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See this post at Weatherall's Law.

Q: So, does this decision settle Australian law when it comes to the legality of circumventing 'technical measures' like those used by Sony in this case?

A: No, the law isn't settled, because under the FTA we have to change our anti-circumvention laws by 1 January 2007. In fact, the new laws are currently being drafted, and discussed by a Parliamentary Committee

Q: Well, does this decision at least mean mod-chipping is legal in the meantime?

A: Well, no. Even that is not clear, because the meaning of 'reproduction' has changed from 1 January 2005, so that it's possible to argue now, post FTA, that a 'reproduction' of the computer program is made in a Sony console when a pirated game is played. And that means it could be argued that the Sony measure is now a technological protection measure, even though on 31 December 2004 it wasn't

Q: So, the law isn't settled by this High Court decision, and it's even possible that Stevens' activities are illegal under the new law. So is this the least important High Court decision ever rendered on copyright law?

Of course, fair use would be better than what we have now, when there's hardly an Australian who doesn't violate the law by loading songs into their iPod. Heck, I wonder how many members of Parliament have one...

In Virginia, Level 3 destroyed people's property without getting their permission. They keep trying to get the power of eminent domain to get land for free.

Here are some related links:

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/xp-14617
http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/opnscvwp/10 40481.pdf
http://swvalaw.blogspot.com/2004/11/are-we-back-in -business.html

Level 3 is just plain evil.

http://overat.blogspot.com/2004/09/desktop-pc-vend ors.html

Anyway, there are several dispatches about snipers, UAVs, counter battery radar, ....

How do you "hack" the terrorist mind? The 1-24th infantry regiment created 'social engineering' traps (honeypots?) for terrorists and terrorist snipers. For example a fake IED explosion with fake US casualties and a scrap US Army vehicle created a lure for both the terrorists and the media stringers ...

The Deuce Four soldiers left quickly with the "casualties," "abandoning" the burning truck in the traffic circle. The enemy took the bait. Terrorists came out and started with the AK-rifle-monkey-pump, shooting into the truck, their own video crews capturing the moment of glory. That's when the American snipers opened fire and killed everybody with a weapon. Until now, only insiders knew about the AK-monkey-pumpers smack-down.

Mike Yon's "Ground Truth" dispatches

MilBloggers

Belmont Club's - a 30,000-foot view of what is going on

Armor Geddon - a John's Hopkins neuroscience grad (?) who gave it all up to drive tanks and blow stuff up - cool video also

Blackfive - a freak who enjoys jumping out of planes

countless others; although Hugh Hewitt gives a decent review of such here

Anyway, there are several dispatches about snipers, UAVs, counter battery radar, ....

How do you "hack" the terrorist mind? The 1-24th infantry regiment created 'social engineering' traps (honeypots?) for terrorists and terrorist snipers. For example a fake IED explosion with fake US casualties and a scrap US Army vehicle created a lure for both the terrorists and the media stringers ...

The Deuce Four soldiers left quickly with the "casualties," "abandoning" the burning truck in the traffic circle. The enemy took the bait. Terrorists came out and started with the AK-rifle-monkey-pump, shooting into the truck, their own video crews capturing the moment of glory. That's when the American snipers opened fire and killed everybody with a weapon. Until now, only insiders knew about the AK-monkey-pumpers smack-down.

Mike Yon's "Ground Truth" dispatches

MilBloggers

Belmont Club's - a 30,000-foot view of what is going on

Armor Geddon - a John's Hopkins neuroscience grad (?) who gave it all up to drive tanks and blow stuff up - cool video also

Blackfive - a freak who enjoys jumping out of planes

countless others; although Hugh Hewitt gives a decent review of such here

Anyway, there are several dispatches about snipers, UAVs, counter battery radar, ....

How do you "hack" the terrorist mind? The 1-24th infantry regiment created 'social engineering' traps (honeypots?) for terrorists and terrorist snipers. For example a fake IED explosion with fake US casualties and a scrap US Army vehicle created a lure for both the terrorists and the media stringers ...

