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Comment: Re:he should think this through (Score 2, Informative) 631

by JimBowen (#31546490) Attached to: Company Sued, Loses For Not Using Patented Tech

One thing that might put you off wanting this feature in all buzzsaws:

If you read StopSaw's "how it works" section on their site, it'll tell you that the brake is a single-use cartridge that costs $69 a pop, and that you also need to replace the blade (presumably also a StopSaw proprietary part)
That'd be all well and good, if the saw only ever stopped when you actually put your finger in it - $200 for a new blade and brake is obviously a small price to pay for saving your finger.
But the site also goes on to explain that the brake is activated electrically, by the conductivity of the human body as opposed to wood.
In order for the saw to stop if you are not touching some other part of the chassis, this will need to be a high-frequency noise detector (like when you touch an audio amplifier input), which are very susceptible to.. noise.

It must be VERY profitable for StopSaw if they get $200 or so every time there is a bit of RF noise in a workshop!

Comment: Re:Is terrorism such a big issue? (Score 1) 469

by JimBowen (#27563401) Attached to: UK To Train Pro-West Islamic Groups To Game Google

This is not about terrorism. This is about political power and controlling a populace.
Terrorism is merely the spectre our governments wave over our heads to make us swallow their propaganda.

Really, the idea is to give up our rights, freedoms, and equalities, and instead trust in the government.
Surveillance will save us all from crime and terror. Give up your rights. If you don't want to, you must be a criminal or a terrorist.

This search engine spam seems to me like an exercise in propaganda. The home office wants to see if it can force undesirable pages out of the public eye by means of google spam, and it has invented a legitimate way of doing it.
It won't work, of course, as the article points out. Our governments are as incompetent as they are evil. :)

Programming

char *speelCheck(char *myPogrom) 1

Submitted by Jerry Asher
Jerry Asher writes "Not all of my coworkers are careful about spelling errors. Sometimes this causes real embarrassment as spelling errors creep into software interfaces. Does anyone know of spell checkers for programming languages? I don't want a text spell checker, I want a programming language aware spell checker. A spell checker that I can pass all of my code through and will flag spelling errors in function names, variable names, and comments, but will ignore language keywords, language constructs and expressions, and various programming styles (camel code, or underscores, or ...) I want a spell checker that knows that void *functionSigniture(char *myRoutine) contains one spelling error. Does anyone have such a thing for Java or C++? Are there any eclipse plugins that do this?"
Music

CBS buys last.fm for $280m->

Submitted by
JimBowen
JimBowen writes "Music recommendation based social networking site Last.fm have announced that the US broadcasting giant CBS have bought them out for $230 million.
In a blog post, Last.fm's Richard Jones claims that the buy-out will not affect the site's open-source client, the absence of DRM in their web radio or their privacy policy. However there is considerable dissent of the deal on the site's forums.

Following the purchases of MySpace and YouTube, could this be the fate of all successful independent "web 2.0" sites, reminiscent of the massive surge of buyouts in the dotcom boom?"

Link to Original Source
Security

AACS LA loses another code...->

Submitted by
SmoothTom
SmoothTom writes "Seems that AACS LA has lost yet another code to the folks ferreting them out. Subsequently, I will not be posting that code on any of my sites. It has been redacted it from the following list of possible codes.

45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A AF
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B1
[redacted]
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B3
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B4
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B5

(One of these days, the AACS LA folks will learn that it is a losing battle.)"

Link to Original Source
First Person Shooters (Games)

A Brief Look at Free Quake3 Engine Based Games

Submitted by
Thilo2
Thilo2 writes "As most of you probably know, id software released the Quake3 engine in summer 2005 under the terms of the GPL, which is now past over two years. Ever wonder what came out of it? Even though the engine is eight years old, just recently two independent projects have released fully featured multiplayers games, weighing in with downloads of about 550 megabytes each. Urban Terror and World of Padman, formerly modifications that required you to have the original Quake III Arena game, can now be played independently as stand-alone versions. Urban Terror combines realistic environments and weaponry with movement similar to Quake3. World of Padman on the other hand is a colorful shooter in comic style giving you fun weapons like water balloons and water pistols to shoot with. Last but not least there is Tremulous, a first person shooter with added real time strategy elements which has been out for quite some time now. Interesting to note, its game data is licensed under a CC license. All three games use an improved Quake3 engine from ioquake3, which has cleaned up the Quake3 source code since its release and made many improvements like OpenAL, Vorbis and SDL support, and thus are available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX. If you are willing to compile the engine yourself you can get support for even more platforms like Solaris or *BSD."
The Courts

Britain to expand 'talking CCTV' scheme nationally

Submitted by
Jack Dietrich
Jack Dietrich writes "After a successful trial of CCTV cameras which allow operators to shout at the surveilled masses via speakers attached to the cameras, the British Home Secretary John Reid has announced that he plans to provide £500,000 ($980,000) in funding to twenty areas to establish similar schemes. Competitions are to be held in schools in many of the areas for children to become the "voice" of the cameras. The word Orwellian seems utterly inadequate."

QOTD: "He's on the same bus, but he's sure as hell got a different ticket."

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