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how about Linus' recent make over? Talk about queer eye for the geek guy. The guy looks a lot better now

Not to undermine open source, but the guy used to look like a complete dork.

Maybe Linus can help remove the geek stereotype that is so often associated with Linux.

how about Linus' recent make over? Talk about queer eye for the geek guy. The guy looks a lot better now

Not to undermine open source, but the guy used to look like a complete dork.

Maybe Linus can help remove the geek stereotype that is so often associated with Linux.

I am only responding because you are *SO* clueless about CCTV cameras that you somehow fail to notice. Your statements that "I don't see them so they aren't there" and "78 million isn't very much money" are sad.

Please research this for yourself. The facts are - at least tens of thousands of monitored cameras - at least tens millions of pounds spent on using the cameras each year.

CCTV in Cambridge - note: estimated that each Londoner is watched by 300 cameras each day. Cambridge alone has 127 camera and spends 1/3 million per year. Nationally, 20 million+ per year for the last decade.

Wired article "British authorities have placed great faith in CCTV as a crime control device, installing an estimated 1.5 million police cameras along the country's streets, buildings and mass transport systems. Still shots taken from video feed are used to identify protesters and hooligans."

78 million pounds for 250 new CCTV monitored systems
40 million per year is currently spent on CCTV
In Jan 2000 a further 40 million was allocated to 218 public CCTV schemes.
At present, there are well over 750 local public closed circuit tv surveillance systems in operation in the UK.
Search Parliament for CCTV spending yourself

(Oh, BTW your officials are now selling footage of your cameras to the highest bidder)

To all the responses that claim there is no camera network, etc. etc..

Wired says "British authorities have placed great faith in CCTV as a crime control device, installing an estimated 1.5 million police cameras along the country's streets, buildings and mass transport systems. Still shots taken from video feed are used to identify protesters and hooligans."

That may not be every street corner, but that sure is a lot of cameras. (Oh and why identify protesters?)

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

The University of Florida is not Congress and is therefore not restricted by the First Amendment. And - exactly how is a p2p connection a First Amendment freedom anyway?

I did some research on ICARUS - there's a pretty good article here. Apparently the system is a bit more sophisticated than we thought.

Also, it appears students agree not to do this stuff as a prerequisite to using the school's network - apparently they also consent to network monitoring.

What right do I have to "use everyone else's bandwidth up"? I run the network here - downloading ISO images from software vendors and government distribution points is in my job description. When I mentioned targeting "offenders" I was talking about my network, not UofF's network.

Anyway, it's clear we're not gonna see eye to eye on this, since it's clear you believe students have a right to connect to anything they want to on a publicly funded network and I disagree with that premise. It's a pretty fundamental difference - so I'm gonna move on. Thanks for the conversation :)

Oops, here's a more poignant link to those convicts I mentioned.

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.

But the greatest potential for CVD diamond lies in computing. If diamond is ever to be a practical material for semiconducting, it will need to be affordably grown in large wafers. (The silicon wafers Intel uses, for example, are 1 foot in diameter.) CVD growth is limited only by the size of the seed placed in the Apollo machine. Starting with a square, waferlike fragment, the Linares process will grow the diamond into a prismatic shape, with the top slightly wider than the base. For the past seven years - since Robert Linares first discovered the sweet spot - Apollo has been growing increasingly larger seeds by chopping off the top layer of growth and using that as the starting point for the next batch. At the moment, the company is producing 10-millimeter wafers but predicts it will reach an inch square by year's end and 4 inches in five years. The price per carat: about $5.

Indeed, Intel's top materials executives weren't aware of the latest research breakthroughs when I spoke to them in June, although they certainly understood the potential for diamonds in computing. "Diamonds represent a seismic change in semiconductors," says Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel's director of communications circuits research. "It takes us about 10 years to evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We're not about to abandon that."

Amen, bro.

I'm an oldtimer, *nix since 1975, Mac since 1985, OS X is the best of both worlds. And if you want to hear this from someone with *nix cred, Bill Joy says this about OS X in this interview:

Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed.

Wired has an interesting article related to this story. Summary: Open-Source as a design philosophy will be applied to an increasingly diverse set of disciplines.

Obviously it is. I announce a Linux distro that's Windows compatible, but then I decide that, well, no, it's not, that's kinda a setback for the whole "this isn't a pointless waste of time" idea, no? Eerily similar, in fact, to announcing a GPS system that can't be jammed, and later deciding that, wait, no, we were actually, how you say, "making shit up" when we said that.

And now, let me, here, use a few more, additional, useless, commas, and clauses, that will fuck, up, you know, the flow of the sentance, yeah.

For anybody interested in the subject (and for those who might have missed the article) I can only reccomend this article in a recent Wired edition. Looks like James Marsh read it too, and acted in consequence of it.

With the average TV show lasting only 22 minutes * and the rest being filled up with advertisements, the television industry has over time increased the demand for nixing all of the ads. Over 36% of our time is spent watching pure ads alone! If they had fewer ads I bet people just wouldn't bother skipping past them. Instead they would go back to the bathroom/soda/food run & actually watch the ads the other half of the time.

