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Canada

Canada First Nation To Pull Out of Kyoto Accord 561

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the then-let-them-ride-bikes dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Canada will become the first country to formally withdraw from the Kyoto protocol on climate change, dealing a symbolic blow to the troubled global treaty. 'Kyoto, for Canada, is in the past,' says Environment Minister Peter Kent. 'We are invoking our legal right to formally withdraw from Kyoto.' Kent, a Conservative, says the Liberals should not have signed up to a treaty they had no intention of respecting and says Ottawa backs a new global deal to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, but insists it has to cover all nations, including China and India, which are not bound by Kyoto's current targets. Kent adds that meeting Canada's obligations under Kyoto would cost $13.6 billion: 'That's $1,600 from every Canadian family — that's the Kyoto cost to Canadians, that was the legacy of an incompetent liberal government.' Kent's announcement came just hours after negotiators in Durban managed to thrash out an agreement at the very last minute — an agreement to begin a new round of talks on a new agreement in the years ahead. 'Staying under 2C will require drastic, immediate action — with global emissions peaking in the next five years or so,' writes Brad Plummer. 'The Durban Platform, by contrast, merely prods countries to come up with a new agreement that will go into effect no later than 2020.'"
The Internet

Better Copyright Through Fair Use and Ponies 169

Posted by samzenpus
from the omg-fair-use dept.
Balinares writes "With even harmless parody sites like Peanutweeter now getting shut down by twitchy lawyers in the name of brand dilution concerns, the situation with fair use has become bleak. Yet some companies are learning at last. Variery reports that when parodies of their latest production started popping up online, Hasbro not only allowed it to happen, but started contributing some of their own. Now their My Little Pony reboot has gained a huge following and reached cult status. Fair use does make everything better. That, or it's the ponies."

+ - Ask Slashdot: What happened to Pixel Qi?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Years ago the OLPC was released with a low-power, outdoor-readable screen. Today there are barely a handful of products bundling Pixel Qi screens. Why aren't Pixel Qi screens in every single smartphone, tablet, laptop, PC and other device with a screen? Is it lack of funding? Lack of marketing? What?"
Data Storage

+ - How to store massive amounts of video on the cheap 4

Submitted by fredklein
fredklein writes "I recently started contractor work at a relatively small video conversion business. They accept jobs from the public as well as various photo studios and photo labs. They digitize everything from photos to VHS to old reel-to-reel film, putting it on DVDs. However, in the process, they end up with at least two DVDs to archive- one of the raw video, one of the edited. I'd like to move them to a completely hard drive based system, where the incoming jobs are saved right to video files, edited, then stored, all without being burned to DVD (except for the customer's copy). This, of course, requires massive amounts of storage. 20 jobs a day, roughly 5Gig for the 'raw' video (DVDs are 4.7Gig, but...fudge factor), another 5Gig for the edited, means about a Terabyte a week to store, or 50+ Terabytes per year. And that's not mentioning backups. I'm looking for any ideas on how to handle such a huge amount of video data, preferably while keeping costs at or below what the original DVDRs would have cost."

Comment: Bad summary: No US troops, only a drill (Score 5, Informative) 395

by NekoYasha (#36218638) Attached to: PLA Develops First Person Shooter With US Troops as Targets

The game is named Glorious Mission, or sometimes Mission of Honor, not Glorious Revolution, and the plot follows a soldier's life through military camp and cumulates in the eponymous large-scale drill, as reported by China Daily. No US Troops anywhere.

It also supports 32 person multiplayer. You can watch footages of the game on YouTube here.

+ - Domesday Project reborn online after 25 years->

Submitted by clickclickdrone
clickclickdrone writes "A good idea, combined with the right technology, can change the world. 25 years ago, the BBC dreamt up an inspired scheme. However, in the case of the Domesday Project, it was the tech that doomed it.

The premise was straightforward enough — create a 20th century version of William the Conqueror's 900-year-old page-turner, the Domesday Book.

Instead of land rights and livestock, it would chronicle life in 1980s Britain, based on photographs and written accounts submitted by ordinary people.

It was an incredibly ambitious undertaking and, in many ways, the Domesday Project was a success.

The BBC received more than a million contributions and the electronic version was released commercially.

However, the system was based on laserdiscs, a BBC Master computer and a trackball and over the years, the ability to access the data has been all but lost. Until now..."
Link to Original Source
Science

+ - Einstein's Immigration Papers Found at Heathrow->

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes "When representatives from the Merseyside Maritime Museum paid a routine visit to Heathrow Airport, they were in for a surprise. Looking for any tidbits of the UK's immigration control history, they came across Einstein's Dover landing card dating back to 1933. Apart from being a wonderful snippet of physics history, having been handled by the legendary physicist who transformed the way in which we view the Universe with his general and special theories of relativity, the landing card is a stark reminder about the harrowing pre-war history of Nazi Germany. Stating his nationality as "Swiss," the landing card shows that Einstein, a Jew, had denounced his German nationality only weeks earlier in protest of Adolf Hitler's oppressive regime."
Link to Original Source
Android

+ - The Frankentablet: Windows and Android Mashup->

Submitted by
GMGruman
GMGruman writes "What happens if you take a netbook, remove its keyboard, put Windows 7 in one partition, a custom version of Android 2.2 in another, throw in a Linux bootloader, and physical buttons that match none of these? You get the ViewSonic ViewPad 10, a Frankenstein creation of technology body parts that just don't fit together. As this InfoWorld review shows, it's definitely a "were they even thinking?" class of product."
Link to Original Source

If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it. -- Ernest Hemingway

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