The Deuce Four soldiers left quickly with the "casualties," "abandoning" the burning truck in the traffic circle. The enemy took the bait. Terrorists came out and started with the AK-rifle-monkey-pump, shooting into the truck, their own video crews capturing the moment of glory. That's when the American snipers opened fire and killed everybody with a weapon. Until now, only insiders knew about the AK-monkey-pumpers smack-down.

Mike Yon's "Ground Truth" dispatches

MilBloggers

Belmont Club's - a 30,000-foot view of what is going on

Armor Geddon - a John's Hopkins neuroscience grad (?) who gave it all up to drive tanks and blow stuff up - cool video also

Blackfive - a freak who enjoys jumping out of planes

countless others; although Hugh Hewitt gives a decent review of such here

Anyway, there are several dispatches about snipers, UAVs, counter battery radar, ....

How do you "hack" the terrorist mind? The 1-24th infantry regiment created 'social engineering' traps (honeypots?) for terrorists and terrorist snipers. For example a fake IED explosion with fake US casualties and a scrap US Army vehicle created a lure for both the terrorists and the media stringers ...

The Deuce Four soldiers left quickly with the "casualties," "abandoning" the burning truck in the traffic circle. The enemy took the bait. Terrorists came out and started with the AK-rifle-monkey-pump, shooting into the truck, their own video crews capturing the moment of glory. That's when the American snipers opened fire and killed everybody with a weapon. Until now, only insiders knew about the AK-monkey-pumpers smack-down.

Mike Yon's "Ground Truth" dispatches

MilBloggers

Belmont Club's - a 30,000-foot view of what is going on

Armor Geddon - a John's Hopkins neuroscience grad (?) who gave it all up to drive tanks and blow stuff up - cool video also

Blackfive - a freak who enjoys jumping out of planes

countless others; although Hugh Hewitt gives a decent review of such here

Anyway, there are several dispatches about snipers, UAVs, counter battery radar, ....

How do you "hack" the terrorist mind? The 1-24th infantry regiment created 'social engineering' traps (honeypots?) for terrorists and terrorist snipers. For example a fake IED explosion with fake US casualties and a scrap US Army vehicle created a lure for both the terrorists and the media stringers ...

The Deuce Four soldiers left quickly with the "casualties," "abandoning" the burning truck in the traffic circle. The enemy took the bait. Terrorists came out and started with the AK-rifle-monkey-pump, shooting into the truck, their own video crews capturing the moment of glory. That's when the American snipers opened fire and killed everybody with a weapon. Until now, only insiders knew about the AK-monkey-pumpers smack-down.

Mike Yon's "Ground Truth" dispatches

MilBloggers

Belmont Club's - a 30,000-foot view of what is going on

Armor Geddon - a John's Hopkins neuroscience grad (?) who gave it all up to drive tanks and blow stuff up - cool video also

Blackfive - a freak who enjoys jumping out of planes

countless others; although Hugh Hewitt gives a decent review of such here

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2005 /10/oregon-riaa-victim-fights-back-sues.html

And I loved your joke the first time that I read it, too, but I wrote about it seriously a couple of weeks ago. I want one on my web server!

o Clustering and Load Balancing on the fly!

o Host your own services, radio stations, et all

OK OK I know you're not ready for it all yet, I just VERY glad that a HUGE PUBLIC will have the experience of working on OpenOffice like WebOffice Suite THUS making it easier to accelerate the pace of desktop migrations to Linux, for instance...

A while ago, I started a blogspot entitled Our Technological Future.

As an opening blogpost, I posted my selfwritten Singularity FAQ For Dummies.

It can be found here for those interested:

http://jwbats.blogspot.com/2005/07/singularity-faq -for-dummies.html

It is meant to be introductory material for those who don't know what The Singularity is yet, and want their information nice and compact.

Read my TrueCrypt/Autoplay howto here.

OT but, perchance are you referring to the practice of destroying musical recordings during the mastering phase via killing the signal with limiters and cranking it up to constantly fill all the available headroom on a CD (or other digital medium)?

Now that is the industry-destroying practice that the RIAA should fight against with all their might, IMHO...

I predicted it long loooong ago.

I've read his 'singularity' theory before, and I think it's fundamentally flawed. *Nothing* can uphold an exponential grow-curve, I think this has been established more then once; it's like claiming a perpetuum mobile exists. Well, it doesn't.

