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The Toronto Star has the story as well.

"This ruling is yet another example of the EU assaulting a successful American industry and policies that support our economic growth," said U.S. Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Microsoft's home state, Washington.

While Mr. Andreessen (note to editors - 2 s's really are sufficient), sings the praises of open source, he also sings the praises of source of the out kind.. Of course, that's where he makes his money, right?

Bah, that was a non-article. See this post and this article.

Toronto Star article here

The Toronto Star reports: Howard Knopf, an intellectual property lawyer speaking as an intervener said providers should not be ordered to disclose the names because there is no evidence to suggest they are breaking any Canadian laws..

Here ya go....

Boy Scout Leader Faces Child Porn Charge

You know, with all the kicking and screaming over RateMyTeachers-type sites, can you imagine how a RateMyDoctors.com site would be received? (Maybe we'll find out)

He may have some very liberal ideas on some issues, but I wouldn't classify Maher as a liberal - he also has some true conservative ideas. He's a self-described libertarian. Just hating George W. Bush's doesn't make you a liberal, although it can get you kicked off the radio airwaves.

and greedy corporations can't control the roads (pay me for a license, pay me a monthly access fee, pay me again for joining the flow of traffic just now, now pay me some more at a rate of n-per-mile... plus tax and environmental fees).

Uhh... I beg to differ.

Even our government (Provincial government of Ontario, Canada) can't seem to be able to control the skyrocketing rates the Highway 407 corporation has imposed. Unfortunately with few alternative ways to get around for those of us who live in the 905 within a reasonable timeframe, we are at their mercy. Whether or not we actually use the thing.

It's a neat little $10 million 50 kilo unit. The best part is that a software upgrade improved the stability 10x. Hopefully there'll be some pictures soon.

Finally, is it just me or does Ballmer look really evil in that photo?

Obviously you cropped the picture. Sure he's got his shoulder devil whispering to him on one side, but you cut out the other side where you can see his shoulder angel! That's slashdot for you...

Well, duh. That's why Microsoft has a monopoly, right? Ballmer likes to bitch and whine about how it was a "political decision" and how such things are somehow dirty and rare, but he seems to have missed the fact that every decision is political. There's no such thing as a pure business decision.

No matter how many TCO studies you do, no matter how many reports are written by an IT dept doing an evaluation, the final decision is going to be made based on how comfortable somebody is with an idea. Going with Microsoft is safe, it's easy, because everybody else does it. That's a political decision. It's the old "nobody got fired for buying IBM" thing.

The problem with Ballmer is that he sees what he wants to see. Somehow he has to reconcile his beliefs (that Microsoft is better) with reality (people are chomping at the bit to leave them). He does this by saying:

The people who are making business decisions based on where are the applications, what is the value, what is the lowest cost of ownership, we're not losing them.

... while apparently ignoring that TCO includes future costs such as forced upgrades, complying with license audits, working around the inflexibility of their software and so on. The hard to value, intangible costs. So he smears former (and possibly) future customers by writing off their decisions as "political" - a thinly disguised euphamism for "irrational".

There's another thing. Does anybody else have questions about the competency of the Munich guys to be doing such a migration? Why are they doing a crash switch, which is bound to end in tears? Why are there persistant rumours of them using VMware rather than bringing Wine up to speed on their products (which I'd guess works out cheaper in the long run and certainly provides a better desktop experience).

Finally, is it just me or does Ballmer look really evil in that photo?

The city of Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario already has a functioning system as discussed in this article.

You're some what right about this, I've been hearing plenty of reports about how spectacular venus looks in the night sky now-a-days. Here's just one of the many links, but yes, the images that were there in the link were prety suprising. The only ground based venus images I can remember of is this Discovery channel programme about space, in it there were snowflakes of sulfuric acid if I remember correctly.

Don't forget to watch for the pairing of the Moon and Venus tomorrow night at 6:30 - 7:00pm (Eastern Time) in the West sky. They'll only be about three degrees apart in the night sky.

