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Government

Submission + - GPS horror stories

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Three girls and their aunt have ended up at the bottom of a lock near Kingston, Ontario. story

My first reaction is to wonder if they were using GPS. There have been lots of stories about GPS leading trucks down roads that were never intended for trucks. I haven't heard stories about people being led astray by inaccurate GPS but I don't see why that isn't also a possibility.

So, my question is: What are your GPS horror stories? Have you been led astray, with disasterous (or comical) consequences?
Media

Submission + - Pirate Party Coming to Canada (google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After scoring a surprise electoral win in Sweden and getting high-profile support in Germany, The Pirate Party is coming to Canada. The party's goals are fairly simple. People should have the right to share and copy music, movies and virtually any material, as long as it is for personal use, not for profit. It opposes government and corporate monitoring of Internet activities, unless as part of a criminal investigation. It also wants to phase out patents.

Linux Patch Clears the Air For Use of Microsoft's FAT Filesystem 272

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the anything-you-can-do-i-can-do-better dept.
Ars Technica is reporting that a new kernel patch may provide a workaround to allow use of Microsoft's FAT file system on Linux without paying licensing fees. "Andrew Tridgell, one of the lead developers behind the Samba project, published a patch last week that will alter the behavior of the Linux FAT implementation so that it will not generate both short and long filenames. In situations where the total filename fits within the 11-character limit, the filesystem will generate only a short name. When the filename exceeds that length, it will only generate a long name and will populate the short name value with 11 invalid characters so that it is ignored by the operating system."
Medicine

Submission + - The Race to Analyze Swine Flu

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Swine flu is nothing new. The first virus in the US was isolated in 1930, and since then there has been roughly one human case in the country every year. The latest virus is more infectious than previous strains, but little else is known for sure — how often it kills, how swiftly, and even precisely what those who succumb die of. Most of the victims developed flu over a week or so, which progressed to severe and ultimately fatal pneumonia. There is no clear explanation of why the virus has killed only in Mexico and Mexican health officials do not have a clear idea how many people are infected more mildly, making it almost impossible to gauge how lethal the virus is. Fresh vaccines to combat the infection could take between four and six months, by which time the first wave of the disease could be over. In 1918, when Spanish flu killed tens of millions, there were two subsequent waves, which were far more lethal than the first. "Thirty-five to forty thousand people die per year in the US from the regular flu," says Dr. Louise M. Dembry, director of hospital epidemiology at Yale-New Haven Hospital. "It's not that it's a benign disease even in regular times.""
Privacy

Submission + - Home Office asked Phorm for legal advice (itpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
nk497
nk497 writes: "Emails released under the Freedom of Information Act have shown that the UK Home Office asked Phorm for help deciding if deep packet inspection behavioural advertising systems — such as, say, Phorm — were indeed legal. After the pair decided changes to an advice document, a government official asked Phorm: "If we agree this, and this becomes our position do you think your clients and their prospective partners will be comforted?"

An opposition MP called the email exchange "bizarre" and suggested the Home Office sought help either because it doesn't understand the technology or because it wants to use it, too."
Space

Submission + - NASA Researchers Worried About Huge Sun Flares (wired.com) 1

Submitted by resistant
resistant writes: Wired reported recently that a group of researchers assembled by NASA issued a "chilling" report expressing great concern about the potential for solar flares in 2012 to coincide with "the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth's geomagnetic shield", potentially virtually collapsing national power grids. Complicating the matter is the lack of current plans to replace the sole early warning satellite on which power grid operators rely, and the poor state of readiness in general. Full recovery from such a catastrophe might take four to ten years, and cost trillions of dollars.

The report was largely ignored at first because of the unfortunate overlap with an ancient Mayan prediction of a major "turning point" in the year 2012 (by the Western calendar).
The Courts

Submission + - The Pirate Bay Aftermath Circus in Swedish Press

Submitted by MaulerOfEmotards
MaulerOfEmotards writes: Reading the Swedish news reports, the turmoil surrounding the aftermath of The Pirate Bay trial continues.

