Slashdot Mirror

I wonder what they'll do in what looks like the increasingly likely case that they won't get an orbiter? Maybe a Buran?

Only if they have a lot of time to reconstruct one. While I do not know the ultimate fate of the Buran, but judging from the last photos, I suspect it's in a landfill. Such a shame.

I'm going to miss the shuttle. I watched the first one go up on television at five years old. I had a copy the local newspaper proclaiming the launch in my room for decades. It is/was not a rocket, but an actual honest to god space ship. Yes it has it's problem. Yes, the requirements were repeatedly changed and made more stupid. Yes, being able to return cargo from space wasn't really needed. It's a construction vehicle. And while I'm now critic of the manned space program[*], I'm going to miss it. It's like we've taken a big step backwards back 50 years. As someone said (and I really wish I could find the quote), "I always knew I'd see the first man step foot on the moon. I just never realized I'd see the last as well."

[*] Until there's a reason to send humans into space, why bother? It's far, inhospitable, and boring, and colonization is nigh-impossible and driven by pulp fiction fantasies and crass appeals to emotion, not reason. Astroid mining? Come back when iron and nickel are rare, or they find a solid gold nugget.

John McAfee, eccentric bad-boy founder of the McAffee antivirus company, is in Belized: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/21/lawsuit-plagued-mcaf.html

If not that, sure would be cool to come up with some type of targeting system that would aim a laser into the camera lens and blinding it as you go by.

Maybe, but probably not. They found the rest of the set of books, minus the volumes that Washington borrowed. I suppose it could be a coincidence, but it would appear that Mr. Washington's estate owes the NYPL a great deal of money, and their book back.

Sadly for them, the will already passed probate and it's too late to press their claim.

The library went to a lot of trouble to prove that their records from the 18th century are probably a bit inaccurate. It could have been as simple as a star-struck librarian forgetting to update the register.

Maybe, but probably not. They found the rest of the set of books, minus the volumes that Washington borrowed. I suppose it could be a coincidence, but it would appear that Mr. Washington's estate owes the NYPL a great deal of money, and their book back.

"No-one's talking about it" - er, except http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/17/so-far-icelandic-vol.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+(Boing+Boing) et cetera et cetera

Nobody seems to be talking about the effect that this volcano will have of the weather. Previous large eruptions have caused mini ice ages.

BoingBoing brought it up. They say it's too early to be certain, but so far, the latitude of the eruption seems to be high enough that the ash isn't going to block enough solar radiation to cause any noticeable impact. They point out how eruptions at high latitudes, even huge ones like Mt. St. Helens, have very little impact on climate, whereas smaller ones at low latitudes have a much larger one.

http://boingboing.net/2005/11/09/sonys-eula-is-worse-.html

Yeah because it's not like EULAs are habitually some of the most absurd overreaching screw-your-rights documents ever made...

They could require the deployment of chipped banking cards.

And this is where most of the problem has been caused. The belief that if we put those RFID chips in our bank cards, they must become safer. The problem is, it's the chip that is the biggest security issue since its RFID it's 'always on' and more then willing to send it's information to whomever asks. The banks and credit card companies have invested millions, if not in the billions, of dollars into the technology and its a flop. A massive, expensive flop. And now they have 2 options. Fess up that it's a failed experiment and have very pissed off investors. Or, censor/intimidate anyone who wishes to publicly expose this as the failure it truly is.

Unfortunately for most, Teh Steve has all the control and delivers all the subtext. You are simply the catamite.

This article may give you some neat insight: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/07/science-question-fro-7.html

Long and short of it is, since it happened when you were an infant, there just may be nothing you can do about it, no matter what the exercises. Might be time to look into some stem-cell therapy ;)

I dispute the "clearly shown" part, but there was definitely a guy holding something about the size and shape of an AK-47. In the ~18-minute video embedded on BoingBoing, look at the guy just above the crosshair at 3:39, and the guy left of him; those are the probable AKs that I see. Comments in the video refer to these people being near US ground forces: 4:28 in the video, "he was right in front of the Brad".

