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Comment: Very Clever, getting the police to erase evidence (Score 1) 236

'excessive police action' was used during the raid. Dotcom could prove this in court because the entire raid was recorded by CCTV data, which is stored on Dotcom's confiscated computers.

Making this claim seems like a great way to cause the confiscated hard drives to get 'accidentally' damaged.

(If they really did contain evidence against the police, would you reveal that while the drives were in police custody? I wouldn't).

Comment: Re:About time! (Score 1) 282

by KSeghetti (#38165870) Attached to: Toyota To Let People Ride In Self-Driving Prius

I have ridden motorcycles, in Bay Area traffic. I agree it is a lot of fun. However, I wouldn't claim that 99% of motorcycle accidents are the fault of the driver (unless you include selecting a motorcycle as your vehicle in the first place). Most motorists are oblivious to anything smaller than a car.

A motorcycle is a T.I.E. fighter, highly maneuverable, but no shields. One has to pilot accordingly. This means
a full 360 degree scan at least once a second. I have had cars try to drive over me from just about every direction.

I felt the safest on the freeway when I was going so fast it was unlikely anyone was going to come up behind me, so that I only had to scan in front of me for potential assailants, with rear scans less often.

The worst is when stopped or not moving very fast. One doesn't have nearly as much maneuverability then. (that is where the 0-60 in 4 seconds can save your ass).

Comment: Re:About time! (Score 1) 282

by KSeghetti (#38165764) Attached to: Toyota To Let People Ride In Self-Driving Prius

My uncle has a country place
That no one knows about
He says it used to be a farm
Before the Motor Law
And on Sundays I elude the eyes
And hop the Turbine Freight
To far outside the Wire
Where my white-haired uncle waits

Jump to the ground
As the Turbo slows to cross the borderline
Run like the wind
As excitement shivers up and down my spine
Down in his barn
My uncle preserved for me an old machine
For fifty odd years
To keep it as new has been his dearest dream

I strip away the old debris
That hides a shining car
A brilliant red Barchetta
From a better vanished time
I fire up the willing engine
Responding with a roar
Tires spitting gravel
I commit my weekly crime

Wind
In my hair
Shifting and drifting
Mechanical music
Adrenaline surge...

Well-weathered leather
Hot metal and oil
The scented country air
Sunlight on chrome
The blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware

Suddenly ahead of me
Across the mountainside
A gleaming alloy air car
Shoots towards me, two lanes wide
I spin around with shrieking tires
To run the deadly race
Go screaming through the valley
As another joins the chase

Drive like the wind
Straining the limits of machine and man
Laughing out loud with fear and hope
I've got a desperate plan
At the one-lane bridge
I leave the giants stranded at the riverside
Race back to the farm
To dream with my uncle at the fireside

Rush - Red Barchetta

Software

SPAM: TWiki is dead, long live Foswiki - Foswiki 1.0.0 2

Submitted by
Eugen Mayer
Eugen Mayer writes "I am absolutely thrilled. It has been some time since i reported on the situation with TWiki and the fork. That does not mean there is nothing to report, though! With the first release (1.0.0), Foswiki establishes itself firmly in the marketspace. TWiki is dead, long live Foswiki!

So for those who have not kept up to date, let me summarize the preceding events. It all started 10 years ago, when Peter Thoeny decided to create a fork of JosWiki, and named it TWiki. TWiki developed into a very powerful structured wiki platform, mainly with the help of many volunteers. Lately, Thoeny stopped development contributions, and focussed mainly on pr. Around a year ago, he decided to found a company called TWiki.NET, a venture capital in the silicon valley.

The company promptly decided to take over the entire open source project, claiming it as theirs even though Thoenys code contributions to the actual product had been minimal for years at that point. Additional trademark enforcement rules didnt improve things. After months of strife, the project halted. Thoeny declared himself benevolent dictator for life, but did not show any benevolence in his dealings with the volunteer community. The culmination came in october 2008, with the lock-out of all current community members from the community site by TWiki.NET. This sparked the fork, first under the working-name Nextwiki and later under the permanent name Foswiki. The Foswiki website contains some background reading.

