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Did Defendants prove by a preponderance of evidence that they are service provides [sic] who acted in a manner that entitles Defendants to the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

the jury answered "no" for all three parties, including the service provider. They considered the DMCA and rejected that defense.

It looks to me like this is a lot of people getting upset over nothing; to the best I can tell (without access to other court documents), the host blatantly ignored DMCA-like steps to mitigate the situation, acted willfully to support the copyright infringers, and got financial compensation for doing so. Justice was served.

This is being widely discussed in the hosting industry. The full jury ruling is online, and there's additional analysis and discussion at the Web Host Industry Review, TechDirt and Data Center Knowledge.

Okay, suppose we are back in the forties. We have lots of sound and telephone technology. There are tape and wire recorders. We have some early TV technology. There are mechanical calculators and cash registers. You have Hollerith punched cards, Jacquard looms, and the Harringay Tote. How would you set about it? Telephone technology and mercury delay lines were used for early memory, but you had to wait for your bit to arrive back. TV read/write tubes were used to store a small 2D array of dots and re-sample them, but they weren't really RAM yet.

To me it sounds like you're asking "could you make a computer starting with 1940s technology?", but that's pretty much what actually happened, since the first computers were developed during the 1940s. So just look into how the early computers were built.

For fundamental logic technology, I think the two main approaches were electromechanical relays, used by Howard Aiken at Harvard and Konrad Zuse in Germany, and vacuum tube triodes (or thermionic valves as the British called them), used by Eckert and Mauchly with ENIAC. Vacuum tubes won out for about the next decade, until transistors had matured enough to replace them.

For memory, different techniques were used. Machine registers were usually built using flip-flops made from the same technology as the other logic circuits. Programming was often done by plugboard wiring or by punched cards on the earliest machines, which didn't use the stored-program concept. (This approach is sometimes called a "Harvard architecture" and was named for Aiken's machines at Harvard.) Later machines did use denser memory technologies like the ones you mentioned: delay lines, cathode ray tubes, or spinning magnetic drums. These weren't randomly addressable and did have long access times, but that was just something designers had to work with. Even though cathode ray tube memories weren't randomly addressable, they did share some traits with modern DRAMs, like destructive read-out and the need for constant refreshing.

Secondary storage was on punched cards or magnetic tape; magnetic disks were still in the future.

For me, the big missed opportunity was the neon lamp. A neon lamp may take 20 volts to strike, but will run on 5 volts. A neon lamp would store a bit. You could even address a single bulb in a 2D array of them by X and Y buses, and query the state non-destructively, or change its state without affecting the others. Rather than having hundreds of little glass tubes, you might seal a 2D array into a single, flat tube. You would then have an early plasma display (remember the early orange ones in the eighties could store data?). There were calculating valves like the decatron (I remember using those) but, tantalizingly, no large-scale plasma arc logic.

It seems that some systems did use neons for some logic and memory (see here, here, and here), but they're kind of tricky and are slow to switch, which may be why they weren't used more widely.

Perhaps most shocking are items such as the list submitted by D.C. Attorney Ronald L. Drake who decided he wasn't being paid on time by the D.C. schools and thus raised his rates retroactively from $390/hour to $425/hour, submitting as evidence the names, home addresses, ages and social security numbers of 67 children.

I hope every judge in the District of Columbia knows about that. What's even more humorous is that Carl Malamud includes a hyperlink in that letter to FindLaw in case you wish to contact Mr. Drake.

And the response informs Malamud that it's taken care of with the SSNs redacted and the documents removed from public display. I wonder how long public.resource.org and Scribd have to demonstrate their usefulness before federal court documents are uploaded there by default in addition to being available through the court?

On a related note, I read in a Google blog that you can now release your works under Creative Commons on books.google.com and they happen to have Carl Malamud's A World's Fair for the Global Village available for download. And if you wish to release your works under the Creative Commons, Google will host them.

Perhaps most shocking are items such as the list submitted by D.C. Attorney Ronald L. Drake who decided he wasn't being paid on time by the D.C. schools and thus raised his rates retroactively from $390/hour to $425/hour, submitting as evidence the names, home addresses, ages and social security numbers of 67 children.

I hope every judge in the District of Columbia knows about that. What's even more humorous is that Carl Malamud includes a hyperlink in that letter to FindLaw in case you wish to contact Mr. Drake.