Considering the released report claims the ground troops actually found these weapons at the scene, as well as the cameras which apparently contained photos of the Bradley, the narrative that the photographers were walking around with a group of people who were intending to do violence to US forces and were near US ground forces seems at least adequately supported.

If you want to know why they weren't ducking and covering, did you see the delay between the gun firing and the hits? The bullets must have been in the air a good 2 seconds. That puts the person shooting like a kilometer away! The guys on the ground probably had no idea where the shots came from. They were too busy looking at the Bradley right next to them, and thought they were perfectly shielded.

The audio track is certainly pretty ugly, and what happened to the kids in the van is tragic -- but in context it all seems pretty understandable. Once it was decided that this war would be fought, there were bound to be tragic incidents like this.

I am, at the moment, willing to believe the government line that this was a small number of civilian casualties in the heat of battle, and I'm a lot unhappier about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. If this is what it takes to get people talking about the real issues again, fine, but I don't see that this is one of those issues. This is the cost of war. Apparently there was probably an ROE violation when they shot the van -- which is sad, and the attitude of the soldiers is ugly, but this is no My Lai massacre.

An AC is not just a person, it's "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Tacoma. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... abraded genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by banging out trolls and flamebait on its wireless keyboard."

(With apologies to William Gibson and Cory Doctorow)

here is what I believe is the review by C. Doctorow P was talking about. It is bashing and enlightening. http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html

Try to get outside apps running on a kindle.

Kindle Hacking: it's a lovely little linux box

What you see there is a Kindle 2 with the Ubuntu 9.04 port to ARM running in a chrooted environment. On the screen you see xdaliclock in front of an xterm with the remains of a "top" command and a few mildly embarrassing typos.

To open up the Kindle, I used the USB networking debug mode Amazon left hanging around when they first shipped the Kindle 2, a statically linked telnetd and a cross-compiler to bootstrap myself. From there, I built a daemon that can convert DRM-free PDFs and ePubs into something Amazon's reader on the Kindle can deal with.

After that, I started to get curious about what else might be possible. It only took a few evenings to get a moderately usable Ubuntu environment running.

Mostly, the Kindle is a lovely little Linux box. Getting X working took a bit of hacking, but everything else "just works" with very little configuration.

After having read this post a couple days ago on using the iPad at an angle, I specifically considered this when checking one out in the Apple store today. The iPads at the store sit on a low cylinder, angled slightly toward the user. It will go unnoticed by those test-driving the iPad, but the angle definitely enhances the experience. I took it off the stand and used it on the flat table which was noticeably less comfortable. This issue isn't a show-stopper, but it's definitely something to consider when thinking about how you'll use the iPad.

Andy Ihnatko's Sun Times review + Unboxing

Xeni Jardin's Boing Boing review

Goatberg's WSJ review

Baig's USA Today review

and Pogue's awkward review for NYT

Additionally, while I agree with shorter copyright limits, one could make the argument that infinitely-long copyrights are better for society than no copyrights.

No, not if one understands human history one can't. Humans created art before copyright, and some of those works have come down to us today. Meanwhile, existing copyright is preventing the preservation of existing works.

and without copyrights, there is no good economic model for the production of a lot of new work.

Sure there are. There's various forms of patronage, there's government-funded production (which is no more an intervention into the "free market" than copyright is), and there's my favorite, royalty-right: anyone can copy a work for free, but commercial use -- selling copies or derivative works -- requires payment of a royalty. (Modeled on songwriter royalties: sing in the shower all you want, but sing at the bar to bring in more customers, and the songwriter gets their nickel.)

