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Check out the ITU's plan for a unified deep packet inspection standard. This should convince anyone that the ITU is the last group that should get their hands on the control of the Internet.

You need to read Mannings own words.

You first. The chat logs that allegedly got Manning caught for his alleged actions have him saying he tried reporting war crimes in Iraq but was rebuffed by his superiors. As for what he was saying now - bitch please. If you were subjected to 18 months of humiliation and psychological torture via the extreme isolation of extended solitary confinement, you'd be confessing to the Sharon Tate murders faster than Dick Cheney.

Then there's the slight fact that ever single one of the "hang Bradley Manning" club are engaging in extreme situation ethics. If the sticking point if the UCMJ, then you must be demanding his immediate release for Obama's textbook unlawful command influence, which is a direct violation of the UCMJ. If the sticking point is "revelation of classified data", then WTF aren't Libby, Rove, and Armitage being prosecuted under the Espionage Act for outing Valerie Plame. If the rule of law is the issue, how can you with a straight face say that Manning needs to be prosecuted, but not officials who's corruption and criminality was revealed by Manning's alleged leaks.

It's a lose-lose-lose-lose proposition for you.

Huh. Why is this modded troll?

Clarification from Geist says pretty much the exact same thing.

And don't do like Finland where murder/torture/rape fines are orders cheaper than the ones for pirating.

This is a false situation - maintained by deliberate policy of an Elite which effectively both owns the Government and monopolizes capital. The one/two knockout punch makes change through the electoral process obsolete and impossible.

The combined worth of the 6 Walmart heirs and heiresses is greater than that combined of the bottom 41% of American families (48.8 million households). How do the grinning kids of Sam Walton stay so rich? By paying their employees slave wages and not providing benefits, forcing them to use food stamps and medicaid. Above, a poster by Miel Macassey that shows how Walmart siphons money from taxpayers so it can pay its workers (which represent 1% of the American workforce) an average of $8.81 an hour without having them and their kids drop dead of starvation.

http://boingboing.net/2012/11/23/how-walmart-uses-medicaid-and.html

Nothing illegal in your photo drive?

Do you have a flag of Taiwan in a picture? Perhaps you took a picture of your car? (Especially if you post it on your company's vanity page...) Or maybe there was a stranger in the background?

It's not so much what is illegal in your photos, as it is "who takes offense at your pictures". And when anyone can sue (civil court) anyone for anything, there doesn't even have to be a law against it.

Nothing illegal in your photo drive?

Do you have a flag of Taiwan in a picture? Perhaps you took a picture of your car? (Especially if you post it on your company's vanity page...) Or maybe there was a stranger in the background?

It's not so much what is illegal in your photos, as it is "who takes offense at your pictures". And when anyone can sue (civil court) anyone for anything, there doesn't even have to be a law against it.

I think this one made with Lego pieces are interesting and maybe cheaper (if you have already the pieces around) http://boingboing.net/2006/02/07/difference-engine-me.html

"If it's a choice between paving the way for tyranny and risking the loss of your digital life at the press of a button by some deceived customer service rep, and having to remember a password, I think the password is the way to go. The former works better, but the latter fails better. A note to anyone from Amazon PR contemplating sending me a comment regarding this: I expect that any comment from Amazon regarding this story will disclose whether and when Amazon can delete files (including files loaded by users) from Kindles, and whether DRM-free files can still be deleted. Also: as a policy, I do not quote anonymous spokespeople for firms unless they are telling me something that could cost them their jobs."

This sounds a lot like the idiotic stuff formulated in the preliminary list of internet security legislation that was posted two months ago.

You claim (in the subject of your post):

> 10 mice was all that Monsato used to pass.

Unfortunately, in actuality, it was 20 groups of 10 mice each. The researchers who published the flawed study you are trying to defend reviewed, in a paper published in 2009, the Monsanto study and wholly criticized the use of groups containing only 10 mice. Yet instead of doing a better study, they chose to merely return tit for tat. Oh, and they released the results to the media in a totally manipulative fashion.

If they really were interested in discovering the actual truth about this strain of GM corn, one would assume they would have done the study in a better fashion.

Until their neighbors declared that, due to their majority on the local School Board, evolution, history, a large chunk of geology, and set theory will no longer be taught. And all children will have a compulsory christian values class. And if you have a problem with it you are free to set up a completely separate school system on your own. And a separate medical system. Heck, unless you are willing to do things all their way you are 'free' to personally replicate all of western society yourself.