Speaking of jumping the conclusions, try this link to the "Special to the Toronto Star" story. I think it's called the author of the story milking the market for everything he can get. And it brings to mind the famous line that P.T. Barnum never said.

I'm always skeptical of stories like this. Everytime there was a story where I knew the people and facts directly, the story was usually a mish-mash mixed or invented to sex up the story.

Why should software be any different from sugar?

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson wants more time for conclusive scientific study as the United States recommendations to the World Health Organization, which has the temerity to come out with outlandish and controversal dietary recommendations such as eating less sugar and more fruits and vegetables.

Other sugar-producing nations in the Americas are falling into line with this policy view. (Although I can't understand that they're very happy with the US subsidies to its domestic sugar producers.)

For those old enough to remember, this "needs more scientific study of direct causal relationship" was trotted out by the tobacco industry for a long time to combat U.S. governmental efforts to label cigarette packs.

this brings up a very good point, though: the only true way to prevent counterfeiting is to have the legitimate currency producer have exclusive and restricted access to the materials required to mint money, those being:

1. paper
2. ink

i should note that in canada the new $100 bill really stresses unique inks as an anti-counterfeit measure - there's translucent printing, a holographic stripe and some funky watermarks. read up on it here.

even my city's municipal currency (a local "barter" currency) uses this crazy plasticized paper that is custom designed for printing money and is only sold to legit minters.

so, go ahead and get that old version of photoshop and yr swank inkjet... it won't do you any good if you want to make canadian $100's or calgary $1's!

I smelled a Rodent Of Unusual Size the first time I read this story, it doesn't get better the second time around. Come to think of it, it didn't smell any better when someone did basically the same story 21 years ago in Montreal and took a handful of disaffected haxor/ph34k kids and blew them up into the sinister hacker group "Top 40". The fact that the group didn't exist didn't stop one reporter from trying to enroll every computer enthusiast in Montreal in the group.

Bah!

In the Toronto Star CRIA, what a perfect acronym: CRY EH!

Um, I have some bad news...

What few remember is that, in the late 1950s, Russian astronomer Iosif Shklovskii floated the idea of civilizations on Mars, but he did it based on actual scientific data.

"OK. I'm not trying to belittle you; I'm trying to help you. Keep that in mind as you read this." ...
"As for the claims you make in another post . . . Those numbers were invented out of whole cloth as pure Iraqi propaganda, meant to convince gullible suckers who will believe anything that casts the U.S. in a bad light. Sound familiar?"

You have a funny way of not trying to "belittle" someone. *cough*

"No, they began interfering with inspections from day one. Ken Pollack's book, "The Threatening Storm," contains a good, readable chronology of all of Saddam's many, many, many efforts to delay, confuse and/or obstruct the inspection process. You really ought to read it."

I'll keep it in mind if I spot it. But, since I can't read it on the spot, I can't argue for, agains, or just agree.

"Let's ignore your stupidly patronizing "like most Americans" comment for a moment."

What, you think people in the US magically get the news? Few people know the names of politicians outside of the President, much less pay attention to news abroad. The media here is slow and extremely cautious in reporting anything negative of our current government because it is a great way to get figuratively lynched job wise. For instance, in the US it is reported that "we" captured Hussien, while the rest of the world reports that he was handed over by an unnamed iraqi group.

"I notice that somehow, despite the fact that half the administration was saying something, you somehow managed to avoid including a *single example*." etc...

Well, since I can't find info discrediting all links, I'll back off and say a link to Al-Qaida.

NYT reprint: Colon Powel covering his rear.
Didn't O'Neill mention something about the Al-Quida-Iraq thing? I'm too tired to hunt for that one. From what I have read so far tonight, looks like a hint at it. But, nothing direct.
Dick Cheney is still holding strong to his original assertions, though.
"Bush has since conceded there was no link between Saddam and the Sept. 11 attacks and there has been no proven ties between the deposed Iraqi leader and the Al Qaeda terrorist network." ...and thats all I can dig up at the moment.

