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A recent study was done on 117 of the most common climate models cited by the pushers of CO2-based warming,

Which is a misrepresentation. It's 117 runs of 37 models of particular working group. It has nothing to do with collecting commonly cited models. The first paragraph of the paper, which you don't like to, accepts that there has indeed been warming, contrary to your claims elsewhere.

This is scientists doing what scientists do, improving the science. Improving models for the future. It's certainly not something that supports any of your denier positions.

For the benefit of others, here's the link to the paper you mention:
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs/C...

It appeared in the September, 2013 issue of Nature Climate Change.

Here is a link to the pdf.

simply put, this is a very expensive way to do things. the Kinect has done a good job at motion capture so why not just improve on that idea? using multiple (cheap-o) cameras at different angles, you could not only capture one person but multiple people without putting on any annoying suits or even extend the area of capture. what's better is that it scales as you can add more and more cameras and create a more accurate model which means it would solve occlusion issues. just to sweeten the deal, you could use optical flow to predict future motion and thus remove any possible lag you may encounter. this would be a great use case for Epiphany III manycore processor as it could process every camera at the same time.

the bottom line is that while this military-grade motion sensing stuff may be a great but it's going to be expensive ($350 per unit from what i see on KS) and there are going to be a LOT of hardware support issues.

Further reading:
3D Reconstruction from Multiple Images
Optical Flow

the abstract doesn't say they used data, it says they identified a math procedure that caused variation between the models

so, what you have are a lot of complex computer models that vary in output; the authors show that about half the variation is due to cloud mixing
however, we have no idea if the models are in fact accurate, other then Fig 1b of Fyfe etal, which suggests that the models are in fact NOT accurate, so it doesn't matter if you lower the variation between them.
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs/Climate%20change/Climate%20model%20results/over%20estimate.pdf

I would remind people of history: in the early 1800s, people realized that CO2 absorbs IR, and the late 1800s, they realized that humans were actually putting out enough CO2 to make a diff
Then, around 1900, someone pointed out that the atmosphere is optically thick in the IR (if you could see the color "IR" it would be pitch black all the time), so an increase in CO2 shouldn't matter
This *scientific consensus* lasted untill the 1950s, when people realized that it is emission from the outer atmosphere that matttrs....

so, for 50 years, there was a consensus that CO2 human warming was hooey

Our long-term strategy is to make it so that nobody needs to use plugins by adding new web APIs

The illustration on the page you linked uses Silverlight as an example. Netflix uses Silverlight so that it can wrap rented videos in Microsoft's PlayReady digital restrictions management, and lack of PlayReady is why it doesn't work in Moonlight. Video on demand providers use digital restrictions management in the first place to deter users from in effect teeing a rented video into an encoder and keeping it past the rental period. How would VOD work on a browser distributed as free software without any proprietary plug-ins?

The page you linked states: "As browsers have advanced, this kind of feature development can occur directly within the browser using technologies such as WebGL" but this page, on Firefox 25.0.1 on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on a laptop with an Atom N450, states: "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." A lot of users aren't in the position to buy a brand new PC just to be able to switch from Flash or native apps to web applications.

The page also mentions asm.js, but do non-Firefox web browsers, such as Chrome, Safari, and IE, support it yet? Otherwise, will have to write the program several times: once in asm.js for Firefox, once in Native Client for Chrome for PC, once as a native app for Android if the user hasn't already switched from Android Browser or Chrome to Firefox for Android, and then once as a native app for each platform that IE or Safari runs on.

and to use the mobile web as leverage to get new sites to use native HTML APIs

That won't especially help when Apple refuses to implement key HTML APIs in its iVersion of the mobile web. True, Safari for iOS can't run Flash anyway, but the idea on mobile is to get developers away from making platform-specific apps.

Quick question: Using HTML APIs, how should a web application let the user select a folder (or "directory" if you insist) on the local machine and upload all files in the folder?

how did this story get all the way to the front page without anybody noticing that "thermoelectric" was misspelled?

For the last time, I'm not your personal fucking Google.

For a vampire your questions sure aren't well informed. What good is being immortal if you can't adapt to changing society? It's the Age of Information, who would want to be an eternal troglodyte? Stake yourself to a sun spot, you're giving creatures of the night a bad name.

"Where are you suggesting these pay checks issue from? What would the UN, say, stand to gain by influencing IPCC research toward alarmism -- or bias in any direction, for that matter? In the other corner, as it were, who is bankrolling the denial camp?"

