Comment Re:So, how much for one of the engines? (Score 1) 98
Russia did build one.
Submission + - City of Boston pays $170,000 to settle landmark case involving man arrested for (aclum.org) 1
Ian Lamont writes: "The City of Boston has reached a $170,000 settlement with Simon Glik who was arrested by Boston Police in 2007 after using his mobile phone to record police arresting another man on Boston Common. Police claimed that Glik had violated state wiretapping laws, but later dropped the charges and admitted the officers were wrong to arrest him. Glik had brought a lawsuit against the city (aided by the ACLU) because he claimed his civil rights were violated. According to today's ACLU statement:
"As part of the settlement, Glik agreed to withdraw his appeal to the Community Ombudsman Oversight Panel. He had complained about the Internal Affairs Division's investigation of his complaint and the way they treated him. IAD officers made fun of Glik for filing the complaint, telling him his only remedy was filing a civil lawsuit. After the City spent years in court defending the officers' arrest of Glik as constitutional and reasonable, IAD reversed course after the First Circuit ruling and disciplined two of the officers for using "unreasonable judgment" in arresting Glik.
Comment Re:How to Brake with ABS (Score 1) 756
That only works for people who professionally drive cars. Somebody who just commutes to work isn't going to be in the right state of mind for precisely pressing the brake pedal when they suddenly realize they must brake NOW.
Comment Re:John McCain AGAIN?? (Score 3, Insightful) 93
No, stop staring at the sky, and get off your ass and do something about it.
At least make a donation to the EFF.
Submission + - Iowa Criminalizes Reporters on Factory Farms 1
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Cody Carlson writes in the Atlantic that Iowa recently passed HF 589, better known as the "Ag Gag" law, that criminalizes investigative journalists and animal protection advocates who take entry-level jobs at factory farms in order to document the rampant food safety and animal welfare abuses within. The original version of the law would have made it a crime to take, possess, or share pictures of factory farms that were taken without the owner's consent, but the Iowa Attorney General rejected this measure out of First Amendment concerns. As amended, the law achieves the same result by making it a crime to give a false statement on an "agricultural production" job application (PDF). As a Humane Society of the United States investigator, Carlson worked undercover at four Iowa egg farms in the winter of 2010 and witnessed disturbing trends of extreme animal cruelty and dangerously unsanitary conditions. "Millions of haggard, featherless hens languished in crowded, microwave-sized wire cages. Unable to even spread their wings, many were forced to pile atop their dead and rotting cage mates as they laid their eggs." The Ag Gag laws also protect the slaughterhouses that regularly send sick and dying animals into our food supply, and would prevent some of the biggest food safety recalls in US. history. "In short, the Ag Gag laws muzzle the few people that are telling the truth about our food," writes Carlson. "Now, the foxes are truly guarding the henhouse.""
Comment Re:Seriously? (Score 5, Funny) 290
Heh, only in the US people vehemently argue for their right to get screwed.
Comment Re:It only took a century (Score 1) 348
Except things don't really work that way.
What gives you idea that there's some conglomerate of scientists that as a group decides "we will prioritize efficiency"? The people who made this light bulb probably specialize in fields completely unsuitable for contributing to fusion research. And scientists are people with their own interests. Just because you think that fusion is the thing we should be looking at doesn't mean anybody has to pay attention to your wishes
Employers Need Wind Power Technicians 170
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that Oklahoma is one state benefitting from the energy boom. With a wind power rush underway, companies are competing to secure the windiest spots, while breathing life into small towns. The problem is, each turbine requires regular maintenance during its 20-year lifespan, with a requirement of one turbine technician for every 10 turbines on the ground. So even with a job that can pay a good starting salary (for technicians with a GED or high school diploma who complete a four-week turbine maintenance training program), there aren't enough qualified technicians to do the work. 'It seems odd, with America's unemployment problem, to have a shortage of workers for a job that can pay in excess of $20 per hour. But being a turbine technician isn't easy,' says Logan Layden, adding that technicians typically have to climb 300 foot high towers to service the turbines. Oscar Briones is one of about a dozen students who recently finished a maintenance training program after leaving his job as a motorcycle mechanic and now has his pick of employers. 'So I was in the market to find something else to do, and this seemed pretty exciting. Being 300 feet in the air, that's pretty exciting in its self. So yeah, I'm a thrill seeker.'"
Submission + - Photographing police: Deletion is not forever (arstechnica.com)
Geoffrey.landis writes: "The courts have now ruled that the public has the right to videotape the police in the performance of their duties. Of course, that doesn't stop the police from harrassing people who do so, even journalists, not to mention confiscating their cameras.
As it turns out, though, they're not always very knowledgable about how deletion works.
I would say that erasing, or attempting to erase, a video of police arresting somebody illegally (How can a journalist be charged with "resisting arrest" when he was not being arrested for anything other than resisting arrest?) is a clear case of destruction of evidence by the officers. Destroying evidence is obstruction of justice. That's illegal. Why haven't these police officers been arrested?"
As it turns out, though, they're not always very knowledgable about how deletion works.
I would say that erasing, or attempting to erase, a video of police arresting somebody illegally (How can a journalist be charged with "resisting arrest" when he was not being arrested for anything other than resisting arrest?) is a clear case of destruction of evidence by the officers. Destroying evidence is obstruction of justice. That's illegal. Why haven't these police officers been arrested?"
Comment Re:good thing they don't have laws in france (Score 2) 706
Because other people often end up paying when people like yourself end up flying out of their windshield.
Comment Re:Advanced as They Were (Score 3, Interesting) 243
Your information is out of date.
