Comment Re:Actual Red URL (Score 1) 219
If you want to get pedantic, light is digital, the CCD counts photons, and there aren't even that many with high shutter speeds etc.
Submission + - US Border Guards Enforcing Copyright, Trademark an (pressrepublican.com) 1
twitter writes: "A Fordham University artist was detained and accused of copyright violations by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers because she had a sketchbook.
"U.S. citizens who've traveled to the places I've been need to be looked at. A half hour at the computer gave the agent cause to put me into another suspicious category, meriting a full car search. She (the agent) took my keys and went through my car."
"After going through my (laptop) computer, digital camera, cell phone, business cards, suitcase, reading materials, boxes of yarn and crochet tools, she returned with my sketchbook. I was taken to a room and told to sit on a bench with handcuffs at both ends."
"My sketchbook puzzled her," Zempel said. "It was a cartoon sketch. They couldn't understand what I was doing. She said, 'just what were you doing in Canada? We think you're engaged in some kind of copyright infringement'."
Producing a University ID saved her from arrest and further detention but she's understandably intimidated and upset. She renamed her project, "Homeland Security Blanket."
So now you know, the US Border patrol has been turned into a Federal copyright cop and the quality of such work. As Customs and Border Protection spokesman Theodore Woo said, "Time is set aside for intellectual-property-rights training." We already knew that your political beliefs could keep you from being able to cross the border from this previous abuse. Now we know that original artwork can get you arrested there for "piracy".
My feeling is that this was in part due to her political leanings as well. She does not know what the second trigger was for her search but too many people have been added to these "terrorist" lists for political reasons. Besides the CodePink case above there's Republican National Convention pacifist arrests before protests, which have lead to charges and the recent Maryland State Police abuse. The US is in dire need of regime change."
IBM Ships Fastest CPU on Earth 410
HockeyPuck writes "The 5-billion-instructions-per second Power6 processor from IBM would beat such rivals as the 3.73 gigahertz Pentium Extreme and the 2.4 gigahertz UltraSparc T2 from Sun. 'It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is,' said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company's baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two laggards. 'Hold your index finger out in front of your face,' Meyerson said in a telephone interview from IBM headquarters in New York. 'In less time than it would take a beam of light to travel from your knuckle to your fingertip, the new IBM chip would complete one task and start looking for the next, he said.'"