And the response informs Malamud that it's taken care of with the SSNs redacted and the documents removed from public display. I wonder how long public.resource.org and Scribd have to demonstrate their usefulness before federal court documents are uploaded there by default in addition to being available through the court?

On a related note, I read in a Google blog that you can now release your works under Creative Commons on books.google.com and they happen to have Carl Malamud's A World's Fair for the Global Village available for download. And if you wish to release your works under the Creative Commons, Google will host them.

From the English translation of the verdict:

Someone with an ip adress from the piratebay has visited this website.

Could you give an URL to that english translation? There seems to be a difference between this dutch version
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17846197/Vonnis-rechter-The-Pirate-Bay
and the english one you quote.

In the dutch version the IP address belongs to piratebyran.

-V

I got the translation at http://drop.io/breinpaidforthis_english.

As I understand the Dutch text, the IP address did belong to Piratbyrån, but they are the ones who established TPB. (Note: Piratbyrån is not to be confused with Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and copyright cop. Yes, the name of the former is a play on the latter.)

There are scientists who amongst other things make predictions of possible human extinction events. Yet I don't see the causes at the top of that list being talked about as much as global warming.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/13613339/Global-Catastrophic-Risks-Nick-Bostrom-Milan-M-Cirkovic

Why not?

And I'd have to side with Bjorn Lomborg any way. Even assuming global warming is real - we basically can't do anything about CO2, not somethin that would have any effect anyway. We can however do lots, already today, about the things we think global warming might cause. For a fraction of the cost. I strongly recommend reading "Cool It":

http://www.amazon.com/Cool-Skeptical-Environmentalists-Global-Warming/dp/0307266923

(PS: The models you talk about, how well-studied they are, have so far not been able to predict anything at all. On the contrary, all of them have completely failed to predict the climate of the last decade)

Try reading the Missouri "MIAC report", Missouri Information Analysis Center, a "fusion center" for DHS and local agencies They do seem to like 'presidential candidates Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr" supporters :) http://www.scribd.com/doc/13290698/The-Modern-Militia-MovementMissouri-MIAC-Strategic-Report-20Feb09-

Oh I agree that the people in power want to stay that way, and that ultimately the same mindset still exists to this very day. But there are at least some limits on what they can do to you with that information, sans actual criminal behavior on your part.

When you get right down to it, much of the Constitution was designed to keep government from criminalizing such things. If that document falls entirely into disfavor I don't think people realize how bad it could get in this country.

Try reading the Missouri "MIAC report", Missouri Information Analysis Center, a "fusion center" for DHS and local agencies
They do seem to like 'presidential candidates Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr" supporters :)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13290698/The-Modern-Militia-MovementMissouri-MIAC-Strategic-Report-20Feb09-

This might also be informative to those interested in ship energy transformation:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7801101/High-All-Electric-Ship-Concept

at least Toyota banks mad cash on their prius in the mean time.

Actually, that's sort of the problem for Toyota. They got hit with a patent judgment over their hybrid vehicles in eastern Texas a couple of years ago. The plaintiff was awarded nearly $100 a vehicle as an on-going royalty (which is about 17% of Toyota's relatively slim profit margin).

So I agree. Kudos to Toyota for playing the game like it should be played. They got hit pretty hard and they needed to fight fire with fire. Good for them.

The judges order http://www.scribd.com/doc/16501242/Gertner-Order-of-61609-re-Nesson-Tactics has some insight: "The Defendant is permitted to record the remaining depositions in any manner consistent with the requirements of Fed. R. Civ. P. 30(b)(3). The parties are cautioned, however, that the decision to publicize any recording, on the internet or otherwise, may be regarded as an effort to taint the jury pool in advance of trial."

If anyone is really worried about spiking oil and gasoline prices you should be a lot more worried about the role speculators are playing in the commodities markets than any effect cap and trade will have. Rolling Stone has an excellent exposé on the role Goldman Sachs in particular played in running oil prices up to $147 a barrel. Its a must read if you want to understand how Wall Street screws the rest of us to take home their multimillion dollar pay checks. This link is a scan, Rolling Stone doesn't have an online version. It is Rolling Stone so isn't exactly a pillar in the financial news industry, though the pillars probably wont rat out Goldman, and they are rats.

The reason for the recent oil spikes really has nothing to do with supply and demand or cap and trade. The real causes were:

A. Goldman Sachs and a dozen or so other big speculators got secret letters years ago exempting them from commodities regulations dating back to the 1930's which were designed to prevent speculators from driving up commodities prices.