Best Buy is the worst of all the computer/tv/tech stores I've purchased from. They charge for ridiculous 'products' and 'services' that are little more than outright scams. They have been indicted for some of them. Their prices are terrible, and they outright lie about matching others prices. This IS NOT your usual non-techy "I bought the wrong part" or techy "I know better than you" complaint. The complaints against Best Buy have to do with their criminal behavior.

http://consumerist.com/2007/05/best-buy-employee-confesses-to-scams-similar-to-ones-outlined-in-racketeering-lawsuit.html

http://bestbuyscam.blogspot.com/

http://digg.com/tech_news/Yet_just_another_Best_Buy_scam

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/11/04/best-buy-scams-hdtv.html

http://gizmodo.com/241220/best-buy-admits-they-scam-in+store-customers-with-secret-website

http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/chicago-bar-tender/2009/10/lawsuit-best-buy-lies.html

http://www.gpsmagazine.com/2007/03/buyer_beware_best_buy_caught_t.php

Seriously, Best Buy is evil. Do not shop at Best Buy.

Profile pics must contain no smiling, and you're not allowed to wear anything covering your hair (unless you're religious, in which case it's okay, as religious people never kill anyone).

Big red panic button for other people to press, saying "This person is a pedophile, arrest him now".

Privacy options allow things to be visible to Everyone, Friends only and your Government network, or only your Government network.

Adverts will be provided by the Metropolitan police. And you'll have to pay for your account too, anyway.

Funny thing, the comment on the Marines was Nieriko's, which I assume means that Nieriko is Cory Doctorow's alter ego. Original Boingboing story. Either way, my opinion of Cory just took a nosedive.

The Planet is holding competitions to speed-assemble rack-mounted servers. It's like watching latter-day Marines field-strip and assemble their weapons.

Seriously, you couldn't come up with something original?

If you are going to directly quote Boingboing for your summary, say so. http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/14/speed-assembling-ser.html#comments " Speed-assembling servers Cory Doctorow at 11:05 PM March 14, 2010 At SXSW (where my two of the games my wife commissioned just won Best Game and Best Edugame!), the trade-floor booth for hosting company The Planet is holding competitions to speed-assemble rack-mounted servers. It's like watching latter-day Marines field-strip and assemble their weapons. "

Micorsoft down august 2003

And their WGA server failed also sometimes ago.

I am suprised they were not sued for this.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/06/full-content-rss-fee.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+(Boing+Boing)

She's real! I have a picture of her: Picture

Pedometers! Think of the children! Don't let these meters anywhere near our kids.

Pedobear probably used one during his Olympic appearance.

Poor Quatchi, Miga, and Sumi.

No doubt if the machine is $200,000 the print cartridges will be $600,000 and still only use three quarters of its ink!

Except this thing uses stem cells rather than ink, so it'll be a lot cheaper per cartridge.

http://boingboing.net/2005/11/25/pong-clock-plays-one.html

...but it's open source now. Good job.

It's already running Linux out of the box, and the hacks getting everything a unix geek might want on it really don't sound like they're about bypassing DRM so much as they are getting tools onto the system that Amazon just left out.

Static link cross compile a telnetd and toolchain and get 'em both on there and you're set to go.

The only reason I haven't bought in on that action yet is that as far as I know there's no decent third party full size portable keyboard. If it did bluetooth, I'd be totally sold. As it is, I'm almost sold.

One swallow does not make a summer, nor does the occasional lucid court decision give me faith in the legal system as a whole. It's nice when it happens (Kitzmiller especially), but the courts make plenty of bad calls too. That reactionary fugghead Scalia is still in SCOTUS; British libel law is still horribly broken; and then there's this story.

Boing Boing doesn't do confidential, and their lawyers like to smack down such dickish threats.

See Demi Moore's rep's letter http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/28/BoingBoing-net%20121509.PDF
and Boing Boing's classic reply http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/28/BB-response-to-Demi-Moore.PDF

Boing Boing doesn't do confidential, and their lawyers like to smack down such dickish threats.

