretty @#%$@^%@ stupid to sell this company to a US arms manufacturer, which is, at the very least, clearly beholden to the US government for contracting.

Robots are information systems. Information systems raise privacy issues.

Soon many types of robots will be walking, rolling and flying around us. They will collect information about us and do other things that affect our privacy, our safety and our commercial relationships. Although legislatures will probably enact a raft of laws to regulate them, an abundance of civil law already exists to regulate their behavior. For example, as we humans come in contact with robots, we can form contracts with their owners to limit what they can do or set the rules for interaction.

Soon many types of robots will be walking, rolling and flying around us. They will collect information about us and do other things that affect our privacy, our safety and our commercial relationships. Although legislatures will probably enact a raft of laws to regulate them, an abundance of civil law already exists to regulate their behavior. For example, as we humans come in contact with robots, we can form contracts with their owners to limit what they can do or set the rules for interaction.

I would not ascribe malice on the part of Dr Chen.
Yale does not have a single unified campus and buildings are scattered all around New Haven.Chen works at the School of management, which is isolated physically from the rest of the campus. It is quite possible that he has not spoken to the other researchers in psychology.
I have also taken a class with Dr Chen, and he is a young, geeky looking guy who is hilariously funny and keeps joking about him and his PS3. So from personal experience, it appears unlikely that he is the kind of guy who'd pick fight for personal reasons. On the other hand he is fond of mathematical curiosities as applied to real life, here is my notes on some class where I disagreed with him. He took the time out to discuss the issue with me and explain it as much as he could (though I still don't understand why donating medical equipment to China is a bad idea).

Here ya go.

A friend of mine is investigating an interesting approach to spam.

From this article it quite clear that chasing the source of the spam is quite pointless.

His research is into tracking the destination.

Spams only make sense if they can make some money from it. This means the payload(content) must lead
someplace with a URL to order, a URL with adds, or a phone number for orders.

His blog is at:
http://spamdirect.blogspot.com/

I have to push him to post some of the more interesting stuff he has discussed in E-Mails with me.

One very odd note.
My domain unmailable.com get's no spam!
without any filters and addresses even posted publicly there is just no spam to it.
I think they must remove any mail reference to unmailable assuming it must not be a real domain.

I don't care what you say, free, over-the-air local DTV is the way to go. http://williambryson.blogspot.com/

OK now I do have documentation of violations of the cease and desist order in January and February, 2008, subsequent to the issuance of the January 2, 2008, cease and desist order, in LaFace v. Does 1-17.

Well in this instance you're more of a lawyer than I am. I made a big mistake, reading "2007" for "2008". Here is my corrected story and here is my retraction on Slashdot. Sorry about that.

Thing is, I have been advised by another source of a violation of the cease and desist order, but don't at this time have documentation in my possession.

HOLY COW, Bob9900..... you're 100% right. Yes I read the documents but I READ THEM WRONG, equating 2007 with 2008. I've published a correction. I apologize to all, and I am grateful to you for having brought it to my attention. The motion is based on past violations of the statute, not on violations of the cease and desist order. (However, I have been informed by a reliable source that MediaSentry has violated the cease and desist order, but do not, at this time, have documentation to back it up.)

MediaSentry was hired by the RIAA, not by MediaSentry. This was made clear in the declaration of the RIAA's Bradley Buckles in the UMG v. Lindor case.

HOLY COW, Bob9900..... you're 100% right. Yes I read the documents but I READ THEM WRONG, equating 2007 with 2008. I've published a correction. I apologize to all, and I am grateful to you for having brought it to my attention. The motion is based on past violations of the statute, not on violations of the cease and desist order. (However, I have been informed by a reliable source that MediaSentry has violated the cease and desist order, but do not, at this time, have documentation to back it up.)

MediaSentry was hired by the RIAA, not by MediaSentry. This was made clear in the declaration of the RIAA's Bradley Buckles in the UMG v. Lindor case.

There's a general rule that any subpoena has to have a good faith evidentiary basis. While most Slashdotters are aware that MediaSentry's "evidence" doesn't meet that standard, and the Oregon Attorney General certainly picked up on it, most judges -- in these ex parte discovery applications -- haven't. The fact that the evidence was procured through the commission of a crime may get Judge Gertner's attention, helping her to finally realize that the RIAA does NOT have a good faith evidentiary basis for its application.