For given values of 'free' a 'free society' ceases to be a society at all.

mm wavelength scanners will prevent Logan Airport from being blown up by LED T-Shirts.
We need more scanners.

That's when Moononites invade.

mm wavelength scanners will prevent Logan Airport from being blown up by LED T-Shirts.
We need more scanners.

To turn regolith and rock into simple building supplies suitable for micro-g and airless environ, you need...considerably more.

Exactly. You need a whole infrastructure to support all that stuff and to support itself.

See, this is my minor gripe. Everybody's all about exploring. "We need to put astronauts on Mars! They'll accomplish more in a year than 50 years of Mars probes!" But, to me, this is just more of a circus.

I'd rather see us return to the Moon to stay. That means figuring out how to stay there without getting supplies every month. There's water which we can drink. There's water which we can turn into oxygen. Not sure about the nitrogen part. What will be needed to create a habitat? Above ground? Below ground? Inflatable? Solid? Some combination of the four? How will we handle electricity? Solar? Nuclear? Some combination of the two?

Can we add water to lunar soil and grow stuff in it? How will various tasty earth animals react to 1/6th G. Hell, how will human beings react to 1/6 G? Will we have more/less/the same problems we have with zero G? How can we turn lunar ores into useful metal which we could then use to build stuff?

These are all answerable questions. There's no unobtainium necessary to do any of this stuff. You build up the infrastructure on the Moon. It may take 50 years. But, in 50 years, I'd rather look up at the Moon and see a community. I think that would be much better than some flag sitting among a pile of junk on Mars.

Lots of people have been working in this field. The most impressive results are achieved by the astronomy community. link It is possible to produce a home made spectrometer that gets useful results. Some of these are capable of resolution sufficient to identify chemicals. These are sophisticated and often use a peltier cell to cool the CCD in order to reduce noise. link

I did a project whose aim was to produce a cheap spectrometer to match paint colors. link The problems I found were:

1. Cheap webcams are quite noisy
2. Cheap webcams are not at all linear
3. For dark colors, sensitivity is a big problem
4. The spectrum of the light source varies depending on which angle you view it from.
5. Organizing the data is perhaps the biggest problem of all

My own engineering trade-off was sensitivity vs. resolution. To get spectra for dark colored paints, I widened the slit which reduced resolution. That, as far as I could tell, was reasonable because I wasn't trying to identify chemicals and the spectra from paints weren't particularly sharp.

The folks in TFA have a site where people can upload spectra. That's fine but a huge database of spectra is not too useful. The spectra have to be organized somehow. Here's an example. In fact the problem can be quite daunting

Since they won't let you smile, you'll need to find another way to look nice in your photo. Some dazzling make-up perhaps?

Don't forget about the ahimatronic chimp head!

Cory Doctorow wrote about this:
The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

"They" (the corporates) have seen how good Linux, Android and Free Software have become. They understand that leaving general purpose computing open would mean they cannot protect their current profit margins as software becomes more and more a commodity. Hence in order for them to "win" (have control over profit streams), they must make you "lose" (lose control over your own devices).

First came TPM in hardware. Fortunately users defeated this by making it optional and controlled by the device owner.
Apple were the first to successfully foist it on users and people were happy and smiled, "I love my Apple, I don't mind Apple having all the control for safety. What is there to worry about".
Now it is the turn of the Windows folks to lose control. Applications will pass through Microsoft censorship, hardware will be controlled by them, since only they will write (closed-source) software that can run on it. Still we will have people laughing a Richard Stallman's prescience, seeing this decades ago.
The Linux guys are being shut out now, since the Empire knows it must snuff out the Rebel Alliance to get complete control of the computing galaxy (and all the riches therein).

If you are still a believer in "walled gardens" ("I prefer convenience to control of my devices") then you ought to reconsider your views in light of these developments. For those that were always distrustful of the walled gardens, your fears are starting to come to pass, but at least you had the wisdom to recognize them. Now it is time to raise hue and cry about this. Corporates will listen to disgruntled customers if there are enough of them to threaten sales significantly. Blog your asses off about how Intel are doing the dirty on the tech community with their misleading statements.