"See here for a comprehensive overview of the "threat" surrounding depleted uranium."

Ok, despite the link initially not working and the fact this is from someone's personal blog ie: internet diary instead of a fact source, I did eventually get to reading it. The fact he starts up with accusations that these are scare tactics and lies dreamed up by the "anti-war left" without documentation doesn't help his or your cause.

Ok, first the claim that DU is not harmfully radioactive. Yes, it's primary decay is alpha. In fact, I looked it up and found a nice table and graph. Now, I'm not an expert in thermonuclear physics, but I do realize when something radioactive decays it turns into another isotope and/or another element. Potentially the new atoms can be much more radioactive and have different decays. Please note the different half lifes of the varying steps on the table. And because of the pricipal of half life, DU doesn't magically decay at 4.5 billion years, that is a measurement of rate. Some of it decays much faster than the rate, some slower. This passes down through the decay process. Notice on the graph how around 9th and tenth decays it lets off ~.2 MeV w/ a halflife of 26.8 minutes and ~1.5MeV of Gamma radiation respectively, with halflives of 26.8 minutes and 19.9 minutes respectively. Whereas, U-235 AKA

In related news from Canada, the equivalent of the Patriot Act in Canada is facing some problems as well. After 9/11, something resembling the Patriot Act (although not as damaging), called the Anti-Terrorism Act (Bill C-36), was passed in Canada. Needless to say, it strips all sorts of liberties. Unlike the US Patriot Act, the Canadian one has gotten little criticism throughout the years (this isn't that unusual because liberties aren't a big concern of the populace in Canada.) However, something changed all that last week.

A reporter for Ottawa Citizen was raided and many assets (including computers, notes, etc) were seized by the RCMP. For our neighbours down south, RCMP is kind of like the FBI in USA. The RCMP used powers in received after 9/11 to carry out this raid. There have been some controversy, with media organizations taking the matter to court. This is very important to the media because the recent action is an affront to protection of media sources. My feeling is that the Anti-Terrorism Act will be changed. Unfortunatley, the changes will be cosmetic--governments don't like giving up newly found powers.

As a side note, it is crazy how all this is playing out. If you are from Canada or know a little bit, you would know that there is this controversy over the 'Mahed Arar case'. This raid was related to it. Some guys were dissing me last week right here on Slashdot for claming that someone was rogue or lying (CSIS, RCMP, or the high-level govt official). I guessed that CSIS was rogue but the two posters who, needless to say posted anonymously, thought otherwise (either these people were naive or likely CSIS employees). Given the recent events, I wonder if these guys (assuming they are not a party to the mentioned organizations) have changed their opinions.

Sivaram Velauthapillai

This Reuters story in the Toronto Star puts a different spin on the numbers. I assume that they're both using the same numbers?

Of course, it was probably the Venusian railway network where Elron Hubbard claimed he was almost hit by a train...

I did read the article. Mostly... Actually I read the paper version in the Toronto Star, before coffee. (Nice story about Memory Glasses if anyone wants to submit it. Got work to do today, whee!)

NASA Watch is reporting that NASA has cancelled Servicing Mission 4 for the Hubble Space Telescope. The reason given is not for budgets, but for safety."

Associated Links:
thestar.com
news.scotsman.com

I do not understand this. We've got a wonderful tool up there a generating ton of data. Just because it's not getting great press anymore... and just because it's not the sexy thing right now, why forget about it?

They can easily (well, easy for me to say) work on it during their visits to the space station.

We'll spend a trillion to get men to Mars... but we can't take the time and energy to keep the space telescope up and running?

I like the push to Mars... but why abandon a tool that is gathering so much wonderful data?

AC

I don't know if you want to continue this debate...not sure if you have time... your choice...