I didn't write anything about "bankrolling" a "camp". That sound suspiciously like conspiracy theory to me. As for paychecks... they do come from somewhere, yes? I'm not suggesting any kind of big conspiracy, as you seem to be doing. I'm simply saying: AGW is what they're doing, and they are getting paid for it. Is there something about that with which you disagree?

"Also I am pretty sure the latest IPCC report made a point of stating more clearly and unambiguously then ever before that climate change is real and man-made. We discussed it here on /. at the time."

Yes, the report does make a point of saying so, in their executive summary. Which is just proving my point. Because the actual science in the report (pdf) does not justify the claim. If anything, the actual evidence is weaker than before. (That is a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature Climate Change, by the way). 117 climate models were studied. Of those, 114 overstated the actual amount of warming (by, as I stated before, an ever-increasing margin), and the mean divergence between those 114 models and current reality was 100%. In other words, the models, on average, predicted 100% more warming than has actually been observed.

Put that together with the increasing number of new studies that contradict the very foundations of most AGW climate models, and the only reasonable conclusion is that these ever-more-shrill pronouncements are nothing but hot air (pun very definitely intended).

Who uses JSON and YAML outside web development?

Actually, web development is the only place where you *have* to use a non-zero amount of XML since the web technologies are kind of *based* on SGML/XML. OUTSIDE of web development, there are precisely zero reasons to use XML at all. The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well.

Give me S-expressions or another suitable well-established self-describing format any day of the week.

According to this recent paper, the climate models were a bit off......

This mostly agrees with my experience. Here's some data: This is a breakdown of the codes used on HECToR, the main UK academic cluster. It is dominated by chemistry; generally in chemistry the main computational challenge is in performing very large matrix diagonalisations to solve approximations of quantum mechanical systems. Clearly generous allocation and effective sharing of memory is critical for this kind of task.

I don't know how many "guess the ext" games I had to play when some place would tell everyone to turn on full filenames without warning them NOT to fuck with the dot three

Three measures help make loss of extension metadata more difficult.

The first part is to warn the user when changing the extension. Windows has been doing this half since I started using Windows in 1999.

The second part is not to include the extension in the automatically selected text when the user renames a file. Windows 7 gets this right, and Windows Vista may have, though I don't have any Vista PCs on hand with which to confirm this.

Finally, the operating system should allow application installers to register patterns that the file manager uses when identifying a file's content type by its contents. For example, "<!DOCTYPE HTML" or "<html" would suggest HTML, regular expression "GIF8[79]a" would suggest GIF, "\xFF\xD8" would suggest JPEG, "\x89PNG\r\n\x1A\n" would suggest PNG, "NES\x1A" would suggest NES game, etc. To my knowledge, Windows has not yet adopted a counterpart to UNIX file(1).

LyX is the fastest interface I have come across for mathematical syntax, due to the great foundations and comprehensive input mapping. It would be lovely to be able to use generally as a notebook, especially if there were some upgrades to the rudimentary CAS (computer algebra system) support included up to V2.

One feature fundamental to this goal is the parsing of respective CAS languages, obviously, in particular multi-line expressions. In the case of Maxima, I experimented with LyX -> LaTeX -> Maxima conversion in manual steps, playing with SnuggleTeX, but apart from requiring generous amounts of scripting being a java library this is not the most straightforward way to interact with LyX or Maxima.

If someone were to start a project to improve on LyX's CAS integration this would interest me greatly and I would look forward to contributing. The idea of ultimately converging to plain-readable interactive scientific documents together with projects like Sage to me is truly exciting, and I hope that LyX's interface can be part of it.

What you are describing is stuff to go into log files.

In which case displaying the title of the current step becomes an option to expand or collapse a view of the tail of the log file inside the progress window. I've seen such a "show details"/"hide details" control in Nullsoft installers on Windows and in Update Manager on Ubuntu. Or are you talking about hiding the entire log file from the user's view until the entire process has completed or failed, so that the user has nothing to Google until it's too late?

the point is not that they should actively care about LInux, but rather that they should not actively obstruct it

On Linux, DRM means something else entirely. What facility does the GNU/Linux platform offer to ensure that all high-definition video outputs are tee-resistant?[1] Answer this and I'll address your comment about the difference between "care about" and "not obstruct".

[1] man tee

If I were a BOFH asked to "help out" with such a test, I'd talk about my pet peeve: transitive closure in SQL. Comes real handy in anything that deals with bills of material.

