Comment I think... (Score 1) 320
...it's more about a bunch of dickless wimps playing the latest FPS and MMORPGs while living in their parent's basements trying to find a way to validate their hobby. Did I win?
Comment Chortle... (Score 1) 6
Mmhmf! Hah! BWAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!! Oh, it's so funny and yet so very very true.
Comment Swedish Pirate Party has its servers there (Score 4, Informative) 109
This is where we have located the servers of the Swedish Pirate Party.
Part of the reason is that the ISP Bahnhof has taken at stance on privacy issues that we are very happy with as pirates. But of course part of the reason is that it's a pretty cool looking data center.
You can find a couple of pictures from when we installed our servers in the data center here.
Vice Chairman, The Pirate Party, Sweden
Comment Re:Seven hours from a wall outlet (Score 1) 235
Or at least one of those little bags of peanuts which they give you on the plane.
Submission + - Swedish NSA to wiretap all phones, internet (rickfalkvinge.se)
steelneck writes: This is from from the leader of the Swedish Pirate party Rick Falkvinge, who has been running a pull-down-their-pants series on how the national security agencies have been violating the Swedish Constitution for several years. He even had the former minister of defense to visit and comment on his swedish blog about what he is now writing about in english.
The fuss is about a bill in the Swedish Parliament that will mandate the national security agency (FRA, Försvarets Radioanstalt, translates roughly to Radio Agency of the Defensive Forces) to wiretap all phone calls and all Internet communications that happen to cross one of about 20 key points in the national infrastructure, typically placed along the Swedish borders.
All communications will be screened in real time according to automatic criteria. All of it. The communications that match will be automatically saved for manual inspection. These criteria are known only to the FRA and to an equally secret political oversight board, and will be changing constantly depending on what the FRA wants to find.
What this does is to change the default from "you have a right to privacy" to "all your private communications is always wiretapped". The only difference between this and when the East German security agency Stasi opened all letters and selected some of them for closer inspection, depending on a number of criteria, is that the capacity and scale of this system is immensely larger.
The way it looks now, this bill will pass in a vote on June 17. The parties have put so much prestige into passing this bill they can't back down without crashing hard.
Read it all on Ricks blog.
Ohh BTW.
The FRA recently bought one of the 5 most powerful computers in the world from HP. Gee.. wonder why?
The fuss is about a bill in the Swedish Parliament that will mandate the national security agency (FRA, Försvarets Radioanstalt, translates roughly to Radio Agency of the Defensive Forces) to wiretap all phone calls and all Internet communications that happen to cross one of about 20 key points in the national infrastructure, typically placed along the Swedish borders.
All communications will be screened in real time according to automatic criteria. All of it. The communications that match will be automatically saved for manual inspection. These criteria are known only to the FRA and to an equally secret political oversight board, and will be changing constantly depending on what the FRA wants to find.
What this does is to change the default from "you have a right to privacy" to "all your private communications is always wiretapped". The only difference between this and when the East German security agency Stasi opened all letters and selected some of them for closer inspection, depending on a number of criteria, is that the capacity and scale of this system is immensely larger.
The way it looks now, this bill will pass in a vote on June 17. The parties have put so much prestige into passing this bill they can't back down without crashing hard.
Read it all on Ricks blog.
Ohh BTW.
The FRA recently bought one of the 5 most powerful computers in the world from HP. Gee.. wonder why?
Comment Re:Iron Man's Suit Defies Physics -- Mostly (Score 2, Interesting) 279
Hydrogen peroxide powered rocket packs fly for around 30 seconds, because they have a specific impulse of around 125, meaning that one pound of propellant can make 125 pound-seconds of thrust, meaning that it takes about two pounds of propellant for every second you are in the air. Mass ratios are low for anything strapped to a human, so the exponential nature of the rocket equation can be safely ignored.
A pretty hot (both literally and figuratively) bipropellant rocket could manage about twice the specific impulse, and you could carry somewhat heavier tanks, but two minutes of flight on a rocket pack is probably about the upper limit with conventional propellants.
However, an actual jet pack that used atmospheric oxygen could have an Isp ten times higher, allowing theoretical flights of fifteen minutes or so. Here, it really is a matter of technical development, since jet engines have thrust to weight ratios too low to make it practical. There is movement on this technical front, but it will still take a while.
John Carmack
A pretty hot (both literally and figuratively) bipropellant rocket could manage about twice the specific impulse, and you could carry somewhat heavier tanks, but two minutes of flight on a rocket pack is probably about the upper limit with conventional propellants.