The other route is to start making the ads entertaining again. The ads used to be the only reason I watched with superbowl in the first place.

If the editors actually RTFA they would have seen the other /. article from Nov 12 was reference linked in the Wired article half-way down the page:

... Despite blogger conjecture and an Industrial Design Society of America award, ...

That IS pretty funny..
It also seems that MS is trying to get rid of options all together, now.. according to Wired.

S

Yeah. Supply & Demand.

If/When the bait and switch occurs, people will begin to realize that "Trusted Computing" means that they're the ones not being trusted, and their freedom to do as they please has been taken by megacorps. No more mp3s? No more pirated Windows or Office or Games? Not being able to print an image off some website? Having your camcorder shutdown when it detects MPAA/RIAA-tagged content? What the fuck?!

That's leaves a gaping hole for a huge blackmarket in Open Software & Hardware. It would also be a big boost for wireless mesh networking.

--

Here's an article about how someone got back his sister's stolen mac using Timbuktu and help from usenet.

Interesting article in Wired about Linus. I think he's doing quite well...

For some reason, most of the other pages with the info have disappeared from the web, unfortunately.

Yeah but Edward Tufte hates it, and he would know better.

One good (very long) article on submarine cables (by Neal Stephenson):

Mother Earth Mother Board

It basically answers all the questions you had in your post. I had noted this article when it appeared and only got to reading it a month ago. A bit too verbose for my taste, but worth the time nonetheless.

I've found the whole notion of undersea cables fascinating ever since I read Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Motherboard

Cheers,
-- RLJ

This massive Wired article from way back in '96 follows the FLAG cable project around the world an gives a complete history of undersea cables and the technologies used to make, lay and operate the cables.

I picture a minority report situation. Instead of scanning the eye, the rfid is scanned, then a beam of sound in shot into your head, a personal ad is played. Now imagine walking through a mall.

There's more than one cable system linking US with Europe, it just happens that several carriers (Above.Net being one) only have capacity through TAT-14.

Other carriers have working circuits on TAT-14 and another link (e.g. Apollo, Tyco, AC-1, Gemini) and may have some degraded service (depending on whether their transatlantic links are less than twice the size of their peak demand). FranceTelecom OpenTransit is an example of one of them.

Interestingly, not many EU ISPs use TAT-14 North route, since it has a propagation delay of around 110ms (which is 40ms or so more than TAT-14 South from the UK and more than most other transatlantic cables)

Most ISPs in Europe that I can see are fine. Certainly the big international transit ISPs (Sprint, L3, C&W, MCI et al) aren't showing any more trouble than normal.

At the risk of being accused of Karma whoring, This page and This wired article from the late 90s are are good summary and a great story about undersea cables, respectively, despite being a little out of date.

I notice most of the Didn't-Read-The-Article crowd seem to be missing that this is an undersea cable. They're Not Easy to work with, and besides, this outage is a great excuse to point you to Neal Stephenson's great geeky essay
Mother Earth, Mother Board

Check out this great article by Neal Stephenson in wired. It talks about running an even longer cable. Beware though. He's in his typical verbose form. The article is 56 pages long.

In fact they already have devices that do this, but they are not (yet) implanted. They are called ankle transponders and have been used as an alternative to prison. Have a look at this or this article.

Worse, in the near future, you probably won't even be able to hide your cash transactions. RFID tags embedded in bank notes are on their way. The EE Times reports that in Europe it's planned for 2005.

Oh, but how will they know who I am when I spend tagged cash? It's pretty simple, by one of the following methods:

• You took the money out of an ATM and the ID numbers were logged with your name during the withdrawl.
• You had your mobile phone with you, which pings the local cell.
• Got the money from someone else, but it's detected because (the currently faulty) facial recognition software attatched to the video camera in the shop (or streetcorner) where you made the purchase.
• The passivly track cash moving through the city, just like they track the people.

Technology is amazing, and the current convergence of computing power, large databases and tiny radio transponders even more amazing. I don't know about you, but I also find it pretty scary.

Mother Earth Mother Board.

.forsight

Now is the time, GOP congress and President? An especially "pro-business" well pro-big-business with deep-pockets administration in an anything goes legislative spree is the *perfect* time to peel away some fair use rights. It would be foolish if they didn't try, not that I condone this.

Look at the success of Patriot Act II, just attach it to a spending bill and it passes while we were all sleeping. No debate, no nothing. The RIAA knows this is a good thing, for them.

Whatever your political persuasion, its fairly obvious that legislative reform should have happened a long time ago and the current congress and executive branch are pulling every dirty trick they can.

Greg Palast chronicles a lot of the abuses we don't hear about in his book The Best Democracy Money can Buy. Worth checking out if you want to know how stuff like this happens and why non-monied interests have little say in the affairs of government.

