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According to the Sydney Morning Herald

National Geographic
Sydney Morning Herald
Google News

They are also looking at just how bad the radiation threat is likely to be. One of the experiments on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. According to this article the radiation level would be about double that faced on the ISS, but still manageable. Amusingly the instrument on the probe used to measure the radiation levels has broken down due to radiation damage caused during the recent massive solar flares.

No no no, even easier: the weatherman in Melbourne, Australia.

"And the weather today, 20 and fine." Every day

Hey, I'm a fan of the capitalist ethos as much as the next guy, but when it comes to the interests of the populous it's clearly more responsible to choose open source and open standards. Should we really trust Our Data to invisible source code written by anonymous programmers ensconced in a proprietary bubble?

I guess we shouldn't be so surprised that the elite don't have the interests of the populous at heart. Hmm, maybe there's a worm in the Capitalist apple.... It's time the Open Source Community made it clear that we are an essential element of the free market ecosystem and not some fringe element to be vilified and marginalized.

some English media have a little translated excerpts: here and here. and there's a screenshot of one of the Liu Di's original post, in this one, she criticized PRC government for arresting a computer engineer Huang Qi (ye, a geek like you and me), who accidently named his website "64tianwang" (64 Sky Net) on June 4 because "tianwang" is occupied. There are also two pictures of the young girl (one two) on that dedicated site.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani has condemned this, and has asked for a system whereby the person who gets the most votes gets elected instead.

Given this recent revelation, I'm sure everyone is ready to trust the FBI with greater power and lesser accountability:)

It's really a shame though. I know a lot of the people working there are quite professional and care about doing a good job and protecting the Constitution of the United States, the ideals that make America a good place.

But after the legacy of Hoover misusing the agency many decades ago, evidently missing the boat on predicting the 9/11 catastrophe, the last thing they need is this kind of power handed to them by higher ups. Those superiors are political appointees with a vision for enforcement that shares more with authoritarian states than with the principles America was founded upon.

If I was a mid-level bureaucrat in the FBI, I'd make efforts to establish accountability policies, citizen review boards, etc. even if the current administration doesn't think they're necessary.

If they don't this, then they can be assured of getting tarred and feather during Congressional hearings 5-10 years from now, much like what happened to the CIA in the late 1970's.

God made man, but Colonel Colt made him equal.

Handguns are ideal for self defense. Would you kill a man in self-defense? What if you could prevent something like this?

I think IBM USA should talk to its Australian Branch Linux on the desktop? Not Down Under, says IBM SMH

There it is again, the Saddam/9-11 link.

I made no such link.

Bush no longer maintains this fiction, it's time to drop it here too.

AFAIK, Bush never claimed that Iraq was behind 9/11. The Whitehouse has, however, claimed that Iraq supports terrorism and poses a threat to the United States- both of which are true.

BTW, if it was due to just the book excerpts why did Time remove the entire article and any reference to it in the table of contents

Jeesh- the Time article has been printed and released for years. The book is still for sale at bookstores. There is no conspiracy to hide this stuff from the public.

I'm breaking my own rule of never arguing more than two posts deep on slashdot, but here goes.

My point was, when someone says, "I have this information, but I'm not telling!" that's not censorship. It's called keeping a secret. It's called confidential information. It's not called censorship. Censorship requires a party other than a publisher and reader.

Much better! Allow me to summarise: Censorship involves A, someone who has information and a desire to communicate it; B, a potential recipient; and C, a censor, someone who has the functional power to inhibit that communication. Is that close enough to what you are saying?

Actually I would prefer to talk about the right to to communicate and the right to receive, precisely because of such legal issues as "confidential information" which A may have access to without having any right to communicate it. However your definition seems workable and sensible, so let's go with that for the moment.

I simply said that censorship is impossible because you can always go anonymously on the 'net to publish your thoughts.

I think this is a really weak point in your argument. It can hardly have been the case that when the old Soviet Union was banning the publication or importation of the Bible, they were not engaging in censorship merely because some Evanglical societies successfully smuggled Bibles into Russia. There may be workarounds, there may be censorship which is less than 100% effective. But this is still censorship.

Moreover I doubt the effectiveness of web publication as a form of circumventing media censorship. If anything I would say that the sheer size of the market in the US (providing we can stop it all from falling into Mr Murdoch's hands) is the best protection the American public has. Clearly the more players there are in a market, the less chance there is of effective collusion

Smaller markets are not always so fortunate, especially when you consider strategic control of the media. In Australia, for instance, Murdoch has the game sown up as regards print media which floating voters read. That highbrow Sydney Morming Herald and The Age are only read by people who already know how they are going to vote. As a consequence there has not been a (federal) change of government in Australia from 1972, which has not had Murdoch's approval. The same is probably true for the UK from the days of Thatcher onwards (but there haven't been too many changes, so its a moot point).