Rollercoaster ride

The fork took us community members on a rollercoaster-ride. We had to duplicate the project infrastructure that was built up over years on twiki.org, which we managed to do in just one or two weeks. Within moments, a new skin for the TWiki software was designed and implemented, and over the last few months we have had many emails supporting us in our actions. Developers that had been inactive for years because of the dictatorial regime Thoeny imposed on the project suddenly became interested again, new developers decided to join sparked by the radical change of direction.

Seeing the number of developers, designers, user-intraction experts and other contributors that went with the fork, it is reasonable to state that Foswiki is in fact the TWiki project, just under a new name. What is left under twiki.org, the original project website, is mostly a front for the struggling company TWiki.NET. Even though Thoeny keeps boasting the number of people that agreed to the new policy for using twiki.org, the number of actual contributions is very low, and mostly limited to contributions by Thoeny himself and one of his employees.

Meanwhile, in the short period since the fork (about 2.5 months) Foswiki has seen a staggering number of 1900 checkins, a lot of new content on the Foswiki community site, a lot of passionate discussions on the mailing lists and irc channels, and generally the feeling that we are rolling again! The crown on this work for me personally has been when earlier this week I mothballed the TWiki installation on foswiki.org, and replaced that with the Foswiki release candidate, including a port of the new skin-design to Foswiki pattern skin. An important milestone indeed.

New features, security audit and painless migration

That is all very well, and it is easy to gloat in the aftermath of the destruction that Thoeny wrought on the TWiki project. Of course it is not all roses and moonlight (a Dutch expression I believe), Thoenys actions have left the user-community in a split: should we stay with what is renamed to Foswiki, or should we go with the new TWiki. Of course, only in retrospect will we be able to determine what the right course of action would have been. However, given the above considerations, it is likely that users interested in innovation are wise to go with Foswiki.

Foswiki is based on an innovative new base architecture for example; as a result Foswiki can be run under FastCGI, a great step forward. Additionally, performance under mod_perl is improved. The same architecture (called FSA, short for Foswiki Stand Alone) makes it possible to run Foswiki as a stand-alone server, without the need of a webserver such as Apache. This is great for setting up a personal Foswiki on your laptop for example, or for using Foswiki in a more CMS-like fashion with agressive caching between the user and the FSA instance.

Other notable features are an improved search dialogue, giving the user much more flexibility and google-like boolean search operators. The venerable pattern-skin has been given a facelift, and is easier to customize.

And last but not least: much attention has been given to the security of the software. A lot of vectors for remote code injection have been identified and plugged, and other features have been made secure by default, eliminating the risk that a Foswiki application programmer might accidently introduce XSS issues. A further hundred-plus number of bugs have been fixed.

The Foswiki community considers concerns of current TWiki users very seriously. Migration is fairly painless, with the availability of a TWikiCompatibilityPlugin. A pure foswiki does not contain any TWiki-isms (such as the TWikiPreferences page) and all plugin functions are placed under the Foswiki namespace instead of the TWiki namespace. This would provide troublesome with legacy TWiki applications and plugins. The compatibility plugin makes those twiki-isms available under Foswiki, enabling old content and plugins to be used without a hitch.

The future

This is where i gather my crystal ball, and gaze at fuzy pictures of what is to come. Given that TWiki is now basically a two-man show, i think they will have a hard time supporting existing users. Both in development, where only one developer struggles to keep up with fixing reported bugs, as in end-user support. Thoeny is trying to single-handedly support the entire user base. Contrary to that situation, Foswiki has a thriving community behind it.

In an earlier post, i voiced the suspicion that TWiki.NET might become more like MySQL: a community of hired developers, with a product that is developed mostly as a commercial application and a floss version that is lagging behind in features as an afterthought. However, TWiki.NET will need money to build that hired community, and so far it does not seem they have the capital to follow through on that thought. Their ideal is the ubuntu model, their only problem is that they do not have the multi-millionaire to invest in endeavours that bring no profit.

I am biased, but I am convinced that Foswiki will prevail and TWiki will slowly die out. And without the vibrant community that made the product, the company that forced a resolution of the persisting stalemate that had locked up the community for years, will turn out to be an empty shell.

TWiki is dead, long live Foswiki!"

Link to Original Source

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