Part of the news are occupied with Tomas Norström, the presiding judge of The Pirate Bay trial. Mr. Nordström is suspected of bias after reports of affiliation with copyright protection organisations, for which he has been charged reported to the appeals court, is rapidly gaining a certain notoriety. The circus around him is currently focused on three points. First, his personal affiliation with at least four copyright protection organisations, a state the potential bias of which he himself fails to see and refuse to admit. Secondly, Swedish trials use a system of several lay assessors to supervise the presiding judge, one of which, a member of an artists' interest organisation, which is far fewer than Mr. Norström himself, was by Mr. Norström made to resign from the trial for potential bias, and his failing to see the obvious contradiction in this casts doubts on his suitability and competence. Thirdly, according to professor of judicial sociology Håkan Hydén the judge has inappropriately "duped and influenced the lay assessors" during the trial: "a judge that has decided that 'this is something we can't allow' has little problem finding legal arguments that are difficult for assisting lay assessors to counter".

The apparent grave legal problems if the trial itself is also of medial interest. Professor Hydén continues with enumerating "at least three strange things" with "a strange trial": Firstly that someone can be sentenced for being accessory to a crime for which there is no main culprit: "this assumes someone else having committed the crime, and no such individual exists here ... the system cannot charge the real culprits or it would collapse in its entirety". It is unprecedented in Swedish judicial history to sentence only an accessory. Secondly, that the accessories should pay the fine for a crime committed by the main culprits "which causes the law to contradict itself". And thirdly that accessories cannot be sentenced to harsher than the main culprit, which means that every downloader must be sentenced to a year's confinement. In closing Me. Hydén sums up by saying that to allow this kind of judgement the Swedish Parliament must first pass a bill making this kind of services illegal, which hasn't been done.
Privacy

Submission + - Judge in Pirate Bay trial biased 1

Submitted by
maglo
maglo writes: "The judge who handed down the harsh sentence to the four accused in the The Pirate Bay trial was biased, writes Sveriges Radio (Sweden Public Radio): sr.se (swedish). Google translation. The judge is member of two copyright lobby organizations, something he shares with several of the prosecutor attorneys (Monique Wadsted, Henrik Pontén and Peter Danowsky). The organizations in question are Svenska Föreningen för Upphovsrätt (SFU) and Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (SFIR)."

Comment College Course Software? (Score 1) 189

by EvilGrin666 (#27182233) Attached to: Windows Security and On-line Training Courses?
I know it doesn't help much with the current problem your having, but you might want to drop a line to the college in question and let them know about the existence of Moodle. An open source virtual learning environment. The school where I work use it both in school and at home after hours. By all accounts the teachers and kids love it (and works in Firefox too!).

Comment Re:Meh (Score 4, Informative) 272

by EvilGrin666 (#26468227) Attached to: Collateral Damage as UK Censors Internet Archive
I know for a fact (because my work ISP feed gets their feed of them) that JANET does not use the IWF blacklists.

This leads to the amusing situation where schools (who are clearly in a position to most 'benefit' from the IWF list) who use JANET or a JANET subsidiary for their Internet feed are not subject to the IWFs will.

Bureaucracy gone mad. :)
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Bioshock full of DRM: PC Gamer editor locked out

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: it appears that 2K Interactive have added DRM to the much anticipated Bioshock which requries on-line activation and limits you to two installs. In theory you gain an install back when you uninstall, but this is not currently working.

From the PCGamer blog http://www.pcgamer.com/
"So we installed on one machine, then uninstalled and installed on another with no problems. So far, so good. I got in about an hour of play time, but I do the majority of my game playing at home, where I've got my heavy-duty gaming rig set up, so I was really looking forward to bringing it home with me. I uninstalled the game from my work machine and happily headed home...but when I got there and went to activate, I was stopped dead by a failure message that informed me I'd installed with this code one time too many. What... the... $%~&!"

This DRM is NOT mentioned on the packaging of the game, or the EULA. How far do they think they can push their paying customers when they pull crap like this?

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