I agree that it would be wrong, but it would not be censorship. If a reporter found out about it, went to post it on the web, and was stopped by his employer, that would be censorship.

What if the reporter wanted it published in the newspaper. You would have the situation of A, a reporter wanting to do his/her job of informing the public, B a public which ought to be informed,and C a newspaper proprietor using their functional power to inhibit that communication?

Of course this isn't an easy thing to resolve. After all proprietors must have some say in what the publish and what not. Indeed publishers arguably have as much a duty to censor as they do the publish, for instance when something a reporter wants to print, would, in their judgment, endanger the operational security of a section of the nations armed forces during a time of war. Our concern should be with what is being censored, what those people who occupy that special place a democracy accords, decide to allow to filter through to us, and what they don't. And why.

Of course we should oppose this, but it's next to impossible for it to happen because of the way the network is setup. First of all, who has this "right" to sell it? ...

The same people who sold off (not licensed, but sold) a section of the electro-magnetic spectrum for the next generation communications technologies. Governmen

How about one of those blood sugar powered setups. Then your laptop could help you lose weight without all that inconvenient moving around. I can see it now. "I need to finish this paper by midnight, bring me more Krispy Kremes NOW!"

The linked story appears to be noting more than record company propaganda dressed up as news. Let's start with where they got the $60 million figure? Do they really expect us to believe that these kids out did Apple iTunes three and a half times? 17 million $0.99 cent iTunes so far. Not likely.

This story goes into a bit more detail and is worth a read.

I understand some files may have been simple rips but some of the allegedly infringing files that got these kids into trouble are club remixes they did themselves. That is, they created new works by sampling a song, pulling it apart and putting it back together with different beat, and uploading the remix. This is what DJ's do. It may technically be infringing behavior but it's not the kind of thing one would expect police action and possible jail for even if you did upload the final song.

The /. linked story has Paul Roberts, Counsel for the Commonwealth, saying "Ng was well aware he was acting illegally". In my link the story has Ng telling police he believed "Mp3WmaLand operated in a legal grey area". If that is really what happened then Mr. Roberts as the prosecutor should know and is now lying.

Now if you liked the bit about the open source software licensing in the first story, you are going to love this one. In the second story the industry's anti-piracy lawyer draws a comparison between Mp3WmaLand and Osama bin Laden's terrorist cells. Geez, Give me a break! What these kids did is absolutely noting to to with the "T" word. Here is some irony for you, isn't terrorism a small group trying to coerce a large population with fear, and the use or threatened use of force?

Scene inside a smokey pub:

Grey hat: "So, you're writing up on the Ng case?"

Writer, peering into empty glass, "Yeah, guess so. Another beer?"

Grey hat: "It's on me. Look, I need you to throw in some comments about open source. My bosses say if I can get the words 'piracy' and 'open source software license' into the same web article, I get a thousand. I'll split it 50-50 with you"

Writer: "Ng did mention he studied software law. I'm sure that includes open source licenses. Sounds OK."

The grey hat is Michael Speck, who has provided this delicious quote to explain why the forces of law and order have to immediately jail every DJ and MP3 swapper in town:

"Music piracy helps finance organised crime and international terrorism."

Now it all makes sense, huh? Those underground DJs were actually working for Bin Laden in between mixing Mary J. Blige.

Just ask prince Charles.

PRINCE CHARLES HAD DIRTY GAY HOMOSEX WITH HIS MALE SERVANT!

Is this the end of the royal family?

Look at the name of the analyst - Laura Didio.
Maybe you remember her from her SCO kernel source code news?

According to an article originally published by The London Telegraph (online version here), The Burning Question, but which I read in Sydney Morning Herald on 23 October 2003, two separate studies have been unable to prove any ill-effects from following a high-protein diet. Both studies showed that the Atkins diet work. This somewhat distressing for one of them as it had been funded by the American HEart Association, a fierce critic of Atkins.

Being to lazy to sum up the article I paste the full text of the article (copied from SMH) here:

The Burning Question

October 23, 2003

Yet another study has shown that the Atkins diet works. But even the scientist in charge is baffled about why the low-carb regime reduces fat more effectively than conventional low-calorie, low-fat eating plans, Robert Matthews reports.