Originalism as you define it is pretty much defunct. It's one of what have been memorably referred to as judicial fairy-tales and has now been recognised as being intellectually indefensible. Anyone professing that view is well outside the judicial mainstream.

I think your comments in your final paragraphs are pretty much on the money. Scalia gave a lecture at Edinburgh university which I think might be the one you're referring to - it's at http://law-srv0.law.ed.ac.uk/media/46_justicescaliatercentenarylecture.mp3 if not.

Image Processing - my primary job function - relies on calculus, statistics, algebra, trig, geometry, matrix math, domain transforms, you name it. Look at any image processing function library and you will see functions heavy in math. We need developers with image processing experience and a strong math background is a requirement. This is the stuff that separates the men from the boys.

My job title is Measurements Engineer and you better believe that advanced math is a regular tool. Our company has the largest staff of PhDs, MSxx, and other degreed personnel in the country and math is the tool for solving problems.

Anybody who has ever developed a control system for large industrial format actuators has used an advanced math tool involving calculus. It's called PID - Proportional Integral Derivative - which is an essential tool to optimize latency between command and response and prevent destructive overshoots and oscillations.

Programming isn't all games and accounting.

Here is a legal analysis of the situation:

The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing

It's somewhat long, but a one-line summary of what they concluded could be roughly:

At least in the UK and EU, there is no strong legal basis for constraints on non-commercial personal 3D printing.

It's worth reading the whole thing though, as it covers many different forms of legal restrictions on object replication. It certainly foresees problems ahead for commercial companies in this area, but provides legal opinion why personal printing is largely immune to it all.

Of course this means very little in the US legal system where anyone can sue anyone else for anything or for nothing.

It's simple. The function takes a float argument. If you pass it a string, the string will be cast to a float before the function performs any actual analysis on it.

As you can see from the PHP manual, string conversion to number emulates the behavior of the Unix strtod(3) function; according to the man page for strtod(3), "If no conversion is performed, zero is returned".

So if an argument is passed which can't be converted to a number (e.g. empty string), the argument is converted to zero.

I think Cyc might be useful for certain limited domains. I would make it one agent in a multi-agent system, and use feedback to reinforce it when it provides the best response, according to user feedback.

I think if a formal language can represent how the brain stores information, it will have to tolerate inconsistency. Since natural language does this already, why not use it?

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~jim/BBSNEURO/anastasio.html:

The cross-modal response of OR neurons could be larger than either of the modality-specific responses, and even larger than their sum. The modality-specific responses of AND neurons could be non-zero. Other neurons could not be fit into a Boolean scheme at all. For example, the responses of ENHANCED tectal neurons to a stimulus of one modality could be increased by a stimulus of another modality that was ineffective by itself. The responses of all types were significantly magnitude dependent. It would not be possible, on the basis of the data on multisensory neurons in the rattlesnake tectum, to develop a satisfying description of their response properties in terms of Boolean logic.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/november/neutrons-brain-movement-110810.html:

"If you said that the neuron was effectively voting for its preferred movement, you'd say it is voting for moving left at this time and a tenth of a second later it is voting for moving right and a tenth of a second after that it is voting for something else," Churchland said. "It would not make any sense at all."

---
Note: both the above papers present their own hypotheses about what's really going on, or how to resolve the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies observed.

In the first case, instead of P(X=Apple|S), I would use modalities in natural language ("That is an apple", "It may be an apple", "It looks like an apple" etc.). In the second case, I think I would try to use an agent model; one agent is saying "move", another is saying "don't move", and some controller makes a selection among them.

In the mean time hundreds of thousands of ££££s have been spent researching this. The price of beef has rocketed.

It's been a complete waste of money in my view.

I'm really quite sure that this disease is not imaginary - because people and animals fall ill and die because of these conditions, and because cases fall once transmission vectors are removed. People didn't start randomly dissecting cows' brains in the UK because of mass-media fears, it was because of an epidemic of a neurodegenerative disease in herds - they didn't know of BSE before then, and it took several years to appreciate what the problem was. When controls to eradicate infectious animals started, the incidence declined; correspondingly, human zoonoses peaked (after a delay due to the incubation period) and then declined. 176 people have died from definite or probable vCJD in the UK, though there are few new cases now. BSE/vCJD is hardly the only prion disease around either, with scrapie (affecting sheep) also being studied and monitored, and kuru having affected humans who engaged in cannibalistic practices.