B. Large amounts of money were fleeing the housing bubble bursh, and resulting stock market crash, also caused in large part by Goldman Sachs. Goldman was packaging a lot of the toxic mortgages and then buying credit default swaps shorting their own mortgage bundles because they knew they were garbage. Most were with AIG so when the mortgage bundles turned to crap AIG went bankrupt, U.S. taxpayer gave them a $130 billion dollars and much of it wen out the back door in to Goldman's pocket (like $10 billion). Most of this was engineered by Paulson and the new head of AIG, both former Goldman Sachs executives. It was... criminal.

C. Speculators poured in to oil and food futures with the help of entites like J Aron, Goldman's secretive commodity trader. Oil futures traded hands 20-30 times and were inflated beyond all reason, there was and still is a glut of oil was being parked all over the globe. They just moved the housing bubble to a commodities bubble. This bubble caused the oil price spike and food price spikes that caused $4 gas in the U.S. and food riots and starvation in the third world.

Goldman Sachs has acquired such massive control over our government and financial system thanks to alumni like Paulson and Rubin. They have completely gutted financial regulation and turned all global markets in to rigged casinos where they always win and the rest of us always lose. It appears Summers is the new White House insider protecting Goldman's interests. Rubin in particular defeated every attempt to regulate credit default swaps. Paulson as Goldman CEO talked the government in to removing caps on leverage that enabled the recent bubble. A host of characters gutted regulation of the commodities market making commodity bubbles the new norm.

A British Lord and financial type recently testified in front of an EU commission. His take was the big banks have managed to completely defang new attempts to regulate them in the wake of the recent crisis. They often threatened to just move off shore if the regulations got too onerous. He said they are RAPIDLY returning to business as usual prior to the recent collapse. They are returning to obscene compensation levels which is why they rushed to pay back all the TARP money. He predicted there will be another bubble and another major collapse in 10 to 15 years if it even takes that long.

Moral hazard is a critical element in a Capitalist system. If you gamble big and lose you HAVE to know you will fail. Since the U.S. and E.U. governments bailed out all the most of the gamblers and saved most of them from any consequences at all for their misdeeds they will just repeat the cycle. They will gamble, they will pocket big profits, and when the bubble bursts tax payers, workers and consumers the world over will get to pick up the tab for the losses.

That's why they've issued pants without pockets.

The rich ones thought they were getting what they thought they deserved - high returns from being in the club. Rich seem to have access to investments that the average person does not (IPOs schemes for example). There have been many scandals along these lines. Then the charities and pension funds were just looking for a good return and probably thought they had gotten lucky to get refered to Maddof by their rich contacts.

Its not that hard to believe that they did not suspect anything was wrong. He used great tactics (by referral only - an exclusive club).

Quoting from your comment: "Opponents of this bill hate capitalism, pure and simple." Many people think there is another problem. The system is being created to accomplish fraud, not capitalism.

Someone posted a link in another Slashdot story to a Rolling Stone article in the issue on the newsstands now: The Great American Bubble Machine, that discusses hidden purposes behind the present design of cap and trade.

By some measures, the U.S. government is the most corrupt in the world. For example, someone posted this link to a Rolling Stone article: The Great American Bubble Machine.

The U.S. government has invaded or bombed 25 countries since the end of the 2nd world war, all for profit. In Iraq, the U.S. government wanted control over the oil, and didn't care how many people it killed. In Afghanistan, they want to build an oil pipeline.

The U.S. government has a higher percentage of its people in prison than any country ever in the history of the world, over 6 times higher than in Europe, for example.

Who exactly is benefitting here?

Government owning the rights to pollute doesn't mean they stand to benefit the most.

The Investment Banking cohorts JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are the **huge** winners. How?
1. They take a cut of every transaction. The more valuable the credits, the more they earn. So the value of the business is guaranteed to increase every year.
2. They arbitrage the market. There is a spread that develops between an asking and a selling price in any given market. you can place bets on the spread among other neat ways to make money.
3. They game the market. Recent economic history is full of deregulated energy schemes that had huge artificial spreads between demand, supply and price.