An academic nutritionist at the University of Cincinnati, Dr Bonnie Brehm, is at the cutting edge of research into the biggest question to hit her field in decades: does the Atkins diet work?

Most nutritionists faced with the torrent of anecdotal evidence for its effectiveness have simply parroted the mantra that more research is needed, while muttering darkly about possible long-term health effects.

Brehm and her colleagues, in contrast, have spent the past few years actually doing the research and will unveil their findings at the American Dietetic Association's annual meeting next week.

They have been studying the effectiveness of the Atkins diet in trials involving people classed as clinically obese, implying a weight of more than 92 kilograms (14 stone) in a person 175 centimetres (5 foot, 9 inches) tall. The latest results are in - and they appear to vindicate the late Dr Robert Atkins, whose diet books have sold 15 million copies over 30 years.

According to Brehm, those following Atkins's low-carbohydrate diet for four months achieved twice the weight loss of those on a conventional calorie-controlled, low-fat diet. Furthermore, the team found no evidence of harmful effects from following the diet - at least during the study.

These results are in line with those found in similar small studies now starting to emerge. As well as backing the claims made for the Atkins diet, these latest results seem to further undermine standard nutritional advice about the need to focus on cutting fat and calories.

They are something of an embarrassment to Brehm, whose research is funded by the American Heart Association, which has long advocated calorie-controlled, low-fat diets.

As a scientist, Brehm puts unearthing the truth above pleasing her paymasters - but it is this that causes most concern. She is having problems explaining her findings - and in the increasingly vociferous debate over the Atkins diet, that may well land her in trouble at next week's meeting.

The scientific world is becoming increasingly polarised over the diet, with researchers such as Brehm being given a tough time over their apparent support for what some scientists regard as the nutritional equivalent of crystal therapy. At the heart of the controversy is the science behind the Atkins diet - first published 30 years ago - and whether it is really anything more than a collection of buzzwords.

Conventional wisdom dictates that calories are the key to weight loss, and so those who lose weight must simply be consuming fewer calories than they burn up. Yet, according to Brehm, the obese people who lost weight on the Atkins diet ate and burned up essentially the same number of calories as those on the standard diet. What was very different was the proportion of body fat shed by each group, which mirrored their percentage weight loss. On the face of it, this backs the central claim of the Atkins diet: that a low-c

I too was skeptical, until I read this article.

In summary, a scientist found that the Atkins diet was working, and results "are something of an embarrassment to Brehm, whose research is funded by the American Heart Association, which has long advocated calorie-controlled, low-fat diets." Read the article for details...

So, I had a try, and lost the extra weight I hadn't been able to shed for the past few years. I'm only missing cake so far ;-)
And I eat my vegies now, not only meat as some think it's all Atkins is about.

...the initial job was done well.

How can you say the job is done? Mullah Mohammed Omar is still on the loose. Usama bin Laden is still out there plotting something (here is his latest news).

Sivaram VElauthapillai

Which one of those statments are you claiming was false?

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

Even without the qualifier this statement is true. David Kay found plenty of evidence to back it up.

The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda.

You probably don't disagree with the first sentence, but the second one is true too.

The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.

So, you don't think it would be dangerous if terrorists were to use WMDs against the US or another country?

That's really interesting, because there has been evidence found that Al Qeada was training in Iraq and getting WMDs from Saddam. There also have been plenty of evidence found that Iraq still had active WMD programs.

Does that mean Fox viewers are actually the best informed?

I think this, 'QuikTrak', was one of the companies that the insurance mob pointed me to...

Also, a year-old story from the Sydney Morning Herald on a carjacked porsche recovered within 30 mins with satellite doo-da's...

I think this, 'QuikTrak', was one of the companies that the insurance mob pointed me to...

Also, a year-old story from the Sydney Morning Herald on a carjacked porsche recovered within 30 mins with satellite doo-da's...

Jacques Chirac is incredibly rich. Well, his wife is.

Read here, or here

Red Hat has per-server licensing now. If you buy a copy, you are allowed to install it on one server only, unless you buy more support seats. They reserve the right to audit you for compliance too, and charge you penalties if you have more systems installed than licensed.

Yeah, I don't see how that complies with the GPL either.

If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed Servers, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed Server.
During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement.

In fact, I think it's a blatent violation. I guess the FSF doesn't want to enforce the rules on a company that has given so much to the community. I, however, don't think they should get special treatment. I appreciate all Red Hat has done, but that doesn't give them a right to violate copyright law.