I'd allow first trimester abortions...

What's first trimester?

Ahh, but the extreme left is calling for diversity, and it's OK in some schools to show a Muslim crescent (and in some cases a Jewish star), but not a cross.

I'm against promoting ANY religion. This applies to Islam, Judaism, Buddism, Hinduism, Zen, Taoism, Sikhism, and so forth. So, if Christianity is being discriminated while others aren't, that's not right. I don't support that.

Anyway, to tell you the truth, I'm not really against banning religious symbols or clothing from students. I don't think what France is doing is the right way to do it.

I'm not really against people wearing crosses or stars, or whatever. I'm more against concepts and ideologies. I'm against taking oaths to Gods, or government relying on God, or pretending that wars are fought for their Gods, or governments distributing religious texts (not counting academic study of them), and so forth. If I had the choice, I would let everyone wear religious clothing, or symbols, or whatever. I don't want to PREVENT people from practicing religion after all. What I will do, however, is ensure that the government philosophies and ideals are not rooted in religion.

Sivaram Velauthapillai

The Toronto Star had a recent human-interest story A do-it-yourself shot at the final frontier about Brian Feeney behind the Da Vinci team project.

See this Toronto Star article for the conclusion to this story:

A British pilot forced by bad weather to abandon her attempt to fly around the world over both poles said today that an Australian aviator stranded at a research station on the Antarctic coast could use fuel she had stored there. The offer by Polly Vacher ended a diplomatic spat between Australia and its two closest allies, the United States and New Zealand, who had refused to refuel Jon Johanson's homemade plane.

Clinton never drafted because he never really needed any troops. No one is going to draft just for the sake of it; they will only do it if troops are needed. Clinton's wars were either supported by foreign countries (the present 40-odd "coaltion of the willing" does not count, especially given that half of them are tiny countries only doing it for money or US political support), or the wars weren't full-scale imperial wars which required occupation. The present wars aren't like that.

It all depends on who wins the election though. My guess is that Bush will win again. If he does, he may conscript (if needed). Howard Dean won't conscript (unless he wants a major lynching), but Wesley Clark probably will. So, Bush and Clark will conscript IMO.

The probability of a draft is very low at this point in time. However, it may happen. Here are some articles speculating on conscription. The articles are a little bit old but the point stands. Also, the draft board they refer to was taken down by the military (it's not online anymore):

Will U.S. bring back the draft?
Talk of a draft grows despite denials by White House
Draft boards fuel rumors

I only read the first article. The scanned the others and the message is similar.

The Pentagon wouldn't really want draftees coming in anyway, not after Vietnam, so no matter who's in the White House, you're not going to have conscription until we have a French carrier halfway up the Patomac or something.

French Carrier up the Pontamac? Nah... all you need is a non-existent Iraqi carrier armed with non-existent WMD posing a non-existent threat... I don't whether to cry or laugh at this comment :|

Sivaram Velauthapillai

The REAL problem with the iPod is that the battery is crap and replacing it is a huge nuisance.

"For more than a year, Casey Neistat was thrilled with the performance of his Apple iPod. A loyal fan of Apple computers, he loved using his iPod MP3 player. It looked cool, sounded great and he could listen to eight hours of music on a single charge.

Gradually he noticed the iPod's battery didn't last as long. He had to charge it more and more often, until the iPod could barely pump out 30 minutes of music.

Neistat called Apple's customer support line to find out what he should do. An Apple rep gave Neistat the bad news: those lithium-ion batteries don't last forever. And Apple wouldn't replace the battery for free.

"It's past its year [warranty] which basically means there will be a charge of $255 plus a mailing fee to send it to us to . . . correct it," said an Apple customer service rep on the recording. "But at that price, you know, you might as well go get a new one.""

Read more at http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pag ename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1 070233809823&call_pageid=968350072197&col=96904886 3851, sirs.

