Slashdot Mirror

Myth.

Good idea. It will make it very easy to investigate paedophiles. On the other hand, if you are innocent you have nothing to fear, and the police will promise nicely not to use it for amusement.

Therefore, if you object to CCTV in your home, you must be a paedophile and should be sent to jail straight away.

Incidentally, CCTV in some private homes has been seriously proposed.

Unless you know something the rest of the world doesn't, it would appear you are very wrong indeed.
The 'Laddie is owned by a few private individuals, they don't even allow companies to hold shares; it's all private investors, mostly from the island!
As you can see here: http://www.theherald.co.uk/business/news/display.var.2227543.0.Bruichladdich_sees_a_rosy_future_as_malt_sales_soar.php

They appear to be doing quite well from all accounts. I would so love a job with them in any position!

Here's the real math from the UK where government contractors face a real threat of jail time if they are caught intentionally lowballing a cost estimate....

"Total cost of closing down nuclear sites rises to £73bn

The cost of decommissioning Britain's ageing nuclear power sites has risen from an estimated £61bn in 2005 to £73bn as the "start-stop" nature of the work is creating significant uncertainty for contractors, Whitehall's value-for-money watchdog reveals today.

The report by the National Audit Office (NAO) into the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority will prove particularly uneasy reading for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who earlier this month gave the green light to a new generation of nuclear power stations - albeit that none will be built in Scotland because of the anti-nuclear stance adopted by the Scottish Government.

As well as reporting to the UK Government via the Department for Business, the authority also reports to Scottish ministers who agree its strategy and plans for sites in Scotland. By December 2007, 14 of 19 facilities across Britain had already shut down and were in the process of being decommissioned, which includes cleaning up the sites.

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.2003619.0.Total_cost_of_closing_down_nuclear_sites_rises_to_73bn.php

That's 150 BILLION DOLLARS... ON JUST 19 UK reactors. That means the REAL US cost of decommissioning US nuclear reactors is going to be well over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!

But who cares when we are going to get free HD via satellite ?

"From today [October 05, 2006] all British citizens renewing their passport will receive a new biometric passport. The hi-tech, or ePassports contain a secure chip with an image of the holder's face, and are designed to make forgery more difficult and improve international security ... also from today passport fees will rise. A 10-year adult passport will now cost £66" - Times

Q. So why are we paying this tax on holidays for a technology that apparantly couldn't tell Osama bin Laden from Captain Birdseye?

A. Although "facial recognition biometric data" all sounds very sci-fi, it is in fact the least accurate biometric identifier there is, according to experts. It will, however, be good enough for entry into the US without a visa - BBC

but I still am of the opinion that offers of financial aid will produce more allies than threats ever will. (with the possible exceptions of Poland and France)

Instead they waited until Bush puffed out his chest and made hollow threats, then called his bluff.

Ah, I was unaware that "laying dormant" was a synonym for "engaging in battles". My mistake.

extradited to the US for committing a crime in Britain.

Britain's controversial extradition treaty with the US faces a challenge from Holyrood over whether it can be applied in Scottish courts.

MSPs are understood to have agreed in private to lobby Whitehall over the deal with Washington under which British people can be incarcerated while awaiting trial in America, despite no evidence being presented against them.

[2 paragraphs]

The treaty was agreed by Britain three years ago to avoid long delays in bringing terrorism suspects to trial. All that is required to remove a suspect from Britain is a warrant from a US court, without any evidence being required. However Congress has stalled its reciprocal part of the treaty because legislators there fear it does not give adequate protection to US citizens extradited to the UK.

Liberty, the [UK human rights &] civil liberties campaigning group, complains that the law is being used for non-terrorist charges, that those involved face jail on remand because they have no residence when they arrive in the US, and that the preparation of cases can take months

In Europe we have our own way of doing things, just for shits and gigles

Why bother actually going to space when you can just do this, it's the answer, nobody has ever thought of faking it before! Genius!

I have been watching the news lately and is what they have been telling me to believe is wrong with America.

If you watched the news lately you would know that your lack of a right of a feeding tube is the most dangerous thing in America. The President even flew back a week early to sign the bill into law to secure you right, Not to mention Congress having a late session. You need to get your head screwed on straight, and look at the important things in life and stop listening to Science. Science is too busy messing with something called FACTS.

And they probably love Bush for making the Park Service tell the truth: Noah's Flood caused the grand Canyon. S'pose this is part of that pandering to the ignorant?

Yeah, but time and again Americans can't find the current designated victim on a map. They often fail to find the US itself. I wonder how many would fail to recognise a globe as Earth. ("Nope-nope. God made the world flat.")

Official site of the games part of the festival, Nvidia sponsors and some pre-Fringe hype. And my 2 pence: it's nice to see games being part of a celebration of culture, and that they've found their place as an established medium.

Just think -- all those lawyers around SCO coming up with a ploy to play the victim. Its working quite well for lots of other groups.

...is there any substance not lethal in high enough doses? Btw, the "contains toxic chemicals" part merely restates the first part - the very definition of toxic is what is harmful to people.

I imagine even water is outlawed under this law, after all you can drown from it. Polluted water at least. Nevermind air, which is definately lethal if injected into the bloodstream.

(reg req'd)Goodbye speed cameras, hello a spy in every car

(reg req'd)The Informer: a car that will tell the police everything

AA gives green light to spy-in-car proposal

These are of course, the same people saying these backscatter x-rays are safe. If they arent, well, a lot of people are going to have been exposed before that becomes clear.

I am not outstandingly worried as (a) the exposure from cosmic rays of any over-the-pole flight is bound to be worse, and (b) back in '85 I was caught out in rain that turned out to be from chernobyl.That was in Scotland, where some places are still so radioactive that they have to decontaminate sheep before sale for human consumption.

