There are surely going to be better commercial solutions out there than Audacity, but it's robust, lightweight, and can handle multiple-hour-long recordings. I used to use it 8 years ago to record three-hour-long radio shows. I recommend it also because it's free.

Seth

A lot of the tracking/wiretapping tech (well, virtually any technology) have dual uses. For example, if a family member of mine gets kidnapped I'd like the police to be able to locate him/her easily by tracking a cellphone.

The frustrating thing about the holes punched in our constitutional rights in America is that decisions of when to trample privacy rights are made by the feds. They're not so keen to preemptively foil a kidnapping or murder plot. If your family members are held, you can passionately beg the United States government to use all the power at their disposal to locate and return your kidnapped mom and pop, but they'll shrug their shoulders. Now if the culprits could be connected to a so-called terrorist organization.... then you might get someone to open up their Echelon files....

Seth

Can I just say one thing, and it might have just been my computer because Guillermo's was fine, but Garage Band cannot be trusted on its own for live recordings

Don't use garage band to record long interviews. It's not intended for that purpose. Use Audacity. Since you didn't even give the details of the resolution you were recording at, I'm not going to mention how that was probably the culprit in your garage band crashes. But when you use Audacity, be sure to set the recording to a low bitrate for an hour+ long spoken word interview.

Seth

Prison has many purposes in our society.

1) retribution: basically, punishment. The prisoner is paying his debt to society. This also acts as a catharsis for the prisoner himself.
2) specific deterrence: The prisoner will think twice about committing another crime.
3) general deterrence: others will think twice about committing crime when they see others being jailed for it.
4) rehabilitation: so the prisoner can change his ways. Maybe he will learn skill for the outside world so that he need not turn to crime again.
5) utilitarian: somply to keep the prisoner from committing more crimes.

In this case, 2,3, and to some extent, 5 applies.

Seth

Skynet just inched us one-step closer to the apocalypse by establishing its ability to assemble T1000 robots via CnC machines controlled by this botnet.

Seth

Oh, this guy just wants to have an adventure and take the cost of it out of his taxes. I doubt he'll get any usable footage, but the expedition will qualify nonetheless.

Seth

There was a Slashdot blurb about this on August 17th. The general consensus in that discussion was the haystack technique is a fool's solution to http traffic analysis. It's hardly even a proxy. All it does is stuff a bunch of random 'safe' http requests around your illicit requests. Yeah, that might slow down the work of a traffic monitor that has to look at all your requests. Haystack is completely ignorant to the common filtering methods of http traffic monitoring tools. It's essentially the work of inexperienced students. EFF got all serious because it was possible Haystack might be endangering people with it's false sense of security.

If you try to use this tool to browse 4chan at work, it's going to surround your browser's 4chan image http requests with nonsensical weather.com http requests. Your network admin will still see that your browser requested .jpg files from the 4chan image server.

Seth

For me in Firefox loading a Slashdot page in the background locks it up for several seconds.

Try defragging your hard drive. Browser cache by its very design, seeks to fragment the crap out of your filesystem.

In my day, we differentiated between the iPad and the iPod. Apparently in this article, the author considers them one and the same.

Seth

I personally have a Patriot Box Office that I bought off NewEgg for $65. It is solid for what it does. Every format, streaming off a network SMB share or from its own HD. Also has a P2P bitorrent client with web browser interface that'll store your torrent files directly to a local hard drive. This is a feature missing from many of the other similar media streamers.

Problem is the interface. It's not as slick as Boxee or AppleTV. I'd go with one of those if you want it to be accessible to people not familiar with directory structures. AppleTV, btw, will read from an SMB share, I believe. The new one will not play Divx or other common formats, though.

Seth

Here's an anecdote to support your assertion:

I once met a fellow at a party who told me that when he was a small child his mother was single and they had to bounce around from cheap motel to cheaper motels. For him, the Atari 2600 game, Breakout, was pure escapism. He had read every bit of text on the box about how the paddle you control is really a space ship and it is trying to destroy a cosmic cloud barrier that has trapped the ship with all its passengers. This fellow even had constructed a space helmet out of cardboard which he would wear while playing the game. He would often stay up late at night playing and so his mother could sleep in their small hotel room, he would drape a blanket over the television and himself to block the glow.

The story he told me climaxes when he said one night the fire department came banging on their motel room door. The whole building was being evacuated. The boy, his mother, and the other residents were instructed to stand on the other side of the street opposite the motel. A landslide had weakened the foundation of the building. As they stood out there in the night, they watched as the motel slid down a cliff into the ocean. The boy cried as he watched, in his words, "his whole life being destroyed in that landslide." He meant that his Atari 2600 with Breakout had been lost.

I know you're probably aware of this solution, but I'll throw it out there anyway. Several vendors are selling low-power set-top boxes that support torrent downloads to attached or internal media. These run linux and can also deliver 1080p media to your TV from a wide array of file formats.

I recently purchased the Patriot Box Office for $65 (with rebate) off NewEgg's site. It's not without it's problems, but it performs most of its responsibilities reliably. It also works as a NAS, though without many permissions options.

I'd get three more of these before I'd waste any money on a walwart linux box. These settop boxes are just as hackable, plus they have hardware video chipsets.

You're right about the production expenses, etc. It's kind of ugly, though, the way things have turned out. It's as if the developers (publishers) said, "We want to give you consumers less so we can make more money. Here's a dumbed-down controller, lower-horsepower, and closed platform for you to enjoy." And consumers said, "Ok."

The result is that innovation has been squelched. Hobbyists & garage studios can't knock out mods on their own. The number of developers who are financed to develop for a console is much smaller than those who used to code PC titles.

So, 3D is kind of a big deal right now. It's the feature on a lot of the new HDTV's. nVidia already has a card that supports hardware 3D rendering. None of the big 3 consoles have it, though. Consumers will have to wait until the console vendors have scheduled the lifecycle of the current consoles to expire and then they will be allowed to upgrade to the next generation console platform for 3D gaming. Hopefully that next generation of console will maintain legacy support (ahem, PS3 & PS2). It's possible they might retrofit the current consoles via firmware updates, but that's going to mean software-rendered 3D. Good luck with that.

As somebody who was a PC-only gamer for most of the 90s, I always used to enjoy the point, 3 years or so into the console cycle, where my PC was putting out the kind of graphics that my console-owning friends could only dream of. It's been a long time since we were in that kind of territory, though.

You do realize that your observation proves my point completely, don't you? It's because of the console platform dominance that developers are no longer pushing the envelope with their PC releases. As with the Crysis example you gave, it is economically unattractive for publishers to back a dev studio who is working on a PC-only title. If John Carmack walked into Activision's offices and said, "Guys, I just came up with this new rendering engine that's incredible. Ambient lighting, reflective shadows, the whole shebang! Only drawback is that it requires a video chipset released within the current generation of video cards." Those executives would punt his ass right out the door if titles using the engine can't easily port to consoles.

Did you notice that this year's QuakeCon tournaments were entirely limited to QuakeLive? iD has given up on horsepower-hungry development and has redirected its pc-gaming business towards comodity hardware.

Goodbye innovation. Hello stagnation.

Sadly, I don't much care about those consumers affected by denied RMA requests. The larger picture here is that this is another example of how console gaming has brought stagnation to the gaming industry. Companies who profitted from deploying bleeding edge hardware that was demanded by a constant churn of increasing software demands are no longer able to stay afloat. Consoles lock graphics to a much longer generation than does pc gaming. It's hard for companies like BFG to stay afloat when stuff stays the same for five or more years.