See Demi Moore's rep's letter http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/28/BoingBoing-net%20121509.PDF
and Boing Boing's classic reply http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/28/BB-response-to-Demi-Moore.PDF

The summary could have put in a word about how MagicJack sued for defamation after Boing Boing made a post highly critical of their EULA, before explaining how the judge shot their suit down as a SLAPP...

How do I protect myself from a skimmer inside a gas pump?

Or use a bike. Better for you and the environment too at the same time.

Okay, that's one problem avoided. So then how would one protect themselves from a skimmer on any other type of card reader, like at an ATM, vending machine, or a gas pump since no, you can't always just bike everywhere.

Ok, on a serious note about the problem. How to figure out a solution to this problem. Issue is, there isn't a simple answer.

Some might say we just need more education on the subject. But lets be honest. That won't work, never has, never will. People have been told that about everything from health (eat less processed/junk food, exercise more, ect... and as there are more people obese today then ever shows how well that works), to drugs (I've heard of the problems with things like crack since the 80's when I was born, and it's still being used today), to the basics of never share passwords but these things still happen.

Others might say we need more surveillance with cameras and police. But this isn't working either with Britain having millions of CCTV and also being the most violent country in Europe ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html ). So this is also not a solution.

Other things need to be taken into consideration. Why are these happening? People are need money more then before with a lack of jobs due to the recession. Also the ease of availability of these problems (these machines are showing up in more and more places). Also a lack of security in these newer forms of payment that are shown to be insecure ( http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/03/19/how-to-hack-an-rfide.html ) yet still forced upon the consumer due to the millions funded into these technologies and the fear of admitting these losses to shareholders.

Many of these company's and people are no doubt hoping things like DMCA laws and their inclusion into global laws like the ACTA will help get rid of the problems since it will make the technology illegal (these break digital security locks). Thing is, again it won't work. Drug growers have shown that when these problems come about, people will just go underground and look for other ways to do this. This was shown during the Regan years of the war against drugs. As time passed, it was harder to smuggle weed from places like Afghanistan, so people started shipping hash. Same type of drug but smaller and easier to ship. After that came hash oil since it was again smaller and the law started to figure out about hash. When hash oil was found out, people started to look into hydroponics (a new growing method for plants of ANY kind) and found they could grow a better crop (better watered, feed, controlled, ect...) in the country bypassing the issue of smuggling it in.And just like pot dealers/growers showed that the law means little in the end to get what they want, same will happen with this and as with every crime in history.

That link is a proposal from the USA - as reported on /. here with another link to the same document in the source article here

Still bad, nonetheless, but it's not been accepted.

Yet.

In any crisis, the worst can come out of people who are usually held in place by the law. Just look at what happened after Katrina

"According to the replies of some of his fellow students, he had taken the pictures with the webcam himself and left them on the hard drive when he returned the laptop to the school, and someone else accidently stumbled on them.." citation needed

All right. Citation provided. From reply #148 in the above link, I quote: - The improper behavior report was based on a picture that the kid took using the webcam and left on the hard drive of his school issued laptop. Which the school can search if it wants to. They probably contacted the parents as a courtesy.

"As for what he was actually doing, there are conflicting reports. Some say he was smoking weed; others say he was eating Mike and Ike candies which the school official mistook for drugs." Actually the reports are not conflicting, it's been well established: "A Pennsylvania student who accuses his high school of spying on him with a webcam says the controversy started when an official mistook a piece of candy for a pill."

We seem to have a semantic disagreement here. We have very different definitions of the phrase "well established.". Anyhow, I quote from reply #147 of the same source I cited above: I attend Lower Merion High School (in 10th grade) and I am worried that the full picture has not come into view ... This article also didn't mention what Blake was doing. Blake was smoking weed and, according to some of his friends, visiting pornographic websites. As you point out, some other sources say he was eating candy that was mistook for drugs. So, as I say, conflicting reports.