Futurologists *always* make the same mistake; they start from the current technologies, and then extrapolate this into the future...which is a sure way to get it completely wrong most of the time. I have given some analysis and criticism (see Gazing the Future) of this typical 'futurology'-tendency before.

Sure, for obvious technologies and the near future, extrapolation can and does work, and is quite often pretty good at it. But, truth be told; it's not what is known today that really changes the future, it's those things that *are not known*. If you go back and look at futurologists of the 60ies making predictions of how the world will look today, then you'll notice they have been over-optimistic in many area's, and most notable, they *COMPLETELY* missed those technologies that really had the most (or most widely applied) influence on modern society. Oh yes, you will see space-tourism...but todays space-tourism of millionaires paying 20 million wasn't the picture they presented. And they 'predicted' many things, which did - at least to some (mostly minor) degree - get developed today. But...where in all those predictions do you find the PC, the cellurar phone, the Internet, etc? Back in the 60ies, no one could even *imagine* such things, and in fact, no futurologist ever can, and that's why they always suck at predicting how the technology, let alone the future will look, or what will happen.

As for this 'singularity'; ah well, we've been hearing the 'longelivity' mantra for decennia, if not longer, and I suspect the '300+' age will still be hundreds of years away past his 'singularity' point. If that point will ever happen, because, apart from unforseen events (a metorite could strike and the human race could be wiped out tommorow, after all), it is inhertently impossible to keep expanding at an exponantial rate, because, even if there isn't another dark-age period (something he conveniently leaves out in his theory of always expanding knowledge, but, in fact, if his proclaimed continuous increase would have hold true from the roman times on, we would be *way* ahead of where we are today - how does this fit his hypothesis?), it sooner or later would still crawl to a more moderate rate, because of sociological, economical and other problems. The most aparent thing to happen, for instance, is a lack of sufficient energy (technology needs energy, after all). We already have an increasing problem with having enough energy to sustain our western civilisation today, after all, and this will only augment; our craving for energy always gets worse, but the energy production isn't following. And sure, we'll find some solutions, like fusion-reactors, eventually; but the increase of energy will never be exponential, and thus, neither will technology on itself, or our scientific and technological progress as a whole.

Google is an advertising - why would you voluntarily give them your information? Theres an article about it already here http://internet-addict.blogspot.com/

Linux lovers who care about freedom might want to avoid Matalan, because it makes all shoppers join a compulsory ID card scheme. You can't simply buy stuff anonymously. Yes, I have tried. Other cut-price stores.

Even our former, ID-card-loving, Home Secretary, David Blunkett, spoke out on the dangers of store cards because of the amount of personal information collected.

The RIAA is getting a taste of its own meds.

Oregon RIAA Victim Fights Back; Sues RIAA for Electronic Trespass, Violations of Computer Fraud & Abuse, Invasion of Privacy, RICO, Fraud

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/

A company that migrated from Microsoft Windows to Linux on the desktop has praised the open source operating system's stability.

Günter Stoverock, the data processing manager at German import company Heinz Tröber, said on Thursday his firm had decided against running its ERP software on Windows as it considered it less stable than the open source alternative.

How long has slashdot been around anyway? These stories were there in the first 2 years of slashdot.

Think!

The latest versions of GIMP (the open-source graphics software) and Blogger (Google's blogging tool) are chock-full of improvements. I use both of them on a daily basis for my blog (http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/)

An Oregon woman, Tanya Andersen, has countersued against the RIAA, in Atlantic v. Andersen. She has demanded a jury trial, and is suing for fraud, invasion of privacy, electronic process, Oregon RICO violations and other things.

I think you'll be pleased to learn that an Oregon woman has countersued the RIAA, under Oregon's RICO act, and numerous other laws. And she's demanded a jury trial. Recording Industry vs. The People

Think!

Regardless of whether any given person hates Microsoft, or merely dislikes them, or doesn't even know that they exist (and think the Windows is "the computer" and IE "the Internet"), you would be rather hard pressed to find a person outside of Redmond that actually feels the warm fuzzies for Microsoft. And, judging from people like Mini-Microsoft, those people seem to grow fewer even inside Redmond.