Rolling Stone has a nice article on Goldman Sachs absolutely worth your time. If you read it, please realize it is exactly that bad. http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=16763183&access_key=key-aq99m8654zlwmm5muht&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

It essentially puts extra costs on industry that uses polluting fuels,
Right. The idea is to have the worst polluters 'taxed.' That tax defrays the public health costs of pollution. For example, if there were 10,000 less instances of cancer that kills people, there would be meaningful savings in medical expenditures. Now, that is not to say this scheme will not blow up in a mushroom cloud of corruption. Because it is. GS and JPM are behind it 100%. That's a clue that it's bad to the core.

If I followed the logic as laid out in most of the replies, then most regulations with a public health savings angle should be abolished. We should go back to the 1940's and have cars that kill people instead of absorbing impact, cigarettes for everyone and smoked everywhere just to name two.

How about expressing your dissatisfaction by getting involved in the political process instead?

Before you troll and bash "fundamentalists" with no proof you should read a few books on why education in the US is in the state we now see.

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America By Charlotte Iserbyt

An Underground History of Education by John Gatto

Or read the Dodd Report to the Reece Committee which investigated Tax Free Foundations in the early 1950's.

Here in page 15. You can see the amount of land area solar power would require for generating our requirements for the next couple of decades. Only problem is, it is still too expensive to build it.

It was Portugal. Here is a link to a paper by the CATO institute about the success policies in Portugal.

I had a drive where the file system was shredded, so I loaded the drive into FTK Imager (its free, about halway down the page), did a search of the raw space of the drive for the file name I needed, found the relevant $i30 reference (its in there), jumped to the relevant sectors on the disk using ftk imager's goto command , carved out the hex with ftk imager's copy hex command, dumped it into a hex editor, and saved the file under the extension. It worked perfectly.

Uphill, both ways, in the snow.

This is the ultimate last resort if you absolutely, have to, get a file back.

I knew this had the ring of truth about it

http://www.scribd.com/doc/13855395/Weaseljumper-Read-Me-First/

No, only require so-called "reasonable and non-discriminatory", which you can just imagine what that really means...

Also, Knuth has said that under today's patent system he couldn't possibly have legally written TeX...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/29707/Letter-to-the-Patent-Office-From-Donald-Knuth

But why would anyone listen to a genius when there is money to be made from thin air...?

Scribd's "iPaper" page is laughably false. I remember it being even worse before, but it's still bad now:

iPaper is a rich document format built for the web

Kinda like PDF?

iPaper will display documents in the same way regardless of whether you're using Windows, MacOS, or Linux

So, it's like PDF?

Your readers no longer have to download files or extra software to view your documents

Because every computer in the world comes with Adobe Flash and not Adobe Reader. No sirree.

But it gets worse:

You can convert just about any major document format into iPaper, including Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs,OpenOffice documents, and PostScript files.

Because apparently, PDF converters don't exist. There is no such thing as Acrobat Distiller or PDFCreator.

Scribd documents are indexed by major search engines

That's kind of like saying that "Volkswagen cars use engines" and touting that as a feature.

Scribd's iPaper document viewer is embeddable in any website or blog

Conclusion: Scribd is a needless Flash-based frontend to PDF. In fact, I remember that when Scribd was launched, it actually used Macromedia's FlashPaper, obviously used by Macromedia to turn people away from Adobe Reader (before they got acquired by Adobe, of course).

Scribd.com and other web sites offer free eBooks with or without the author's signed consent.

Some companies give away old books as free eBooks like the old Wrox Computer Books all around the Internet and it is legal. They give away the old books to promote their new books.

If we consider the fact that the database could do stuff to save space,
you can probably assume less than 2^32 email addresses and compress ever email address to an integer 40bit index, ip addresses are 28bits and dates 16bit(good 180years). at 136b per email (68 extra bits, per extra recipient) you can deal with 56million individual emails per gigabyte (Its hard to estimate how many email recipients revive each spam mail, but ill guess 63) so 4368b per sent spam means they could log 2m sent spams (124m received) per GB. If we take the 2008 figures of 210B/day but assume 72% spam and 4% go to/from uk, 8.4B (6B spam) it would take 43GB/day to store legit records, but ~3TB/day to store all the spam. There is however a huge assumption that when the sources cite numbers for emails sent, they actually mean emails sent, if they are citing emails received then all the spam takes up 'just' 48GB/day and storage is actually feasibly, over a week (9.8 days) per terabyte (spread amongst all the isps)

All calculations are estimates, i know nothing about real life databases, the index would take up space, etc, feel free to improve my estimates or provide a good source for the estimates i used
number of emails addresses? (i think a trillion should be the right order of magnitude if you include spammers)
emails per day? (spams per day)?
average recipients per email? (i assumed 1 and 63 per spam, but both are probably wildly inaccurate)
email traffic in the uk? (Seriously my source was a 2005 paper with nothing to do with email use)

that said i think the estimates probably provide the correct magnitude
If 210B individual emails are sent per day, each isp will likely have store a Terabytes for every few days.
However if 210B emails are recived then each isp will likely have to store a Terabyte of data every few weeks.