Sweet zombie jesus! What the hell was I smoking this morning? I meant the Toronto Star .

However, considering 90% of home broadband is flat rate, ( and a lot of dedicated business service is too ) since when is the bandwidth being 'stolen'?

Rogers has begun to suspend the accounts of high-bandwith users (while still charging them!). They advertise unlimited usage, but disguise this as a violation of the end-user agreement.

Article from the Toronto Star (Link'll probably be gone for non-subscribers by tomorrow.)

I guess that open WiFi router didn't have the Belken auto-anti-pr0n nagger eh?

I was interested to see they had a hybrid system. You marked your vote on paper but then its run thru a scanner which presumably counts the votes. So the second the polls close they'll know the results. But the old style ballots are around for recounts.

They scanned thru one lady's ballot and the machine gave an error. The election official looked at the ballot with her and told her had mistakenly voted for two people for mayor - duh. She was talken over to a table and I assume her first ballot would be destroyed and she was given a second one. Normally ballots like that from people who are too stupid to know how to vote would not count. That seems like a bad side-effect of this device. I am not sure what I think about the official looking at her secret ballot.

A display on the machine show the number of voters. At 11:30 it was only 101 people (including me but not include that woman). Doesn't seem like very many for a very dense urban riding. I guess my vote might count.

Small businesses can neither afford to claim patents nor defend them.

Spam filters work only for those able to configure them. For the vast majority of Internet users, they are just a dream.

I think the vast majority of Internet users already use filters, but they are configured by the user's ISP, not by the user.

Spam blacklists are unsustainable in a world where most net connections come across DHCP, and most spam is/will be sent from owned home computers.

Updates of the dial-up list will stop this. Don't accept incoming email connections from machines using DHCP. It's hard on people who set up their own SMTP servers because their ISPs can't cope (e.g. sympatico.ca), but there are workarounds.

Unlike reality, at least they're not thinking of randomly forcing people to play the game.

Michael

I don't think we disagree. You say an Indymedia article is like a slashdot comment. That doesn't suggest a high level of credibility.

"Indymedia did have summitted coverage of Israel's acquisition of submarines that fire nuclear-armed Harpoon cruise missiles."

You might find this AP article interesting: Sub claim `impossible'

Plane crashes outside of the Canadian IBM headquarters. SCO was not available for comment.

"Peanuts also contain bioactive components such as resveratrol (the substance also found in red wine), beta sitosterol, flavonoids, and antioxidants, the benefits of which nutrition scientists are only beginning to discover.

I think we've just discovered a good use for Flash Mobs. :)

Yes, Canadians pay less on health care than Americans. But ours is the 2nd most expensive system in the world. Australia, Sweden and much of northern Europe operates "as good or better" systems much cheaper AND most allow people some level of choice in health care (like Australia's 2 insurance systems or Sweden's private hospitals who compete for your government voucher). England is going through some serious rethinking of their "national health system" right now with people considering a change to an Australian system.

But not all is doom & gloom, some cutting edge work is being done here.

I can feel a new wave if ISAs coming through.

I hope so, but I haven't heard of anything free in practice lately other than MIPS minus unaligned load/store patented instructions. Intel has ratcheted down the license fee for ARM ISA to literally next to nothing because they are competing against those free MIPS subsets.

The ISA is insignificant in comparison to cache architecture in all the heavy-duty applications I care about. A/V codecs, which lend themselves directly to hardware a lot better than huristic search does, as far as I'm concerned, are only good for the, erm, health benefits.

Can't wait for Red Star, though, I want solar powered speech toys.

smyle wrote:

(Now, everyone who sang "happy birthday" as a class in school, please make your royalty check payable to...)

Summy Birchard, Inc., a subsidary of AOL/Time Warner. Here's the history of its copyright. Assuming Congress doesn't extend copyright yet again, it is due to enter the public domain in 2030.

(mod me down, but you can't avoid the facts)