Cory Doctorow wrote about this:
The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

"They" (the corporates) have seen how good Linux, Android and Free Software have become. They understand that leaving general purpose computing open would mean they cannot protect their current profit margins as software becomes more and more a commodity. Hence in order for them to "win" (have control over profit streams), they must make you "lose" (lose control over your own devices).

First came TPM in hardware. Fortunately users defeated this by making it optional and controlled by the device owner.
Apple were the first to successfully foist it on users and people were happy and smiled, "I love my Apple, I don't mind Apple having all the control for safety. What is there to worry about".
Now it is the turn of the Windows folks to lose control. Applications will pass through Microsoft censorship, hardware will be controlled by them, since only they will write (closed-source) software that can run on it. Still we will have people laughing a Richard Stallman's prescience, seeing this decades ago.
The Linux guys are being shut out now, since the Empire knows it must snuff out the Rebel Alliance to get complete control of the computing galaxy (and all the riches therein).

If you are still a believer in "walled gardens" ("I prefer convenience to control of my devices") then you ought to reconsider your views in light of these developments. For those that were always distrustful of the walled gardens, your fears are starting to come to pass, but at least you had the wisdom to recognize them. Now it is time to raise hue and cry about this. Corporates will listen to disgruntled customers if there are enough of them to threaten sales significantly. Blog your asses off about how Intel are doing the dirty on the tech community with their misleading statements.

well there's an 8-bit processor in minecraft... http://boingboing.net/2010/11/12/working-8-bit-cpu-in.html

Unpaid internships are the new black (market labor).

One political party wants to repeal minimum wage laws, child labor laws, and the entire category "labor laws".

Take a good look at what happens when you have a government that wants to "unleash business". And polish that resume, or you might not get that unpaid internship (I wonder if they give them free pizza).

Who's calling the shots in China? Hu Jintao or Apple?

In related news, Mitt Romney sees cold fusion as the future of "basic science", so clearly things are looking up here in the 'States.

Good night, God bless you, and God bless America.

Ericsson is owned by Sony.

Sony Ericsson != Ericsson...

So...what does that leave Sweden? Lots of taxes or something.

"something" includes companies like AstraZeneca, Electrolux and H&M, and no one is forced to perform "Let It Be" to pay medical bills for an 11 month old child.

This is all I could find on the WIPO Treaty:
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/11/wipos-broadcasting-treaty-is.html

Wouldn't put public domain things back into copyright, per se, but says that recordings of broadcasts of public domain material would be under copyright. Still silly, and should be shot down.

Thank you for your patriotic pre-support of pre-crime legislation citizen. There will be an extra pillow in your cell!

Because of this?

But can they do a BANANA shaped venn? http://boingboing.net/2012/07/12/just-look-at-that-banana-genom.html

It's really dumb too. I would not worry about a mad physicist building a death star. All he's worried about is whether or not he'll have trouble with the peer reviews.

Now a mad engineer, that's a different story.

http://boingboing.net/2010/06/01/the-dark-side-of-eng.html

Look at the money flowing into the EFF from Sergei Brin: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/join-now-and-eff-gets-4x-power http://boingboing.net/2011/12/10/give-to-eff-today-and-your-do.html https://www.eff.org/pages/eff-mission And then there are the fun private parties: https://www.eff.org/event/eff-mixer-google Didn't you get an invite? Face it. A big part of their budget come from Google billionaires and so it shouldn't be surprising that they're seeing eye to eye.

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/06/curiosity-landing-removed-from.html

Yeah, right. Time to beat those greedy careless bastards UP!

Like the above anonymous coward reply: let's give them some kind and loving attention, eh?

http://www.scripps.com/heritage/contact-us

• Spacevidcast - live talks, with telemetry sidebar
• Eyes on the solar system - pretty cool simulation with view a few meters away from the lander
• BoingBoing, linked earlier in this post
• NASA TV

Happy viewing! Fingers crossed!

p.s. watching the simulation while listening to the beautiful blue danube is kind of fun :)

I found this link on reddit.com/r/science

Some of those 'house of the future' articles are right. Behold the flatscreens, the fax machine, the roomba, the digital camera, Skype, telecommuting. The only real miss is in describing a neighborhood intranet instead of a globally connected on.

http://boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/COMPUTERS2.jpg

Via boingboing.net

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

Intellectual property: Patents against prosperity | The Economist

Why abolish software patents - software patents wiki (en.swpat.org)

When Patents Attack! | This American Life

Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture | Video on TED.com

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? Times Labs Blog

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation - Boing Boing

US patent trolling costs $29b: study - Strategy - Business - News - iTnews.com.au

Patents | Electronic Frontier Foundation

http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/

Zynga might be too close, but the vast majority of games actually copy each other so much that they create a GENDRE for god's sake. And that has been alwways a good thing for gaming in particular. The truth is that yes, there are indeed assholes, there will always be, but they seem to be on both sides and the question remains to where do they cause the less damage.