So WHY do you have exactly the same 'Linux is *not* user friendly' comment on your blog? WHY do you complain about the same issue in at least one of your comments? You are the one who sends these comments. Just admit it and stop posting that crap. Easy!

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I wonder what the specifics of Joss's Fox agreement are? One commenter in my blog noted that Joss may be contractually barred from making further TV shows, but surely there is a way.

a Kung Fu Monkey blog entry from a month ago said this:

Kevin Drum recently quoted a study which re-iterated that there's no "real" advantage to buying a hybrid. It's only just as convenient - so if you're driving a hybrid, you're doing it for some other reason than financial incentive.

That made me think: what a perfect example of just how fucking useless as a society we've become. We can't even bring ourselves to do the right thing when it's only JUST as convenient as doing the wrong thing. And that's not even considered odd. Even sadder.

Bless you if you got the dough to purchase Photoshop, but GIMP, run on my Windows PC, works like magic. With its "Script-Fu" function you can create logos in literally seconds.

I use GIMP to create "faux" movie posters for my website (http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/).

Illegally according to who?

The Constitution of the People's Republic of China, that's who. What do you think I sat up all night writing about, my cat?

Unfortunately I moved to the Gulf Coast the week before Katrina, to work for a local casino. Here's a list of some of the supplies we've found invaluable for personal and professional computer recovery work:

1. CAT5 and an unmanaged switch
a. Either have a dozen sets of various lengths
b. Bring a box of cable & a crimping tool
2. Gaffers tape (duct tape leaves residue all over the place, gaff won't)
3. USB Keys (I can't tell you how invaluable these are!)
4. USB hard drives (I have a 250Gb with dozens of .iso images and gigs upon gigs of "personal files" people would store on their local machines)
5. Small KVM (I use a 4-port from Belkin)
6. Small computer toolkit (I use a 55 piece kit from Belkin)
7. USB external drive kit/enclosure (I use it to pop drives out of computers, then connect the bare drive to my laptop via the USB enclosure and this thing has been a lifesaver)
8. Leatherman (of course)
9. Cellular connection (I use T-Mobile and a v330 that has been getting me connected at nearly ISDN speeds)
9. TETANUS SHOT!

Sidenote, I (currently) live off E. Second Street in Pass Christian, MS, and in my area (about 2 miles EAST of downtown) we have power and water. Food is easy to come by thanks to the generous relief efforts of churches such as yours. However downtown Pass Christian is obliterated. It is unimaginably ruined and will be years before businesses or residents are able to have a "normal" life there. The area simply must be leveled and everything rebuilt from scratch. The level of destruction is so complete that very few, if any, locations can be "repaired."

Also, you don't need boots. I didn't have any and haven't worn any and I've been climbing through anything and everything for a month. Converse has served me well! And you don't need any other "survival" supplies. There is plenty of water and food and shelter. Right now we just need sheer manpower and (for complex technology-related issues) expertise. If you want to do home repair work, bring your power tools. If you want to help recover PCs, bring your tech tools.

Finally, thank you. I say that 50 times a day. To the FEMA guys who helped 3400 people at my casino fill out their paper work, to the linemen who came from North Dakota to restore power to our neighborhood, to the CableOne crew who connected a new connection for our office, to the Bellsouth repairmen who hooked up my grandparents line on their only day off in three weeks, to the National Guardsmen from Arkansas who gave us water and ice for two weeks, to the Cops from Winter Park FL who patrolled our areas at night to keep out looters, and to the endless churches who brought food and HOPE to us when we needed it the most.
-Jon

Hopefully this will get thrown out the same way the lexmark case did. It's obvious these companies are just doing this to make money knowing there really isn't anything wrong with it. --http://www.kunae.blogspot.com/

This is very old news. Infact, I had blogged about it way back in april. You may read my post here - http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/04/100-laptops- running-linux.html

But I am really excited about the $100 laptops. This is the right way to go if you want to bring computing to the masses. Infact, in India, we had a project called simputer (a palm top device which can also be connected to the internet). But it was bogged down by hiccups and never really took off. And the price was more than $100.

you can view entire copyrighted works via Google's service.