This earlier article blames the email problems on buggy email software that Telstra installed recently.

Ms Lawrence said yesterday the software problems had been resolved and 90 per cent of emails were "getting through first time around".

Thank heavens, they're only bouncing one email in ten now :-)

Um... Actually...

here

if there's any place where eccentricity is tolerated, or promoted even, it's academia.

That is true enough although one sometimes wonders if they are not too fond of it? There are some forms of academic eccentricity that I will find distasteful.

Coke is running the "thrillseeker" comp in conjuction with the rugby world cup this month. Looks like Australia is the guinea pig again!

This technology will be rolling out much sooner than next summer. Coca-Cola will be running the same promotion in Australia in conjunction with November's Rugby World Cup. Here's an article on the forthcoming Thrill Seeker promotion. Australia is a big, empty place -- I wonder what happens if someone in Mt Isa or Kalgoorlie picks up a winning can? It's gonna be hard for them to instantly find the winner then...

trying to destroy the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission

Being the force behind Australia's equivalent of the Patriot Act

Refusing to defend a homosexual judge, despite being bound by his position as Attorney General to act as an advocate and protector for the judiciary

Refusing to accept UN reports on racism in Australia

Lobbying for increased intellectual property rights

Lobbying for laws allowing Australia's spy agency, ASIO, to read domestic emails

Supporting the increase in the rate of phone tapping

And generally trampling on human rights and civil liberties wherever possible.

This is definately not good news.

Now, let's not forget the acceptance of kickbacks from Telstra in the form of a $10,000AU plasma television.

I will never call this man a pinup.... NEVER do you hear me?!

Perhaps here is a nice summary

I my own personal media monitoring service I noticed in their weekly week day IT section (Next) (not to be confused with the weekend IT section which sucks big dogs balls), the number of Open Source Software rocks articles trippled with a corresponding decrease in "I would willingly perform any kind of legal or illegal sexual favours for either Bill or Steve kind of articles. And I watch these pages particularly closely, so it must be true.

Actually, the hole in the ozone layer is on course to become the Biggest ever

• "war on terrorism protects everybody"
  Okay, fighting terrorism is good. But is he doing an effective job? And who is benefiting? Take the Iraq war -- we were told that we had proof that Iraq had WMD, and it turns out that that was false, and the Bush administration knew it. So we are spending US$4 billion dollars a month for a war that hasn't increased security. (see cost of war) And who is making money from the war? Just Cheney's former company, who he is still being paid by. (see Cheney paid by Pentagon contractor).
  
  And, by the way, terrorists tried to murder government officials (Democrats) and media with anthrax. The administration doesn't seem to be making any progress in tracking these people down, now, have they?
  
  
• "the tax cuts and rebates were for everybody (even people who don't pay taxes):"
  Okay, first of all, the "people who don't pay taxes" bit. The administration was misleading here. Rebates were given to those who didn't pay INCOME taxes, but those people still paid PAYROLL taxes. And because there is a ceiling for payroll taxes, the working poor pay a higher percentage of their income in payroll taxes than rich people do.
  
  As for the tax cuts and rebates being for everyone, who gets by far the most money? Answer: the rich. Take the dividend tax cut. The rich own lots of stock and therefore highly profit from this. The poor and middle-class don't. The administration tried to claim that more Americans than ever own stocks, but didn't mention that most Americans own stocks IN RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS, and this won't be affected by the dividend tax cut. And take the cut in the estate tax. The estate tax only affects people who have more than a million dollars in assets: the rich.
  
  And, by the way, if you want to stimulate the economy by giving people money, then economists agree that you should give the money to the poor, not the rich. Why? Because the poor will spend it on goods (food, clothing, housing...), which in turn will help stores and manufacturers. The rich will just save it, which is not nearly as effective.
  
  
• "the faith based initiative benefits the downtrodden":
  How does the faith-based initiative help the downtrodden? All it does is funnel money that would have previously gone to non-church related charities to churches. In fact, it make things worse, because faith-based institutions are free to discriminate against people they don't like.
  

Install whatever OS you like--it won't do you any good against my power shovel!

(The guy in that article failed, but there have been a number of successes in the last year or two. What will people think up next...)

Amit Yoran is of course, a VP at Symantec. That would be the same company whose COO, John Schwartz, recently caused a storm by calling for laws to make it a criminal offence to share information and tools online which could be used by malicious hackers and virus writers.

Am I alone in putting two and two together and becoming alarmed at the implication?