It's not a reason to panic, and it's not going to destroy civilisation. After all, it doesn't seem to be very infectious anyway, at least cross-species. But it's not imaginary.

To be honest I don't know, but these man pages show
PermitRootLogin
Specifies whether root can log in using ssh(1). The argument must be "yes", "without-password", "forced-commands-only" or "no". The default is "yes".

Isn't this the same thing that Project Festival has been doing since about 2004?

http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ (try the demo)

Many hundreds of years before the GPL was even a twinkle in Richard Stallman's eye, an Irish monk proved to be an unlikely champion of the geeky A2K notion of access to knowledge. [...] and they settled things the way they did in those days, with 3000 people getting killed in the resulting battle.

The full article about Saint ColmCille and his fight for free access to knowledge and Copyleft is available here (PDF).

(and after all, if those lawyers working for the music industry are serious about that copyright shit, why don't they join the army and fight that battle on the front line, huh ? Hand me a banana bomb, there's a cluster of them coming our way...)

The way I see it, there is no way for the UK government to control UK or foreign citizens posting on foreign sites.

Right now, if I am in France and you are in Venezuela, and you post a highly defamatory article about me on a server in New York, and someone else in the UK reads it... I can sue you in the UK for defamation. The law focuses on the place of publication, which at the moment is treated as the place where the material is accessed and read (arguable I can sue you in multiple places... see here: http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/it&law/c10_main.htm). So long as I have some reputation in the UK and you cause harm to that reputation by publishing 'into' that jurisdiction, I can sue you there. This is a huge problem with internet defamation law at the moment.

There is no reason why the UK government can't make laws in relation to anything accessed from the UK, even if it's stored elsewhere.

Encoding language into DNA has been used in several art projects, for instance this one by mad professor of literature Christian Bök (work still in progress, I believe). DARPA imitates art?

The question isn't so much which distro to use. There are plenty of articles around the web with step-by-step instructions for LAMP installs. You should much rather ask about how to secure your server and keep packages up to date. For the latter I prefer apt (debian based distros). YaST (Novell) and YUM (Yellow Dog Linux, Fedora) work nicely too. Securing your server, especially as newcomer, you will rely on your community. So i suggest you chose one of the bigger distros.

As many have pointed out before, familiarize yourself with Command Line Interfaces and the awesome UNIX toolchains. You will use them for automatization of day to day tasks. Most helpfull tool to know is the "man" command. It will usually give you an in detail description of the commands power and what it's switches do. (i.e. man cat)

You're right, helium is too precious to be used for more than the initial tests. Once they get into unmanned platforms far out to sea, there is really no reason not to use hydrogen. It should be possible to arrange it so that if there is an fire nearly everything but the envelope itself can be salvaged.

The amount of lift needed will less than 100,000 tonnes. A 50cm diameter x 20km column of water weighs less than 4000mt. The pipe will have to have some serious walls, though - that's nearly 2000 bar just from hydrostatic pressure, and much more will be needed to push the water -the article states 4000bar. Allowing 50% extra length for the curve and figuring the weight including the hose wall as equivalent to a 64cm diameter column of water, that is about 10000 tonnes. The envelope will have to be huge, though, and it will weigh much more, about 72 tonnes if I've done my math right. (Figuring 1250m length, fineness 2.8 ellipsoid, 50g/m^2 envelope (higher weight envelope figured to allow for airbeam skeleton/keel), net lift of 0.8N/m^3 for H2 at 20km standard atmosphere.) A bit more lift is needed for reserve lift, other equipment and the higher density of salt water, but the total should be in the neighborhood of 100,000 tonnes.

That size pipe at that pressure should deliver about 3 or 4 cubic meters per second if the water is going at 15-20m/s (~35-45mph). At the higher flow rate, that would be about 785MW just to lift the water, and over 1.6GW including pipe friction. That's about 1/8 km^3 per year and about 5e16 Joules/year.

The water will need to be atomized - Prof. Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh designed an elegant, efficient and reliable way of atomizing such large volumes of water in his paper "SPRAY TURBINES TO INCREASE RAIN BY ENHANCED EVAPORATION FROM THE SEA". (The rain-making part didn't work, as the spray suppressed natural ocean eveporation by increasing humidity.) The atomization should not take a relatively significant amount of power, less than 1MW.