If GP is still blaming the economic problems on REAGAN he sure as hell can keep blaming them on Bush for a while longer.

Because our current problems are Reaganomics coming home to roost. Reagan slashed the income tax rate on the rich while drastically increasing defense spending in peacetime, resulting in an explosion of the deficit and the national debt. And it was Reagan who ushered in deregulation for the sake of deregulation, famously declaring "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

as you are at a University, you probably have access to a copy of Adobe Accrobat, I have found that it has an alright OCR for scanned pdfs. Also you may want to look at using Scribd it is not open source but is free and searchable.

Here is another aspect of the impact of CFLs compared to incandescent bulbs... per an EPA fact sheet, even if your CFL breaks the amount of Mercury released into the environment is less then the amount released by a regular bulb and a coal power plant. If you do break your CFL, there are steps that you need to take to get it cleaned up. Snopes has some good tips on how to do that

Anyone who thinks Ruby on Rails can't scale is as dogmatic in their anti-hype as the original hypers were. The right tool for the right job and all that.

If you want to read the document for yourself: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13765305/UN-Defamation-of-Religions-Resolution-Full-Text

The write-up is here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13731776/Tracking-GhostNet-Investigating-a-Cyber-Espionage-Network Apparently only 11 out of 34 Anti-Virus programs on virustotal detected the initial dropper from the e-mail attachments.

I'm going to burn some Karma here and pimp myself out a bit.

I'm currently trying to sell a novel, Trust Network: a contemporary techno-thriller about a woman who stumbles upon a group of people doing pretty much exactly the kinds of stuff with botnets that we're talking about here. She has a great idea involving social networks and online trust, which is at odds with what these people want to do. From there it's a fast-paced cat-and-mouse to see who can get the upper hand.

One of the reasons I wrote it was because I got tired of all of the contemporary fiction with computers that made you roll your eyes at how absurd the technology was. You know what I'm talking about: "It's a UNIX system -- I know this!". I wrote it to prove that you could get the technology right without sacrificing the story or making you want to scrape your eyeballs out. In other words, it was written specifically for the Slashdot technorati.

I haven't found an agent yet, but until then I have made the complete book available for anyone to read: you can read it online at Scribd, or download a free PDF or have a print-on-demand copy sent to you from Lulu. The cost of the printed book ($9-$17) from Lulu is 100% publishing cost, with nothing going to me. In the US, you can get it shipped to you for as little as ~$15 total. I've even got a sort of money-back guarantee if you decide it was a complete waste of your money.

If you are intrigued by the thought of what you could do with a million zombie computers at your command, and you enjoy geektastic fiction, then have at it. I hope you enjoy it. Meanwhile, I've got about a zillion query letters to agents that I have to get back to writing.

"While connecting the dots to infer something may not make it so, Russia has a rich history of cyber attacks against enemies. Isn't it prudent to consider their history when looking at the evidence?"

What evidence a report that claims that Stopgeorgia.ru is hosted by an ISP that's in the same street as GRU headquarters. Like, given the history of the KGB, do you think they would be that stupid.

'* The StopGeorgia.ru forum was part of a bulletproofed network that relied on shell companies and false WHOIS data to (a) prevent its closure through Terms of Service violations, and (b) to maks the involvement of the Russian FSB/GRU. By mimicking the structure of the Russian Business Network, a cyber criminal enterprise, it created plausible deniability that it is a Kremlin-funded Information Operation (IO)'

Why set up a traceable organization when you can instruct your own agents in the real organizations to carry out such blackops. I mean that's the one thing spy organizations are designed to do, infiltrate conventional organizations with their own secret agents. And given the nature of DDOS attacks, it wouldn't take that much organization. Cases in point being the Conficker worm and the BBCs bought in botnet. Are we supposed to take this 'report' at face value, given its timing and its source, a front organization with ties to the US intelligence community.

Perhaps the 11 who received retention bonuses even though they are no longer with the company fulfilled the requirements of their retention agreement and hence earned the bonus. As far as I know, there is insufficient public information about the bonuses to know if this is the case, but it seems most likely.

