Now that is a kickass hack! Seriously, taking hardware with limited functionality and actually adding (not just restoring) functionality to it that was not planned for it is pretty cool.

This is not like the "triple core" or "double core" CPUs being "hacked" into quad-cores when the crippling was just the setting low of a line or setting of a jumper on the chip. That was back when they were making all the chips quad cores and then crippling them as needed to meet market need: more dual cores were being purchased because of the lower price point, so the manufacturer just intentionally "disavowed" the extra cores on those chips, just to make a sale at that price point.

Of course, due to some hardware limitations, it can just record bursts of 59 frames at a time (probably RAM buffer limits since the RAW video takes up hella lot of data):

DNG Burst and raw video

The 50d can already shoot DNG silent bursts with maximum resolutions of 1592x1062 (buffer is full at 59 frames) in 1x mode and 1992x1080 (buffer is full at 53 frames) in crop mode thanks to @smeangol http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5481.msg37526#msg37526

@coutts has found the stubs for the 40d which means it is 'likely' that the 40d can do raw video and DNG bursts however it will need porting and developing.

@Smeangol is having some success in porting the raw recording feature however some other developer assistance may be required to iron out bugs.

Re: I don't know much about him or if he deserves his conviction or not but that seems like a flaw in the justice system that should be fixed.

      Fucked up legal system takes away the judging power from the judiciary.

      It's not so much a flaw but instead a way for those in power to maintain their consolidated hold on power. This discretionary power held by the Attorneys General (of the States of our United States of America and of the Federal Districts of these United States) on whether or not to charge individuals and with what charges to pound them into submission is monstrously overwhelming firepower: it's the use of nuclear bombs to swat a mosquito. It's not so much a flaw as it a specific design feature: it's meant to be that way because it was designed that way.

        It's the same as the silly hammer of "minimum required sentencing guidelines" (guidelines? how are they guidelines if they're forced upon you as a minimum???) forced upon the federal judiciary for certain types of crimes:

These are called mandatory minimum sentences: - A mandatory sentence is a court decision setting where judicial discretion is limited by law. Typically, people convicted of certain crimes must be punished with at least a minimum number of years in prison.

        So now with the judicial branch tied off because judicial discretion is limited by law, the enormous power of the judiciary is funneled into the hands of the prosecutors, those Attorneys General aforementioned, and into the hands of the police who also have leeway and discretion in deciding whether to detain / pick up / arrest the people whom they run into or decide to actively look for or to actively avoid looking for.

Fucked up legal system takes away the judging power from the judiciary. As someone else mentions in this article, "It is abuse of power and exploitation of the system by the people within the system."

I'm pretty sure there is a "country" resident in the Cayman islands.

I believe you meant to say "a company". ;>)

Re::Their country, their rules

Yep. I must agree with you. Especially since the USA seems to want to go to war with other countries and individuals about them breaking our laws in their countries (see copyright, Kim Dotcom, the Dmitri Skylarov case, kidnapping Manuel Noriega for breaking "our laws", and probably a million other things), it seems minimal to allow a country to fucking assert its own laws in its own sovereign territory.

Their country, their rules. Though as to your comment about "You can't complain that you do it in your country so why can't you do it there", there are many many whiny americains who go abroad and then whine whine complain whine about how they can't do what they want to do and what they're used to doing at home.

Often, these idiots and our state department are complaining about the jailing of our USAian countrymen (and women!!!) for breaking the laws of those other countries. How dare those other countries have laws that affect our citizens! Why, we won't even be a party to international treaties if our soldiers would be bound by the International Criminal Court!

Say, have you ever read The Nine Billion Names of God ? It's a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, and just like in "2001", he somehow manages to get IBM involved in the storyline!!!

Perhaps it's a fear of the end of the world that leads to such superstitions such as not saying god's name, or in Harry potter stories the continual references to "He who shall not be named" for [spoiler alert!!!] Voldemort (vol-de-mort? flight of death? orgasm? wtf???]

The summary from wikipedia:

This short story tells of a Tibetan lamasery whose monks seek to list all of the Names of God, since they believe the Universe was created in order to note all the names of God and once this naming is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which they calculated they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about 9,000,000,000 ("nine billion") and each having no more than nine characters. Writing the names out by hand, as they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combinations, would take another 15,000 years; the monks wish to use modern technology in order to finish this task more quickly.

.

