Slashdot

ulash writes "Ars Technica has an article about the (alleged) leaked 'wishlist' that RIAA submitted to the US government back in March of this year listing what they wish to see as a part of ACTA. The list includes such gems as forced filtering of materials by the ISPs, gutting the parts of the DMCA that provides safe harbor to the ISPs, and even restricting supplies of 'optical grade polycarbonate' in countries 'with high rates of production of pirated optical discs.' While the effectiveness of such a 'wishlist' on the law is not by any means objectively measurable, if one takes into account how *AA was instrumentative in the passing of DMCA, I think it is more than likely that they will get at least some of their wishes."

That sounds like something a spammer might say.

CraftyJack writes "Bright white chunks in the trenches dug by the Phoenix Lander have disappeared, leading Peter Smith & co. to believe that the chunks were ice that has since sublimated."

mjasay writes "Is Google making us stupid? Following a growing body of research within neuroscience, Carr argues that as we use the Web 'we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.' This sounds great: Who wouldn't want to have the 'recall' capacity of Google? But, as Carr writes: 'The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. ... The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image.' In other words, as we 'go online' in increasing numbers and to an increasing degree, are we losing our ability to think coherently and deeply, preferring instead to process byte-sized information quickly, regurgitate 140-character 'tweets,' and skim thought? Is the concern overblown, or are we becoming the Web that we created?"

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a billion dollars?
Senate: I'll tell you what I'd do, man: Online Child Porn Fight.
Peter Gibbons: That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd have an online child porn fight?
Senate: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a billionaire I could hook that up, too; 'cause child porn fighters dig a dude with money.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.

kingston writes ""As I say to my students 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?" So says Deakin University associate professor of information systems, Sharman Lichtenstein, who believes Wikipedia, where anyone can edit a page entry, is fostering a climate of blind trust among people seeking information. Professor Lichtenstein says the reliance by students on Wikipedia for finding information, and acceptance of the practice by teachers and academics, was "crowding out" valuable knowledge and creating a generation unable to source "credible expert" views even if desired. "People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading," she said. "Parents and teachers think it is [okay], but it is a light-weight model of knowledge and people don't know about the underlying model of how it operates.""

Andrew Feinberg points out a New York Times story about the stress put upon prolific bloggers to maintain a constant flow of content in order to satisfy both consumers and advertisers in the information age. When breaking a story first can generate thousands more page views and clicks, many bloggers are finding themselves chained to their computers, worrying that they'll miss something important if they step away. Quoting: " 'I haven't died yet,' said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. 'At some point, I'll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable,' he said."

Pickens writes "Aaron Rower has an interesting post on Wired with the "Top 5 Reasons it Sucks to be an Engineering Student" that includes awful textbooks, professors who are rarely encouraging, the dearth of quality counseling, and every assignment feels the same. Our favorite is that other disciplines have inflated grades. "Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films," writes Rower. "Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores." For many students, earning a degree in engineering is less than enjoyable and far from what they expected. If you want to complain about your education, this is your chance."

Wired has an interesting editorial on the latest resurgence of the old days of phone phreaking and the latest phreak that is rising into the FBI crosshairs. The most recent hoax, "swatting", involves malicious pranksters calling police with reports of fake murders, hostage crises, or the like and spoofing the call to appear as though it was from another location. "Now the FBI thinks it has identified the culprit in the Colorado swatting as a 17-year-old East Boston phone phreak known as "Li'l Hacker." Because he's underage, Wired.com is not reporting Li'l Hacker's last name. His first name is Matthew, and he poses a unique challenge to the federal justice system, because he is blind from birth. If he's guilty, the attack is at once the least sophisticated and most malicious of a string of capers linked to Matt, who stumbled into the lingering remains of the decades-old subculture of phone phreaking when he was 14, and quickly rose to become one of the most skilled active phreakers alive."

austinhook brings us news that the U.S. government has resumed wiretapping with the help of telecommunications companies. The companies are said to have "understandable misgivings" over the unresolved issue of retroactive immunity for their participation in past wiretapping. Spy agencies have claimed that the expiration of the old legislation has caused them to miss important information. The bill that would grant the immunity passed in the Senate, but not in the House.

philetus writes "An article in New Scientist describes a robotic system composed of swarms of electromagnetic modules capable of assuming almost any form that is being developed by the Claytronics Group at Carnegie Mellon. 'The grand goal is to create swarms of microscopic robots capable of morphing into virtually any form by clinging together. Seth Goldstein, who leads the research project at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in the US, admits this is still a distant prospect. However, his team is using simulations to develop control strategies for futuristic shape-shifting, or "claytronic", robots, which they are testing on small groups of more primitive, pocket-sized machines.'"

JD Rucker writes "When a company has news that they want buried, they issue their information on a Friday night and hope nobody in the media notices on Monday morning. Marred in controversy over their Beacon advertising platform, Facebook hoped that their latest attempt to gather more user-data would go unnoticed."
http://soshable.com/facebook-user-data/

thefickler writes "It's official, manufacturers are starting to dump Windows XP support entirely and some new models won't even have Windows XP drivers or any kind of support available, anywhere. One reader, "Mark" contacted TECH.BLORGE regarding installing Windows XP on his HP V6610 (Australian) laptop which is the V6620 in the US. "Mark" said when he went to the HP driver/downloads section that very few Windows XP drivers were available for it and he was right, there were almost no useful drivers for the laptop there. His call to HP support didn't get very far as "HP is no longer supporting Windows XP on the newer PCs.""
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/12/21/windows-xp-driver-support-begins-to-end/

bergwitz writes "Mozilla Sunbird is a standalone calendar application and Lightning is a integrated calendar for Thunderbird. The new 0.7 version has a new UI and some bugfixes. Download from the Project Homepage, read about the release on the calendar weblog or the Rumbling Edge. The most notable new feature is in the UI with the new Today panel for Lightning. The worst is that the Google data provider extension breaks, but a new version is available here."

From the Washington Post:

"Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources."

Just why did we vote these jokers into office again?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702438.html?hpid=topnews