There's a general rule that any subpoena has to have a good faith evidentiary basis. While most Slashdotters are aware that MediaSentry's "evidence" doesn't meet that standard, and the Oregon Attorney General certainly picked up on it, most judges -- in these ex parte discovery applications -- haven't. The fact that the evidence was procured through the commission of a crime may get Judge Gertner's attention, helping her to finally realize that the RIAA does NOT have a good faith evidentiary basis for its application.

The advantage of using dumb old radios is that you can operate independent of any fixed infrastructure, so it's usable even where you don't have cell coverage.

Tracking something small like a dog (I've had inquiries about kangaroos, too) introduces the problem of antenna placement, though. APRS is typically used on the 2-meter band, which means a quarter-wave vertical antenna is half a meter long. I did once put a passive data logger on my cat, and found that she roams a little more widely than I thought, but that doesn't really count.

The advantage of relatively low frequencies and high transmit power is that you can cover a radius of 20 miles from one mountaintop digipeater (equivalent to a cell site), and they're not difficult to make solar powered.

There's a nationwide digipeater network in the US, and most of Europe is covered as well, along with much of New Zealand, Australia, and many other countries. I think there are at least two APRS-capable satellites on orbit too, though PCSAT-1 is dying. Internet gateways are all over the place, so you can map APRS stations online, and not have to maintain any receive-side hardware of your own.

I'm constantly surprised by the applications people come up with for this stuff. The most recent I heard was someone with a cable TV company who found that he could drive around and transmit at low power every couple of seconds and use a receiver back at the headend to plot ingress leaks in the cable system.

Add to that the fact that you can do two-way text messaging, weather, and telemetry, and it's more than worth the hassle of taking a simple multiple-choice license exam. It's this sort of thing that's going to save ham radio (if anything can) - talking to people around the world just doesn't interest people as much these days, when it's so easy to do on the Internet or the phone.

Just thought people might get a giggle out of the April fools joke we did saying NIH was cracking down on Brain Doping among scientists which was covered in the Nature article about their survey. The original post and related posts on the April 1 joke are here . You can see the Fake NIH Press Release there too. In addition we created a fake web site for the "World Anti Brain Doping Authority" More background on the joke is here

Just thought people might get a giggle out of the April fools joke we did saying NIH was cracking down on Brain Doping among scientists which was covered in the Nature article about their survey. The original post and related posts on the April 1 joke are here . You can see the Fake NIH Press Release there too. In addition we created a fake web site for the "World Anti Brain Doping Authority" More background on the joke is here

Yes I would. I don't know if you follow what the WADA is doing in sports. Try:

http://rant-your-head-off.com/WordPress/
http://wadawatch.blogspot.com/

One major problem is just the attitude that you sight, which is that drugs are assumed to provide performance enhancement, but yet no studies have been done on how much if any affect this is in different sports, which lead to overly broad and abusive enforcement.

Until we have done the studies, you can't say that any drug is performance enhancing in any given endeavor because there is no evidence to support the statement. Lots of people, even if smart and even if scientists, doing something does not provide scientific evidence until it has been properly controlled etc.

I went to a lecture by memory expert Tom Coughlin, who predicted that lifelogging would dramatically increase consumer memory demands in the coming years. He pointed to a product Vievu. You can read a more thorough discussion of the lecture here

• http://libregamewiki.org/Main_Page
• http://wiki.freegamedev.net/index.php/Complete,_non-casual_open_source_games
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=427205

The above links are from a posting on http://freegamer.blogspot.com/ - I'm not sure if there are any decent split screen games in those lists, apart from running commercial console games in emulators, but there should be a decent amount of entertainment there if you count everything else.

As for the GP2X, if you place a higher priority on commercial games than on owning an open platform, by all means buy a DS or a PSP, since I would assume that the GP2X's useful software is mostly free ports of games from other platforms, as well as independently produced games for the GP2X and similar devices. I don't have one myself, I got a Nokia N800 instead, which isn't good for gaming, but is good for reading, listening to music, and browsing the web over 802.11g.

Oh, they plan to.

I couldn't, for whatever reason, find a non-blog source for this, but:
http://arnaldolicea.blogspot.com/2008/04/pixar-release-schedule.html

Toy Story, Toy Story 2 are planned, but I'm sure if they are successful they will revisit more and 3-D-ify them.

-Lee

There is another vulnerability, a PoC has been published some months ago:

http://2wire-poc.blogspot.com/

http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/27516

Yup, and for some more numbers and some good commentary on this, check out this post from EU Referendum: 'A world gone mad'.