However, an actual jet pack that used atmospheric oxygen could have an Isp ten times higher, allowing theoretical flights of fifteen minutes or so. Here, it really is a matter of technical development, since jet engines have thrust to weight ratios too low to make it practical. There is movement on this technical front, but it will still take a while.
John Carmack
Submission + - Full "Operating Thetan" documents leaked
An anonymous reader writes: Wikileaks has received a copy of the Church of Scientology's full, unabridged "Operating Thetan" documents, including "Operating Theten Level 8" and "Clear." These documents were written on a typewriter and include none other than L. Ron Hubbard's handwritten notes in the margins. Previously leaked OT documents were missing sections and didn't include the marginalia.
Furthermore, at
[t]he final level, 'OT8', you are to "have full certainty and, therefore, perception on all" of your issues. According to Hubbard, the 'OT8' manuals are supposed to stay aboard the Free Winds Scientology ship which has heavy security because nothing is supposed to leave the ship. Despite that, Hubbard himself claims to have smuggled out his own 'OT8' instructions for the "elite" Scientologists. "I am breaking security as I disagree that this should only be released to an elite in Scientology. I do, however, ask it not be released to psyches or 'squirrels' or anyone who will break the Independent Security Network and allow it to get back to the Church of Scientology. It would be best if they do not find out that we have it. Please treat this data responsibly. It is the key to the only truth possible," said Hubbard in regards to his 'OT8' instructions.
Submission + - What the IFPI tries to conceal about its origins (copyriot.se)
An anonymous reader writes: An old, influential, international organization usually wouldn't miss the opportunity to celebrate its own 75th birthday and inform the world about their history. Not so with the IFPI, the international lobby group of the record industry (closely affiliated with the RIAA). That their 75th anniversary takes place in 2008 is not only ignored by themselves. In fact, they actively try to conceal and suppress information about when and where they was founded.
Journal Journal: GENTOO: Keeping Boxes Up to Date in a Sane Way 4
I posted my current approach to keeping my Gentoo boxes up to date on the Gentoo Forums. Just linking here for anyone on Slashdot who might be interested. The general gist of it is using GNU screen to try and make some of the update process a bit more automatic.
Submission + - Opera Files EU Antitrust Suit Against Microsoft
taskforce writes: Opera Software just filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft at the European Commission. (A place where Micorosft has historically come to blows over its monopolist practices before.) The suit alleges that Microsoft has abused its dominant position in the operating system market by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows; Unlike Apple or Nokia, who also bundle a browser with their OS, Opera argues that web designers build their sites with IE in mind both because of its dominant market share and non-compliance with web standards, meaning that other browsers simply do not work correctly with many pages which are designed for IE, leading to unfair and deliberate restriction of competition on the part of Microsoft.
Journal Journal: VIRTUALIZATION: VirtualIron is WAYYYY Cool 2
Alert: If you're not into computers, don't manage servers at work or at home, or don't know what TFTP, DHCP, Xen hypervisor mean, then skip this entry.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with VirtualIron other than being a very happy customer so far.
Journal Journal: PROGRAMMING: Please Tell Me More About Java on the Desktop 2
OK... Here is what I know (or at least think I know) about Java:
Submission + - The Swedish OOXML vote as been declared invalid! (os2world.com)
Landreth writes: "The Swedish Standards Institute has tonight issued a press release, according to OS2 World, where they declared this weeks earlier vote regarding OOXML as invalid and by that Sweden don't have any official position regarding OOXML any more.
According to the press release (Swedish) issued by SIS, Swedish Standards Institute tonight (the pdf document is created 18:05) the SIS board has declared this weeks earlier OOXML vote as invalid due to that one of the participating companies has voted two times where the SIS rules clearly says that each company can only cast one vote each."
According to the press release (Swedish) issued by SIS, Swedish Standards Institute tonight (the pdf document is created 18:05) the SIS board has declared this weeks earlier OOXML vote as invalid due to that one of the participating companies has voted two times where the SIS rules clearly says that each company can only cast one vote each."
Journal Journal: MEME Attempt: Top 10 Cool Home Stuff You've Done with *nix 2
RULES: These have to be things you can't do on other proprietary platforms easily (without being a programmer), at all, or without buying additional software, or pirating software. These don't have to be things that are necessarily special within the *nix world, just things that you know you can't do elsewhere. (ie. they can be commonplace *nix operations)
My list:
Submission + - Sweden shuts down The Pirate Bay again
larkly writes: "(From the i-told-you-so-dept) The Swedish Pirate Party released a press statement today, claiming that the Swedish police authorities have classified the torrent site The Pirate Bay as a distribution site for child pornography. The filter has not been subject of much national criticism, as it was only intended for blocking child pornography sites, but its usage now seems to drift in a different direction."
