is it my imagination or has this been reviewed on slashdot before?
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There would be a new growth industry based on people paying to retrieve old issues of newspapers, songs, movies, etc.
Currently there's a large barrier for small-time archivists because if they sell someone access to a newspaper article, they have to make sure the copyright is legit.

If we reduced copyright to a much shorter time, people would be able to take multimedia and remix it and reuse it in a broader manner

I agree 100%. I love her kits. especially the SpokePOV.

Ladyada, if you are listening, please please please release a kit for a full RGB SpokePOV. The monochome version is awesome so an RGB version would be 3x better!! heh

also, instead of having separate magnetic sensor for each spoke, it would be easier to have one sensor and wire the spokes together so they are guaranteed to be synchronized.
I guess the design would have to change so the user has to program in the angle between the spokes.

1) I LOVE the google maps+navigation features. I don't feel like I'm getting lost in the city anymore.

2) Being able to browse the web on the go is amazing. Now I can find a really great restaurant close to me or settle a debate via google while out and about.

3) Android can take advantage of wi-fi whenever its available. My massive use of pandora doesn't cause me agonizing overage charges because of this...

Oh and before I forget, the SDcard on the android acts just like a memcard. You just copy media into it and the android media players just notice the new media and allow you to play it. The mp3 tags are parsed and scanned and you get all of the searching features you get with iTunes without all of the restrictions...

If you have verizon and hate their standard Moto razr or krazr, get a droid instead. I've had mine for months now and love it. I can upload/download whatever I want onto the SDcard (music, video, apps) and can download whatever I want from the app market. Mostly I use it for pandora and music playing. But in the future, I hope to use it for server monitoring/maintence. (Please someone port Juniper's VPN client to droid!!)

Sure, I play ~$100/month but I think its money well spent. I get unlimited downloads + limited uploads and more notifications then I can deal with. I get to make my own apps and give them to my friends without anyone needing to get a development license from google or jailbreaking...

Verizon was desperate to get people back from the iphone so they FINALLY opened up their devices. at least the droid. The only current forseeable problem is that moto doesnt send us the 2.1 update like they promised. If it doesn't happen by the end of feburary, I'll probably just jailbreak the phone and follow one of the guides for installing a custom 2.1 image for the droid.

btw, I would recommend the insurance because I don't trust the hardware to last more then a year. But the great thing is that if the device does die, all of my contact info is still backed up onto google.
I'll have to scrap the info out of google but I doubt it'll be a huge problem...

It's a win-win for everyone (except ATT and apple)

I have 4chan.org on my droid with no wi-fi. They must have unblocked it by now...

Wow, surprise surprise, android is open -> easier to teach kids how to program it...

Remember that you can always vote with your dollars.
And if apple doesn't provide the devices and features that you need, someone else will.

I think that Jobs is getting cranky in his old age....

heh, except that the fuel pellets use tritium and deuterium and the containers (hohlraums ??) are made out of gold foil.

You don't find these elements at your local 7-11....

I'd be interested to know how much tritium and deuterium a fully functioning fusion machine is expected to use up...

Just as a followup.
After reading more about EC2 instance types, the amazon term is compute unit. However, they don't give any hard numbers for the Hz of the machine (just "One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.") and they don't give any GUARANTEEs that the compute unit won't be diluted over time.

Amazon's instance types (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) doesn't seem to indicate the number of cycles/sec you are guaranteed to use per type.

They sell instance types based on the physical hardware specs which is worthless in a cloud architecture.
What they should really be doing is indicating the number of cycles/sec an instance type will be GUARANTEED and then enforce it.
If the customer doesn't use that number of cycles/sec, then fine put the idle cycles up for bidding.

Just my $0.02
Ben

Of course the flipside is that it's easy to oversimplify and ignore feature which don't fit inside your design.

From the user's POV, the engineer is not being responsive to his needs and the application is "broken"

So, yes, simplisty is awesome from a maintenance engineering POV but actually kinda sucks when the feature just needs to get done.

To be fair though, part the reason you probably hadn't heard about it is because the world's media was mostly too busy covering middle east stuff like Israel's war with Lebanon.

I think the reason for this is that its a lot less fun to be a reporter in Darfur then it is to be a reporter in Tel Aviv. If you are a reporter in Israel, it's only a 3 hour trip from Tel Aviv to the Gaza strip or to the north, you get your news story about the horrors of conflict between the Israelis or Palestinians or Lebanese, and then you drive back to Tel Aviv, send off your report, and then go partying in Tel Aviv all night. Rinse and repeat.

What the heck type of fun is there in Darfur?

Cheers
Ben

I don't get it.

It the malicious circuity has to be triggered externally and it's unknown when it'll be used, that means that either:
(1) hackers have to get into a network linked to the hardware or
(2) there has to be an external radio signal which can disable the hardware or
(3) The hardware (radar in this case) doesn't validate it's input well enough and is open to buffer overflows/ bad execution based on invalid input.

From what I've read, the Israelis exploited (3) in order to disable the syrians radar systems.
It seems to me that the syrians bought just plain crappy radar systems and then never bothered to test or "fuzz" them.

However, the article seems to be going crazy over (2). However, a simple faraday cage should be good enough to defeat that kind of attack.
It'll create a barrier between the inside of the container and the outside. No EM radiation goes in, no EM radiation goes out.
Any kind of circuity triggered by EM would be defeated. And by definition, any circuity triggered by time is useless because it's impossible to determine when in the future, it'll be required.

And (1) is easily defended against by not connecting your critical defense hardware to any network of any kind. Or by using 3rd party firewalls which have not been made in China/Russia/Iran...

So this is much todo about nothing IMHO.

I find this study to be wildly stupid.

The author merely asks the survey participates to rate their mathematical abilities without actually testing them.
I wonder about the correlation (probably negative) between people who rate their math skills highly and people who actually can do math.

This study should be titled "Correlation between people who have high self esteem and who thinks that this child pornography prosecution is stupid."