Thanks to shale oil, the very concept of "peak oil" has been debunked.
What a bunch of nonsense. There's a limited amount of oil in the ground anyway, even if shale oil increases the amount. That changes absolutely nothing about peak oil, except perhaps by postponing it by a little bit.
Also, things like shale oil are energy intensive to extract. Oil is only convenient because so far getting it has been easy. If you need to spend 2 gallons to dig up and progress 1 gallon, then it doesn't matter how much there is.
Submission + - FBI Turns Off Thousands of GPS Devices After Supreme Court Ruling (wsj.com)
suraj.sun writes: The Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a “sea change” inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/25/fbi-turns-off-thousands-of-gps-devices-after-supreme-court-ruling/ ).
Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called “Big Brother in the 21st Century” on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use.
These devices were often stuck underneath cars to track the movements of the car owners. In U.S. v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled that using a device to track a car owner without a search warrant violated the law. After the ruling, the FBI had a problem collecting the devices that it had turned off, Mr. Weissmann said. In some cases, he said, the FBI sought court orders to obtain permission to turn the devices on briefly – only in order to locate and retrieve them.
WSJ: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/25/fbi-turns-off-thousands-of-gps-devices-after-supreme-court-ruling/
Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called “Big Brother in the 21st Century” on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use.
These devices were often stuck underneath cars to track the movements of the car owners. In U.S. v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled that using a device to track a car owner without a search warrant violated the law. After the ruling, the FBI had a problem collecting the devices that it had turned off, Mr. Weissmann said. In some cases, he said, the FBI sought court orders to obtain permission to turn the devices on briefly – only in order to locate and retrieve them.
WSJ: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/25/fbi-turns-off-thousands-of-gps-devices-after-supreme-court-ruling/
Comment Re:So what is your suggestion then? (Score 1) 412
I think he was referring to trusted platform module (TPM) which can be used for good and not so good purposes. I don't see why Netflix would be interested in controlling your hardware. They have no stake in what happens to video that isn't delivered by them since they aren't the producers and are simply getting paid for being a provider.
Er, no. There are no good purposes for a TPM. See below. And TPM is pretty much equivalent to controlling my hardware, because that's what it's for: providing a way to certifiy to some third party that I've not modified my system, which includes starting from the bootloader and up to the browser I'm running.
TPM already exists and is installed in Intel based computers. Some encryption programs (The kind that keeps others from looking at YOUR stuff) can take advantage of it to increase data throughput. I think the hardware acceleration and being a "black box" are what Netflix is referring to.
Aha, that proves you have no clue what you're talking about. The TPM is in no way an accelerator. It's a slow, cheap chip, that sits on a slow bus. Any acceleration if it exists comes from special CPU instructions, which are completely separate from it. This existed on say, VIA CPUs well before the TPM came into being.
What the TPM is, is a key management device. It provides attestation (for instance, it could be used to prove to Netflix that my system hasn't been modified), and can work as key storage for say, disk encryption. The first is definitely not in my interest, and the second has very limited utility as the only thing it adds is tying disk encryption to a particular device. This is most of the time not in my interest either. Laptop falls and breaks? Say goodbye to your data, because you can't move that disk into a new laptop and type your password. Therefore I avoid any hardware that has a TPM like the plague.
The clue being that he mentions being beneficial for open source software since it wouldn't require some module that may not be compatible with the GPL or other licenses since it is already present in a lot of newer computers.
This goes directly against what the GPL intends to do: make software modifiable by the end user. A TPM is able to certify to a third party that I'm running a RIAA Certified (TM) version of Firefox. That is a perversion. The point of OSS for me is to really modify my software, and not just as some theoretical benefit.
This way Netflix would be able to offer streaming on platforms not currently supported by Silverlight.
Two things.
1. In my opinion, freedom and control of my hardware is more important than what Netflix wants. If lack of DRM is inconvenient to them, that's their problem.
2. The whole argument hinges on the incorrect idea that DRM is an enabler. It's not. Refuse it consistently, and content providers will have to offer content without DRM, as they have with music.
Comment Re:So what is your suggestion then? (Score 1) 412
An interesting part of the discussion (TFA, basically) was that it was difficult if not impossible to completely ensure this in an opensource browser, because there wasn't really any way to stop the user from modifying the browser and dumping the decrypted frames and audio.
And that's precisely the problem I have with it. I absolutely do not want any of that crap on my computer. And a non-modifiable open source browser goes against the whole idea of what open source is about.
Comment Re:So what is your suggestion then? (Score 1) 412
I don't believe you intended on making a straw man argument, so I'll ask again. What are your concerns about HTML5 based DRM other than your inability to "pirate" movies? Nevermind the fact that this does nothing to address the P2P file sharing and only exist to allow services like Netflix to exist.
No, that's precisely it. I'm simply thinking long term. Netflix's Mark Watson said:
There exist many devices with content protection mechanisms of various sorts baked into their firmware/hardware. Open source software could make use of such capabilities in just the same way as it makes use of other hardware capabilities,
This is an outright admission that hardware control is coming next. And I'm just not going to wait until they get to that stage.
What are your concerns about HTML5 based DRM other than your inability to "pirate" movies
It's about control, not piracy. This is for services like Netflix. If I'm a subscriber, I'm paying for it, therefore I can't possibly be a pirate regardless of delivery method. Even un-DRMed files will require an account to download, so I don't see where the piracy would be happening.
Nevermind the fact that this does nothing to address the P2P file sharing
Exactly. Therefore it in no way stops me from obtaining the content illegally, and is not about piracy at all, but control.
