Slashdot Mirror

s20451 writes: "The American Solar Challenge solar car race wrapped up yesterday in Claremont, California, with the University of Michigan winning. According to this article in the Globe and Mail, two Canadian teams finished in the top five: Waterloo and Queen's, finishing third and fourth, respectively. Go Canada!"

InterlockingP writes: "The Canadian government, after promising high-speed internet access for every community in the country by 2004, has concluded a report on the cost of implementing such a scheme. The total cost, from $1.85 billion to $4.5 billion ($CAN), would be shared by all levels of government and the private sector. Has any other country even addressed this issue yet? It looks like Canada is leading the way (again) with increasing availability of cheap internet access for all to enjoy. The story is covered in the Toronto Star and in The Globe and Mail."

tyrann98 writes: "The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian record industry has experienced a 6.4% drop in CDs and cassettes overall (not singles) in the last year - plus a 7% drop in the first four months of this year. They don't know who is to blame, but they have their fingers pointed at you guessed it: Napster. Canadians are one of the world's most connected societies (mainly due to cheap high speed Internet access) and may reflect the direction the Internet is headed. "And indeed they are. Canadians have embraced the practice of downloading songs from the Internet faster and more intensely than most other countries. The surveys show nearly six in 10 of those between the ages of 18 and 34 go to their computers rather than a record shop to acquire songs. There are as many as five million Napster users who sign on to the Web site an average 6.3 days a month. It's about twice the reach the Web site has in the United States.""

BananaBoht writes: "According to this article, a Canadian named Matt Goyer plans to set up a Napster clone server off the shores of the UK on a sovreign island. Mr. Goyer is eyeing HavenCo Ltd. as a possible site for his cloned Napster computer server. The company rents computing power and Internet data storage space to those seeking to avoid government laws. It operates from an ocean platform called Sealand, which has operated for 30 years as a sovereign territory off the coast of England."

Dspiral writes "At the Canadian publication, The Globe and Mail, they write about the scramjet. A jet engine, with theoretical speeds over 8000 Kph, and pollution free!" Zero pollution because its fuel is hydrogen (a scramjet takes its oxygen from the air). The HyShot homepage is amazing; the beast has been built on a shoestring, barely over a million dollars Australian, and my favorite part is their planned test: "...shooting an engine into the atmosphere on a rocket, and hoping it will ignite as it plunges back down to Earth. Mr. Paull's speed objective is Mach 7.6, and the engine should ignite 23-35 kilometres off the ground."

delfstrom asks: "Retention time for online reference material is decreasing. First it was Deja moving archives offline. Now try to find the AP story you saw on Yahoo from earlier this year about a judge's order against a CyberPatrol decryption tool. You can't, because anything older than 30 days is canned from news.yahoo.com. Likewise, certain online newspapers (not to mention any names) are removing content after a mere 7 days, though for $25 per retrieved article you can go back to 1977. This certainly goes against the philosophy of not breaking links. What responsibility do information providers have in maintaining articles that they post? In this era of electronic publishing, academic papers are beginning to contain URLs in the references. To what extent can we keep copies of such information and provide it to others?"

Legolas-Greenleaf writes: "The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are currently conducting an investigation into a software package called 'Promis,' used by the government, that allegedly contains a backdoor. According to Inslaw Inc. (original makers of Promis), the American and Israeli intelligence services pirated this software package, and resold a hacked version allowing them access. This software is possibly running in some of the RCMP's databases. The Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail has a story on it here, and CNN has a story on it here." The whole thing reads a bit like a Monty Python sketch: a months-long investigation based on sketchy allegations from 1993, claiming some very interesting just-among-pals bureaucratic copyright violations. Hmmm. A handful of Canadian quarters says it's not an open-source product.

Legolas-Greenleaf writes: "The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are currently conducting an investigation into a software package called 'Promis,' used by the government, that allegedly contains a backdoor. According to Inslaw Inc. (original makers of Promis), the American and Israeli intelligence services pirated this software package, and resold a hacked version allowing them access. This software is possibly running in some of the RCMP's databases. The Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail has a story on it here, and CNN has a story on it here." The whole thing reads a bit like a Monty Python sketch: a months-long investigation based on sketchy allegations from 1993, claiming some very interesting just-among-pals bureaucratic copyright violations. Hmmm. A handful of Canadian quarters says it's not an open-source product.

Welcome to another episode of Slashback, since stories keep popping up in parts rather than in neat, hermetic, well-encapsulated little packages. So read this -- it's like going to the demolition derby. You want to see the slip-ups, the revisions, the torture of correction, but without having beer poured on you by strangers. Read on if you'd like (at the very least) to know more about the the British Columbia law which relegated naughty (violent) video games to the back of the arcade.

And no, he didn't just slip through the bars. Grexnix writes "ShapeShifter, the 2600 staffer arrested during the Republican convention protests, has finally been released, after a series of events that clearly illustrate the sort of things to expect when the wheels of judicial bureaucracy start grinding. Read the article here."

Sticking up for common sense in the Great White North. Ant writes "http://www.globeandma il.com/gam/National/20000812/USOLDN.html Victoria -- The U.S. manufacturers of Soldier of Fortune are launching a legal battle over an unprecedented British Columbia ruling classifying the graphic computer game as an adult motion picture. Activision Inc. announced yesterday it will appeal the decision by B.C.'s provincial director of film classification that restricts minors under 18 from renting and selling the CD-ROM game. The Canadian distributor of the game, Beamscope Canada, has also filed an appeal with B.C.'s Motion Picture Appeal Board."