In the Herald on Saturday, the local boss of BMG Australia, Ed St John, complained that making records and signing acts were "incredibly expensive": "I'm not sure how we deserved the terrible reputation of fat cats - it is not true."

Not fat cats, Ed - fatheads.

There is nothing wrong with the music market. If you take into account illegal sales of pirated CDs - $US4.6 billion ($6.9 billion) last year - and billions of dollars more in illegal MP3 downloads, interest in music has never been greater.

The problem lies not with the music market; it lies with the music industry.

... get rid of those big recording studios and buy your artists home computers.

Pour yourself a stiff drink and bung on a Nick Cave MP3.

The Perens, Raymond letter is covered in this mainstream press article.

The Sydney Morning Herald is one of Australia's largest newspapers.

For more info:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030827/152/e6yxh.html; and http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/19/10612611 27586.html

Article text follows:

SCO may not know origin of code, says Australian UNIX historian

By Sam Varghese
September 9, 2003

More doubts have been cast on the heritage of System V Unix code, which the SCO Group claims as its own, by an Australian who runs the Unix Heritage Society.

Dr Warren Toomey, now a computer science lecturer at Bond University, said today: "I'd like to point out that SCO (the present SCO Group) probably doesn't have an idea where they got much of their code. The fact that I had to send SCO (the Santa Cruz Organisation or the old SCO) everything up to and including Sys III says an awful lot."

He said that even though SCO owned the copyright on Sys III, a few years ago it did not have a copy of the source code. "I was dealing with one of their people at the time, trying to get some code released under a reasonable licence. I sent them the code as a gesture because I knew they did not have a copy," he said with a chuckle.

Dr Toomey's statements come a few days after Greg Rose, an Australian Unix hacker from the 1970s, raised the possibility that there may be code contributed by people, including himself, which has made its way into System V Unix and is thus being used by companies like the SCO Group.

Dr Toomey said this was one reason why the code samples which the SCO Group had shown at its annual forum had turned out to be widely published code.

SCO was unaware of the origins of much of the code and this "explains how they could wheel out the old malloc() code and the BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) code, not realising that both were now under BSD licences - and in fact they hadn't even written the BPF code," Dr Toomey said.

He said that there was lots of code which had been developed at the University of New South Wales in the 70s which went to AT&T and was incorporated into UNIX without any copyright notices.

"At that time the development that was going on was similar to open source - the only difference was that the developers all had to have copies of the code licensed from AT&T," he said.

Dr Toomey, who served 12 years with the Australian Defence Force Academy, an offshoot of the University of New South Wales, before joining Bond University, said he had source code for Unices from the 3rd version of UNIX which came out in 1974 to the present day. "I don't have Sys V code but there are people with licences for that code who are members of the Unix Heritage Society. We can compare code samples any time," he said.

He agreed that the codebase of Sys V was a terribly tangled mess. "It is very difficult to trace origins now. There is an awful lot of non-AT&T and non-SCO code in Sys V. There is a lot of BSD code there," he said.

In March, the SCO Group filed a billion-dollar lawsuit against IBM, for "misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract."

SCO also claimed that Linux was an unauthorised derivative of Unix and warned commercial Linux users that they could be legally liable for violation of intellectual copyright. SCO later expanded its claims against IBM to US$3 billion in June when it said it was withdrawing IBM's licence for its own Unix, AIX.

IBM has counter-sued SCO while Red Hat Linux has sued SCO to stop it from making "unsubstantiated and untrue public statements attacking Red Hat Linux and the integrity of the Open Source software development process."

-----

Wordforge writing contest now open: deadline 2003-03-28

Very interesting article here that SCO have little information on how the origin of Sys V. code.

This will backfire big time at the trial or maybe as soon at the alledged Offending Code leaks after discovery.

Quote:

Dr Toomey's statements come a few days after Greg Rose, an Australian Unix hacker from the 1970s, raised the possibility that there may be code contributed by people, including himself, which has made its way into System V Unix and is thus being used by companies like the SCO Group.

Dr Toomey said this was one reason why the code samples which the SCO Group had shown at its annual forum had turned out to be widely published cod

No way. He wasn't "of Pakistani-Indian-Arabic appearance". Only people "of Pakistani-Indian-Arabic appearance" can be bad guys. Come on, it was on FOX News just this morning...

Perhaps they weren't "main fileservers". Taken from the Sydney Morning Herald:

[The representative] said the stolen servers did not contain sensitive information.

"They did not contain any personal, business-related or security information, and they are not servers that are used to communicate with law enforcement or security agencies," [she] said.

and send it to the cops. :-)