For example, their retention agreement signed on December 1, 2007 may have read something like "If the employee continues to provide full time satisfactory service to AIG through November 31, 2008, AIG shall pay a bonus of $X to the employee on or before March 15, 2009." and the employee was laid off on December 1, 2008 having completed all the work they were needed for. (Actually, gory details can, I think, be found here - for example see sections 3.03 through 3.05)

The employee may have turned down lucrative offers from other financial institutions in anticipation of receiving the bonus for not jumping ship. Although the amounts seem high, they might be reasonable. This would depend on the unique skill/knowledge of the individual and its value to AIG. It's possible that some of these people are very knowledgeable people whose skills are actually very much in demand as many financial entities around the world suddenly have to unwind and juggle a situation they hadn't expected so were not staffed for. Note that to be effective, a retention bonus needs to be in the neighborhood of any bonus (immediate signon bonus or over the first year or so) a prospective employer may promise in order to hire the person.

Also, note that most of the work this person did to earn the bonus was done before the September 2008 bailout.

I'm not saying that any of the above is the situation at AIG with these retention bonuses. It's just that we don't know yet so it seems a bit early to condemn with a broad brush based on little knowledge. Just because Washington politicians are bleating about it doesn't mean much -- they are, after all, mostly opportunistic scum sucking bottom feeders.

Many of the passwords shown in the postings I've skimmed past haven't looked like dictionary words. I've actually gone back to an earlier post, and Google'd a few of the higher-security looking ones, and the only result is a single out of order page.

That makes me fairly certain someone screwed up this one.

OK, then on the Mac, what the fuck is this for then?

ret = fcntl(file, F_FULLFSYNC, NULL);

Besides, you already admitted that fsync does NOT write the fucking data to the disk. Getting the data anywhere but the disk is ALLOWABLE by POSIX, but it's fucking stupid anyway.

Whatever work that fsync() on the Mac does, actually writing data to the disk is NOT PART OF IT.

So, you call me a troll. I call you an ass because you're just like ever other toe-picker assburger's syndrome programmer I've ever met.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/4246806/eat-my-data

Read that shit and learn something, infant.

Oh, and I jerk off all over your face too. Listen to me grunt!

The British public support this measure and others like it every single morning when they buy sensationalist, right wing papers

Manufacturing Consent

Like this?

Unless you are an off-the-grid cash-economy false-ID type a la Claire Wolf outsider (which you are not given your job), then you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from being on linkedin.

This is not to say you can't shoot yourself in the foot with inappropriate postings on myspace of facebook, but a drooling cretin can tell what should and should not go up there. But linkedin is a resume, letters of recommendation and a way to contact folks with warm introductions. No harm, no foul.

It's unfortunate the Save the Netbooks campaign was not credited in the summary (nor many of the resulting articles) for uncovering Dell's petition to cancel (note that the linked document is in our account), even if only because we have the most complete collection of information and research on the topic.

We've been working hard over the last days to overturn Psion's trademark and it was actually in the course of filing the petition to cancel that we discovered Dell had beaten us to it by a day! We're happy they're playing the white knight this time (after last year's "cloud computing" claim), and especially for their having added the "fraud" angle to our pleadings for abandonment and genericness.

Anyway we wish them the best of luck, even though we don't think they'll need it.

Save the Netbooks

And you have discovered how to advance the technology enough for it to be buildable within the available open space, without destroying habitats and greenspaces that are protected?

Guess what? The sunniest places on Earth are deserts! Plenty of open space there.

The solar energy concentration is not sufficient to convert the amount of energy we need with the technology we have without bulldozing half of the available landmass.

Bollocks. Look at page 15 of this talk.

This argument is similar to the (thankfully abortive) ethanol argument, which had Brazil contemplating how much of the rain forest they could knock down to grow corn without destroying the world's oxygen supply.

Eh? Brazil gets its ethanol from sugar cane, which is much more efficient than corn.

you could look at on actual experiments that (under very controlled conditions) appear to show information transfer at greater than light speed

Except that it doesn't.

Nemesysco's Poly-Layered Voice Analysis measures 18 parameters of speech in real-time for interrogators at police, military and secret-services agencies. Its accuracy as a lie detector has proven to be less important than its ability to more quickly pinpoint for interrogators where there are problems in a subject's story. Officers then can zero in much more quickly with their traditional interrogation techniques.