They rent a computer capable of printing all the possible permutations, and they hire two Westerners to install and program the machine. The computer operators are skeptical but play along. After three months, as the job nears completion, they fear that the monks will blame the computer, and by extension its operators, when nothing happens. The Westerners delay the operation of the computer so that it will complete its final print run just after their scheduled departure. After their successful departure on ponies, they pause on the mountain path on their way back to the airfield, where a plane is waiting to take them back to civilization. Under a clear night sky they estimate that it must be just about the time that the monks are pasting the final printed names into their holy books. Then they notice that ''overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.''

Re: The problem is that none of the mythologies make any sense unless you are already a believer. So comparing three mythologies that do not make sense to each other will not result in any insights except that they are different.

So true! In fact, comparing fictional religious world-views is as fruitful as trying to compare them based on their relative phase shift of holy or sacred days:

Islam holds Friday to be the holy day / lord's day

Judaism holds Saturday to be the holy/lord's day

Christianity holds Sunday to be the holy/lord's day

(or so I have been told, I grew up in the middle of those three)
So is the phase shift due to the age of origin of the religions? 'cause Judaism predates the other two and holds the middle religious day.

But then again, considering the various calamitous and cliff-like calendar changes from Julian (hail, Caesar!) to Gregorian (hail, popey monkey suits!) and the various calendrical manipulations involved in orthodoxy and non-orthodoxy, it's all baloney / bologna / non-kosher-meat to me!

And have you noticed how this part of the earth likes to use Norse gods (Tieu, Odin, Thor, Frig/Freya, Saturn) and sky-orbs (Sun's day and Moon's day) for the days of the week?

Christian's worship the sun (son?)? Jews are Saturnalians? Muslims and Freya? WTF? Of course, it all makes no sense at all, which makes sense when you consider that it is nonsense at its base.

That is a problem if they prioritize their own results above legitimate search results and if they effectively blackmail the owners of the search terms into paying to be listed at an appropriately high level. Oh wait, they already do that with adwords and threatening to allow competitors to buy keywords for your own unique business. They keep trying to create gold-rushes and make sure that Google is the only territory in which the gold-rushes occur.

That may, in fact, be inappropriate use of a monopoly. And their purchase of doubleclick and the bundling of their products may in fact constitute such abuse of monopoly powers.

dude, you miss the point entirely. Normally, "whoosh" is used for people who don't get the joke, but in this case you deserve a "whoosh" for not getting the point. WTF do I care if the drug dealer puts adulterants in his crappy drugs? The point is that the deaths from overdoses are not because some insanely careful and meticulous dosage-calculating drug user OD'ed 'cause he counted on the drug dealer to give him a calibrated and accurate and precise amount and strength of drug as the USP would give him. These fuckers die because they used illegal drugs and they took too much of the damn drug.

It's no use blaming the drug dealer for getting your poor widdle kid addicted: your kid chose to use the drugs. Blame your kid, not the drug dealer, for the kid's decision to seek out and use drugs.

To take a phrase from the NRA types: drug-dealers and drugs don't cause the overdoses, the fucking idiots who ingest the drugs cause the overdoses.

Well, you're posting so you're definitely a writer, ergo no money lots of time. However, you're posting in response to something, so you must have read it so you're a reader, so lotsa money and no time. However, you're posting in response tosomething on slashdot, so if you follow the norm (for slashdot) you did not RTFA so you're definitely not a reader, so less money and more time?

As to which color of star to ask, I do not think our badge system defines that as of yet. Please speak to the gamification Tzar and I'm sure they'll get right on it. You could also use D&D to decide:

a - roll a 20-sided die three times to select a HUE

b - roll a six-sided die once to select SATURATION

c - roll a 10-sideed die to select the number of points on the star

d - roll any die and use odd/even to select whether to cut and sew the star yourself or outsource it to chinese manufacturers...

So Google is going to become the new "Permanent Record" bogey-man... just like the arrest and mug-shot sites that put up names and photos of recent arrests and mug-shots and "offer" to make those photos go away if you pay a little something...

Or expedite the "going away" of those photos if you pay a little more.
Sad world. Sad concept.

Just because Schmidt 'the idiot' of Google sez forget about your privacy (and no matter how frequently he bleats it) is no reason to take him at his word. We have rights beyond those he believes in, inalienable rights. I read about them somewhere.