It may be possible to offset the energy cost by using wind power. The wind will do work on the charged water spray, which will be carried a long way, turning into microscopic salt-crusted condensation nuclei before being rained out, mostly into the ocean, which could act as a current return path. The work of the wind would be turned into a higher voltage on the droplets by capacitive voltage multiplication (costant charge on the droplets, increasing distance from the spray electrode -> lower capacitance, higher voltage). A direct wind-electric energy conversion should be possible, though how much power it would produce is an open question.

Edinburgh university has a Department of Informatics

The number of new names there are for data processing is really mind-boggling now. More a regular expression script
than any one term:

[bio][genomics|[proteo][genetics|statistics|nomics]]

Really? I found him here.

The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.

There's some decent caselaw and precedent if anyone's intersted - Wiki has a little summary that shouldn't take too long to browse through. Long story short, it's certainly possible but there are some pretty high barriers to use (see specifically the ruling in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum [pdf]). It's a lot easier if its person on person, moreso if one of those is physically in the US, but it extends to corporations and non-residents as well.

My understanding is that shred doesn't work on modern file systems because they don't overwrite a file in place. See the Shred MAN page for information on this. It worked on old file systems like ext2, but on more advanced journaling file systems, this is almost never the case.

man ps

I_WANT_A_BROKEN_PS
    Force obsolete command line interpretation.

also, you can create a none OS application for Linux.

Linux for the desktop PC has far more places where the underlying operating system can be modified to in effect tee the decompressed video into MEncoder. You can do it at the level of Qt or Gtk+, at the level of X, or even in the kernel. There is nothing remotely close to the Protected Video Path under Windows; what is called DRM under Linux is something completely different.

They are very long and steep.

Many stretch deep into the ground, including the 230-foot-long moving stairs at Wheaton, the longest escalator in the Western Hemisphere. To reduce accidents, Metro keeps the speed of its escalators relatively slow -- 90 feet a minute, compared with the 120 [but up to 150] feet a minute that is typical of escalators at shopping malls, said Fred Goodine, Metro's assistant general manager for system safety and risk protection.

That means that riding the Wheaton escalator can take three minutes; and the Dupont Circle Metro's 2 minutes and 10 seconds. The escalator at Woodley Park Zoo/Adams Morgan, a favorite of tourists with small children, clocks in at 2 minutes and 20 seconds.
From a Washington Post article
We have elevators (and shuttles when they're broken, which is common). It's a decision, but the decision is because of the slope, walking is due to the length. By walking you can easily cut that 2 minutes in half. That can the difference between making the next train which can be 5-10 minutes depending on whether it's rush hour or off times.

As it turns out walking is pretty dangerous. As a result many other escalator systems boost speeds above the ones listed above in an effort to discourage walking. So Metro's policy is fairly counter-productive.

Seriously, ssh -D is your friend:

-D port
                  Specifies a local ``dynamic'' application-level port forwarding.
                  This works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the local
                  side, and whenever a connection is made to this port, the connec-
                  tion is forwarded over the secure channel, and the application
                  protocol is then used to determine where to connect to from the
                  remote machine. Currently the SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 protocols are
                  supported, and ssh will act as a SOCKS server. Only root can
                  forward privileged ports. Dynamic port forwardings can also be
                  specified in the configuration file.

My prior job required me to travel to China for a few weeks every 2-3 months & I found it invaluable. Fire it open on the command line, and set your browser to use that local port as a SOCKS proxy.

(Note, however, this will not help you deal with shitty bandwidth to sites outside china. On that front, you're pretty much just fucked until you leave China. Even "off hours" don't help that much.)

Some people have already been thinking about the legal implications of 3D printers. You might be interested in the following paper:

"The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing"

True, however Detroit would be all over replicator pattern "intellectual property" the same way that Hollywood is over DVD copyrights. This isn't a fantasy, however. It is just a matter of time. Actually, there are entirely new IP minefields when it comes to rapid prototyping and 3D printing. If I scan an item and produce a copy, have I infringed on a copyright, a patent, or a trademark? Is the shape of a turn signal indicator considered a sculpture? If I remove the embossed logo from an item and replace it with my own, have I broken any laws? What about selling patterns to The Doctor's scarf or Jayne Cobb's hat (Firefly)?

Less is, well, less...

... More or less.

Less is, well, less...

... More or less.

PPV, thelease or rental model, is considred legitimate in many other contexts. Why does it become illegitimate when the rental is an audio or video recording?

With free software, there's no way for a publisher to prevent users from editing the source code and inserting the equivalent of a tee(1).