But sometimes, you just want a little silence. For example, if you're building a home-theater PC, you'll want as quiet a system as possible.

Well, that would have been nice to be able to recommend when I wrote this article. I had also recommended an Asus GeForce 6600, albeit one that didn't cost quite as much. For myself (not being an audiophile), the cheaper card works fine as it rarely spins up to any noticable volume while I'm watching TV. I can understand, though, that for others the background noise can be very annoying.

As you can see, the card is actually designed to take advantage of a preexisting CPU cooling fan to blow air over the passive radiator. If you have a standard active cooling mount, then this is an innovative idea. But it does limit your choice of CPU coolers. For one thing, your processor heat sink can't be taller than the bottom of the card.

So what they're saying is that the ASUS Star Ice Jet Engine^W^W CPU Fan isn't going to work with this card? What a shocker. ;-)

(No, I won't let go of it. I've still got mine sitting on my desk, just so I can get all the "What the hell is that?" comments. )

Nvidia's upcoming Release 80 drivers include a number of enhancements for HDTV, including the ability to minimize overscan problems, something which has plagued home-theater PCs for years.

This reminds me, has anyone had any experience with this or any other HDTV-compatible cards that don't cost an arm and a leg? I'm still avoiding HD for now, but it's likely to catch eventually. To date I haven't seen too many inexpensive HDTV tuner cards. Then again, maybe I'm not looking hard enough?

My home team, Cornell, is currently in second place at the qualifiers, knocking only over one cone on the obstacle course.

You can read their blog here, or find their website (with technology writeups) here.

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I mentioned AjaxOffice (ajaxoffice.sourceforge.net) in my recent entry about this.

Even though firefox is said now not to be more secure and things of that nature because it is open source it has and will become better faster. I use my flash drive to carry around a copy of portable firefox with me where ever I go so I always have my prefrences, extensions and bookmarks. I wouldn't give it up for the world. This is only possible because they have made it open source. =) -- http://www.kunae.blogspot.com/

I actually ordered a nano a couple of days ago but decide to cancel to wait this out. See if apple makes any more changes to the nano to improve its durability. I hope they do, it's a nice piece of hardware! -- http://www.kunae.blogspot.com/

It's been done :) http://kassemi.blogspot.com/#112620201948714629

that Google will come out with it's Online GoogleOffice Suite here and eventually a Web Deployable OS with unstructured XML DB will soon be reality. Like I say, People will make lot's of Software, it's the impeccable timing of Google, that will make their products shine, be it Office products or others.

Here is a description of the one used in India: http://www.eci.gov.in/EVM/index.htm

Here is a comparision between the Deibold and the Indian EVM system:http://techaos.blogspot.com/2004/05/indian- evm-compared-with-diebold.html

Here is a wikipedia article on it:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_mach ines

Implementing a system like this can make it so much easier to count votes and do it quickly too.

Wow, good point. It almost makes me want to read my novel.

Engadget also has coverage of the plans.

Evolution port for OSX is already in progress according to Novell
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2005 -March/msg00592.html
working with fink
http://primates.ximian.com/~aaron/doing/evo-osx.ht ml

While Tor Lillqvist and few others works on Windows port
http://evolution-win32.sourceforge.net/newsrss.php
screenshots
http://tml-blog.blogspot.com/2005/06/evolution-lim ps-along-on-windows-and.html

How are blogs any different from "personal web pages" (remember "home pages"?) I just wish they'd get better WYSIWYG editing and image uploading (no, I do not want to use Hello or imageshack-- I just want to drag and drop, or at worse, click Browse...) I do agree however, that the sheer number of blogs is a bit rediculous.

Google should think up a way to segregate the opinion-oriented blogs from the actual informative websites out there. The danger is that genuinely useful websites will be drowned out in whiney teenagers complaining about how much they hate everyone else. Or something, I don't read blogs much. Neither should you.

[offtopic]
Ideally, I'd want to see Microsoft FrontPage-like functionality totally within a web page. (Ahem, Bill, can you hear me?) Anyone know any open-source products that do website editing online?
[/offtopic]