Wired ran an article about embedded XP back in September. At the time I wrote a Letter to the Editor, which was not posted (so very un-slashdot-like), stating how insane it is that banks would be willing to risk their front end machines when their back end machines have been slammed repeatedly by Microsoft issues. That goes for windows and MS SQL.

You mean something like the space elevator?

Wired Article

2001 article. My mistake.

Holy Cow!!! The name of the company that scammed the US Government... You guessed it. Media Fusion.

IT IS A SCAM!

Next, there's the human factor. No definable workspace that's "mine" gives the impression that I'm temporary, simply a cog in a machine. Plus, remember high school? Everyone will gravitate to an area and stake out turf. They will consider that space "theirs" and resent any intrusion. Plus, the "cool kids" will undoubtedly stake out the good areas, leaving the less powerful to wander the office aimlessly looking for a place to work.

Shared space sounds like a pure utopian ideal that would never work in the real world. The assumption is that everyone on your team gets along perfectly and never needs time apart. I'm part of a pretty good team, but if we all had to share one big cube, we'd be at each other's throats. What happens when you have to work on something with someone? Two people have a conversation with an unwilling audience of three. Either you whisper or you bother everybody else.

Count me out.

NTT and other companies have already been offering 100Mbs fiberoptic lines to homes in Japan for quite awhile now.

The best part is it's cheap, They usually cost a little more than $40 a month.

Of course, it's still twice the price of 12Mbs ADSL lines in Japan like Yahoo BB who offers 12Mbs speed for $21/month. Not that most people would know what to do with 100Mbs anyways (except for some stuff that RIAA doesn't really approve of).

On the other hand, having hotel offices for the person who comes in everyday, works 9-ot-5, ... is dumb. And I doubt many companies would do that.

Renowned advertising firm TBWA Chiat/Day tried it back in 1994. According to a Wired article about it, things didn't go so well.

~Philly

...are doomed to repeat them. Viz. this famous disaster at TBWA Chiat/Day.

You CAN stream DRMd files across a subnet in iTunes. Only one machine has to be authorized host. That's one of its main features. DUH!

...and here it is:
Wired Magazine Article

That they have the power to see it inserted in a bill that has absolutely NO relation to them whatsoever is the problem.

The U.S. Congress has managed to sneak other, seemingly even less related, statutes onto the books through riders such as this. For example, "technical correction" that briefly removed the right of a recording artist to own copyright in his recordings was attached as a rider to the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999, which in turn was a rider to a budget bill.

Especially since at that point there'd be the critical mass necessary for bottom-up mesh networking to replace the top-down telecoms (except for crossing oceans).

--

"A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees ... of an unnamed Canadian company. ... Booker, of Sunnyvale, California, now faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine"

Is that five years in a Canadian or US prison? I mean the way the economy is in California a short stay in Canada (even in one of their prisons) might be preferred. Atleast you'll get three meals a day and some poutine if you're good.

If the fine is in CAD then I suggest paying it quickly. This time next year the CAD might be equal to the USD ...

Bonne Chance

I tried it on my phone, and the display is lots more readable.

The original version had lots of italics and the text flow wasn't great.

The updated version looked much better (except that the header of the first story was separated from the body by the section nav and poll and stuff)

Handspring Treo 600, blazer browser.

Now there's no reason to fix http://slashdot.org/palm (which doesn't seem to work) to be as good as http://www.wired.com/news_drop/palm looks on a handheld.

Maybe even make it automatic.

They don't call them laptops because they don't want to imply that you can use them on your lap.

Why not?

Wait a minute, don't we have math and engineering to deal with all those problems (we certainly did in the 60's and 70's)?

But the units matter.

Is it just me, or does anyone else detect a sloppiness in our current program that didn't exist before? Maybe it's a symptom of the "Me! Now!" generation-X (and now gen-Y) attitude (disclaimer: I'm not even 30 yet).

OK, before we start, let's be clear that you're completely wrong about that, on both counts.

Are you certain? Do you have a link to back that up?

This PC World Article contradicts your assertion. In addition, the SonicBlue Replay TV had a "send show" option that allowed the owner to send a recorded TV program to one other user (presumably a family member or friend). While this feature is being challenged in court, current law appears to allow this as "fair use". (There's an article here.)

There is a Wired news article here that indicates the lawsuit is still undecided.

And, for the last goddamn blessed time (see what I mean about the yellow part of the journalism?), it was not someplace a person could actually wager real money on events. That was just the statistical model.

Well, in that case, my argument still applies, but for a different reason: instead of of guilt interfering with the normal incentive for acquisition, there is no incentive for acquisition at all, because acquisition is simply impossible.

As some guy said in this Wired article, the whole of the predictive power of futures markets is the fact that money or reputation is on the line. If it isn't, the predictive power of the system is greatly diminished, if not gone entirely.

...is something that addresses low-tech weaponry, like a modern day version of the double-barreled cannon [wired.com]. Just think, every platoon would have it's own anti-donkey cannon!

Quite a few have stood up. Three of them are even republicans.