Document management is essential in business.

"Document management" connotes access control for unpublished works within an organization, used to enforce trade secrets on machines owned by that organization. Even when used between two organizations, these organizations are still in a position to negotiate terms. "Digital restrictions management", on the other hand, connotes access control for published works, used to enforce copyrights on machines owned by members of the public, made available only under a standard form contract. It's supposed to be easier to lock down your own organization's machines than every machine in the world.

Which leaves me with strings.

There's no bias against women in the vast majority of workplaces or academics.

The advantage of pulling stuff out of your ass is that you can post quickly.

The problem with pulling stuff out of your ass is that you often end up being wrong.

man shred

So lets say you set them up with a linux server. Designate a directory as the "shredder". Write a cron job which shreds the contents of that directory every night. Something like that might do the job.

I believe law enforcement authorities have tools which will recover the former contents of overwritten sectors on hard disks. They would need different tools for SSDs. I doubt they would go to that expense unless they had very good reason to believe you had shredded something they needed.

FYI - Mac OS X is UNIX. Certified and all. It's a fantastic server platform.

http://beast.bio.ed.ac.uk/BEAGLE_on_Mac_OS_X

I'm guessing you've never used Spotlight extensively. It works great on large network shares.

http://elbitz.net/home.php is good, but they only open up registering every now and then (I remember I waited like 2 months to get my user). In general, though I just use the same popular torrent sites for everything else I get for books, too and I've gotten 6.28GB that way. Also, appear to have just found a .pdf with a huge list of ebook sites (and one for how to swear in all languages!). Haven't tried any of them, but go for it:
O'Reilly online http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ | http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/ Computer books and manuals http://www.hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html | http://www.informit.com/itlibrary/ | http://www.fore.com/support/manuals/home/home.htm | http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/webbuy/freebooks.html The Network Book http://www.cs.columbia.edu/netbook/ Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc links http://www.extrema.net/books/links.shtml Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc fiction http://194.58.154.90:4431/enscifi/ Pimpas online books (Indonesia) http://202.159.16.55/~pimpa2000 | http://202.159.15.46/~om-pimpa/buku Security, privacy and cryptography http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/crypto-security.html | http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ My own misc online reading material http://www.eastcoastfx.com/docs/admin-guides/ | http://www.eastcoastfx.com/~jorn/reading/ Computer books http://solaris.inorg.chem.msu.ru/cs-books/ | http://sweetrude.net/~cab/books/ | http://alaska.mine.nu/books/ | http://poprocks.dyn.ns.ca/dave/books/ | http://58-160.skarland.uaf.edu/books/ | http://202.186.247.194/~ebook/ | http://hooligans.org/reference/ Linux documentation http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html FreeBSD documentation http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/ Sun documentation http://osiris.imw.tu-clausthal.de:8888/ | http://uran.vvsu.ru:8888/ SGI documentation http://newton.unicc.chalmers.se/ebt-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb;td=2 | http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/init.cgi IBM Online Redbooks http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ Digital Unix documentation http://www.unix.digital.com/faqs/publications/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V40D_HTML/V40D_HTML/LIBRARY.HTM Filesystem Hierarchy Standard http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html | http://www.linuxbase.com/ UNIX stuff http://ww

think there is bound to be a bit of prior art here... like the teletext, sms, wordprocessors and even digital radiotransmissions.

At the very least the wall command comes to mind as prior art:

http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?wall

I have had to work with UK privacy laws before, and trust me, violating them is nothing like murder (see point #1 in the link). It's more like a slap on the wrists and a small fine. Lying and prolonging the media coverage, OTOH, means more customers get to find out that you're lying scumbags.

Which is why IMHO Spinvox is indeed innocent (and is the victim of disgruntled employees) or an especially brazen scumbag.

Well, considering that the kindle is already powered by linux, it's completely idiotic to assert that he's "shoving your pet OS down your throat" because you're already running linux on the Kindle.

Also, there is a text-to-speech is a standard package in one of the most common desktop managers for linux. I use the text-to-speech sometimes while I'm doing the dishes, etc. It does about as well as most text-to-speech programs do. You don't have to use kde to do it, ktts is just the front-end, it uses the festival synthesis system, so a front end might be out there can use a less full-featured OS than kde, which might be faster and hence more suitable for an e-book reader device. I wonder if it's possible to get the festival speech synthesis system running on it and bypass amazon's DRMed solution all together.