Olympic Dam is a copper mine. When the expanded production reaches full capacity in 2015 or so, 450,000 tons of copper metal will be produced annually.
There is a little bit of uranium, gold, and a couple of other things mixed into the orebody which are valuable too, so they extract them as well when the copper ore is processed.
It's a homogeneous orebody - the uranium and copper and things are all mixed together, so it is impossible to mine the copper without mining uranium, too.
For that 450,000 tons of copper metal that will be produced, only about 14,000 tons of uranium oxide will be produced. The uranium is only a byproduct.
Remember - without copper being mined out of the ground, no electricity of any kind, clean, green or not, can be generated, distributed or used. Without production of aluminium metal, a popular target of so-called environmentalists, electricity transmission over overhead cables cannot be done.
Even since the stone age or the bronze age, mining has been integral to the existence of our technological civilisation. Even as we move to clean sources of energy to power our technological civilisation, such as geothermal and nuclear energy, mining will always be essential.
Now, the expanded mine will consume 690 megawatts of electrical power, on average.
A typical nuclear power reactor generating 1 gigawatt of electricity requires an amount of uranium fuel corresponding to about 200 tons of natural uranium in the form of uranium oxide per year.
So, Olympic Dam will consume 690 megawatts of electricty - and it will produce enough uranium in one year to generate 70 gigawatts of electricity for one year - over one hundred times the total power consumption of the mine.

Have you ever tried to hold a camcorder to your LCD while you adjust the brightness? -- You would notice that streaks of colour and flicker increases as you reduce the brightness which can contribute to bad eye sight - what you should do instead is increase the brightness and use your display adaptor controls to reduce the brightness.

Sure this would reduce your contrast ratio, but save your eyes.

See this page for flicker details for those nice expensive 2408WFP monitors: http://monitortest.blogspot.com/

There are many more exploits other than change the password field (DNS changes, resetting a password to default/custom et cetera) - however you can create workaround by changing your private network range and disabling the 2WIRE default hostnames. http://oleksiygayda.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-protect-your-2wire-router-from.html

The simple mathematics are that if something is being used faster then it is created, it will reach zero.

And therein lies the fundamental error. First off, you're not using "oil"; you're using gasoline or diesel or any number of refined products. You pull up light sweet crude, and it's pretty close to what you want out; you don't have to refine it much. You pull up sour crude, heavy crude, ultra-heavy crude, or even bitumen, and you've got a big refining task ahead of you. You cook oil out of keragenous rock like shale, and you're doing even more organic chemistry. Ultimately, you can make oil simply from CO or CO2, plus water for the H2, plus energy, via Fisher-Tropsch or Sabatier synthesis. In short, for oil to be able to *physically* run out, you need "peak energy" to occur.

Of course, the doomers make lots of other arguments. They're easily taken down, though. And I do mean "doomers". The more extreme ones are sort of a death cult.

The fonts in mac Leopard have gone from being pure shades of grey or pigment to polychomatic blends. Your eye reads them as a single color but the blend has a much less jagged appearance.

You can see an example here

Standing across the room and looking at the blow ups on that page I linked to two things are apparent. 1) you can't see the colors and 2) the color one looks more uniform (look at the upper part of the C) and more bold (look at the leg and curve of the R).

My guess is this. You can have more bold if you use colors because if two letters are adjacent in grey then a dark grey bold would bleed together but on these letters red is on the left and blue on the right so dark red and dark blue still have a contrast.

In the eye the ganglia are set up to sharpen edges of contrasting regions. So my guess is that this principle works for the cones as well as the rods meaning that the contrast between the red and blue separation is enhanced even if they have the same grey level.

This is really sad because there is already so much confusion among the population about the digital television transition. I'll keep tracking the dtv transition progress on my blog (http://williambryson.blogspot.com/) and help visitors with their questions. The questions I receive reflect the mass confusion that exists about this whole process. But scum like this should be nailed to the wall IMHO.

Top 5 Reasons Blu Ray will never be in my home. (follow up)

Top 5 Reasons Blu Ray will never be in my home. (follow up)

Top 5 Reasons Blu Ray will never be in my home. (follow up)

But at no cost, what do I really have to lose?

Well, if it's anything like some other Google sites, your entire site, if (after a couple years or so) they decide to change their terms of service:

http://lastgoogle.blogspot.com/

That said, I'm looking forward to trying this out. But I'm not planning to use it for anything I consider too important or can't keep mirrored on my own system. Be careful.