The software measures voice for a variety of parameters including deception, excitement, stress, mental effort, concentration, hesitation, anger, love and lust. It works prerecorded, over the phone and live, the company said. V Entertainment recommends it for screening phone calls, checking the truthfulness of people with whom you deal or gauging romantic interest.

Or, according to the article that was pulled, it measures momentary transient signals in the digitized recording that are more likely to be caused by a noisy signal or random[1] combination of multiple frequencies and assigns them into arbitrary classifications using a method that has no known basis in science and was invented by a man with no formal scientific training who prefers to program in (sloppy) Visual Basic. Its only benefit is in making people who are lying nervous about doing so, because they think it might work.

[1] or at least semi-chaotic, it seems based on a brief analysis.

I found it by clicking on the aticle link( An article called "Charlatanry in forensic speech science: A problem to be taken seriously" was pulled by the publisher after threats of a libel lawsuit.") in the summary.

Then I had to 'temporarily allow scrbd.com' in 'noscript'.

Next you need to find the 'iPaper' link (upper left border of reader window next to the scribd logo)and mouse over it, select 'view mode' from the menu, then select 'book mode' from the 'view mode' menu.

Use the bar(s) to change 'book' pages...may also need to right click and zoom in, the magnifier tool at the top of the window was broken for me.

Hope this helps, even if it's only to start a flurry of "U dum n00b!- Here's the right way!!11! LOLZ!1!" replies. :-)

if you're transferring that much data with a card reader, it might be worthwhile to get one that supports FireWire. even a FireWire 400 CompactFlash card reader in PIO mode beats out a USB 2.0 card reader in UDMA mode. but a FireWire 800 CF card reader in UDMA mode absolutely smokes USB 2.0 in UDMA mode.

Synchrotech has performed some FireWire vs. USB 2.0 UDMA CompactFlash benchmarks. this is their conclusion:

While USB 2.0's theoretical 480Mbp/s (60MBp/s) throughput should be sufficient for UDMA 4 CompactFlash, real throughput is significantly less. Top hard drive manufacturers typically cite USB 2.0's best speed at 33MB/s, or about half the speed of UDMA 4 CompactFlash, or 25% of UDMA 6 CompactFlash. There are myriad reasons for USB 2.0's 'real world' speeds including: CPU overhead from its master/slave arrangement, NRZI encoding, and inexpensive chipset implementations. The USB 2.0 UDMA reader used in the benchmarks above uses one of the latest USB chipsets from Genesys Logic. While a new generation of that chipset should soon be available, we don't foresee it providing throughput close to half of that of FireWire.

The above tests demonstrate both FireWire 800 and 400 readers are significantly faster for reading CompactFlash cards by orders of magnitude. When card to computer speed in crucial, always choose a FireWire based CompactFlash reader or a reader with a comparable bandwidth.

so if you don't want the bus interface to be a bottleneck preventing your CompactFlash cards from realizing their full performance, then it might be worthwhile to invest in a slightly more expensive FireWire 800 card reader.

of course, if you have a laptop with an ExpressCard 34/54 slot, then you could go with a CFExpressPro+ PCIe ExpressCard to CompactFlash Memory Card Adapter. though CF rev. 4 itself only supports transfer speeds of up to 133MB (UDMA 6), so any bus speed beyond 1 Gbps would be overkill.

I think 'pop' is used extensively in this type of memory that doesn't need 'push':
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8189749/Signetics-Fully-Encoded-9046-x-N-Random-Access-WriteOnlyMemory

If you want the book that most influenced my IT career (and life in general), you've got to go way back to the 80's.

Mapping the Commodore 64
http://www.scribd.com/doc/40444/MAPPING-THE-Commodore-64

It blew my mind, revealing every little inner part of the machine. Ah, the glory days of writing machine code with a software monitor. None of this assember luxury - we figured jump offsets by counting the bytes as we wrote the code!

At first, I thought he had managed
to make a force field around the car using a tesla coil.

But then I saw that he was just rotating a pole connected to a tesla coil around the car, what a disappointment.

It might actually be possible to make a force field with a Tesla coil if you can find the correct field harmonics.
See http://amasci.com/freenrg/audwall.html

You might also have to know something about
quaternionic electromagnetism to pull it of.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4445/quaternionic-electrodynamics

Also if you think that slashdot stories have been
to low quality lately then maybe you should try http://crowdnews.eu/