"They also report he was not disciplined by the school, but the school official did contact the parents out of concern for the student's safety." Again, your sources are wrong: "Parents Michael and Holly Robbins claim an assistant principal disciplined their son... "

Yes, I'm aware that is what Mr. and Mrs. Robbins claim. That is in the legal brief. No one disputes that is their claim. The sources above claim otherwise. As I said, the truth will probably come out at trial.

I find it interesting you (and no one else) read replies from fellow students stating he took the picture himself and left it on the drive,

Well, this is Slashdot. Why are you so surprised that almost no one RTFA?

but did not do a simple google search to see that it was candy mistaken as drugs or to see that the student was disciplined. Out of the three allegations made, two have been proven false.

Another semantic quibble here. You and I have very different definitions of the word "proven".

Way ahead of you.

However, the expressions on the faces of people who are caught unawares...

Just a simple FYI, Apple have been actively sabotaging 3rd party iPod/iPhone music managers (iTunes replacements).

There have been made several workarounds (from windows, linux and mac developers), and apple have firmware patched it several times to counter those workarounds.

When Apple is so set against 3rd party working with the ipod, it naturally becomes hard providing proper support for it from a 3rd party system.

This was just a friendly FYI as to WHY ipod's are so little supported in linux. It's not lazy developers, it's Apple's own policy.

Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence.

All people who were responsible for this should be labelled for the rest of their lives as sex offenders with all the consequences. Hey, they could have watched the children naked at home. I am not an American, but from what I hear from news, some people got this sex offender stigma for much more ridiculous incidents. In this case it would make sure that something like this would never happen again.

Kid from the school defends admins' use of the remote surveillance here (in essence "because what he was doing was wrong"):
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-student.html#comment-716313

Yes, they're indoctrinating kids to think that this kind of thing is okay.

Of course they can claim her name as their I.P. They can also claim to be from the planet Xenu, or they can claim to be 2,000-year-old leprechauns. Claiming a thing is their property does not actually make it their property until a court has made the decision.

For a great example of other lawyers claiming untrue things, look at BoingBoing's laugh at Demi Moore's lawyers' expense. They claimed that BoingBoing was slandering Demi Moore by saying her image was photoshopped, when clearly it was not photoshopped as attested to by the sworn testimony of the photographers.

So the IOC can claim that Lindsey Vonn is made out of ice cream, milkweed pods, and sandpaper, if they want. Won't make it true. If UVEX wasn't getting such a good laugh out of this stupidity, I hope they'd have the integrity to restore Lindsey's name to their web site.

I didn't see this one in there... I once typed it into some code by accident. It's more common than you'd expect.

Photoshop is only 10 years old. They photoshopped all the pictures to make it look like 20.

And also to give themselves more functional weapons of mass destruction.

A MIT student is nearly shot while picking up a friend at the air port because her T-Shirt had a proto board mounted between her boobs. It had blinking lights and wires.... Seriously, I can understand how a regular person might not understand the situation, but don't they actually train security people? And if they are not trained, are we safer?

You might want to take a closer look at the shirt she was wearing. MIT student arrested for entering Boston airport with "fake bomb' Without examining the board how can you be certain of its function?

Here is an interesting lecture by Robert Sapolsky, "Evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality", http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/06/evolution-religion-s.html

It's an interesting talk about how while schizophrenia may be the result of a full expression of a recessive gene, the schizotypal may be a mild expression of the same gene, leading to people like shamans. That would tend to support your "born with a strong propensity"...

His recent graduation day talk at Stanford was, while not related (on the uniqueness of humans), even more interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrCVu25wQ5s

They've even got one of those catchy web-2.0-style names for their new site, mail.ir [mail.ir].

I think this one is catchier. :)

Here's a nice recent introductory article for the less technically-inclined or via BoingBoing. (fd: I was interviewed for this one).

Please set up a bridge if you have the ability.

And then there's my favourite: Translate Server Error.