Well, it's not a law of nature, fellas. Ian01 writes "Here is an article from MIT's Tech Review magazine about how Moore's Law is false." Well, "false" is a little strong a word for as loose an idea as Mr. Moore's -- errr, "conjecture" -- but isn't it nice to see things keep getting smaller faster and cheaper?

Lars Lars Lars Lars Lars Lars Lars Obiwan Kenobi writes: "As quoted from the Q Online article: 'Napster's number one critic Lars Ulrich - who can barely contain his pleasure at seeing the file sharing company in strife - has done a U-turn. The Metallica drummer's business, the no-brainer monikered The Music Company, will promote work from its artists online at www.theMusicCom.com. And users will be able to sample one of the artists, Goudie through MP3 downloads on the band's official site, which it linked through The Music Company site.'

Dudn't it just seem...you know...ironic?"

While Lars hawking online music may seem ironic at first blush, reading the words he spoke to slashdot a few moons ago, it's not that surprizing at all. Metallica, after all, has long allowed fans to bootleg their concerts, and as Lars said, "So of course there will be at some point -- we are not stupid, of course we realize the future of getting music from Metlalica to the people who are interested in Metallica's music is through the Internet. But the question is, on whose conditions, and obviously we want it to be on our conditions." Now at some level, doesn't that strike a chord?

RollingThunder writes: "The Globe and Mail has a story about the International Olympic Committee suing to have 1,800 domains removed. All the domains contain the words 'Olympic', 'Olympics', or 'Olympiad', and variations thereof like '2004olimpics.com'. Interesting that they're going after the DNS hierarchy (the lawsuit is filed in Alexandria, Va.) rather than the daunting task of going after the domain owners themselves." Wow. Maybe they could organize something where the domain owners could compete in a variety of fitness tests and games, you know, like the... Oh, never mind.

RollingThunder writes: "The Globe and Mail has a story about the International Olympic Committee suing to have 1,800 domains removed. All the domains contain the words 'Olympic', 'Olympics', or 'Olympiad', and variations thereof like '2004olimpics.com'. Interesting that they're going after the DNS hierarchy (the lawsuit is filed in Alexandria, Va.) rather than the daunting task of going after the domain owners themselves." Wow. Maybe they could organize something where the domain owners could compete in a variety of fitness tests and games, you know, like the... Oh, never mind.

iKev writes: "Today's Globe and Mail has an interesting story on China's attempt to restrict Internet content available to its citizens. It seems that The New York Times is on the list of 'politically sensitive' sites, but all other U.S. papers are not. ... Porn, however, is free for all 1.3 billion people to view. Go figure. I wonder what kind of setup they have running this firewall." "Firewall" is the wrong term for blocking political content, but the pun's too good to resist I guess. If anyone has details on the software, please post your comments below or emailme.

iKev writes: "Today's Globe and Mail has an interesting story on China's attempt to restrict Internet content available to its citizens. It seems that The New York Times is on the list of 'politically sensitive' sites, but all other U.S. papers are not. ... Porn, however, is free for all 1.3 billion people to view. Go figure. I wonder what kind of setup they have running this firewall." "Firewall" is the wrong term for blocking political content, but the pun's too good to resist I guess. If anyone has details on the software, please post your comments below or emailme.

Ami Ganguli writes, "This morning's edition of Canada's Globe and Mail claims that Corel and Intel are discussing an alliance to produce cheap Linux boxes. The article claims that a major PC vendor, a browser developer, and an ISP would also be involved. It sounds like a two year commitment to AOL may soon land you a free PC with Linux and Corel Office 2000. " It's all rumors and "talks" at this point, however.

Ami Ganguli writes, "This morning's edition of Canada's Globe and Mail claims that Corel and Intel are discussing an alliance to produce cheap Linux boxes. The article claims that a major PC vendor, a browser developer, and an ISP would also be involved. It sounds like a two year commitment to AOL may soon land you a free PC with Linux and Corel Office 2000. " It's all rumors and "talks" at this point, however.

tpck writes "Corel is suing the U.S. Department of Labour for favoring Microsoft's Office software over Corel's own WordPerfect. They have already successfully sued the Canadian government for similar discrimination and won $9.9 million. "

Anonymous Coward writes "Canada has restarted talks on a tax of 74 cents per 15 minutes on digital recording media that is scheduled to begin on January 1st." It's interesting that when DAT was taxed, the format never caught on. Then again, CD-ROM is already a popular format. For more on the DAT issue, which this very closely parallels, RMS has an interesting article that appeared in Wired about 7 years ago, titled "The Right Way to Tax DAT".

HadMatter writes "An Ontario Superior Court Judge may have made netiquette a principle of Canadian case law, according to this article in the Globe and Mail. A spammer was denied an injunction against an ISP who terminated an account on the basis that Spam is in breach of the emerging principles of Netiquette, and that Spam is not allowed unless a contract specifically allows it. The ISP says they had no choice unless they wanted to get cut off too. Could the law be catching up to accepted practice? "

HadMatter writes "An Ontario Superior Court Judge may have made netiquette a principle of Canadian case law, according to this article in the Globe and Mail. A spammer was denied an injunction against an ISP who terminated an account on the basis that Spam is in breach of the emerging principles of Netiquette, and that Spam is not allowed unless a contract specifically allows it. The ISP says they had no choice unless they wanted to get cut off too. Could the law be catching up to accepted practice? "