'Our future is now totally dependent, totally entwined, totally symbiotic'

I would have said more parasitic than symbiotic, actually ...

Yes, it seems pretty sensible. Righthaven was not harmed at the time of publication. They clearly looked for an infringement and then brought the harm upon themselves.

On the other hand, it could be said that the Las Vegas Review-Journal had suffered harm, and Righthaven bought the rights, thus relieving LVRJ of the harm and taking it upon themselves.

I use the Scientech LS-30 which is a device supporting several types of wireless sensors including PIR (infra-red), reed switch, glass breakage detector, smoke detector, medical alert button and wireless outdoor alarm.

The alarm system can report a break-in, fire or medical emergency via PSTN or SMS. It's very programmable, with support for lots of different zones, X10 home automation switches, day-of-week and time-of-day mode setting, doorbell and so on.

The LS-30 has accessories including a GSM module (for sending alerts via SMS) USB interface and also ethernet interface.

I wrote the LS30 project to allow me to control and monitor the device from linux. There's a daemon which connects to the alarm's ethernet port; it proxies commands (from clients on my machine) and events (alerts / status updates) from the device.

I have daemons to watch for particular events (e.g. door open/close), logging the activity rates of PIR sensors (movement detection is reported by the unit even when disarmed) and burglaries (so the computer knows and can react accordingly e.g. by sending SMS messages or twitter).

Looks like 1987 for me. That's not an exhaustive search, only looking through my homedir, and I'm ignoring files with obviously bogus mtimes (like Jan 1, 1980).

Files I converted from the TRS-80 would have preserved the timestamp and I think it was limited to the years 1980-1987 (due to using only 3 bits to represent the year number).

When does the system become sentient? Looking forward to the day.

So, yeah, information like this can be useful.

Not to me.

It's like parking my car and coming back to find friends of the ice-cream vendor making out in the back seat and they want me to drive them somewhere.

... why, in order to buy music, I have to agree to let Apple sell my location to unknown businesses? What exactly is it about the music transaction that has anything at all to do with my location and some other company that have no relationship with?

It's like going to the shop to buy an ice-cream and coming back to find some squatter living in your house.

Thanks for the information. I can't confirm that from my own experience, but I'll be wary.

I have had some bad experiences with Strathfield however ... they are definitely a shop-of-last-resort.

JB's not bad, but I have learned to never pay their ticket price on electronics. I always ask for, and get, a discount.

Sorry but I patented that idea^H^H^H^Hbusiness method.

... runs to submit patent application for switching legal strategies with a period of between 0.5 to 4 seconds ...

Probably not a wiki; we should be using git repositories for working on laws.

Anybody can commit their suggested changes, but getting them merged will be really difficult.

I thought the same thing. Clearly software incompatibility is a nuisance only when it's somebody else's software. If it's my flash crap, being asked to upgrade or install is a feature.

This looks like a job for geekmyride.org.

I think they should do it annually. Or maybe monthly. It's important to keep showing how silly these Islamic preachers are, with their medieval worldview. We have one in Australia too; Sheikh Hilali, former (?) Mufti of Australia and speaker of the quote comparing immodestly dressed women to raw meat left out in the sun. He wasn't talking about their suntan.

Can we devote like every Sunday to BoobQuake day?

I know, I know ... with the acres of flesh on display during the summer months in most enlightened countries, it's surprising that the cities haven't all come tumbling down with the resulting quakes.