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gmack writes "The Canadian second attempt of their version of the DMCA has been Released.

Upside: allows format shifting. Downside: $500 penalty for file sharing."

That would be cool. It would also be funny if you just hovered there and let their arrows bounce off until they got tired of shooting them. Then just start flashing a bunch of colored lights in geometric patterns. Once you have done that, leave the immediate area for a bit.

Then come back at night, abduct one of their tribesmen and put him in a bright room. Once he is in the room, we come in with dark sunglasses with big lenses and snazzy white coveralls to go with the shades. We should ignore him/her if they try to speak to us (we likely won't understand their language anyways). At this point we should shove probes up their asses and then take blood and other bodily fluid samples. If the abductee is female, she should be impregnated (artificial insemination is best, but if you are desperate just find a human with similar skin color and don't have him where the coveralls and glasses combo).

In the event that you do get a female and impregnate her, come back in 3 or 4 months (time isn't important, just be sure to get there before the end of the second trimester so that the baby has very little chance of surviving outside of the womb). When you come back, put the coveralls and glasses back on and abduct the woman again. Once you have her, remove the fetus and have your dark skinned pal make some hand gestures to indicate that the baby would live "up there" (point up to the sky etc). Then place a tiny piece of a meteorite under her skin (I recommend administering a good narcotic dose here, not enough to put her to sleep but enough to make her groggy and unaware). You can either keep the fetus or throw it away at this point, you won't need it again for our purposes (though I recommend keeping it as you can sell it to stem cell researchers or you can dissect it yourself if you like embryology and you just never no when an aborted fetus might come in handy - it's best to store them in a deep freeze or similar device).

Finally, every few years, come back and abduct her again. Each time you do it come back with the same weird looking kid (note that he must be both wierd looking in some fashion and of similar skin color and body type to the abductee). Have her play with the kid and give her food and drink that would appear strange to her (you could just bring something from burger king just make sure to present it in an odd fashion). If she seems upset to leave the kid behind, have the kid indicate that he can't survive outside in the air (he could just take deep breaths and then pretend to gag while pointing outside).

This is a wonderful hobby, but be warned that it's easy to get carried away with it.

Yes, and most of those people don't actually write a single line of code.

I can't speak for McCain, but go watch Obama at Google and tell me that he has no passion for tech issues. Half of his broader economic plan boils down to putting our faith in science and technology again -- we'll never be competitive with China at building toys out of injection-molded plastic -- we can be competitive in the technological arena.

Half the reason I started following him back before it was popular was because he was one of the few candidates that I heard that even acknowledges the war on science and all the ill effects that we've suffered as a result.

I mean, look at how libraries have put all those authors and publishers out of business.

You can get the books for free there! It totally destroyed the book selling market.

gmack writes "Toshiba has finally done the inevitable and announced that HD DVD will be discontinued"

gmack writes "A new robotic system lets cows chose when to be milked.

Were all one step closer to Douglas Adams' vision of restaurants in the future."

gmack writes "Police have unmasked a paedophile who used a standard adobe Photoshop swirl to cover his identity. Hopefully this doesn't mean they all move to more advanced ways of covering their identities."

prostoalex writes "Reuters is reporting on Siemens engineers reaching 107 Gbps data transmission record over a fiberoptic cable, and expects the technology to be on the market within a few years: "The test, 2.5 times faster than a previous maximum transmission performance per channel, was done in cooperation with Germany's Micram Microelectronic, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications and Eindhoven Technical University of the Netherlands.""

Firefox 1.5.0.9 and 2.0.0.1 (and Thunderbird 1.5.0.9) have been released. All include security fixes. But why are Firefox 1.5.0.8 users being offered 1.5.0.9? "If you already have Firefox 1.5.x, you will receive an offer to upgrade to Firefox 2.0 over the next several weeks", we were told almost two months ago. Yes, we can manually install 2.0; but where's the automated 2.0 upgrade for our less technical friends?

An anonymous reader writes "Sony has to pay $1.5million to California & Texas to settle the case against it. Also, users have until 12/31/2006 to file to get a new CD and $7.50 & 3 downloads. http://blog.wired.com/music/2006/12/sony_settles_b m.html"