As far as being non-creative, I'm not sure who you mean. Personally, I develop new software for a living and I was curiously enough working on my novel when I got your reply.

Dear Cory Doctorow,
Why, in the article http://boingboing.net/2012/07/28/apple-wont-carry-an-ebook-be.html does the link behind Holly's book "How To Think Sideways Lesson 6: How To Discover (Or Create) Your Story’s Market" actually link to Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765329085/downandoutint-20 in the Amazon bookstore?

For what reason?

For being false, first of all. "Atheistic Marxism" has been in decline for decades, and it's not because Christianity defeated it. It is because it is an unworkable social construct which failed in competition with moderate Socialism and Capitalism, especially when bolstered by a bedrock of humanism. Furthermore, defending against authoritarian dictatorship by embracing authoritarian dictatorship is stupid. Embracing the tinpot tyrants of Christianity to avoid Marxist dictators is a fool's game. What does the underlying dogma matter when they both would strip me of my rights and freedoms? And finally, your argument works just as well if you were arguing for Islam as a bulwark against "Atheistic Marxism."

That is not the point. The point is that anti-theists try very hard to mix Christianity and Islam (for example) in the same bag.

Whenever some theocratic Islamist terrorist blows a bomb in a crowded square, anti-theists say "this is what religion does".

As it most certainly was.

They know that Christian people, even if they have occasional faults, are nice and friendly people; so the only way to condemn religion per se is to say that Christianity is the same as Islam - which is a very ridiculous idea.

Really? So Christians aren't calling gays demonically possessed? They aren't push lies to children in violation of the Constitution? They aren't involved in the cover up of horrific crimes against children? They aren't involved in killing children for witchcraft? They don't file charges to have skeptics arrested for debunking their lying claims? They aren't fighting against laws like the Violence against Women Act? Those are just a smattering of current problems that Christians are causing or exacerbating. That's not even counting the numerous acts of evil that Christians are historically guilty of.

Shall I continue, or do you get the point yet? An individual Christian is most likely a perfectly fine and upstanding citizen. The same is true for the average Muslim, the average Jew, the average Hindu, etc. The institutions of Christianity, however, are just as filled with dogmatic ideologies as those of Islam and such. You mistake the fact that they have been largely neutered in the west for the idea that they are benign.

the consequences of trolling are serious as a heart attack

This is a great article certainly worth having on the front page of Slashdot. However, the complete lack of editorial oversight is infuriating. The sole link in this article is to Mashable, which cites BoingBoing, which sites the webpage for the book. I simply clicked through those citation and found the primary source. Why didn't the Slashdot editor do this? To push traffic to Mashable? We should have the primary source as the primary reference. If the discussion on the other sites is worth it then those can be the focus of the article. Otherwise give the primary source!

Where was this guy? http://boingboing.net/2012/07/19/elderly-gentleman-shoots-armed.html -- That link there shows a video of an elderly man thwarting an armed robbery in an internet cafe. No guarantees, but it sure could've made a difference at the theater.

Well.. there is a nice system in the USA for fixing that without killing, that many, people.....

1. Create a police-state where everyone is afraid of the police. Especially the 'non-wanted groups'.

2. Erode the Judicial system and allow even more corrupt people to control it.
http://boingboing.net/2009/02/02/judges-jailed-for-ta.html
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2010/03/house-impeaches-bribed-fed-judge/
http://medicolegal.tripod.com/govtcrime.htm
http://www.judiciaryreport.com/bribing_a_judge.htm

3. Convince people that taking a plea is in their best interest since otherwise they might face much harder punishments.. Even if they are innocent.. Thereby reducing the number of votes from non-wanted groups.
http://www.brennancenter.org/content/section/category/voting_after_criminal_conviction/ (~5 million not allowed to vote!)