Damn, you make some fine and excellent points. A friend of mine pointed out that the "sharpen my axe" and "i'm here to sever heads" quotes are from the lyrics of a song by the Vancouver Hip Hop Band Swollen Members called "Don't Bring me Down". And I was defending the quoting of lyrics.

But you are absolutely right that people in the midst of a psychotic break or in the midst of paranoid delusions do in fact believe that everything in the world references them directly: that the songs on the radio are not just about them but are directly speaking to them.

So I retract my previous statements. We are of course free to express ourselves, but some outrageous statements may require assessment? Or should the boundary really be at outrageous action? Outrageous statements ought to be allowed and actions that cross the line ought not. But the trick is where does the outrageous statement cross the line?

Allowing detention for statements alone is getting very fascist. Even allowing psychiatric detention or forced psych evaluation for statements alone is not fair: the soviets used to lock up dissenters in psychiatric wards, didn't they?

It's a tough call.

re: I doubt he was claiming to literally sharpen an axe. But then it's hard to know what someone else is thinking.

Yes. Exactly. He wasn't making a literal claim. He was quoting lyrics from the song Bring Me Down by the Vancouver Hip Hop Band Swollen Members:

I'm far beyond the magic of a wand inside a wizard's fist
Sharper than the hand of Edward Scissor's, I'm a wiz at this
Hotter than the desert but I'm colder than a blizzard kid
Harder than a prison bid, with God I'm never hesitant
My business it isn't as amazin as it's ever been
As long as God allows me to be clever it will never end
Sharpen up my axe and I am back, I'm here to sever heads
Compulsive obsessive, I'm also aggressive
My mouth is the message, my life is a lesson, my pulse is a blessing

Now he left out the middle of that stanza ("and I am back") but otherwise it's a word-for-word copy of those lyrics. People do tend to post lyrics or the name of song which captures the emotions or beliefs which they are feeling. I do believe people can quote songs for their metaphorical meaning: saying something does not mean believing in the literal meaning of those words, it can also be a reference to a prior saying of those words by yourself or someone else, or even a sarcastic reference. Girls know sarcastic.

I don't know about the rest of his postings, but seriously people, have some musical knowledge (or at least some human-being friends with musical knowledge!) That post from August 13th

On August 13, he wrote, "Sharpen up my axe; I'm here to sever heads."

is from the lyrics of a vancouver hip-hop band named Swollen Members , from their song Bring Me Down:

I'm far beyond the magic of a wand inside a wizard's fist
Sharper than the hand of Edward Scissor's, I'm a wiz at this
Hotter than the desert but I'm colder than a blizzard kid
Harder than a prison bid, with God I'm never hesitant
My business it isn't as amazin as it's ever been
As long as God allows me to be clever it will never end
Sharpen up my axe and I am back, I'm here to sever heads
Compulsive obsessive, I'm also aggressive
My mouth is the message, my life is a lesson, my pulse is a blessing

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/swollenmembers/bringmedown.html

I seriously remember this being covered on slashdot about three months ago, wasn't it?

Re: I simply can't believe that contracts are awarded without any sort of penalty clause that covers errors like this, delays in completion dates, etc I'm sure there probably were penalty clauses and cost-overrun clauses and all kinds of things. The government has been in the business of writing contracts with civilian industry for a long long long time. (See the rant by a former president about the entrenched Military Industrial Complex" ). It probably depends on the nature of the mistake. If the company screwed up, well then they fucked up and need to bear the costs. If the company merely did the work to specs provided to them externally by the government or by another contractor, then the problem occured with the design and the specs and not with the manufacture side. In that case, the design guys need to pay for the fuck-up. I don't think all of the details are in the article that I could find.

I thought that the taxi regulations and the anti-"gypsy"-taxi laws were so that out-of-town tourists don't get ripped off so frequently that they decide to stop visiting thereby dropping your tourist tax dollars: transportation, hotel taxes, restaurant visits, shamu - and - seaworld - and - the old village district (mission area) [that probably only applies to san diego and such). But the tourist market is large in NY, just as in chicago, SF, orlando, atlanta, etc. So the taxis do need to be regulated.

Do a quick search for "why are taxis regulated?" on your favorite engine and come up with a grab-bag of hooror stories about taxi drivers taking advantage of customers. You can also watch the movie The Freshman with Marlon Brando and SJP's husband, Ferris Bueller.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab :

Seattle re-regulated in 1984, reinstating a restriction on taxicab licenses and fare controls.