There was a story recently how mobile phone transmitters can be used to detect stealth aircraft.
There's also the story about how the first time a B2 made a flypast at the Farnborough Air Show, the USAF said they'd turn on a transponder and open some weapon bays so it could be seen on radar when they entered UK airspace.
The RAF picked it up some time before they did that, while it was still in full stealth mode.

Because the "passive radar" that is based on the transmissions of cell phone towers unmasks stealth jets, the US is considering banning some cell phone technology!

NB: TIAJ

This has been concieved as a way of defeating stealth aircraft, and some observers believe this was how the Serbs shot down the F117 stealth fighter during the Kosovo campaign.

Stealth aircraft work mostly by reflecting radar away from the transmitter. But when the transmitter and receiver are not located at the same site, this can be defeated. Mobile phone networks fill the air with electromagnetic radiation, and if any one transmitter is located at a "lucky" spot, the receiver will be able to pick up the reflection from an aircraft. Since the open air usually doesn't reflect any radiation, an aircraft will stand out from the background.

Of course, to aquire range information, you'd have to trangulate with another receiver. And you can hardly use the doppler effect to get rid of ground clutter, since you'll be listening to a wide range of frequencies from a number of base stations. Also, it puts a new perspective on the question of targeting civilian infrastructure or not.

I brought this issue up in an article I submitted - but was rejected by the editors.

You are correct in that space has been deemed "The province of all Mankind" - however these are flawed human beings we are talking about here.

The problems we will see with going into space is claims to resources - and the protection of those claims. At this point it is set to be that only the companies that can pay off big governments, or are run by big governments - will be "allowed" access rights to resources.

There was an article talking about how mars might be the wild west of the future (it is very short - but you can extrapolate in your head) which brings up interesting points about how territories will be handled. this article is much longer on the same subject. It says "MAN'S conquest of the planets could become a Wild West in space if privately funded expeditions are the first to open up the final frontier, experts claimed yesterday." this is *absolute* crap - its a scare tactic, this thinking will lead to such things as "UN space territories and resources allocation commitee" or some such thing.

Although it might sound good on paper to have some body who is responsible for handing out deeds to land and resource rights on other-than-earth bodies, the problems with a commitee of any sort like this is that their interests will be heavily biased by the corporations and governments that already have huge financial weight over world economies and UN budgets today. This means that the likely industry to aggressively go after domination of space resource rights would be the oil industry.

They know that fossil fuels will run out someday... and they have shit loads of money and political might. Just look at the top levels of american government - every single one off them is a corrupt oil puppet.

I think that things should be done now to ensure that the resources in space are not "owned" by any company - or "licensed" to some company for a rediculous amount of time like 150 years....

its simply really, after 2 months of the press reporting these chalk symbols of possible suicide bomb attack spots, these odd symbols that represent circles, semi-circles and letters used in warchalking give computer-users the information they need to tweak their wireless network setting to access other people's connections. The idea of the chalk marks comes from "hobo signs", an old tradition among travellers and the homeless in America. They would scrawl a mark on a wall to show other hobos where they might find food or shelter. more... What if these symbols represented steganistic versions of network passwords... then that would be unauthorized access... if the door is open, well then friend, come on in!

Here in the UK we have both satellite digital and "terrestrial broadcast" digital, the latter being digital that you can receive through an ordinary antenna with a set-top box on your plain old analogue TV. The terrestrial broadcast network, ITV Digital, tried to squeeze 48 channels into the available bandwidth, and the result was famously shite quality.

It wasn't even the tolerable sort of poor quality that you get on analogue: fuzz, crackle, etc. Instead, it's blocks of non-motion on your screen, or even the entire screen freezing up, while the video buffer struggles to refill.
Just what you want when you're watching a crucial sports match.
No thank you.

ITV Digital have recently gone bust, and a consortium including the BBC and Murdoch have stepped in to take it over. They are planning to reduce the channel count to 24, and to introduce other improvements in the transmitter network, so maybe the quality will improve. But they are no longer asking people to pay a monthly subscription: it will be for free-to-air channels only. Seems sensible to me: why pay for what we can already get it for free?

I also expected that my new digital cordless phone's quality would be better than my old analogue cordless. No, just like the digital TV, the intereference is no longer crackle-and-fuzz, it's random cut-outs when I get more than 20 yards from the base station. A friend of mine has had similar problems with his new digital cordless in the US.

So I don't expect that TV reception quality will improve simply because "It's digital!" You can implement bad quality transmission in any medium.

They tried something like this a few decades ago. Wire the poor feline, get it to hang around the person you want to spy on, and control its various bodily functions through wires and the sort. Fortunately, this was project was stopped, though it makes you wonder about the lows governments are willing to stoop to.

(Death by taxi came afterward)

Four million is nothing when you compare it to the US department of defense loosing trillions of dollars worth of equipment Yes thats trillion with a t.

One of the basic laws of engineering is to spend your time and effort optimizing those functions that have a large impact on the overall system.

--InfinityEdge

"I just heard a fly in the garden, trapped in a spider's web, call out for Philippe!"
"That's nothing, I just heard a bunch of cockroach es in the fridge say, 'All your paté are belong to us!'"

The next level seems clear: to round up convicted murders and psychopaths and have them tear one another up, then sell the grisly pictures over the Web to anybody with $10. Maybe fires, traffic accidents, shootings, or the next federal and state executions could be broadcast that way, too, a new revenue source for embattled popular media. Believe me, it will happen.

The Herald covered the story.

Check out this article on Iraq jamming GPS guided missles:

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/28-2-19101 -0-24-33.html

Very interesting eh?

For those of you interested in spreading computer awareness, the entire continent of Africa needs your help. There's a good article here with a handful of links, including Computers for Africa.