Wow more microsoft vs. yahoo drama... I hope microsoft just buys yahoo already so I don't hear about this anymore.

Please check out my website for ways to make money online
http://mikesmoneyclub.blogspot.com/

While CAPA and PLA are the primary materials, there are also experiments with ABS, at:
http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2008/04/absolution.html

and HDPE, at:
http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2008/03/hdpe-pu.html

At this point the extruder can extrude any thermoplastic with a melting point of less than 200 Celcius. A high temperature extruder made of stainless steel is being worked on, and if it works it would be able to extrude the full range of thermoplastics. That experiment is at:
http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2008/03/high-temperature-extruder.html

There is work on high resolution printing, like at:
http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?1,10726

The priority, however, is making something that can make the majority of itself. Because then you can make the custom parts needed for high resolution printing cheaply; for a typical material cost of twenty dollars, rather than having to order several hundred dollars of parts just for an experiment.

For fun stuff that can be built with low resolution plastic, hopefully I'll be able to print a small kayak next summer:)

While CAPA and PLA are the primary materials, there are also experiments with ABS, at:
http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2008/04/absolution.html

and HDPE, at:
http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2008/03/hdpe-pu.html

At this point the extruder can extrude any thermoplastic with a melting point of less than 200 Celcius. A high temperature extruder made of stainless steel is being worked on, and if it works it would be able to extrude the full range of thermoplastics. That experiment is at:
http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2008/03/high-temperature-extruder.html

There is work on high resolution printing, like at:
http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?1,10726

The priority, however, is making something that can make the majority of itself. Because then you can make the custom parts needed for high resolution printing cheaply; for a typical material cost of twenty dollars, rather than having to order several hundred dollars of parts just for an experiment.

For fun stuff that can be built with low resolution plastic, hopefully I'll be able to print a small kayak next summer:)

While CAPA and PLA are the primary materials, there are also experiments with ABS, at:
http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2008/04/absolution.html

and HDPE, at:
http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2008/03/hdpe-pu.html

At this point the extruder can extrude any thermoplastic with a melting point of less than 200 Celcius. A high temperature extruder made of stainless steel is being worked on, and if it works it would be able to extrude the full range of thermoplastics. That experiment is at:
http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2008/03/high-temperature-extruder.html

There is work on high resolution printing, like at:
http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?1,10726

The priority, however, is making something that can make the majority of itself. Because then you can make the custom parts needed for high resolution printing cheaply; for a typical material cost of twenty dollars, rather than having to order several hundred dollars of parts just for an experiment.

For fun stuff that can be built with low resolution plastic, hopefully I'll be able to print a small kayak next summer:)

That stinks for gmail users...

Check out my site for ways to make easy cash online.
http://www.mikesmoneyclub.blogspot.com/

So I popped over to Lott's website like you suggested, and lo what do I find prominently highlighted... clear evidence that guns save lives...


HOUSTON -- ...
"Two suspects walked in the store and attempted to rob, or did rob the convenience store," Sgt. J. Rubio said. ...
Police said Dan was pistol-whipped and forced to put his hands on the floor and lie down. Dan opened fire on the men as they left the store, investigators said.
The man who was shot died out in front of the convenience store, officials said. His name was not released.
Police said they found a stack of cash and a handgun near the body. . . .

http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/

Oh wait... how does that support your theory that guns save lives again? Or even increase security for that matter?

At the end of the day, he still got robbed despite having a gun, and we now have a guy dead over some petty cash from a till, probably less than 100 bucks if they were operating under standard convenience store cash handling practices. And the clerk shot someone in the back, putting everyone in the vicinity at risk, when the damage had ALREADY been done and his safety was no longer even in question -- they were LEAVING when he shot them!! Yeah, I'm sure glad he had a gun. Really saved the day there. I feel safer already.

So this is what you and Lott support?

If that's your idea of a justification for gun ownership... you fail miserably, both of you.

oh the irony of a hebrew research center practicing eugenics.

How's that ironic? The Ashkenazi have been selecting (the purposefulness is debated) for intelligence for quite a long time, and are now generally more intelligent on average than the average humnan. It's speculated that this is tied up with their higher than average proportion of genetic diseases.

They've been recently using outright eugenics to eliminate their genetic diseases. Whether this has a negative pressure on their intelligence curve remains to be seen (by our descendants, not us).

Oh, sure, there are probably PhDs out there blogging. Okay, okay, I'm kidding - I sincerely doubt it - unless they were useless in their fields to begin with.