With a voter turnout of only 57% during presidential election years and 38% rest of the years it's quite easy to start influencing where it all will go.... Especially since lower-income families usually have a much higher rate of crime, and also a higher rate of taking pleas since they cannot afford lawyers..

Ie what's been happening is that the power to influence the country is shifting upwards towards where the money is...

There are a few things a country never should be able to remove from a person.
- The right to vote.
- The right to privacy.
- The rights to a fair trial. Without the need of having money for a lawyer.
- The right to education for all children.

Unfortunately, it's getting worse and worse.

Take a look at these 2 police recruitment videos: http://boingboing.net/2012/07/07/police-recruitment-videos-from.html Which police force do you want to vote (and pay) for?

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html

The organization also pointed out that there are many other similar applications available at the site, 'which can be used to steal content from CBS, which owns Download.com.'

Yeah, CBS is also going to be real happy about this.

Now even less people will download their adware/malware infected wrappers. That can't be good for Download.com's business model.

It's one thing for the RIAA to go after little kids for downloading music, it's another thing entirely to go after its own members (but then again, CBS is probably just a member of MPAA, not RIAA, so may be I just answered my own question).

The probability of dying in an aircraft related incident of terrorism is 0.00000009607, if the math on the BoinBoing chart is accurate. This is close to the probability of getting the winning lottery ticket (0.0000000715).

You're 20 times more likely to die from being struck by lightning.

Never mind the "there will always be risk", the risk is very low compared to other stuff that we take for granted and do nothing about.

Yeah, in terms of terrorist attack risk, you could just consult this handy chart.

Of course, the Burj Khalifa doesn't even have this. http://boingboing.net/2011/11/08/what-happens-when-you-flush-a-toilet-in-the-worlds-tallest-building.html

I'd figure in a prestige building like that, when you flush the toilet, the sewage was routed directly out to shower on the little people below.
Why do you think they have the helipad?

And whether or not you want (or are required to have) water, electricity, gas, and sewage disposal

Yes, most people don't realize that about half of a building is site preparation. Putting in all the utilities and building a strong foundation is key.

Of course, the Burj Khalifa doesn't even have this.
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/08/what-happens-when-you-flush-a-toilet-in-the-worlds-tallest-building.html

I was a happy OpenSUSE user for several years, but abandoned it after the 12.1 release. My reasons were quality and stability issues that had been on the rise over the last few releases, which culminated in the premature (IMHO) and half-assed transition to systemd in 12.1. That was the last straw and the trigger to embark on another distro-walkabout (I won't say what I ended up switching to, because this isn't about that).

There is a lot to like about OpenSUSE and it's probably still one of the best distributions to use for a nicely integrated and well supported out-of-the-box KDE environment. But the incidence of instability (generally user-facing stuff - the base environment of kernel, toolchain and libs is pretty rock-solid), random bugginess (usually caused by a lone developer or small team marching to their own drummer without regard to their surroundings) and poor integration of interacting components has been creeping up over the last few years. It seems that people in the OpenSUSE development team have taken notice and started to think about the causes and how to address them. Bravo to them for having the insight to notice and the balls to try and address the problem before pushing out a release.

Not that they probably care too much about what I think*, but I'll be watching carefully and may give the next release another chance.

---
* The developer community is probably one of the more unconsciously user-hostile developer groups I've encountered in awhile. A fine and dedicated bunch, but they tend to keep to themselves in places apart (mailing lists, IRC) from where the users hang out (forums.opensuse.org). A typical response when a user is baffled about some problem or wants to discuss improvements is the typical "well did you file a bug report" (delivered in an imperious and self-important manner by the a senior forum user or appointed moderator who are just a little too zealous in their developer worship), or the suggestion that users join the mailing lists if they want to be heard because the developers don't use the forums (don't want to be too close to the hoi polloi, after all). Meritocracies do indeed become oligarchies, apparently. http://boingboing.net/2012/06/13/meritocracies-become-oligarchi.html

Can someone explain to me the challenges and state of the art in creating artificial sensors capable of replicating, e.g., dog's amazing sniffing abilities, even if only for specific compounds (I imagine replicating the amazing generality of canine sniffers is for now "very sci-fi").

Here: How electronic smell detection works